04/03/08 – Nick Turse – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to Antiwar Radio and Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org and also from Antiwar.com slash radio.
Our guest today is Nick Terse, and boy, I guess I should have his bio open on the page in front of me.
Nick Terse is the Associate Editor and Research Director of TomDispatch.com.
He's written for the LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, AdBusters, The Nation, The Village Voice and regularly for TomDispatch.
His first book, The Complex, How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, has just been published in Metropolitan Books' American Empire Project series.
His website is NickTerse.com.
Welcome to the show, Nick.
Thanks for having me.
It's good to talk to you, and I look forward to reading this book as soon as I can.
I heard your great interview with Charles Goyette the other day all about it.
What was it, the military, industrial, congressional, academic, media, high tech, scientific, something rather complex?
You got it.
Boy, yeah, it is getting all pervasive.
When Eisenhower gave that speech, that was already, what, two generations after the arms manufacturers had taken over American foreign policy, wasn't it?
Exactly.
All right.
So, here's this thing.
The Pentagon's Battle Bugs, your most recent article with Tom Englehart.
It's at AntiWar.com slash Englehart and at TomDispatch.com.
And when I saw this headline, I pictured, you know, little robot bugs flying around.
And then, oh no, I should not make assumptions.
I got into this article, and the first thing I see is that DARPA, the high tech gurus at the Pentagon, are figuring out how to weaponize moths and June bugs.
What the hell?
Yeah, it sounds like science fiction, but unfortunately, it's all too real.
Now you say in here that they figured out how to, I guess, implant microchips and other, you know, technological circuitry and so forth inside these bugs in the larval stage.
And then, when they hatch, they're, you know, full grown, they have these parts built into them.
Is that right?
That's right.
It's a DARPA program called HI-MEMS.
That's the acronym for it.
It's the Hybrid Insect Micromechanical Systems Program.
And what they're doing is they're funding scientists at some of the top universities across the country to implant microelectronics into these insects when they're still in the cocoon, in the pupil stage, actually, of metamorphosis, so that these computer chips and tiny muscle and neural stimulators are integrated into the insect's bodies as they develop, so when they emerge from the cocoon, they can be remotely controlled.
And then, what are we talking about, tiny little video cameras and microphones and so forth?
Yeah, that's the idea.
Video surveillance, acoustic sensors, and then also, you know, chemical sensors on board.
That's at least what they'll admit to right now.
Okay.
Now, just to make sure to ground this interview solid in reality, this is not kookery.
You're not some conspiracy nut.
You're an expert on the Pentagon.
You write about this kind of thing all the time.
This is literally what they're doing.
This is not, you're not BSing me, and this is not a novel that you're trying to sell about the future.
No, no, this isn't, this isn't from, you know, the fringes of conspiracy theory.
Everything that I talk about, you can find in advanced academic journals right now.
This is research that's going on, you know, quite publicly, although under the radar at University of Michigan, at University of California, Berkeley, Cornell University.
And by the way, for anyone who goes to antiwar.com slash Engelhardt, it's just a few articles back.
The Pentagon's battle bugs.
You will see that the footnotes all throughout our scholarly journals, direct interviews with the people at DARPA.
So wow.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
I'm just trying to get my head around this thing.
You actually, one of the first things you brought up was one of the first things that came to my mind is the paranoia, the idea that, you know, I don't know, I guess I'm imagining myself 10 years in the future, something camping somewhere and a Beatles crawling across the campsite.
And I don't know whether it's working for the Pentagon or not.
That's right.
I, yeah, I spoke to a technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who's the, which is a digital rights and civil liberties group.
And this is something that he really keyed in on that, you know, that, that it's troubling for everyone's mental health.
When, when any insect that you see might be, you know, a high board surveillance device.
Wow.
That's really incredible.
And now, so there's obviously some, some hurdles to be overcome here.
Beatles don't really live that long, do they?
How effective are these things going to be for surveillance tools, do you think?
Well, that is one of the major sticking points.
And right now they're, they're putting a lot of money into trying to figure out how the, how to get these, these bugs to live, you know, for long enough to, to accomplish their mission.
So that's one of the, you know, the major drawbacks right now, but, but they're, they're pouring plenty into it to try and try and figure out a way to overcome those obstacles.
And then you also talk about weaponization.
And I guess you were, I'm not sure who it was you were speaking with, were you asking, well, how exactly do you weaponize a beetle?
And their answer was?
Bioweapons.
It was really shocking and intense, frightening to me.
This was a, a researcher at Georgia Tech University who's, who's worked, you know, on military projects for, for years and including DARPA projects.
Right now he isn't funded by DARPA, so he was able to, to speak a little freer, although he has acted as a spokesman for, for DARPA recently.
And, you know, I, I told him that I talked to, to some experts in the field and they, they believed that, you know, weaponization would, would be coming down the road and being that this is a Pentagon project, it does seem like a reasonable assumption.
And I, I just asked him point blank, how would, how would one weaponize a cyborg insect?
And he said, you know, straight out, bioweapons.
You know, it reminds me of that old show that used to come on the Discovery Channel, Beyond 2000.
Well, it's 2008 now.
It's the future right now.
And, you know, just last week I was interviewing David Case from Mother Jones about the predator drones and killing all these innocent people from the air and so forth.
And I was just joking.
He talked about, well, you know, there's 50,000 something of these things have been turned out by now or something like that.
And I said, boy, you know, it won't be long before there's a few of these things circling over Austin, Texas all day.
And then that very day, it was, I think last Friday, that, that very afternoon, I, I saw an article about the Miami police seeking predator drones to fly over Miami.
So I guess it won't be, you know, another couple of months or something, and I'm going to have to really start being paranoid about the insects in my neighborhood.
And it is scary.
The, you know, sheriff's departments and, and law enforcement across the U.S. have been experimenting with the use of UAVs.
I know that Los Angeles has also started a test program.
So, yeah, well, and, you know, you quote one guy in here who says, well, you know, come on, surveillance is happening all the time anyway.
Don't quibble about the surveillance platform.
Yeah, that's right.
It's a, it's a common argument to say that, you know, these are just, just tools being used and it's the people that employ them that have to, that, that are really the, the problem.
If there are any ethical issues, they, they have to do with, with people.
But, you know, we, we've seen that, that the government is able, is, is more than willing to play fast and loose with, with legal bounds of, of surveillance.
So you know, it's, it's, it's especially troubling that, that they look into this, you know, this line of surveillance.
Well, and, and once they have a total surveillance society, they're much harder to oppose and get rid of the bad people and hire only good people who won't surveil us all the time.
That's right.
I mean, you kind of get sliding down this slippery slope.
How do you stop?
Exactly.
All right.
Now, again, wait a minute.
Wait, wait, wait.
I still can't get my, I forget if it's my cerebellum or cerebral cortex or what around this.
You're telling me that this actually works, that these guys can, what, look at a video screen and with a PlayStation controller in their hand and they can fly June bugs around and control where they go and what they video?
Well, right now they've, they've gotten to the point where they can get the, the insects to live into adulthood and they're able to control them, but the bugs right now are tethered.
They're not able to fly free yet, but I've talked to a couple of researchers who say that they think a prototype will be available in the next couple of years where it'll be totally wireless and and won't have to have an onboard battery at all.
Right now, say that the beetles are actually powered with a, um, a cochlear implant battery, but they're hoping to actually run it off the beetle itself in the future.
And then they think that'll remove one of the last obstacles.
Yeah.
Well, um, I don't mean to come off sounding like Ted Kaczynski or anything, but this does kind of remind me of, uh, the book technopoly by a postman where he talks about basically we live in a, in a situation now in our society where any gadget that can be invented will be invented when, as soon as cameras are cheap enough to put them up on every street corner, they put them up on every street corner.
There's no democracy, there's no vote and demand.
We all want to be surveilled all the time.
It just happens.
And there's no stopping it now.
And this is completely the attitude of, of the people at DARPA that you talk about in the article that, Hey, this is just research.
We're just scientists researching here.
And if we accidentally help these people create a totalitarian society here, well, that's not our fault.
This is, you know, it's just a gadgetry and we're doing whatever we can.
That's right.
They, they just, uh, you know, I, I, I talked to the DARPA spokesperson and I tried to, you know, I, I even brought up to the point to her that, that, uh, that a formerly funded, uh, DARPA researcher had, had mentioned bioweapons as, as, uh, you know, how these, how these insects would be used.
And she just refused to even look down the road.
She just, she said, I can't speculate on the future, even though that's what DARPA is all about.
They just, uh, they won't address those issues and they won't look into them ahead of time.
Yeah.
It's like that movie real genius where they make the great laser and then they realize their professor's actually going to sell it to the DOD to murder people with.
That's exactly right.
Yeah.
It's that kind of thing.
Although, you know, in that movie, Val Kilmer actually cared that that's what his great invention was going to be for.
You can hope that, that some DARPA researchers there will, will step up, but I wouldn't count on it.
Yeah.
And now, um, they're already, uh, you, you mentioned in your article, uh, they're already remote controlling sharks and, and, uh, bees.
Is that right?
Rats.
Rats and sharks.
And they, they figured out how to, uh, how to control bees without any type of implant.
But, uh, but, uh, the rats and the sharks, they're using neural implants to, to control them so they can be used, uh, you know, simply for surveillance in the future.
Wow.
That is really is out of some weird science fiction that I'm sure somebody already wrote a generation ago or something, you know, where the sharks work for the DOD.
I mean, come on, it's a, it really does sound like the wildest realms of science fiction, but this is, this is the research that's going on right now.
Incredible.
Incredible.
Well, uh, tell me a little bit about your book before I let you go here.
The Complex, How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives.
Yeah.
Well, um, you know, basically the, the subtitle says it all.
It's a, it's an expose on how the military invades our everyday lives and what I try and do in about 25 short snapshot chapters to show the many ways that the Pentagon has infiltrated the civilian sphere.
And um, I demonstrate that President Dwight Eisenhower's idea of the military industrial complex is now completely updated and it's been replaced by what I call the military corporate complex or the complex for short.
And uh, you know, basically I, I try and show that Eisenhower's military industrial complex didn't extend far beyond the Lockheed factory floor and his formulation basically consisted of the large arms dealers like Lockheed and Boeing and mega corporations like General Motors.
But today, Lockheed, Boeing and companies like GM, while they still form the core of the complex, they're dwarfed by tens of thousands of other contractors that you wouldn't necessarily guess were wrapped up in the military.
I'm talking about a civilian firms like Apple computer, Starbucks, Oakley, Pepsi, and thousands of small town businesses like Christian bookstores in Mississippi or barbecue joints in Louisiana.
The complex is just everywhere today, but almost everywhere it goes unnoticed.
William S. Lynn says the DOD budget is the biggest honeypot in the world.
That's right.
That's right.
It's uh, in, in real terms, uh, the national security budget is, it's somewhere around $1 trillion these days, despite what the DOT says.
Yeah.
So that's really how to make a fortune.
It's not to be an entrepreneur.
It's to get a government contract, particularly a Pentagon contract.
Yeah.
That's the way to do it.
Yeah.
That's the American way.
Yeah.
I guess.
Maybe it always has been.
All right.
Uh, thanks very much for your time today, everybody.
That's Nick terse.
He is, uh, the associate editor and research director of Tom dispatch.com and, uh, his new book, the complex, how the military invades our everyday lives has just been published by metropolitan books.
Check out his website, Nick terse.com.
Thanks very much for your time today, Nick.