You think a brain has to be connected to a machine to be hacked? Ask a cult deprogrammer if you need a computer to hack a brain. Ask an "enhanced interrogator

You think a brain has to be connected to a machine to be hacked? Ask a cult deprogrammer if you need a computer to hack a brain. Ask an "enhanced interrogator" if you really need anything more sophisticated than a pair of pliers or a rag and a bucket of water. We have always been able to hack each others' brains by manipulating sensory inputs, and by using conditioning. And we have more recently been able to use drugs to target particular classes of neuroreceptor. Does taking a dose of LSD or Salvia divinorum count as hacking a brain? How about heroin or cocaine? Even if you have a computer wired directly into your brain, it will likely be a long time until anyone can do anything more complicated than reading out from or injecting into one of the sensory inputs. And so guess what? No one will be typing "these aren't the droids you're looking for" into a console window and piping it into your brain. Instead, they will yank out just one fingernail, save the sensory stream to a file, and hit the "replay" button until you decide to cooperate. Hopefully, no one will be so foolish as to connect their brain directly to the Internet, without some sort of firewall.