On NPR today there was a guy who works to get declassified stuff that shouldn’t be classified anymore. For example, Elvis once met with Nixon on the spur of the moment, just showing up at the front gate asking to see him, and asked to be made into an honorary undercover narcotics agent. They chatted, he got it, gave a gift to Nixon (a pistol!) and that was the end of it. This is classified information by default, and stayed that way because no-one ever asked for it to be declassified.
Acoustic Kitty was another project he got declassified. The project involved embedding microphones under the skin of cats, and then sending them in to curl up near (or in the lap of) The Target. They’d tried dogs and stuff, but cats are more likely to stay in one place and sit still.
So they got the plan all put together, got a cat, trained it, put the microphone in, and took it to a park in D.C. They marked the target and turned the cat loose. It started to move in.
And then got hit by a taxi.
End of project.
that’s what you get when you trust a cat.
I am willing to bet if that happened today the ASPCA and PETA would scream for a Congressional Investigation, siting that the cat’s personal freedoms were usurped and then the NY Times would leak the cat’s owners name, find out where these cats are trained in foreign countries and leak that, only to start another investigation to see if the President was overstepping his legal bounds, and misuse of the Patriot Act is in play!
That is as bright as the artist who bound his legs in chains in the desert and then lost the key. Had to “hop” 12 miles to town for help. I guess these may be the things that make God laugh at us humans. 🙂
The government has a history of trying to do strange things with animals.
I recall hearing a story about them tying explosives to bats during WW2. The idea was that they would release them in the air, the bats would fly inside buildings and blow them up.
It didn’t work very well.
I’m not sure of the details of how it went wrong, but the project never got out of testing.