"Psychological Warfare" Research & The Rockefeller Foundation

By Prof. James F. Tracy
April 29, 2012
Courtesy Of "Global Research"

The Rockefeller Foundation was the principle source for funding public opinion and psychological warfare research between the late 1930s and the end of World War Two. With limited government and corporate interest or support of propaganda-related studies, most of the money for such research came from this powerful organization that recognized the importance of ascertaining and steering public opinion in the immediate prewar years. Rockefeller philanthropic attention toward public opinion was twofold: 1) to review and establish the psychological environment in the United States for anticipated US involvement in the coming world war and 2) to wage psychological warfare and suppress popular dissent in foreign countries, particularly Latin America. Recognizing how the Franklin Roosevelt Administration was bogged down politically and less capable of planning for war in terms of domestic and foreign propaganda efforts, Rockefeller Foundation-funded projects and research institutes were established at Princeton University, Stanford University, and the New School for Social Research to monitor and analyze shortwave radio transmissions from abroad. The “founding fathers” of mass communication research could not have established their field without Rockefeller largesse. Alongside World War One propagandist and University of Chicago political scientist Harold Lasswell, psychologist Hadley Cantril was a principal contributor to the knowledge and information that helped propel Rockefeller-controlled enterprises and American empire in the postwar era. Throughout this period Cantril provided the Rockefeller combine with important information and new techniques in public opinion measurement and management in Europe, Latin American, and the United States. A roommate of Nelson Rockefeller’s at Dartmouth College in the late 1920s, Cantril took a doctorate in psychology at Harvard, coauthoring The Psychology of Radio with his doctoral mentor Gordon Allport in 1935. “Radio is an altogether novel medium of communication,” Cantril and Allport observed, “preeminent as a means of social control and epochal in its influence upon the mental horizons of men.” The work garnered the attention of Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Division officer John Marshall, commissioned by the Foundation with convincing commercial broadcasters to include more educational programming into their advertiser-driven schedules. To this end Rockefeller was funding fellowships at the CBS and NBC broadcasting networks. Aware of the Dartmouth connection, Marshall encouraged the enterprising Cantril to apply to the Foundation for support. Cantril’s request resulted in a $67,000 grant for a two-year charter of the “Princeton Radio Project” (PRP) at Princeton University. There Cantril proceeded to develop studies assessing radio’s effects on audiences. In 1938 Cantril also became a founding editor of the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Public Opinion Quarterly, an organ closely associated with US government’s psychological warfare endeavors following World War Two. When the Princeton venture commenced another trained psychologist close to Rockefeller, CBS Director of Research Frank Stanton, was named PRP lead researcher but took a secondary role of Associate Director due to his position at the broadcast network.  At this time Austrian émigré social scientist Paul Lazarsfeld was recruited to join Cantril. Thus Cantril, Stanton, and Lazarsfeld were closely affiliated and ideally positioned to embark on a major study involving public opinion and persuasion. The opportunity for such an analysis presented itself when CBS broadcast Orson Welles’ rendering of H.G. Wells’War of the Worlds on on October 30, 1938. Lazarsfeld saw the event as especially noteworthy and immediately asked Stanton for CBS funds to investigate reaction to what at the time was the largest immediate act of mass persuasion in human history. Over the next several months interviews with War of the Worlds listeners were collected, provided to Stanton at CBS, and subsequently analyzed in Cantril’s 1940 study, The Invasion From Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. Pointing to the dearth of “basic information on its formation and operation”, the Foundation thereafter developed an even more concerted interest in understanding public opinion during wartime. “The war in Europe”, the Foundation’s 1939 Report asserted, “has given this country an unusual opportunity for studying the development of public opinion, the changes which opinion undergoes under varying conditions, and the reasons for change.” Appointing Cantril to the task of revisiting several years of polling and interview data, the Foundation’s leadership concluded that the project would supply essential facts on the formation and trend of opinion from peace to war time and from one stage to another under the force of successive war crises. It is expected that further analysis of the data will demonstrate the influence of such factors as family relationship, educational experience, and occupation; the group origins of reported intensity of opinion or apparent lack of it on many issues. Thus as the US entry into World War Two approached, Rockefeller provided $15,000 to Princeton for establishment of the Office of Public Opinion Research. A primary objective of OPOR was to systematically examine how public opinion is forged, the motivating factors behind mass public sentiment toward certain ends and, in Cantril’s words, “follow[ing] the course of American public opinion during the war that had already started in Europe in which I felt the United States would soon be involved.” In 1940, the Foundation increased the amount of funding devoted to research on public opinion and mass communication to $65,000, with $20,000 apportioned to continuing Cantril’s OPOR. In addition, a $25,000 grant was given to Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs for monitoring and assessing European shortwave radio transmissions, and $20,000 for University of Chicago political scientist Harold Lasswell to launch an institute at the Library of Congress “for more general studies of radio transmissions, the press, and other media.” A similar shortwave monitoring station was set up at Stanford University to assess transmissions from Asia. Cantril succeeded in predicting voting behavior on important referendums through covert sampling procedures in both the US and Canada. Such achievements brought the young psychologist to the renewed attention of old school tie Nelson Rockefeller, who at the time was a close associate of Franklin Roosevelt. Rockefeller oversaw the State Department’s Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs office, a US intelligence arm focused mainly on psychological operations in Latin America. Given the American public’s apprehension toward propaganda, titles like the one afforded Rockefeller’s agency were intended to obscure such undertakings. A foremost concern of Rockefeller was ascertaining public opinion in South America in anticipation of extending Rockefeller banking and oil interests in the region. In Rockefeller’s view, no longer would power be determined by military control over colonies, but rather through the exertion of “soft power”, where the understanding and anticipation of public opinion figured centrally. To this end in the early 1940s Rockefeller helped Cantril and public opinion impresario George Gallup establish American Social Surveys, an ostensibly non-profit entity that carefully assessed public opinion throughout South America. In 1942 Cantril also began The Research Council, Inc. with initial funding from advertising tycoon Gerard Lambert. Housed at Princeton, the Research Council embarked on a nationwide survey mechanism to monitor public opinion in the US during wartime and in anticipation of the postwar environment. With Nelson Rockefeller acting as intermediary, Roosevelt closely consulted Cantril’s findings in crafting his speeches during the war. The Research Council proceeded to carry out projects for the Psychological Warfare Branch of Military Intelligence in North Africa, the Department of State on US attitudes toward foreign affairs, and the Office of Strategic Services on public opinion in Germany. Cantril’s Research Council continued its activities for US interests in the postwar period, measuring public opinion in France, Holland and Italy to anticipate and quash popular political and social movements. It was later revealed that for much of its existence the Research Council was being funded by the Central Intelligence Agency via the Rockefeller Foundation, a technique often employed by Rockefeller to support a variety of covert projects. Nelson Rockefeller was so delighted with Cantril’s continued public opinion analyses 0f European countries that while working as a psychological warfare consultant for President Eisenhower in 1955, he offered the researcher and his associate Lloyd Free with lifetime patronage of $1 million to continue providing such information. “Nelson had always been a great believer in utilizing psychological concepts and tools for the understanding of peoples”, Cantril recalls. With the formidable sum, revealed two decades later in the New York Times to have actually originated from the CIA by way of the Rockefeller Foundation, the researchers founded a nonprofit entity, the Institute for International Social Research, with Rockefeller slated as one of its distinguished trustees. The Rockefeller Foundation’s interest in domestic persuasion continued apace throughout the war. Between 1938 and 1944, for example, the organization directed a total $250,000 to produce educational and documentary films through the American Film Center. By the late 1940s Foundation officials had developed an even more pronounced interest in opinion management. As the Foundation’s 1948 report read, “An understanding of communication and attitude change is important to our educational system, to those who lead great organizations, and to those who are concerned with political opinion and behavior.” Toward this end the Rockefeller Foundation devoted an unprecedented amount of funding to psychological warfare research. In 1954, for example, a $200,000 grant went to support Yale psychologist Carl Hovland’s attitude change and persuasion studies. Yet with the Cold War as a backdrop such work was increasingly funded by the US military where often the same social scientific talent was tapped that had been groomed under Rockefeller aegis. As historian Christopher Simpson observes, in the postwar era government funding now accounted for at least 75 percent of Lazarsfeld’s Bureau of Applied Social Research and Columbia University and Cantril’s Institute for International Social Research at Princeton. In accord with the more far-reaching educational and social scientific efforts the Rockefeller Foundation saw fit to develop, the elite class to which the Rockefeller family belongs has traditionally failed to distinguish between domestic or foreign subjects as targets for propaganda and behavioral modification. From a perspective that often recognizes national boundaries as obstacles to expanding a certain agenda of political-economic power and control, all are equally subject to similar designs of manipulation and persuasion and the often unwitting acquiescence they cultivate. One need look no further than the legacy of supporting certain philosophical and pedagogical approaches to US public education from the early 1900s that has resulted in a vast reduction of the quality and scope of educational institutions to recognize how the Rockefeller interest in psychological warfare is but a chapter of a much larger saga. This holds true as well in terms of the Rockefellers’ broader philanthropic activities, which from the days of mollifying an outraged citizenry following the Ludlow massacre and John D. Rockefeller’s famous dime dole outs have constituted a thoroughgoing and carefully coordinated exercise in impression management. James F. Tracy is professor of media studies at Florida Atlantic University.  References Cantril, Hadley and Gordon Allport. 1935. The Psychology of Radio. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers. Cantril, Hadley. 1940. The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. —. 1967. The Human Dimension: Experiences in Policy Research. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Cramer, Gisela. 2009. “The Rockefeller Foundation and Pan-American Radio”, in William J. Buxton (ed.) Patronizing the Public: American Philanthropy’s Transformation of Culture, Communication and the Humanities, pp. 77-99, Lanham MD: Lexington Books. Engdahl, F. William. 2009. Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century. Joshua Tree, CA: Progressive Press. Gary, Brett. 1999. Propaganda Anxieties From World War I to the Cold War, New York: Columbia University Press. Glander, Timothy R. 1999. Origins of Mass Communication Research During the American Cold War: Educational Effects and Contemporary Implications. New York: Routledge. Lazarsfeld, Paul F. 1969. “An Episode in the History of Social Research: A Memoir”, in Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (eds.) The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960, pp. 270-337. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Maessen, Jurriaan. 2012. “Documents Reveal Rockefeller Foundation Actively Engaged in Mass Mind-Control”, Infowars.com, 4 March, http://www.infowars.com/documents-reveal-rockefeller-foundation-actively-engaged-in-mass-mind-control/ Pooley, Jefferson. 2008. “The New History of Mass Communication Research”, in Jefferson Pooley and David W. Park (eds.) The History of Media and Communication Research: Contested Memories, pp. 43-69. New York: Peter Lang. Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report – 1939. New York: Rockefeller Foundation.http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/about-us/annual-reports/1930-1939 Rockefeller Foundation Annual Report – 1940. New York: Rockefeller Foundation.http://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/about-us/annual-reports/1940-1949 Simpson, Christopher. 1993. Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960. New York: Oxford University Press. Shaplen, Robert and Arthur Bernon Tourtellot (eds.). 1964. Toward the Well Being of Mankind: Fifty Years of the Rockefeller Foundation. Garden City NY: Doubleday & Company.

Global Research Articles by James F. Tracy

The Military Occupation of Our Minds

By Tom Hayden
Former state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice and environmental movements
Posted: April 27, 2010 04:25 PM
Courtesy Of The Huffington Post

As Congress weighs Afghanistan funding, the military is escalating what it calls the "war of perceptions" at home and abroad. The question is whether the American media and Congress will collaborate in the Pentagon's press strategy or retain a critical edge.

It is no accident that the Pentagon is shaping the "information battlespace" by welcoming friendly reporters and think tank hacks to beam back commentaries about the Kandahar offensive to the American people.

Nor is it accidental that the US is soft-pedaling any public criticism of its crooked crony in Kabul, Hamid Karzhai, as thousands of American soldiers are being dispatched to face bullets in his defense.

Nor is there any question that Afghan civilian casualties are being downplayed or covered-up. The agency in charge of counting the bodies, the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan, published a footnote last year admitting "there is a significant possibility that UNAMA is under-reporting civilian casualties."

Paranoia? Do we live under Orwellian thought control? Of course not. But we the people, the media and the Congress, routinely accept taxpayer-funded Pentagon and White House public relations narratives. These often take disgusting forms, such as the false claims and cover-up that soldier Pat Tillman died under enemy fire, or the recent Special Forces' killing of three pregnant women which was followed by digging of bullets out of their bodies to cover up the crime.

The current cycle of military media manipulation began with the Iraq war, when the Pentagon enticed generals, intelligence officers, and defense contractors to become "message force multipliers" for the Bush administration's version of the war, "sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated." It took a New York Times' lawsuit to uncover 8,000 pages of documents showing that the chosen surrogates could be counted on to deliver propaganda messages "in the form of their own opinions."

The strategy goes far deeper than the sleaze of everyday public relations. This is about the Pentagon's turning of computer science into a weapon in the emerging field of information warfare, in which the deaths of men, women and children are less important than the perception of those deaths, or whether they are perceived by anyone at all. As Gen. McChrystal, whose entire career in Iraq remains a classified secret, said during a February briefing:

"This is not a physical war of how many people you kill or how much ground you capture, how many bridges you blow up. This is all in the minds of the participants."

McChrystal also has said, in a recent London speech, that Afghanistan is not like a football game but more "like a political debate after which both sides announce they have won."

McChrystal went on a public relations offensive to promote his request for a troop escalation earlier this year, giving interviews to the New York Times, Le Figaro, Newsweek, and to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

He was featured as a modern god delivering us from the impersonal forces of fate, in a worshipful piece by Robert Kaplan in The Atlantic in February. (In a 2003 Atlantic piece by Kaplan, titled "Supremacy by Stealth," he advised that America's wars best be fought "off camera, so to speak.")

Prior to the current media offensive someone leaked (or was it a pre-emptive launch?) McChrystal's August 30, 2009 confidential assessment of Afghanistan, which includes a length section on "Strategic Communication", where McChrystal declares that "the information domain is a battlespace" in the war over perceptions.

The irony is that the Taliban insurgents, with little if any information technology, "have undermined the credibility of the ISAF, the international community [IC], and the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan [GIRoA]", according to McChrystal's own analysis. (It is noteworthy that the Afghan government is never referred to in the American media as an "Islamic Republic," because the frame is communicated to Afghans only.)

Shortening the term Strategic Communications to StratCom, McChrystal goes on for five single-spaced pages with directives for dominating the information battlespace. Of particular interest might be his plan for Offensive Information Operations [IO], which consists of "a robust and proactive capability to counter hostile information activities and propaganda", with every soldier "empowered to be a StratCom messenger for ISAF." A key strategic goal is to win over European and Canadian public opinion, or "the strategic center of gravity which is the maintenance of [NATO] Alliance cohesion." Afghanistan, in other words, is the glue which holds NATO together, as other official strategists have written.

The general does acknowledge, in one sentence, that the battle of perceptions does require a change of behavior on the ground. But the overwhelming emphasis on perception requires that the negatives always be minimized or covered-up, as in any aggressive public relations campaign.

Already, Special Operations forces account for half or more of the American military missions in Afghanistan, and all the operations in Pakistan. Clandestine raids against the Taliban -- not al Qaeda -- more than quadrupled recently, with 90 raids in November 2009. The Red Cross now reports that, as the Kandahar offensive begins, the number of civilian deaths attributed to NATO has doubled, despite McChrystal's orders to avoid such casualties.

From 2004-2009, the Pentagon's PR budget increased by 63 percent to at least $4.7 billion in 2009. The entire video budget for Brave New Foundation's "Rethink Afghanistan" campaign was approximately $350,000 in 2009.

This brings us to the US offensive in Kandahar, which might be called the mother of all media battles. The deadly hubris underlying the US information battleplan was recently exposed in a poll showing that Kandahar residents support negotiations with the Taliban instead of a military offensive by a 19:1 margin, and that five of six see the Taliban as "our Afghan brothers." [NYT, April 21, 2010]. As often happens, the poll was uncovered and released by the Wired magazine blog, not by the Congress or the mass media.

Given Afghan public opinion, the challenge for the Pentagon in shaping the information battlefield in Kandahar, therefore, is overwhelming, even impossible. That means the war of perceptions is going to be directed largely at American and congressional opinion as the heralded offensive gets underway.

A few American journalists, like Doyle McManus of the LA Times, have noted that the warm-up offensive in tiny Marja, back in February, has not met the military's expectations. That it was hardly an "offensive" at all is proven by the handful of US/NATO casualties, estimated in the range of thirteen by late February. The fatal premise of the Marja plan was that the Marines could bring in "a government in a box" after driving out the Taliban. That's a form of immaculate conception that will not happen.

In Kandahar, as in Marja before, the local insurgents probably will fight defensively, and probably launch spectacular bombing operations in other parts of Afghanistan, before gradually disappearing as the Americans advance, bringing their "government in a box". It's confusing, because that same "government" is actually there already, in the form of Karzhai's brother who is widely seen as a corrupt drug-dealing warlord with existing ties to the Taliban. So the US may gain a public relations victory which will mean deepening of the quagmire. Kandahar is not going to be Iwo Jima, forever frozen in a photograph as the turning point of World War 2.

Someday soon the White House and Pentagon will announce on camera that they have captured the Taliban's "spiritual homeland" of Kandahar. While the offensive goes on, few in Congress will be tough enough to take a hard look at the reality behind the war of perceptions. And when the "victory" is announced, Congress will pass another year's appropriation for the war.

This will go on, with American troops dying in vain, unless enough members of the American public, the mainstream media and the Congress finally wake up to the reality that we are no longer citizens but targets in a deliberate war for our minds.

Neuroscience and National Security

The Complex Relationship Between Science and The Military

The military commonly enlists science in its efforts. But when science is humanity, the relationship gets a little stickier

By Emily Badger
Source: Miller-McCune
February 15, 2010
Courtesy Of Global Research

Neuroscience and national security go together somewhat uneasily. Stick the two in a single sentence, and University of Pennsylvania historian Jonathan Moreno starts getting e-mails from all kinds of people who are sure they’ve been brainwashed by the CIA. (It might not help his inbox that he wrote a book called Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense.) “It’s hard to talk about these issues in part because we have kind of a paranoid popular-culture background,” Moreno said. Maybe you’ve seen The Manchurian Candidate, or, more recently, The Men Who Stare at Goats. Neuroscience and national security, though, sit at the forefront of the complex relationship between science and the military, bedfellows that have produced not just compelling fiction, but also real dilemmas for the researchers who bridge them. The American Association for the Advancement of Science hosted a conference today of its year-oldScience and Human Rights Coalition, a group whose joint concerns are embodied most starkly in the application of science to war. “The human rights frame is almost completely missing from this discussion,” said Len Rubenstein, the former executive director of Physicians for Human Rights and now a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins. He spoke at the conference’s opening session. “The question of research for military purposes and scientific activity for military purposes is usually viewed either through the frame of professional ethics or scientific integrity. If human rights is introduced at all, it comes through the question of human subjects research with the Nuremberg Code.” Scientists ought to consider, he argues, the broader question of human rights in work that ranges from weapons development to anthropology. As the science and potential military applications have grown more sophisticated, it follows that the ethics are now more complex, too. Researchers, for instance, are already mulling whether beta-blockers could be used to reduce feelings of guilt in soldiers who do the unpleasant work of interrogation. Conversely, scientists wonder ifoxytocin could induce trust in the interrogated. And what if neuro-imaging could help indicate what combatants are thinking? Or if brain monitoring could track how soldiers handle stress in training? “We’re moving clearly more and more in the direction of being able to manage neural activity, manage behavior, attitudes and perception at a distance,” Moreno said. Rubenstein, in response, pointed to the little-recognized Article 22 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It entitles a person to social security indispensable for both dignity and “the free development of his personality.” “When we have weapons that are deliberately designed to change people’s personalities, to manipulate people’s personalities, we have a problem,” Rubenstein said. “Not only an ethical problem, not only a national security problem, we have a human rights problem.” It’s not that human rights are opposed to national security, Rubenstein argues; this is why the Geneva Conventions attempt to regulate conduct in war, not oppose war all together. From there, the distinctions are important. Weapons incapable of discriminating between combatants and civilians — like land mines or cluster bombs — violate human rights, he said, suggesting scientists who contribute to developing them must bear this in mind. The most public example of murky scientific involvement in warfare has come from the Pentagon’sHuman Terrain System, a controversial program to embed anthropologists with soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Department of Defense billed the program, which was unveiled in 2007, as a path toward greater cultural understanding and, ultimately, less violence. But the American Anthropological Association roundly denounced the program. The participating anthropologists typically wear military uniforms and sometimes carry firearms. The military has insisted the program isn’t designed to gather intelligence for combat, but the AAA questioned how the one can ever be separated from the other in the context of war. The Human Terrain System, the AAA concluded, violates many of the association’s main ethical tenets, including the obligation to do no harm and to obtain “informed consent” from subjects — something it may be impossible to give when facing a scientist in uniform. In the new worlds of asymmetrical warfare, counterterrorism and neuroscience, however, all of the ethical guidelines may not yet be written.

Global Research Articles by Emily Badger

TSA Funding Airport Mind-Reading Scanners

The risks to personal privacy inherent in mind-reading technologies should concern the public about abuse of their rights.

By Daniel Tencer,
Source: The Raw Story
Posted January 9, 2010
Courtesy Of Alter Net

Amid the media furor over the attempted Christmas Day attacks and a renewed political focus on enhancing airport security, attention is turning to a technological advancement that will have civil rights activists -- or, for that matter, anyone with a secret --seriously worried: Mind-reading machines.

"As far-fetched as that sounds, systems that aim to get inside an evildoer's head are among the proposals floated by security experts thinking beyond the X-ray machines and metal detectors used on millions of passengers and bags each year," AP's Michael Tarm reports.

Tarm focuses on an Israeli company called WeCU Technologies (as in "we see you"), which is building a system that would turn airport waiting areas into arenas for Pavlovian behavioral tests:

The system ... projects images onto airport screens, such as symbols associated with a certain terrorist group or some other image only a would-be terrorist would recognize, company CEO Ehud Givon said.

The logic is that people can't help reacting, even if only subtly, to familiar images that suddenly appear in unfamiliar places. If you strolled through an airport and saw a picture of your mother, Givon explained, you couldn't help but respond.

The reaction could be a darting of the eyes, an increased heartbeat, a nervous twitch or faster breathing, he said. The WeCU system would use humans to do some of the observing but would rely mostly on hidden cameras or sensors that can detect a slight rise in body temperature and heart rate.

Homeland Security officials have long been keen on Israeli counter-terror technologies, given the country's extensive experience with terrorism and its reputation for having some of the most effective security systems in the world.

According to numerous news reports, WeCU has received two grants, from the US Transportation Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security, for their research. Raw Story was unable to determine how much money WeCU received from the US government, but regulatory filings show the company spent at least $60,000 on lobbying in Washington in 2006 and 2007.

WeCU has already developed a prototype model of the mind-reading technology, which, according to an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, has already been demonstrated to government security officials in the US, Germany and Israel. It was evidently from that demonstration that US agencies decided to fund the project.

"It sounds like science fiction," WeCU CEO Ehud Givon told the Jerusalem Post. "But I can assure you that the technology is very real. We have accuracy rates that are higher than 95 percent."

Supporters of mind-reading technology argue that it would reduce waiting lines at security checkpoints and reduce the hassle for travelers. But the risks to personal privacy inherent in mind-reading technologies are self-evident. AP reports:

Some critics have expressed horror at the approach, calling it Orwellian and akin to "brain fingerprinting."

For civil libertarians, attempting to read a person's thoughts comes uncomfortably close to the future world depicted in the movie "Minority Report," where a policeman played by Tom Cruise targets people for "pre-crimes," or merely thinking about breaking the law.

WeCU's technology is by no means the only mind-reading security system in development today. Another Israeli company, Suspect Detection Systems, has developed a technology that reads a person's "hostile intent" by measuring bodily responses, through the person's hand, while being asked questions. That system was field-tested at the Knoxville, Tennessee, airport last summer.

Between 2005 and 2006, SDS received $460,000 in grants from the TSA and the science directorate of Homeland Security.

The company appears to have ramped up its public relations in the wake of the Christmas Day bombing attempt.

"A simple five minute automated interrogation during the Visa application process, or at the airport security checkpoint, would have most assuredly exposed the evil intention of Christmas terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab before he ever boarded," SDS CEO Shabtai Shoval said in a press release.

But while these methods are still in development, other behavior-detection technologies, that have less to do directly with reading minds, are on the cusp of being ready for deployment. The Department of Homeland Security has given the green light to FAST, or Future Attribute Screening Technology, which uses a combination of biometric scanners to measure a person's pulse, breathing, pupil dilation and other signals that can determine "hostile intent."

While FAST isn't quite as intrusive as the WeCU system, it appears to be much closer to implementation, with field testing of the $20-million technology set to begin in 2011.

• Selected for you by a sponsor:
• Better airport scanners delayed by privacy fears (USATODAY.com in Tech)

• You might also like:
• Debunked: Ten Conservative Myths About National Security (AlterNet: World)
• The World We Shop in Seems Full of Choices, But Hidden Monopolies Control Most of the Brands (AlterNet: WorkPlace)
• Cerberus Capital: Literally Blood-Sucking the Poor to Make Their Billions (AlterNet: WorkPlace)
• Thanks to GOP Obstructionists, TSA Has Little Money, No One In Charge (AlterNet)