Full title: Operation Acoustic Kitty: The CIA spent about $15 million surgically implanting a microphone in a cat’s ear, a transmitter under its skin, and an antenna through its tail to spy on Soviet conversations

      • SeeMarkFly@lemmy.mlEnglish
        18·
        13 days ago

        In view of recent events, I find it difficult to believe ANYTHING our government says.

        • Duamerthrax@lemmy.worldEnglish
          16·
          13 days ago

          I don’t even think this was the government lying to the public. I think it was a CIA department lying to their superiors. Same with those CIA remote viewing experiments. Come up with a cover story that’s so embarrassing, the higher ups will bury it.

          • Sabata@ani.social
            7·
            13 days ago

            Guys, let’s spend 15 million on LSD and a trip to the woods. Just put cat microphone on the paperwork or something, no one checks.

          • SeeMarkFly@lemmy.mlEnglish
            6·
            13 days ago

            Yea, I think we’re on the same page.

            The CIA has been hiding what they do for a long time now. Your guess is as good as mine.

          • Aqivex@fedinsfw.appEnglish
            3·
            13 days ago

            Do you really believe that the CIA “superiors” didn’t know about the cover up stories and their necessity to chaff the signals up and dilute all of the coups, human trafficking, narcotics empire building, and more realistic ineptitude based fuck ups with wacky zany stories about staring at goats?

            If so, their use of silly is working.

            • Duamerthrax@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              13 days ago

              No, because I think every layer of the CIA thinks they know what’s best and that they shouldn’t have to answer to anyone, including their own boss.

              No, because I think secrets can stay safer the fewer people who know about them. The boss may have a general idea of what’s going on, but the less they know, the less chance there could be a leak from a Man In The Middle attack. The bosses probably have a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. They probably knew the cat story and remote viewing story were nonsense, but knew it was dangerous to know what’s actually going on and left it be.

      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
        10·
        13 days ago

        Yeah, the money went to Katianna the cleaning lady at the embassy and the story about the $15m spy cat was to cover up how they got the information.

    • betterdeadthanreddit@lemmy.world
      211·
      13 days ago

      One was. What they don’t know is that the taxi was being driven by a cat who had been assigned the mission to preserve the secrecy of their own clandestine meetings.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        3·
        13 days ago

        What I remember is they tried to do a test run of whether or not it could hear two people stting and talking at a park bench.

        So, they released, from the safe house on the other side of the road from the park, it started to go toward the bench, and BLAM, hit by a car.

        EDIT:

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_Kitty

        The first Acoustic Kitty mission was to eavesdrop on two men in a park outside the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. The cat was released nearby, but was hit and allegedly killed by a taxi almost immediately.[4] However, this was disputed in 2013 by Robert Wallace, a former director of the Office of Technical Service, who said that the project was abandoned due to the difficulty of training the cat to behave as required, and “the equipment was taken out of the cat; the cat was re-sewn for a second time, and lived a long and happy life afterwards”.[5] Subsequent tests also failed.[1] Shortly thereafter the project was considered a failure and declared to be a total loss.[6] However, other accounts report more success for the project.[7]

        … So… not exactly a high of certainty going on here.