Preet Bharara recently interviewed a former CIA acting director on his podcast. He asked (paraphrased), “If a regular person was able to see the kind of classified gadgets you’re working with now, would they say ‘oh, sure, that’s something like what I see in movies’ or would they be blown away?”
The immediate response was “They’d be blown away.” Which piques my curiosity of course. Then again...that statement could just be a psyop. Twisty little passages.
Some other recent thread here talks about how the Hubble Space Telescope was created from leftover CIA spy satellite gear. Read a bunch of near-future sci-fi and some of those ideas are bound to be hits.
MKUltra was the US program that expounded on the research done by the Germans, Japanese, and Soviets (sometimes only programs we thought they were working on and started counter-programs which then spurred the creation of counter-counter-programs...)
My take is that by about the late 80's, early 90's, they had finished most of the research and transitioned into implementation at mass scale, both domestically and internationally. Extrapolate from that what you may.
"It has been verified by a source who claims she was there that then-CIA Director William Casey did in fact say the controversial and often-disputed line “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false,” reportedly in 1981."
"In their propaganda today’s dictators rely for the most part on repetition, supression and rationalization – the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the supression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or the State. As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these techniques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of democratic institutions. -- Aldous Huxley, "Propaganda in a Democratic Society"
Brave New World Revisited"
or for plausible deniability: if LSD is kept illegal (to insure the majority doesn't use it, and doesn't sympathize with those who do), while kept available (to insure there will be enough people who use it recreationally), then the large but relatively smaller latter group can be used to draw test subjects from, and if things go sideways, you have a documented history of voluntary drug abuse events of an individual to point to in order to obscure the involuntary drug experimentation event that went sideways.
