The future is here: Mind control and torture in the digital era
PDF by Pau Pérez-Sales
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The future is here: Mind control and torture in the digital era
by Pau Pérez-Sales
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Abstract
Torture, understood as a relationship of domination
in which one person breaks the will
and impedes the self-determination of another
human being, taking control of all aspects of
the victims’ life and trying to change the core
elements of their identity to the perpetrator’s
interests (Pérez-Sales, 2017), will increasingly
come to be linked to new technologies, artificial
intelligence, the use of media and internet,
and to new forms of lethal and non-lethal
weapons. The author reviews the implications
of modern technology for the contemporary
fight against torture and some of the emerging
civil society initiatives that aim to face them.
Keywords: Torture, Non-Lethal weapons,
Neuro-warfare, Nanotechnologies, Mind
control. Surveillance Methods, Neuro-ethics,
Cognitive Liberty.
Working with torture survivors: are there
two parallel worlds?
When we discuss contemporary torture, it
seems as if there are two parallel worlds. One
is constituted by, let’s say, “real torture”, that
of blows and beatings, of the dark ominous
places of detention. And the other, that reflected
in mostly speculative reports, is of the
MK-Ultra, the laboratories of human experimentation,
brainwashing and the dark world
of military research institutions. Both worlds
seem dissociated. When a field worker doctor
or psychologist in a torture treatment centre
of the Global South is told about CIA or
China mind- control programmes, or about
documenting threats or sleep deprivation as
subtle forms of torture (Pérez-Sales, 2020,
2021), that person may read the information
with a certain curiosity. But as a reality, such
programmes appear light-years away from his
or her daily practice of hunger, bruises, insomnia
and flashbacks.
Until suddenly Guantanamo prison is
among the main news on TV, and the two
worlds, apparently dissociated come together.
And we realise that thousands of people, ordinary
citizens, have been, and are being, subjected
for years to torture methods designed
by psychologists and doctors, the foundation
for ideas and programmes that sound like outdated
Cold War relics, but which are nonetheless
real: MK-Ultra, Albert Biederman,
Brainwashing, Kubark Manual, and the like.
Human experimentation not so far as that
performed by Nazi doctors. In fact, opaque
centres like Guantanamo exist and have always
existed. La Libertad prison in Montevideo was
a place of experimentation in psychological
torture in the 1980s. There were similar centres
in Brasilia and Buenos Aires, where mind-control
experiments on human beings were done
with British, French or North American instructors.
In the 1990s, experiments on differ-
The future is here: Mind control and
torture in the digital era
Pau Pérez-Sales
https://doi.org/10.7146/torture.v32i1-2.132846
International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims. All rights reserved.
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ent forms of identity destruction were carried
out in Turkey in the Kartal Special Type Prison
(among others), which later gave rise to the
well-known F-Type prisons. The Evin prison
in Tehran has had, for more than 20 years, and
is still in use, a module for experimentation
with different forms of psychological torture,
in the past with US and Rusian trainers, now
on their own. Similar modules have been described
in other countries. It seems nobody
wants to be left behind in the race to delve
into the limits of the human mind and will.
Torture methods: changing the outlook
Psychological torture, in the past, was based
on destruction: the destruction of the body
through pain, and the destruction of the mind
through psychological methods of attacking
self and identity.
Those methods proved to be of little practical
use, except as punishment, and were not
considered cost-effective by the State perpetrators.
Whatever limited success such methods
achieved often came at the expense of a negative
social image, international isolation and
a high political cost for the governments that
used them. Moreover, such methods corresponded
poorly with the logic of the free
market and the monetisation of all aspects of
society in a globalised world in which markets
supplant States as social regulators.
Thus, the torture of the future will be
forms of social control that are also niche
markets. The destruction of body and mind
will still be part of contemporary torture; but
the focus of torture methods will increasingly
be based on the logic of late capitalist societies.
Mind control: more than a myth?
The technological society is advancing exponentially.
In 1969, the US military research
agency ARPA created the first rudimentary internet.
The first PC came onto the market in
1981, based on the MS-DOS system. Barely 40
years later, quantum transmission systems are
becoming available and any desktop computer
is capable of handling gigabytes of information
in seconds. Advances in the battle for mind
control have followed the same exponential
growth. What only ten years ago was part of a
conspiratorial universe, is today a technological
reality; sometimes in animal testing models,
but very often already in human experimentation
or applied in small scale environments.
In a very short time, there will be attempts to
scale it up, and a new battle will ensue as civil
society and human rights groups challenge
the assault on individual liberty. Globally, this
new field, which has undergone extraordinary
expansion since the 1970s, has been labelled
neuro-warfare (Krishnan, 2016). Part of it is
Internet and Communications Ill-Treatment
and Torture (ICIT) which looks specifically
at how communications and social networks
can be used as forms of torture, coercion and
social control and reviewed elsewhere. (Pérez-
Sales & Serra, 2020)
Torture is understood, in its ultimate
consequences, as a relationship of domination
in which one person breaks the will and
impedes the self-determination of another
human being, taking control of all aspects of
the victims’ life and trying to change the core
elements of his or her identity to the perpetrator’s
interests (Pérez-Sales, 2017). This
purpose will increasingly come to be linked to
the new technologies, artificial intelligence, the
use of media and internet, and to new forms
of lethal and non-lethal weapons.
Controlling the body: of course pain, but
not only pain
Table 1 collects a brief summary of available
contemporary non-lethal weapons already
in use or in experimental stage with potential
use as torture devices (National Research
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Council, 2003; Wright, 2002). Some of them
are well-known and debated, like electro-shock
implements (Dermengiu et al., 2008; Institute
for Security Studies, 2016), sound weapons
(Davison, 2009a; Volcler, 2013) or chemical
riot control agents (Schep et al., 2015).
Others are less well-known, like thermal
lasers, radiofrequency or directed energy
devices (Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate,
2011; Risling, 2006; United States Air
Force Research Laboratory, 2002).
Specifically, one of the less known and
most expanding areas of technological development
in recent years is that of so-called Directed
EnergyWeapons (DEW). These are based
on the use of different forms of distant energy
emission devices (laser, radiofrequency, microwave
or other) directed against an individual
or focused towards specific areas within
the human body (Davison, 2009b). As an instrument
of coercion and torture, they can
be used from a certain distance and become
unaware to the victim. They also allow for continuously
targeting a person. In the short term,
they cause thermal pain that can be unbearable
and in the medium and long-term, they can
potentially cause lesions in the skin or internal
organs. There are also complex behavioural
effects, still under study (Davison, 2009b).
Nanotechnology and torture
Nanotechnology is the modern and rapidly
expanding field of medicine that applies the
use of nanoparticles (particles with a size of
less than 100 nanometres [nm]) for preventive,
therapeutic and diagnostic purposes. It
is based on the introduction of these particles
into the body through different transporters
New Non-Lethal Weapons with potential use as torture devices
Chemical weapons • Incapacitating agents (e.g. CS, CN, CR, OC) used as gases or sprays
• Chemicals that target neurotransmission receptors aiming to
produce anxiety, submissiveness or fatigue
• Chemicals that act as malodorant or produce nausea or vomiting
• Chemicals that produce temporary neurotoxic paralysis.
Electro-shock devices • All kinds of guns, projectiles, batons or belts.
Acoustic devices • White sound that produces irritability, insomnia and anxiety
• Low-frequency sound that causes headaches, disorientation and
nausea.
• Sound isolation devices – sound deprivation
• Sound saturation devices
Light devices • Strobe lights, dazzling lasers, flash binding lights that cause
disorientation and temporal blindness
Microwave generators • Increase water body temperature creating general or focused
burning sensations
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and directing them through the bloodstream
to specific targets in the human body. Nanotechnologies
have applications in the fight
against degenerative neurological disease, infectious
processes and chemotherapy where
targeted actions are sought to increase efficacy
minimizing secondary effects. But in parallel,
for the last 20 years, the military industry has
also been researching its potential application
as a powerful tool in neurowarfare (Altmann,
2004). Nanomedicine as a non-invasive strategy
has enormous potential and enormous
dangers, and has yet to be specifically regulated
by an international treaty (Nixdorff et
al., 2018). Nanoparticles do not necessarily
require an injection site and can be absorbed
via the skin or nasal passages. Just as
an example of its potential applications, some
programmes already allow for the permanent
tracking of the movements of animals, a technology
quite close to the conspiracy-minded
ideas of many antivaccine groups.
Chemical weapons are thought of as products
that can be deployed on a large scale in
war contexts, such as in the case of Agent
Orange gas in Vietnam (Verwey, 1977) or
White Phosphorus Bombs used in Gaza or
Syria (Crowley, 2016; Dando, 2015). This
being true, less well-known is the development
of chemicals linked to nanotechnologies.
A recent review has found a wide array of research
into aerosol-delivered toxins and neuro-
regulators (Nixdorff et al., 2018). Its use
has been reported in episodes of poisoning
with permanent neurological damage involving
Russian dissidents over the last decade.
Also the use of oxytocin and other empathic
substances and their potential applications in
psychiatry and mental health are well known
(Lane et al., 2013; Leppanen et al., 2018) and
they have proposed as contemporary forms
of truth serum (Marks, 2010; Walsh, 2014),
something that, for now, is far from reality.
Neural implants
A neural implant is a device placed inside the
body that interacts with neurons. In the early
days these were electrodes implanted through
the cortex, but over time they have evolved
into microchips that require minimal surgery
for implantation and do not require external
power supplies. Neural implants have multiple
applications in medicine, especially related
to neurostimulation in motor and sensory
disorders, but also epilepsy, and they are in
early experimentation stage in depressive and
obsessive-compulsive disorders (Costa e Silva
& Steffen, 2017). This is a rapidly progressing
research area in which biochips and implants
are built in new and better materials
that produce no tissue rejection, incorporating
nanotechnologies to diminish the size and
with more powerful software to control and
interact with the neural system (Dabbour et
al., 2021; Salari et al., 2022; Wan et al., 2021)
while, again, there is no international regulation
of its use (McGee & Maguire, 2007).
The most important concern regarding the
use of neuroimplants – not in the near future,
for now - is represented by the possibility of
controlling an individual’s mental functions
via wireless waves interacting with the electric
activity of the brain. From the perspective of
torture, it has been claimed that they could
be used in the future to manipulate memory
and emotions and to induce hallucinations
and psychotic-like symptoms, among many
other harmful effects (J. Illes & Hevia, 2021;
Krishnan, 2016; Leung et al., 2019).
Unveiling the brain: Accessing thoughts
and feelings
If anything resembles a future in which it
is possible to control the human mind, it is
through the hundreds of civil and military research
projects on Mind-Brain interfaces and
Remote Neural Monitoring. One step ahead of
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neuroimplants, the aim of mind-brain interfaces
is to impant devices that allow for wireless
bi-directional communication between
the brain and the external world. Under the
coverage of medical projects, new generations
of ever more powerful cortical modems developed
by the military industry1 are marketed
and already in use in pilot experimental subjects.
In its present basic form, they allow to
control orthopaedic systems with the mind,
but in their more advanced modalities, cortical
modems allow the user to ‘inject’ images
or sounds directly into their visual or auditory
cortex1,2 allowing blind people to partially
recover their sight or the brain damaged to
restore their ability to recall some memories3,
among other uses.
Different labs in Europe, Japan and the US
have also developed headsets and other extrenal
devices that act as Brain-Computer Interfaces
y detecting and amplifying EEG signals, allowing
patients to communicate with researchers
and control external devices simply by imagining
the actions of their body parts (Bates,
2021), a technology that will have many potential
benefits for patients suffering neurological
disorders. There are now on the market different
basic portable devices that monitor electric
brain activity4,5 and electromyography signals6
for no-touch game interfaces, emotional training
and mindfulness practice, among others.
Different Thought-to-Text devices are already
available (Willett et al., 2021) and ready to
1 https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2015-01-19
2 https://www.sbir.gov/node/736761
3 https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/203718-
darpa-dreams-cortical-modems-and-neuralramplants-
for-restoring-active-memory
4 https://www.bitbrain.com/neurotechnologyproducts
5 https://www.mindtecstore.com/NeuroSky-
Brainwave-Starter-Kit-EEG-Headset
6 https://store.neurosky.com/
be marketed. If EEG waves can be amplified
to the point of being detected by an external
device without the need of a headset or external
electrodes -a possibility that will be real in
a short time -, in popular terms, mind-reading
and telepathy will be technologically possible
(Brigham & Kumar, 2010; Vorontsova
et al., 2021).
Big data, security and surveillance in law
enforcement
This decade will undoubtedly be remembered
as the decade of Big Data. The existence
of super-computers with the capacity to
process millions of data bytes in milliseconds
and to integrate and analyse almost instantaneously
databases from very diverse sources
has opened the door not only to an unprecedented
advertising invasion but also to the
integration of databases on human beings that
include and combine, for instance, biometric
data, activities, movements, expenditures and
opinions, among many other elements. Always
in the name of security and the fight against
terrorism, and pushed by the new Cold War
jargon, governments approve the existence of
databases with use restricted to military and
law-enforcement special units over which
there are few to any means of transparency or
control. Such databases, in the form of antiterrorist
files of persons ‘under special surveillance’,
have always existed. The difference
is that the current databases aim to slowly
include all citizens, and they are transnational
in nature7. The citizen is confronted, once
again, with the need and duty to rely on the
good faith of institutions and governments.
Most of these data are in the hands of private
companies and police and military agencies
7 https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-pushes-to-linktracking-
databases/
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that often act with little political oversight.
There are many risks linked to the routine
use of Big Data by law enforcement agencies,
especially regarding discrimination and
abuse (Guthrie, 2017). Policies for full transparency
have been proposed, including, for
instance, regular meetings between police,
community representatives, elected leaders,
technology experts, and civil liberties groups
engaged in public and open information sessions
(Guthrie, 2017).
Furthermore, Big Data is used to decide
political strategies and design communication
campaigns (Stroud & McGregor, 2019) to increase
voting tendencies and get acceptance
and compliance to unpopular measures.
Debates in the field of human rights about
the limits of the use of Big Data paint a picture
of increasingly urgent ethical awareness and
action (Davis & Patterson, 2012).
Interception and control of communications
is the other side of the coin of social surveillance.
It seemed technologically impossible
to monitor and track millions of telephones
and Internet communications around the
world until Edward Snowden and others unveiled
Echelon, the main among other similar
global surveillance networks (Cohen, 2014;
Verri et al., 2014). Echelon, with an estimated
300,000 employees in 120 stations around the
world, according to official figures, monitors
more than three billion communications every
day, 90% of Internet traffic. The information
captured by Echelon feeds different Big Data
databases (Lyon & Murakami, 2021).
Transhumanism: Upload brains to
computers
This decade has also been called the decade
of the brain. The United States launched the
Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies
(BRAIN) Initiative to develop
and apply new
tools and technologies to the mapping and
study of neural circuits, and the understanding
of the neural and computational basis
of behaviours, perceptions, thoughts and
emotion8 (Jorgenson et al., 2015; Koroshetz
et al., 2018). New neuro-technologies fuelled
by the BRAIN Initiative now allow investigators
to map, monitor and modulate complex
neural circuits, enabling the pursuit of research
questions previously considered unapproachable
(Hsu et al., 2020).
One of the most exciting (and frightening)
careers in contemporary science, mostly
in the private sector is, once deciphered the
brain, the pursuit of methods for transferring
the entire information of a human brain
into a computer. There are several companies
working towards being the first to achieve this
goal, with Neurolink, the company owned by
Elon Musk, as the most mentioned in newspapers
and the media. According to Ray
Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google,
“we’ll be uploading our entire minds to
computers by 2045 and our bodies will be
replaced by machines within 90 years”9. Neuro-
ethicists debate whether, by the time this is
achieved, it will transfer more than just a set
of neural networks and information, or also
transfer that person’s consciousness, which
some speculate would amount to, somehow,
achieving the immortality of a person in a
machine body.
8 For an introduction to Brain Mapping and its
implications see the Open Access Special Issue
Cerebral cartography: a vision of its future compiled
by Semir Zeki in Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society – Biological Sciences (May
2015). https://royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/
rstb/2015/370/1668)
9 https://www.kurzweilai.net/daily-mail-wellbe-
uploading-our-entire-minds-to-computersby-
2045-and-our-bodies-will-be-replaced-bymachines-
within-90-years-google-expert-claims
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This possibility has spawned several thinktanks
of philosophical reflection that try to
promote the debate on where contemporary civilisation
and the human species should evolve.
An example of this was made in a proposition
by the Global Future 2045’s 2013 Congress
which stated the goal “Towards a New Strategy
for Human Evolution” in an open letter
to United Nations General Secretary Ban Ki-
Moon, and was debated at Oxford’s Future
of Humanity Institute and other institutions
(Benedikter et al., 2016). Furthermore, some
philosophers are developing models that speak
of a coexistence of a classic labour-based capitalism
with what is called new cognitive capitalism,
in which persons will have economic
value for their brain and thinking and the economical
applications of the data it generates
(Lushetich, 2021).
Linked to it is transhumanism, a branch
of science devoted to enhancing (or abating)
human beings by employing already existing
and future technologies: artificial intelligence,
robotics, cognitive science, information technology,
nanotechnology, biotechnology and
others reviewed here (Hofkirchner & Kreowski,
2021). While most of the field is futuristic projections,
closer to science-fiction than reality,
different projects of the so-called super-soldiers
are already funded by DARPA military projects
as publicly announced on their website10. Big
Data is also used to create intelligent systems
that can support military decisions in complex
environments (Labbe, 2019).
10 https://www.engineering.com/story/darpasbuilding-
a-noninvasive-neural-interface-forsoldiers
Facing the challenge: Initiatives to defend
human rights in the 21st Century.
Research, documentation and advocacy
initiatives
Fortunately, there are some initiatives
for these new struggles of the human rights
tradition that are central to the fight against
torture. Amnesty Tech is a global collective of
advocates, hackers, researchers and technologists
that aims to “bolster social movements
in an age of surveillance, challenge the systemic
threat to our rights posed by the surveillance-
based business model of the Big Tech
companies, ensure accountability in the design
and use of new and frontier technologies and
encourage innovative uses of technology to
help support fundamental rights”11. Besides
publishing reports, they undertake strategic
litigation cases. Human Rights Watch has
created a specific research line on Technology
and Rights with a team of full-time researchers
that has produced both Global and
Country-Specific technical reports12,13. There
are many more14. Just to mention some relevant
initiatives, the University of Essex created
the Human Rights, Big Data and Technology
Research Group15 which has developed good
practise guidelines for the digital age. The
Georgetown Law Library created in 2014 a
special repository on legal initiatives and reg-
11 https://www.amnesty.org/en/tech/
12 https://www.hrw.org/topic/technology-and-rights
13 Their team, by the way, was among the list of
persons with their telephones infected by Pegasus
malware https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/01/26/
human-rights-watch-among-pegasus-spywaretargets
14 https://www.computerweekly.com/
news/450400044/NGOs-challenge-UK-and-USmass-
surveillance-in-human-rights-court
15 https://www.essex.ac.uk/research-projects/
human-rights-big-data-and-technology
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ulations related to cyberspace and digital
rights16. The United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has
issued a set of Recommendations on the Ethics
of Artificial Intelligence17.
Neuro-ethics and cognitive liberty
Most of these initiatives are related to privacy
concerns. Less developed is human rights research
and activism related to neuroscience.
A pioneering movement linked to what
was called Cognitive Liberty started more than
two decades ago (Boire, 2000) as a reaction to
military research on the use of fMRI and other
medical devices in lie detection in the interrogation
of suspects (Balmer, 2018; Poldrack,
2008). Perhaps the movement was too visionary
for the time and thus did not achieve the
necessary backing from civil society organisations.
Different civil society research groups are
working on the ethical challenges and regulations
of new neuro-technologies and neuro-
warfare (Carle, 2021; Herrera-Ferrá, 2021;
Judy Illes & Hossain, 2017; Salles, 2021; Yuste
et al., 2021). There is a pioneering initiative of
a group of neuroscientists from different countries
led by the Chilean professor Rafael Yuste,
Director of the Neurotechnology Centre at
Columbia University, which has articulated a
transdisciplinary platform that lobbies for the
adoption by the United Nations General Assembly
of a new charter of cognitive rights and
respect for the integrity of the conscience as a
fundamental and inalienable value of human
beings (Goering et al., 2021; Ienca, 2021; J.
Illes & Hevia, 2021; Illes & Hossain, 2017;
Yuste et al., 2021). Chile, by the way, will be
16 https://guides.ll.georgetown.edu/c.
php?g=363530&p=4783483
17 https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/
pf0000377897
the first country to adopt specific national legislation
on cognitive rights (Zúñiga-Fajuri et
al., 2021)
In summary
Brain implants and remote Mind-Brain interfaces;
the expansion of nanotechnologies
as weapons targeting not only the body but
also specific points in the brain; the growing
development of biomarkers and massive surveillance
methods; the implementation of
methods to monitor emotions and thoughts
in the interrogation of suspects; the development
of Internet-based technologies for the
manipulation of opinion and social control:
these, among many others, are technological
developments with potential use in manipulation
of minds, cruel and inhuman treatment
or torture at the individual level, and the manipulation
and social and control of communities,
ethnic groups or societies at a global
level
The world of civil science and human
rights advocacy has always advanced with a
minimum of 10 years of delay in regard to the
advances made by military science. Ten years
may not have been that long in the past, but it
may definitely be too long in the future.
And, so what?
Many of these developments in the field of
the interaction between technology, medicine,
sociology and other branches of sciences have
undoubted potential to help humanity. But
they also have enormous potential risks when
ethics are subsumed to serving business interests
or military or political purposes. Even
more when, in relation to all these developments,
deregulation in the field of human
rights, is complete.
Faced with this reality, it is easy to be
tempting to consider that these are conspiracy
fantasies and that there is too much work
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to be done in our daily lives with victims of
“real torture” to worry about the evolution of
ill-treatment and torture. This is partly true.
Without falling into apocalyptic discourses
nor into naïve confidence in human kindness,
these are areas to which doctors, lawyers and
human rights defenders must pay attention. If
we want to understand the future of torture
in the years to come, those who fight against
it need to evolve as rapidly as those who help
to perpetrate it.
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