This page is still a work in progress - adding content overtime, but it needs reasearch so apologises for the delay :)
This section is dedicated to theories that ended up being more truth than fiction. A lot of these are gross violations of peoples rights by government agencies (mainly American).
During the Prohibition era (1920 to 1933), the production, importation and sale of all alcoholic beverages was banned. Obviously this didn’t stop the American people from wanting to drink – so black markets and crime backed establishments thrived. To counteract this, the US government thought fit to make it so that industrial alcohols (commonly used in moonshine and other alcohol production) should contain toxic chemicals – fully aware that this was a main source of producers making their products. Supposedly an estimate of 10000 people died from poisoning related to this change.
In 1953, the CIA started a program called MKUltra, which set out to develop and identify substances which could be used during interrogations to help force information (essentially they were after a “truth serum”). The project made use of psychoactive substances such as LSD, as well as other chemical compounds, isolation, verbal and physical abuse, hypnosis, and other forms of torture. During the program, the CIA engaged in illegal testing on unknowing citizens, mostly of the US and Canada – taking place at various institutions and front companies across the US.
By 1973, the CIA ordered most of the records to be destroyed, and in 1975 it was revealed to the public. Finally in 2001, some of the surviving records were made declassified (although a lot of them are quite heavily redacted).
Some of the documents in no particular order:
One of the more notorious sub-projects of MKUltra, where the CIA employed and used prostitutes to lure people to CIA safehouses and then non-consensually drug them with LSD, observing the effects behind one-way glass. Supposedly this was done as means of testing means of mind control methods and sexual behaviour.
All either precursors or continuations related to MKUltra. Project Artichoke’s primary goal was to see if they could make someone involuntarily commit an assassination. Project CHATTER was a NAVY project that focused on identifying and testing drugs on both animal and human subjects. MKOFTEN was a DoD and CIA project focused on the testing of drugs on animals and humans – mainly done at Holmesburg prison in Philadelphia. MKNAOMI while related, seems to more focused on biological warfare methods (e.g. delivery methods such as darts, the biological agents themselves, etc.).
In 2013 the Guardian newspaper started to release documents on the NSA collecting telephone records of millions of Verizon customers under secret court orders which essentially allowed unlimited data collection for a 3 month period. This report was then followed up by The Guardian and Washington Post releasing another report regarding the NSA accessing the systems of major American companies (including Facebook and Google) to collect data with a program called Prism.
These leaks were the product of NSA employee Edward Snowden – and these were not the only things revealed, but they revealed the depth of information the US and Foreign agencies (i.e. Five Eyes collective and many others) were able to collect, and how wide spread it was – that is, the mass surveillance of innocent civilians for no other reason than they could.
This GitHub repo contains a comprehensive list of the articles released covering the information provided by Snowden.
This is some of the actual files obtained from this leak.
The Tempora project was a computer system based in the UK and operated by the British GCHQ and American NSA. Tempora was intercepting practically all internet communications, allowing them to harvest large amounts of user data with no real target in mind.
MUSCULAR is a joint program again between GCHQ and the NSA, in which does the same thing that Prism did, expect on a larger scale without the need of any warrants to obtain the data. Supposedly this program stopped with Google and Microsoft’s move to encrypting web traffic.
As well as these, there are other global surveillance systems they use in collaboration – such as Dishfire (collects hundreds of millions of texts & other such info per day globally) – though these are the main ones we know about, courtesy of the Snowden leaks.
This FBI program took place between 1956 and 1971 – and was aimed towards surveying, infiltrating and discrediting political groups including feminist organisations, anti war organisers, black power movements (Martin Luther King Jr., Blank Panthers, etc.), environmentalists, animal rights activists, white supremacists, etc. Basically anything that the agency determined to be subversive to the status quo.
Notably from this program, Black Panther Party leaders were targeted, with methods ranging from assassinations, imprisonment (both falsely and not) and publicly humiliated. Another notable development from this program was the wiretapping of MLK Jr’s phones, sending him (at least one) letter encouraging him to commit suicide, black mailing him with tapes under conditions that they wouldn’t release them if he killed himself before accepting his Nobel Peace Prize, among many other things.
A list of COINTELPRO targets.