14 ms·

Canadian government gag order in CIA brainwashing case

274 points by myth_drannon 9y ago

gtcode 9y ago
Do any modern day entities (governments, corporations, other) perform ostensibly mild versions of such psychological experimentation, possibly at scale, or with the intention of scaling? This occurred decades after an ancestor of mine was PM of Canada, thankfully.
- ShabbosGoy 9y ago
  Probably not. After all, it’s way easier to kidnap an asset in broad daylight and shove them into a van. Or they can target the asset’s family members to coerce cooperation. Again, very low hanging fruit compared to mind control. Coercion is the best mind control.
- boomboomsubban 9y ago
  Almost certainly. One of the wider goals of past projects was to influence opinion over large groups of people. It seems likely that the various state forces using social media to sway opinion come from research on influencing opinion. Additionally, the US torture of alleged terrorist detainees was called "enhanced interrogation" as a link to such testing. As we still have black sites, and a desire for more information, I personally assume there is still testing being done.
  - jhiska 9y ago
    The biggest impediment to a politician who in good-will wants to implement actually crucial policies is public opinion. The problem is so bad that politicians don't actually talk about the hard work -- hours of reunions, negotiations, high-stake talks, etc --, because being honest and open has a detrimental effect on achieving their goals. Lies or half-lies are more effective, even when they are honestly doing what's best for us, because it's easier to accept an uncomplicated lie or half-lie than a complicated truth. The problem, I guess, is that we have a representational democracy but representational democracies have operational flaws and that the will of the people sometimes leads to a mass grave for them. Sometimes our representatives are better educated and positioned to call the shots, but are held back by misconceived public opinion -- aggravated by the fact that the truth is never actually told by any side and debates are over who can "sell" the most convincing story based on "established" lies and half-lies. It's a delicate balance of power. In a way, it is justifiable for the government (a faceless system where the responsibility is diffused to so many people that no one is almost ever truly individually responsible) to want to manipulate public opinion (or influence public opinion, in politically correct terms). In another, it is tipping the balance of power to the already powerful and this can cause problems.
- cryoshon 9y ago
  one of the MKULTRA programs sought to reduce the ambition of populations using chemicals that could be dispersed in an imperceptible quantity if you don't believe me, jump down the rabbit hole and you will become a bit jaded
  - kossTKR 9y ago
    This theory has always seemed pretty outlandish to me. Do you have any sources or interesting leads?
    - cryoshon 9y ago
      https://web.archive.org/web/20071128230208/http://www.arts.rpi.edu/~pellr/lansberry/mkultra.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20071128230208/http://www.arts.r... here you go; it's from the proceedings of the senate select intelligence committee; this evidence is in fact unimpeachable government record.
      - xtian 9y ago
        Here's what looks to be the same document from the senate intelligence subcommittee website: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/hearings/95mkultra.pdf https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/hear... On pages 123-124: > A portion of the Research and Development Program of TSS/Chemical Division is devoted to the discovery of the following materials and methods: > [...] > 14. Substances which will lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men when administered in undetectable amounts.
        lostgame 9y ago
        Goddamn. I’m no tinfoil type but that is genuinely creepy.
        cryoshon 9y ago
        you see creepy i see crimes against humanity that are ready for prosecution
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  Facebook performs secret psychological experiments on its users by manipulating their news feed: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-apologises-psychological-experiments-on-users https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-... I would say without their consent, but it's likely there is a clause buried in the user agreement that means that you consent to it.
  - uiri 9y ago
    If their users did not read that clause in the user agreement and knowingly consent to the experiments, then they are being carried out without the users' consent.
  - lostgame 9y ago
    Are EULA’s still legally binding? I thought there was a recent case against that.
  - gruez 9y ago
    hence why the question should be about informed consent.
pbourke 9y ago
The government has tortured its citizens in the past and is covering up that torture in the present. It sounds like a Royal Commission or similarly significant investigation is needed.
- gtcode 9y ago
  Wasn't there also a conspiracy in Portage La Prairie whereby the government secretly dumped chemicals on its citizens, as part of some experiment?
  - gtcode 9y ago
    For context, that is where my mother is from, I believe she was there during those experiments. Also, my ancestor AM who was PM briefly
- wallace_f 9y ago
  Quite a few things are a bigger deal than this, but get no attention. For example, the same could be said for our government-funded genocide of Native Americans. I don't know why the denial is allowed to persist.[1] In Germany holocaust-denial can land you prison time. America has the only remaining legitimate government in the world that committed an attempted genocide against its people. 1 - www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-madley-california-genocide-20160522-snap-story.html
  - jhiska 9y ago
    Germany lost the war. Although it's not true that the victors always write the history. There are cases where the defeated write books detailing all the injustices committed against them and it gets picked up centuries later after the tides of power have changed again, or so much time has passed that everyone involved is safe or dead -- I guess one can say that's how you know about the Native American version of American history and can talk about it safely. Want an interesting thought? What in the horrors of hell is being done to Middle-Easterners?
  - pc86 9y ago
gtcode 9y ago
I'd speculate that, after such an age of barbaric experimentation, new and supposedly more innocuous methods that don't require physically detaining/restraining a subject have long since been conceived, implemented, and tried.
- VonGuard 9y ago
  I don't know, some of the things they were doing up there were just ridiculous and useless. Like putting a woman in a chemically induced coma for a year, and playing high volume affirmations though a headset she wore the whole time. The doctor who started all this up there was just Mengele with a Psych degree and some very stupid ideas.
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    Many MKUltra documents were shredded, and even those recovered were of little scientific benefit due to the way the experiments were carried out. So many people had their lives irrevocably destroyed, and for absolutely nothing of value.
    - bionoid 9y ago
      > and for absolutely nothing of value Nothing of value to society anyway; looking at the 1979 reunion video, it seems like they were pretty happy with the return on investment overall. [0] https://www.gnosticmedia.com/ccn-unspun-020-mkultra-reunion-party-1979-jan-irvin-joe-atwill/ https://www.gnosticmedia.com/ccn-unspun-020-mkultra-reunion-...
  - AlexCoventry 9y ago
    According to Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, the purpose of the experiments was to find a reliable way to manipulate people so that they'd stay manipulated. The CIA was having a very hard time establishing reliable agents and informants behind the Iron Curtain, because all they really had to offer was stupendous amounts of money, and people weren't staying bought. Their targets generally didn't buy the ideological angle. From that (odious) perspective, I don't think the experiments were ridiculous, though they did turn out to be useless. At the time it was pretty common to view breaking a personality down as a viable path to establishing control over it. The Koreans had done similar things to American prisoners, with some minor, temporary effectiveness.
caiob 9y ago
If they were Muslims, Trudeau would be handing them a $10M dollar cheque.
- dang 9y ago
  This kind of flamebait has no place on HN and will get you banned, so please don't. Instead, read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html to grok the spirit of the site and abide by that. It boils down to this: If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
  - caiob 9y ago
    This has substance, and it has precedent: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/trudeau-defends-apology-and-105-million-payment-to-omar-khadr/article35623594/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/trudeau-defend...
    - dang 9y ago
      That doesn't make it relevant or a substantial point in this thread. You could pick any link to make any point that way. Moreover your GP comment was baity to the point of trolling, so please just don't do this on HN.
dannyw 9y ago
FYI, this is just one of the known experiments out of MK-ULTRA. Victim testimonies describe being immovably bound to chairs for all of their waking existence and forced to listen to a short, recorded tape on loop while blindfolded for sensory deprivation. One victim was unable to recount the message as they suffered PTSD flashbacks and dissociated if they even thought about it. IIRC official records show the tape was something like “I did not kill my mother”, however there were other inclinations that the actual played message was the opposite - “I killed my mother”. At least hundreds of years of torture were carried out on unwitting Americans and Canadians; on a magnitude that is comparable to human experimentation astrocities of the worst regimes in history; just less in numbers. More reading: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/exqjv4/how-do-you-turn-a-family-history-of-cia-mind-control-experiments-into-art https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/exqjv4/how-do-you-turn-a-...
- christmasity 9y ago
  Unethical human experimentation was pioneered by the US. We've been experimenting on natives, blacks, minorities a long before the nazis. And we even tested nuclear fallout on pacific islanders long after ww2. I believe the "father" of unethical japanese human experimentation was trained in the US before ww2. Not sure why canadians got involved in this mess though.
  - ivan_ah 9y ago
    I was reading about this a long time ago, and remember the de-programming research experiments were initially proposed to be done in US, but was rejected based on ethical grounds. So they just took the project up north.
    - myth_drannon 9y ago
      Not surprising, considering the history of residential schools and the treatment of Aboriginal people in Canada
      - throwanem 9y ago
pmoriarty 9y ago
What boggles my mind is after decades and decades of truly scummy, bottom of the barrel activity (not only in this case, but in the torture they inflicted on prisoners, assassinations, drug running, overthrows of governments, etc), the CIA still manages to recruit people. They must either be hiring really naive recruits, who are blinded by idealism or really ignorant of the history of the organization they're joining, or they're hiring complete and utter scumbags. Or, perhaps the revelations that have been made public about them are false and they're really the stereotypical "good guys" they try to paint themselves as.
- jahaja 9y ago
  I think a lot of "normal" people can rationalize away these things to get into positions of status and authority. The shame is that they still somehow have that status is western culture.
- saagarjha 9y ago
  Or maybe they just pay enough for people to forget about the ethics of what they’re doing.
  - pmoriarty 9y ago
    Payment in blood for some, no doubt. I'm sure they have no problem finding people for whom torture or murder is its own reward.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- cryoshon 9y ago
  some people believe that "anything is justifiable" in the name of american security some people will believe MKULTRA is just a conspiracy people and some people will view such actions as necessary but messy aspects of the brutally realist struggle between countries (critically forgetting that humanity comes before any individual nation or individual)
  - deleted 9y ago
anigbrowl 9y ago
"They don't want to have to deal with more applications," Stein said of the government's requirement the settlement details be kept confidential and out of the public eye. Cooperation is complicity. If you're party to a gag order and it's not obviously geared towards protecting the basic (not political) safety of specific persons, then you should consider whether you have an obligation to circumvent it, and how.
- Waterluvian 9y ago
  Academically, yes. But it's easy to say when it's not you.
kelvin0 9y ago
How can anyone discount so called 'conspiracies theories' so quickly when accounts of such atrocities are now mainstream knowledge? I am not saying one should suspend critical thinking and logic to accept anything they are told, but clearly there are some instances where history has proven such conspiracies have taken place and harmed many innocent lives.
- Splendor 9y ago
  Because many conspiracy theorists are more interested in selling brain vitamins than finding the truth.
  - lawlessone 9y ago
    take your brain force!
- wallace_f 9y ago
  I used to be of the mind that ideas within the conspiracy theory realm were most likely utter nonsense. After Snowden and the DNC scandal, I've opened up the possibility for a lot more critical thought. If you take a look at the conspiracy sub on reddit, which became popular after the DNC Scandal, while there is some nonsense, the most-upvoted stuff are often quite interesting. In fact, I find the userbase there in some ways more sane and rational than your typical political online forum, often being even quite the opposite of the identity politics seen in those places, ie the #3 most upvoted post this year is exactly that.(1) 1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/6twr5k/the_only_power_that_scares_the_establishment/ https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/6twr5k/the_only...
  - lostgame 9y ago
    Not sure why this is downvoted. Upvoted for being pretty on point.
  - shostack 9y ago
    >" In fact, I find the userbase there in some ways more sane and rational than your typical political online forum" I'm confused by this statement. /r/conspiracy has been shown to have been heavily used by Russian bots/trolls to spread propaganda and truly fake news.
brunoqc 9y ago
I live near Montréal and I never heard about it except from US sources. It's weird that it doesn't seem to be a big deal. Also I'm never sure if the sources are accurate or if it's from some conspiracy nuts.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- scott_karana 9y ago
  Why would you hear about it from Canadian sources, if they're getting gagged?
  - brunoqc 9y ago
    If I understand correctly, the victims are getting gagged. Not the news medias. They can publish stuff and they did in the past, like that The Fifth Estate thing. So I could have heard about it but I didn't. From the news or from people. Maybe the news don't talk about it often enough or that the population don't care.
forapurpose 9y ago
Coincidentally, I just saw this review of a film about a similar event: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/movies/wormwood-review-errol-morris-peter-sarsgaard.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/movies/wormwood-review-er...
dangero 9y ago
It's not hard to imagine that a government organization capable of this is almost certainly testing out all types of brainwashing techniques online today. (not that many others aren't)

274 points by myth_drannon 9y ago

Do any modern day entities (governments, corporations, other) perform ostensibly mild versions of such psychological experimentation, possibly at scale, or with the intention of scaling? This occurred decades after an ancestor of mine was PM of Canada, thankfully.

ShabbosGoy 9y ago
Probably not. After all, it’s way easier to kidnap an asset in broad daylight and shove them into a van. Or they can target the asset’s family members to coerce cooperation. Again, very low hanging fruit compared to mind control. Coercion is the best mind control.
boomboomsubban 9y ago
Almost certainly. One of the wider goals of past projects was to influence opinion over large groups of people. It seems likely that the various state forces using social media to sway opinion come from research on influencing opinion. Additionally, the US torture of alleged terrorist detainees was called "enhanced interrogation" as a link to such testing. As we still have black sites, and a desire for more information, I personally assume there is still testing being done.
- jhiska 9y ago
  The biggest impediment to a politician who in good-will wants to implement actually crucial policies is public opinion. The problem is so bad that politicians don't actually talk about the hard work -- hours of reunions, negotiations, high-stake talks, etc --, because being honest and open has a detrimental effect on achieving their goals. Lies or half-lies are more effective, even when they are honestly doing what's best for us, because it's easier to accept an uncomplicated lie or half-lie than a complicated truth. The problem, I guess, is that we have a representational democracy but representational democracies have operational flaws and that the will of the people sometimes leads to a mass grave for them. Sometimes our representatives are better educated and positioned to call the shots, but are held back by misconceived public opinion -- aggravated by the fact that the truth is never actually told by any side and debates are over who can "sell" the most convincing story based on "established" lies and half-lies. It's a delicate balance of power. In a way, it is justifiable for the government (a faceless system where the responsibility is diffused to so many people that no one is almost ever truly individually responsible) to want to manipulate public opinion (or influence public opinion, in politically correct terms). In another, it is tipping the balance of power to the already powerful and this can cause problems.
cryoshon 9y ago
one of the MKULTRA programs sought to reduce the ambition of populations using chemicals that could be dispersed in an imperceptible quantity if you don't believe me, jump down the rabbit hole and you will become a bit jaded
- kossTKR 9y ago
  This theory has always seemed pretty outlandish to me. Do you have any sources or interesting leads?
  - cryoshon 9y ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20071128230208/http://www.arts.rpi.edu/~pellr/lansberry/mkultra.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20071128230208/http://www.arts.r... here you go; it's from the proceedings of the senate select intelligence committee; this evidence is in fact unimpeachable government record.
    - xtian 9y ago
      Here's what looks to be the same document from the senate intelligence subcommittee website: https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/hearings/95mkultra.pdf https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/hear... On pages 123-124: > A portion of the Research and Development Program of TSS/Chemical Division is devoted to the discovery of the following materials and methods: > [...] > 14. Substances which will lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men when administered in undetectable amounts.
      - lostgame 9y ago
        Goddamn. I’m no tinfoil type but that is genuinely creepy.
        cryoshon 9y ago
        you see creepy i see crimes against humanity that are ready for prosecution
toomanybeersies 9y ago
Facebook performs secret psychological experiments on its users by manipulating their news feed: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-apologises-psychological-experiments-on-users https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-... I would say without their consent, but it's likely there is a clause buried in the user agreement that means that you consent to it.
- uiri 9y ago
  If their users did not read that clause in the user agreement and knowingly consent to the experiments, then they are being carried out without the users' consent.
- lostgame 9y ago
  Are EULA’s still legally binding? I thought there was a recent case against that.
- gruez 9y ago
  hence why the question should be about informed consent.

pbourke 9y ago

The government has tortured its citizens in the past and is covering up that torture in the present. It sounds like a Royal Commission or similarly significant investigation is needed.

gtcode 9y ago
Wasn't there also a conspiracy in Portage La Prairie whereby the government secretly dumped chemicals on its citizens, as part of some experiment?
- gtcode 9y ago
  For context, that is where my mother is from, I believe she was there during those experiments. Also, my ancestor AM who was PM briefly
wallace_f 9y ago
Quite a few things are a bigger deal than this, but get no attention. For example, the same could be said for our government-funded genocide of Native Americans. I don't know why the denial is allowed to persist.[1] In Germany holocaust-denial can land you prison time. America has the only remaining legitimate government in the world that committed an attempted genocide against its people. 1 - www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-madley-california-genocide-20160522-snap-story.html
- jhiska 9y ago
  Germany lost the war. Although it's not true that the victors always write the history. There are cases where the defeated write books detailing all the injustices committed against them and it gets picked up centuries later after the tides of power have changed again, or so much time has passed that everyone involved is safe or dead -- I guess one can say that's how you know about the Native American version of American history and can talk about it safely. Want an interesting thought? What in the horrors of hell is being done to Middle-Easterners?
- pc86 9y ago

gtcode 9y ago

I'd speculate that, after such an age of barbaric experimentation, new and supposedly more innocuous methods that don't require physically detaining/restraining a subject have long since been conceived, implemented, and tried.

VonGuard 9y ago
I don't know, some of the things they were doing up there were just ridiculous and useless. Like putting a woman in a chemically induced coma for a year, and playing high volume affirmations though a headset she wore the whole time. The doctor who started all this up there was just Mengele with a Psych degree and some very stupid ideas.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  Many MKUltra documents were shredded, and even those recovered were of little scientific benefit due to the way the experiments were carried out. So many people had their lives irrevocably destroyed, and for absolutely nothing of value.
  - bionoid 9y ago
    > and for absolutely nothing of value Nothing of value to society anyway; looking at the 1979 reunion video, it seems like they were pretty happy with the return on investment overall. [0] https://www.gnosticmedia.com/ccn-unspun-020-mkultra-reunion-party-1979-jan-irvin-joe-atwill/ https://www.gnosticmedia.com/ccn-unspun-020-mkultra-reunion-...
- AlexCoventry 9y ago
  According to Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, the purpose of the experiments was to find a reliable way to manipulate people so that they'd stay manipulated. The CIA was having a very hard time establishing reliable agents and informants behind the Iron Curtain, because all they really had to offer was stupendous amounts of money, and people weren't staying bought. Their targets generally didn't buy the ideological angle. From that (odious) perspective, I don't think the experiments were ridiculous, though they did turn out to be useless. At the time it was pretty common to view breaking a personality down as a viable path to establishing control over it. The Koreans had done similar things to American prisoners, with some minor, temporary effectiveness.

caiob 9y ago

If they were Muslims, Trudeau would be handing them a $10M dollar cheque.

dang 9y ago
This kind of flamebait has no place on HN and will get you banned, so please don't. Instead, read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html to grok the spirit of the site and abide by that. It boils down to this: If you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
- caiob 9y ago
  This has substance, and it has precedent: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/trudeau-defends-apology-and-105-million-payment-to-omar-khadr/article35623594/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/trudeau-defend...
  - dang 9y ago
    That doesn't make it relevant or a substantial point in this thread. You could pick any link to make any point that way. Moreover your GP comment was baity to the point of trolling, so please just don't do this on HN.

dannyw 9y ago

FYI, this is just one of the known experiments out of MK-ULTRA. Victim testimonies describe being immovably bound to chairs for all of their waking existence and forced to listen to a short, recorded tape on loop while blindfolded for sensory deprivation. One victim was unable to recount the message as they suffered PTSD flashbacks and dissociated if they even thought about it. IIRC official records show the tape was something like “I did not kill my mother”, however there were other inclinations that the actual played message was the opposite - “I killed my mother”. At least hundreds of years of torture were carried out on unwitting Americans and Canadians; on a magnitude that is comparable to human experimentation astrocities of the worst regimes in history; just less in numbers. More reading: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/exqjv4/how-do-you-turn-a-family-history-of-cia-mind-control-experiments-into-art https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/exqjv4/how-do-you-turn-a-...

christmasity 9y ago
Unethical human experimentation was pioneered by the US. We've been experimenting on natives, blacks, minorities a long before the nazis. And we even tested nuclear fallout on pacific islanders long after ww2. I believe the "father" of unethical japanese human experimentation was trained in the US before ww2. Not sure why canadians got involved in this mess though.
- ivan_ah 9y ago
  I was reading about this a long time ago, and remember the de-programming research experiments were initially proposed to be done in US, but was rejected based on ethical grounds. So they just took the project up north.
  - myth_drannon 9y ago
    Not surprising, considering the history of residential schools and the treatment of Aboriginal people in Canada
    - throwanem 9y ago

pmoriarty 9y ago

What boggles my mind is after decades and decades of truly scummy, bottom of the barrel activity (not only in this case, but in the torture they inflicted on prisoners, assassinations, drug running, overthrows of governments, etc), the CIA still manages to recruit people. They must either be hiring really naive recruits, who are blinded by idealism or really ignorant of the history of the organization they're joining, or they're hiring complete and utter scumbags. Or, perhaps the revelations that have been made public about them are false and they're really the stereotypical "good guys" they try to paint themselves as.

jahaja 9y ago
I think a lot of "normal" people can rationalize away these things to get into positions of status and authority. The shame is that they still somehow have that status is western culture.
saagarjha 9y ago
Or maybe they just pay enough for people to forget about the ethics of what they’re doing.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  Payment in blood for some, no doubt. I'm sure they have no problem finding people for whom torture or murder is its own reward.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
cryoshon 9y ago
some people believe that "anything is justifiable" in the name of american security some people will believe MKULTRA is just a conspiracy people and some people will view such actions as necessary but messy aspects of the brutally realist struggle between countries (critically forgetting that humanity comes before any individual nation or individual)
- deleted 9y ago

anigbrowl 9y ago

"They don't want to have to deal with more applications," Stein said of the government's requirement the settlement details be kept confidential and out of the public eye. Cooperation is complicity. If you're party to a gag order and it's not obviously geared towards protecting the basic (not political) safety of specific persons, then you should consider whether you have an obligation to circumvent it, and how.

Waterluvian 9y ago
Academically, yes. But it's easy to say when it's not you.

kelvin0 9y ago

How can anyone discount so called 'conspiracies theories' so quickly when accounts of such atrocities are now mainstream knowledge? I am not saying one should suspend critical thinking and logic to accept anything they are told, but clearly there are some instances where history has proven such conspiracies have taken place and harmed many innocent lives.

Splendor 9y ago
Because many conspiracy theorists are more interested in selling brain vitamins than finding the truth.
- lawlessone 9y ago
  take your brain force!
wallace_f 9y ago
I used to be of the mind that ideas within the conspiracy theory realm were most likely utter nonsense. After Snowden and the DNC scandal, I've opened up the possibility for a lot more critical thought. If you take a look at the conspiracy sub on reddit, which became popular after the DNC Scandal, while there is some nonsense, the most-upvoted stuff are often quite interesting. In fact, I find the userbase there in some ways more sane and rational than your typical political online forum, often being even quite the opposite of the identity politics seen in those places, ie the #3 most upvoted post this year is exactly that.(1) 1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/6twr5k/the_only_power_that_scares_the_establishment/ https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/6twr5k/the_only...
- lostgame 9y ago
  Not sure why this is downvoted. Upvoted for being pretty on point.
- shostack 9y ago
  >" In fact, I find the userbase there in some ways more sane and rational than your typical political online forum" I'm confused by this statement. /r/conspiracy has been shown to have been heavily used by Russian bots/trolls to spread propaganda and truly fake news.

brunoqc 9y ago

I live near Montréal and I never heard about it except from US sources. It's weird that it doesn't seem to be a big deal. Also I'm never sure if the sources are accurate or if it's from some conspiracy nuts.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
scott_karana 9y ago
Why would you hear about it from Canadian sources, if they're getting gagged?
- brunoqc 9y ago
  If I understand correctly, the victims are getting gagged. Not the news medias. They can publish stuff and they did in the past, like that The Fifth Estate thing. So I could have heard about it but I didn't. From the news or from people. Maybe the news don't talk about it often enough or that the population don't care.

forapurpose 9y ago

Coincidentally, I just saw this review of a film about a similar event: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/movies/wormwood-review-errol-morris-peter-sarsgaard.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/movies/wormwood-review-er...

dangero 9y ago

It's not hard to imagine that a government organization capable of this is almost certainly testing out all types of brainwashing techniques online today. (not that many others aren't)