STILL IN PROGRESS, APOLOGIES FOR LOOSE ENDS SCATTERED THROUGHOUT, I STILL HAVE MORE TO WRITE
Greetings to Houston FBI, Houston police, Harris county personnel, and any other intelligence community personnel for whom this may be relevant,
add index
I have identified each paragraph with a heading that will facilitate discussion amongst any analysts, agents, or officers who wish to discuss this letter with their colleagues. Once the chronological summary begins, each paragraph begins with a year and a letter designation, such as “2009e”.
-this entire letter should be available to view online at https://panaudicon.wordpress.com/2023/09/24/chronological-summary-of-my-situation/ The password is: whyisaraven? <— all lower case with the question mark | If that doesn’t work, then I am being secretly censored online.
I was visited Tuesday, August 29th, 2023 at my apartment by FBI agent Casey M. Villarreal of the Houston office and U.S. Marshal / HPD Officer Ana B. Gorham-Maki. The purpose of the visit seemed to be to establish whether or not I was a threat to anyone else, as Agent Villarreal mentioned that some communications from me had been received by the FBI and may have prompted some concern and confusion. Unless the conversation was recorded it would have been a lot of information that Agent Villarreal and Officer Gorham-Maki had to listen to and process. There were surely loose ends remaining by the time the pair had to go. To summarize the past fourteen years of what I have been through is extremely difficult.
Purpose: purpose-a) The purpose of this letter is to provide a timeline of life events that may be relevant for any police, federal intelligence personnel or analysts who are trying to understand this situation. I would like for this letter to be shared as widely as possible to facilitate discussion between persons and organizations. What began as a conventional narcotics investigation started to metastasize many years ago, and my interest profile has since expanded to include material that surely overlaps with highly classified programs. If you had suggested at any time before 2012 that this latter interest were going to evolve, I would have expressed amazement at how this could possibly be. The personnel who know the most about what is going on are not going to be honest with their colleagues who have not already dirtied their hands, with any IC directors, or with any regional authorities at any level about how this debacle has unfolded.
purpose-b) Given that I have been under surveillance for at least fourteen years, I should have a file somewhere at the FBI or DEA. However, I’m given to understand that due to compartmentalization, information sharing is not always readily facilitated in the IC. I’m also concerned that some misinformation or disinformation may have been added to my file over the years, perhaps starting around the time I was in Munich in late 2009. It seemed at that time that some rumors were being spread about me to coworkers, spoiling previously cordial relations, and then later spread to my friends. From the totality of the circumstances I would now guess that persons around me were being led to believe one or more things that were not true. I would also wager that however this information began to be spread at first, that the source of these rumors knew these things to be untrue. However it is quite possible, if not probable, that many subsequent federal agents called upon over the years to get involved in my case have been misled by the original source(s) of the rumors. There may have been something like an internal Haversack Ruse, where one or more mischievous agents planted something that was designed to be found by their colleagues, setting in motion a chain of events with a corrupting effect on my case that persists to the present day. There may be some glaring discrepancies or inconsistencies between various aspects of a profile of me that has been cobbled together. I would like it for all personnel to be able to develop a clearer picture of me, and I’m concerned that deliberate efforts may have been made some time ago to distort that picture for operational reasons, i.e. to manufacture leverage that could be used to persuade others to cooperate, and. as a fringe benefit perhaps, to discourage IC insiders and police from feeling inclined to assist me — i.e., to stick their necks out for me by making me seem less sympathetic than might otherwise be perceived. I want to state up front that: 1) I do not have any secrets that I’ve never shared with anyone. 2) I have been completely sober since January 2019. If either of these assertions is contradicted by anyone inside the IC, then I would like to be confronted directly about whatever is being held out to contradict what I’m saying here. To any confused personnel who are hearing one thing from me and another from your colleagues or from DC: take another look at whatever is being held out to contradict what I’m saying. Start asking questions. Where did that come from? You will notice your colleagues start to squirm and become very uncomfortable the more questions they ask. Has anyone registered concerns or misgivings in the past? Where are the records of those concerns being expressed? Did anyone reach out to the Inspection Division at the FBI? Was anyone summarily reassigned? Did anyone ask to be reassigned? Do the personnel who got involved originally with my case have a reputation for playing loose and fast with the rules? I get into these issues more in the course of this letter.
purpose-c) I want to state up front that I am _not_ into any conspiracy theories. I do not identify with the “targeted individual” community online. I think 99% or more of the persons who self-identify as “targeted individuals” online are very likely to simply be suffering from mental illness. However there is a very small handful of exceptions, two of whom I have interacted with (Suzie Dawson and Kernan Manion, discussed below). I have never heard voices — not once, ever. I am not into UFOs, chemtrails, trutherism, birtherism, election denialism, Infowars, anything having to do with QANON, etc. I am fully vaccinated. However there are most certainly numerous classified projects in the area of neuroscience, as stories in the mainstream media, books, and declassified or redacted documents available through .gov or .mil websites attest. See, e.g., _Military Neuroscience and the Coming Age of Neurowarfare_ by security studies professor Armin Krishnan. This is a topic that interest me. My open-source research in this area (not lab research) has likely come to overlap with what are surely some highly classified programs. This research would have come to the attention of the intelligence community, and almost surely came to their attention before my car was searched at the NSA headquarters in Ft. Meade, MD in late 2017 with extensive photographs taken of research materials I had in my car at the time. As a PhD scientist, I am able to pull together information from disparate sources to show how different pieces can work together to enable some or another capability that the military and intelligence community have desired for decades. But I have never had access to any classified material. This puts the government in a bind. There are no official levers to the best of my knowledge to prevent a citizen from speaking about research of this nature, all culled from open sources, and to even step in and make the attempt would telegraph the government’s interest in capabilities they wish to remain secret. There is the Invention Secrecy Act that permits the government to issue a secrecy order to an inventor who files a patent application for something the government considers sensitive, thus barring the award of a patent, but according to one source an inventor can avoid the risk of imposed secrecy by foregoing patent protection. I am not trying to patent anything. I am trying to spark a debate about a specific domain in which the frontier of neuroscience intersects with national security, in the same way that author/professor Armin Krishnan has done with his book on military neuroscience. Krishnan also culls from open sources to assemble his book, but I am offering technical suggestions for capabilities that either do not exist yet or have not been reported, but which all militaries and intelligence organizations would surely be working towards. In the course of doing this research and advertising my findings, the harassment campaign against me has ramped up to the most extreme levels.
Note for medical professionals:
note to doctors-a) To any medical personnel who may be called upon to evaluate me: I have been under surveillance since late 2009, when what began as a conventional narcotics investigation took some unusual turns. I have some rather extraordinary suspicions, detailed below, that cannot be evaluated independently of the history as to how they arose. I have been in touch with various former intelligence community whistleblowers, and my claims have been taken seriously by these persons, who in some cases have sought to aid me and put me in touch with other persons. I have never heard voices, although I am aware that psychotic episodes do not require this symptom. I can provide a list of dozens of names of persons — friends, family members, coworkers, attorneys, and medical staff — who can corroborate that I have been a target of what some federal agents, either FBI or DEA, have claimed is an “investigation”, but a closer scrutiny of the totality of what has taken place since late 2009 will reveal numerous outstanding anomalies and deficiencies in that justification for following me around over a period of fourteen years. These anomalies would be evident to intelligence community insiders who are empowered to ask tough questions of their colleagues. It almost certainly the case that some federal agents broke the law in late 2009, in a manner that would end their careers, vacate their pensions, and bring federal charges. When this happens, it is not widely advertised to colleagues. Many of those agents’ own colleagues and managers would have been deliberately misled as to numerous aspects of my case over the past fourteen years. Some of these original personnel have surely had time to climb the ladder, become managers themselves, and hence would be hindering the type of internal investigation that would be required at this point. In any event, that I have been the target of scrutiny by federal law enforcement can be easily proven. That federal agents have interacted with persons around me and made requests of them to interact with me in specific ways can also be proven.
note to doctors-b) I am not making claims about anything that is physically impossible or historically unprecedented. Any medical evaluation rendered must necessarily depend on a clinician’s own subjective assessment of the probability that U.S. intelligence personnel would engage in the types of behaviors I am describing. If it’s assumed that personnel will always obey the law, then what I describe is out of the question. Everyone understands though that the police and other personnel break the rules sometimes. This should not be controversial. The initial transgressions I believe took place in my case are relatively conventional. For instance, I think this started when a confidential informant was fabricated by either FBI or DEA agents. Things went downhill from there, and more rules were broken. This quote is instructive, and needs to be appreciated in order to appreciate the remainder of this letter:
From Mechanics of a Police Internal Affairs Investigation by Robert A. Verry, 2nd edition, page 6, Chapter 1: “Crossing the Rubicon” (the Rubicon in this case being the line beyond which transgressions begin to occur):
“Interestingly, regardless of which one of the above is the driving force behind an officer’s misdeeds, most often it is not the initial action or inaction that ends up being the officer’s downfall. Rogue police officers will spend countless hours trying to figure out how to cover up their transgressions instead of just doing the right thing. Apparently misguided, misdirected, or just plain foolish, it is not uncommon for a target officer who is under investigation to provide false statements to the internal affairs investigator in an attempt to conceal what they’re under investigation for. Targets have also resorted to creating diversions, planting evidence, tampering with witnesses, and various other unthinkable deeds they never would have done if not for the investigation or their need to hide their unethical or criminal actions.”
note to doctors-c) A clinician may have heard a thing or two about the historical precedents I refer to below from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, but cheerfully assume like most citizens that American personnel simply do not do these sorts of things anymore. If it’s assumed that the types of activities I describe could not possibly be taking place here, then that baseline assumption is going to color any assessment of diagnosis. What can most certainly be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt is that scores of persons I have interacted with since late 2009 have been contacted by federal personnel and given instructions to interact with me in specific ways. This includes friends, family members, coworkers, doctors, lawyers, medical staff in hospitals where I was involuntarily committed (described below), etc. I cannot as yet prove the repeated break-ins or that my laptop and cell phone have been hacked, although there is a screenshot suggestive that my phone was hacked in 2017 when I was in Washington, DC. I cannot as yet prove that my body and nervous system have been screwed with via technological means, beginning only in January of 2017, and this is the most far-out claim that I am committed to. It may be tempting for a clinician to consider this claim alone when rendering a diagnosis, but that would not be considering the whole picture. I can give a list of names of persons that can confirm they were contacted by federal authorities, if they are allowed to speak candidly with a clinician (which they are not allowed to do with me, under threat of an obstruction charge or interfering with an investigation charge of some kind). They can confirm they were given instructions to interact with me in specific ways. With that knowledge, it would then perhaps be tempting to ascribe the physiological symptoms/effects that I describe to the stress resulting from a highly intensive psychological campaign. I think this is likely what the neuropsychologist Dr. Courtney Murphy assumed in California when I described what was taking place. That explanation is surely easier to accept than what I am asserting. The details of why a government agency would go to such extreme lengths to harass and discredit me using technological means are discussed below, and not easy to summarize. I do not believe that the “symptoms” I have experienced are a function of stress, and I discuss the basis for my confidence below. If what I’m suggesting is true, and the symptoms are induced via technological means, somewhat analogous to the technology that was speculated to cause the “Havana Syndrome” in American diplomats stationed overseas, then this is almost surely a once-in-a-lifetime case for any attending clinician. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime case in the sense that I am a bona fide victim of such methods, while every other patient the clinician has ever received or will ever receive reporting similar phenomena is simply mentally ill. The more such patients a clinician such as a psychiatrist has treated in the past, the easier it becomes to lump the next such patient who comes along into the same group. I have never heard voices, but I know that doesn’t take me out of the running for a diagnosis of mental illness. I am experiencing strange bodily symptoms that I ascribe to technology, and I am being harassed by government personnel who refuse to interact with me directly. These two points alone make it extremely easy to file me with the rest in the usual basket. I request whoever is reading this to consider that my case might be different, and that I have received some extraordinary treatment from some government personnel due to some extraordinary circumstances that have unfolded, outlined below. I do not believe there is any wide-reaching program of experimentation taking place on citizens in the vein of MK-ULTRA. I believe that I have been specifically targeted for special treatment because certain government personnel compromised themselves early on in an investigation that went off the rails, and those personnel are facing the ends of their careers and possible prison sentences.
Note: I will use the term harassment team and surveillance team interchangeably throughout.
Early life through grad school
Thomas J. Kimbrough | DOB: 08-01-1976 | born and raised in Houston, TX
Parents (divorced): Robert M. Kimbrough (lives in Houston, TX) and Linda A. Ludwick (lives in Bellville, TX)
– middle school: Trafton Academy in SW Houston
– high school: Strake Jesuit, graduated 1994, began college at UT Austin that fall
– Attended first psychedelic conference in San Francisco in October 1996 (see below). I have attended at least 8 or 9 psychedelic conferences over the years. – As a young chemistry student talking to certain persons about novel psychedelic compounds, it is possible that I became a “person of interest” to federal authorities as far back as 1996 when I first spoke to well-known psychedelic chemist Alexander Shulgin at a conference.
– I have broken some drug laws in the past. I do not wish to discuss the details. I have been sober since January 2019, and the last time I took a psychedelic or anything besides cannabis was more than ten years ago. I haven’t used any cannabis products besides CBD alone since January 2019. No delta-8 or any variations thereof.
– B.S. Biochemistry from U.T. Austin 1999
– Moved to San Francisco in the fall of 1999 to start work at Theravance in South San Francisco as a medicinal chemist.
– Began graduate school at UC Berkeley in the fall of 2005
– Adviser moved to Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany in the fall of 2008, and I moved with him along with four other American students to complete our dissertation work (we were all still awarded degrees from UC Berkeley as we had passed qualifying exams there already)
2009 – Living in Munich, Germany; overt surveillance begins
2009a – Overt surveillance and harassment began in September of 2009 in Munich. See detailed descriptions below. My apartment started getting broken into with things moved around in subtle ways. Nothing was ever stolen as best I recall. My computer and phone were hacked in an overt manner, designed to advertise to me that they had been hacked. I was followed around the streets in an obvious manner. These aspects can perhaps best be compared to the reports of U.S. diplomatic staff who are stationed in certain countries like Cuba or Russia, who are known to suffer repeated break-ins and continuous psychological harassment by the intelligence personnel of those countries.
2009b – Former labmates can confirm having been contacted by intelligence personnel and asked to participate in a daily psychological campaign. I believe that some rumors were spread about me to make them upset with me that could not have had any basis in reality. The totality was psychologically distressing like nothing I have ever experienced.
* there are regional FBI and DEA offices in Germany
2009c – Flew to San Francisco for a few days in October in an extremely distressed state. Friends were concerned but I did not perceive that they had been contacted and I do not recall any gaslighting episodes while I couch surfed there.
2009d – Back in Munich, overt harassment picked up again. Before the harassment began, I had gotten a result in the course of research that was worthy of a publication. My adviser could see how distressed I was. He told me I had enough material to write up my dissertation.
2009e – Came back to the United States in early November 2009 and did not return to Munich, although initially I had planned to return. I later arranged for my apartment to be cleaned out and personal items shipped back to me.
2009f – Overt surveillance and harassment continued in the U.S. First I was in Northern California couch surfing with friends. Friends there were all contacted and asked to participate. As I stayed at friends’ places, my possessions were regularly rifled through when I was not around in a manner designed to let me know that they had been gone through.
2009g – Late in November or maybe early December I traveled to Austin, TX. Couch-surfed again. All friends contacted and asked to participate. I don’t know about DEA, but the Austin FBI field office is a satellite of the San Antonio field office. Due to the elaborate psychological nature of the campaign I had begun to suspect the FBI’s involvement, possibly as a joint operation with the DEA (?). Inquiries should be made in Austin (and San Antonio?) of what kinds of information were collected during this period.
2009h – Over Christmas I went to Houston and took a cruise to Mexico with my mom’s side of the family to spread my grandparents’ ashes in the Gulf of Mexico. Personnel asked family members and even strangers to participate on the cruise. My family members can confirm this, at least with respect to their own participation. I suspect that even during the actual ceremony of spreading the ashes, that certain requests were given to my family members. This felt intrusive in a way that is difficult to put into words. I will never forgive this, nor a great many other transgressions and invasions that are substantially more beyond the pale. I would like the names of the personnel who were giving instructions at this time.
2010 – mental state increasingly worn down, with temporary recovery
2010a – I returned to CA before the new year and couch surfed again.
2010b – After ~6 months of _continuous daily harassment_, gaslighting, cooperation of everyone around me and persons forced to lie about it to me, I became suicidal. I was out on the Golden Gate bridge but then went to a friend’s place and was taken to Marin General Hospital psych ward. Numerous staff in the psych ward were contacted and asked to participate in a continuation of the psychological campaign. It was extremely disturbing, at a time when I was already suicidal. I can provide the name of at least one staff member who can corroborate.
2010c – Out of the hospital, harassment continued unabated.
2010d – It was either before or after my first hospitalization (?) that I visited the San Francisco FBI field office on a whim. I was curious what would happen, and part of me wondered if they might just arrest me on the spot. I was ready for the harassment to be over with. This was when they still had duty agents to accept walk-ins. I volunteered my name to the duty agent and that I had been part of the psychedelic scene. I may have said something about the harassment or that my friends had been contacted and I didn’t want them to be bothered. I said I thought I may be under investigation. I remember him saying that if there was an investigation, this was not something they were going to share with me. He stated that he did handle narcotics cases. He turned the conversation very quickly to what did I know about other people, clipboard and pen in hand. He said he had guys that could get pounds of meth. I suppose this was a stratagem to appeal to my ego (?), to prompt me to volunteer information that was supposed to impress him (?) I said I didn’t know anything about meth or hard drugs. It was clear they weren’t going to arrest me or be straight with me about contacting any of my friends or any of the gaslighting. I ended the conversation and left. I was only there for about 5 minutes. That was the first in-person interaction that I had ever had with anyone from federal law enforcement, and I did not have another until 2018 when I visited the Oakland field office to speak with another duty agent. It has occurred to me that this visit might be held out on a later occasion to suggest that I came to the FBI to volunteer information or become an informant. This would be entirely false. I mentioned “my friends”, but did not mention a single person’s name or get into any details at all about my history in the psychedelic scene. _I was only there for five minutes_. Never before then or until 2018 did I interact with anyone from federal law enforcement. The Bureau has strict rules about protecting the confidentiality of its informants, even from fellow agents. Supposedly Whitey Bulger’s identity as an informant was a closely guarded secret, unknown to most agents in the Boston field office over a twenty year period. I get that. But I want to state, for the record, that I couldn’t care less about any confidentiality if it is suggested I ever acted as an informant, because I never acted as one. Please, by all means, disclose any relevant documentation. I wager there will be telltale deficiencies that other agents or legal professionals will be able to spot and my assertions can be confirmed. The confidentiality rules in this case would then be used to cover up a fabricated C.I. through which intelligence gleaned from other sources or unlawful wiretaps or bugs has been laundered, included on some affidavit or two, while indirectly or directly leading my friends to believe that the C.I. has been me. It is possible that legal leverage over some of my friends might have been obtained if any search warrants were ever served. In that case, deals would be offered to my friends such that all they would have to do to forestall the charges moving forward would be to cooperate in the psychological campaign for an indeterminate amount of time. Compared to becoming informants and giving information about other persons, that would seem the lesser evil to them, and they might justify it to themselves if they were actually led to believe that I had informed on them. This would buy the agents time to either wait for me to kill myself, or to actually become an informant. But the ideal outcome from the standpoint of guilty agents facing perjury charges would be my suicide.
2010e – Around this time I was staying at a friend’s property in the small town of Boonville, CA, up in Mendocino County. There are multiple cabins spread out on the property, and I began a sexual fling with a woman living in one of the cabins. At first relations seemed amicable and ordinary enough, but within a day or two of our fling she was contacted and asked to participate in the psychological campaign. This gradually became inordinately distressing. We slept together several more times, and on a couple mornings it seemed that she had been asked to participate in gaslighting me by moving my possessions around as I slept. I don’t believe I confronted her directly to accuse her of cooperating, because I had already learned or anticipated that people were required to lie about it, but the requests she was given caused me a great deal of anxiety, which she picked up on, and it caused friction between us. I suppose that was the point 
I had met this woman several years prior through our wider circle of friends, but she would not have had the least amount of information to share about me in terms of drug offenses. I certainly didn’t volunteer any information, and the surveillance team would have known I wasn’t going to share any information with her, especially after they gave her requests that they knew I would recognize as coming from them. I strongly suspect the she was led to believe one or more things about me that weren’t true in order to secure her cooperation.
2010f – Approximately six weeks later, I had my first actual suicide attempt in Mendocino county. Overdose of Temazepam. I immediately regretted after swallowing and sought assistance. Psych ward in Napa county for a few days. I suspect that whatever transgressions federal personnel may have committed by this point, that they felt emboldened by the development of events and that they wouldn’t have to worry about anything soon enough. They probably felt empowered to double down on claims they knew to be false and relay those claims up the chains of management.
2010g – I perceived less if any (?) cooperation by the staff in Napa county. Don’t recall well, but at Marin General there had been significant staff participation. My mother came to SF to stay with me in a hotel after I got out of the hospital. She was participating immediately. The harassment commenced again immediately. I moved back to Houston after this.
2010h – Harassment continued unabated. My family members were all receiving instructions to cooperate. It was difficult to concentrate and attempts to begin work on my dissertation were sporadic. I still had a lot of files and possessions in Munich that had not been collected and shipped back. The harassment team seemed to intimate that I would be arrested soon through various psychological means. But they never showed their faces to me and I was always left to guess who they were. Seems like it had to be either FBI or DEA or both, because of seeming coordination between teams in TX and CA.
2010i – At this time I contacted two criminal defense attorneys in Houston for a free consultation: Jerry Patchen and George Parnham. Patchen was recommended by a friend in CA. Parnham has known my father for a long time. Both suggested that unless charges were filed, their options were very limited.
2010j – Drove to Grand Canyon on a whim in June or July (?) I had never seen it before. Harassment team followed or passed a baton and let me know I was watched there. In general it seems that they wish to emphasize that there is nowhere I could possibly go without them following me. Feeling overwhelmed, I swallowed what would have been a fatal dose of Tylenol but couldn’t keep it down and wound up calling 911 when whole body malaise became excruciating. No lasting harm, spent two weeks in the psych ward in Flagstaff. Some participation by staff members there directed by what I presume were feds being coached by original team members.
2010k – Picked up by father and rode back to Houston. Moved in with my Dad and attempted work again on my dissertation. It was slow-going, and uncertainty persisted as to whether I would actually receive a couple boxes of key documents from Munich. Made some new friends around Houston and had an old friend from SF move close by to start grad school at Rice. He was occasionally asked to participate, as were some of his fellow grad students in the religious studies department. The other friends I made in Houston were a mixture in terms of some having been contacted and some seemingly not (?) It still seemed on occasion that rumors were being spread about me in order to encourage people to cooperate. However if I were to engage with a random stranger on the street, I could have a normal conversation and no perception of cooperation.
2011 – another breakdown in the spring, but recovery, graduation, and job hunt
2011a – Uncertainty persisted into the new year. There were limited opportunities for harassment as I stayed at home all day while my Dad worked, but I was still deeply frustrated that neither my parents nor anyone around me could tell me the truth about having been contacted. In March or early April I was invited to housesit for a friend in Austin for two weeks while he vacationed. All of my old friends in Austin were contacted and asked to participate every time I got together with them, and nobody could be honest with me about this. It seemed distressing for them as well at times. The harassment team would also signal to me frequently in plausibly deniable ways that some legal situation might arise, arrest, oblique references to prison life, getting shiv’d, raped, etc. In retrospect this trip was destabilizing for my already precarious mental condition.
2011b – In April I had another mental breakdown and drove out to San Francisco. On the Golden Gate Bridge I texted a friend for help and he talked me down. I spent another few days in Marin General. The participation by staff there at the behest of federal agents was significantly less than the first time.
2011c – Came back to Houston and commenced work again on my dissertation. Boxes had arrived via slow boat shipping from Munich, which in the back of my mind I had somehow doubted would ever arrive. I got some articles I needed from the library at Rice. Finished it by the summer. It was signed off on by my committee members and I graduated with my PhD in the fall. This was a powerful motivator to keep going. Also it really seemed to me by this point at a gut level that the team was dragging things out because they had done something wrong. I still socialized with people in Houston and took occasional trips to Austin as I began the job hunt online.
2012 – found a job back in CA and moved back in April
2012a – In March, reconnected with former coworker on LinkedIn and learned of a medicinal chemistry opening at the company he worked for in Santa Clara, CA – Nanosyn, a contract research organization (CRO) that does contract work for pharmaceutical companies. It’s a relatively small company with 40-60 employees. I flew out for an interview with my former coworker, another scientist, and the owners of the company, a couple who are Russian immigrants. During the interview, I didn’t notice any hint that anyone I spoke with there had been contacted by personnel. I got a job offer within a day or two and accepted. One stipulation was that there was a three-month trial period for new chemists. I entertained the proposition that I might be allowed to work in peace without the harassment team getting involved. I was soon proven wrong.
2012b – I moved to CA in April. Stayed in a hotel in Milpitas until I got a studio apartment in Palo Alto. On the very first day it seemed likely that at least one of my new coworkers had been contacted by harassment team members. Soon it became apparent that additional coworkers were being contacted and asked to participate in the psychological campaign. They didn’t seem especially irritated by the requests at first – perhaps bemused. They went through the usual motions and I began work on an established project where I was the sole chemist reporting to the client directly my results. I didn’t confront anyone about their participation, understanding from past experience that it would be useless, they would be required to lie to me, and it would only cause interpersonal friction which I believed was the desired result of the federal agents feeding them instructions. But it was deeply frustrating for me personally and felt completely unnecessary and intrusive. I considered quitting after a few weeks because of the participation of my coworkers, but kept on because I didn’t see how I could switch jobs and not have this keep happening. Also, I like solving problems in chemistry. I spent my whole life in preparation for this. I worked in industry before as a medicinal chemist and so I knew what to expect. And med chem in general is easier than natural product synthesis, which is what I did in grad school. I was excited to be there and did not feel out of sorts. It was all quite familiar. There was hardly anything to learn to get started.
2012c – In general it seemed that the harassment had ramped up considerably upon moving back to CA. If I had to guess, I would say that some federal agents with dirty hands and/or who knew there had been transgressions by agents when I was previously in CA now got involved and launched what amounted at this point to an operation to discredit me and wreck my career. There is some precedent for this sort of thing in the annals of Bureau history from the COINTELPRO era. Agents followed certain high-profile activists from job to job spreading rumors and trying to get them fired.
2012d – I was signed on to continue work after the three month trial period. This would have only been because I produced results that satisfied the client. However the social environment seemed to grow increasingly tense in a way that is hard to put into words. I felt that my coworkers were growing increasingly irritated with having requests be made of them to participate, and to this day I am deeply confused as to why they didn’t just tell the federal agents to set up cameras if they suspected me of anything and/or to take a hike. The level of psychological intrusion and involvement that these agents engaged in seemed utterly absurd to me. There was nothing to investigate going on at all. They seemed to only be doing this to try to cause friction with my coworkers. Over the course of my employment at Nanosyn I reported directly to two supervisors: William Thomas and Kevin Greenman. In addition the owners of the company would sometimes sit in on conference call meetings with a client where the chemists reported their results.
2012e – On a couple occasions I had papers removed from my desk, only to reappear on a later occasion. This is something the harassment team has done on countless occasions with my personal possessions. These were not papers that any of my coworkers would have borrowed or needed to borrow, and I don’t think my coworkers would have taken them at the team’s direction to upset me. The federal agents would have needed to emphasize that they didn’t want to get in the way of daily operations in order to secure moderately agreeable participants, and encouraging my documents to be taken would have seemed highly intrusive in a way that other employees would likely have rejected. Based on these incidents and other signs I strongly suspected that federal team members were breaking in to the building at night on occasion. I couldn’t share my suspicions with coworkers, knowing that they were already in contact with federal agents and would likely trust those agents’ word over my own, in addition to being required to deny contact. Having my possessions move around at work was really just an extension of what had been taking place since the overt campaign began in late 2009.
2012f – _Every single day_ that I went to work from April of 2012 through the end of June, 2013, coworkers were asked to participate in a psychological campaign. There had to be multiple federal agents involved on a daily basis. Hundreds of man hours would have to be put in. And what exactly was this about? _There was nothing to investigate going on_. I was only going to work every day trying to do the best job I could, like everyone else at the company. If anything is suggested otherwise, that I was taking some action or another that warranted involvement by federal agents or police of any kind, then I would like to be confronted about that directly and even publicly. If any reports or agents who were there at the time are insisting on anything that contradicts what I am saying here, then the Bureau has a very serious problem with agents who were fabricating some kind of pretext to discredit a citizen and disrupt their career. This is not “law enforcement”. I thought the COINTELPRO style of running operations was supposed to have been left behind. As a citizen who was targeted in this fashion, I demand accountability. I want to know what was being communicated to my coworkers, why I have never been confronted by any agents who continue to feed instructions to people around me, and why a gag order would still be in place to prevent my coworkers from sharing their experiences there. The purpose of any such order could only be to shield misconduct by the agents who were there at the time. My concern is that some of these agents have had time to climb through the ranks at the Bureau or possibly DEA in the intervening years, and may be exerting an influence internally as managers now to quash any revisitation of this period and discourage any fellow agents from asking me about whatever may have been alleged at this time.
2012g – In the fall or early winter of 2012, I began to collect journal articles on silent speech technology. This involves electromyography of the speech muscles. The origin of this interest is discussed below, after the chronological account.
2013 – laid off, unemployment for six months, living in Palo Alto
2013a – In April I attended the MAPS Psychedelic Science conference in Oakland. Certain strangers there were contacted and asked to participate. A lot my friends were there, but they were generally friendly with me at this time. I was still employed at Nanosyn. For team members holding onto stereotypes about psychedelics still, it may have been possible to imagine that this was all just some kind of nutty health fad and there was no way these things would ever be taken seriously by the scientific and medical communities at large. Ten years later, now 2023, I think perhaps they’re beginning to wonder. I concede that the
2013b – I worked on several projects at Nanosyn, which is par for the course for every chemist there. The last project I worked on before getting laid off at the end of June was problematic from the start because the client was requesting a wide scope of compounds to be synthesized using a methodology that was only suitable for making a small fraction of those compounds. To make the other compounds would require researching additional synthetic routes and using alternate reactions, a process more time consuming than what the client seemed to be anticipating. The methodological flaw could be explained at the level of physical organic chemistry. My supervisor at this time understood perfectly well my explanation, but didn’t seem to have noticed the issue before handing me the project. It would be possible for an experienced chemist to miss the issue in a quick glance at the journal article the client supplied, and this surely happened on the client’s end. If my former supervisor or the owners need a refresher, then the client was requesting a series of compounds to be made with a methodology which utilized a three component addition reaction in which one nitrile component was also the solvent, acetonitrile. The reaction proceeded through an unstable carbocation intermediate generated by the reversible addition of two components, which was then intercepted by a third component. But the client, a major pharmaceutical company, wished numerous compounds to be made in which the chosen nitrile component was not also acting as the solvent. Therefore a new solvent would have to be chosen for these, and regardless of that choice, all such reactions would be entropically disfavored in the extreme with this one-pot, three component reaction, and only those compounds using a nitrile component that could also act as the solvent could be readily made using this method. New chemistry would therefore have to be explored to make the majority of the compounds requested by the client, and the new chemistry would almost surely require more time-consuming multi-step syntheses. This is the sort of thing that should get pointed out immediately before work is agreed upon with some predicted time frame, but really, whoever suggested this methodology at the major pharmaceutical company to make this batch of compounds should have noticed this issue to begin with.
2013c – Within a week or so after beginning this new project I was laid off without any detailed explanation of what my shortcomings had been and without reference to any specific project. The company had a fairly high turnover for chemists with not infrequent lay-offs, but it was hard not to suspect that federal agents coming around and making _daily requests_ of my coworkers for more than a year there was starting to get tiresome to everyone. I believe the two owners of the company had been contacted as well. I can’t be certain, but it felt perhaps like this very last project was known to be flawed in the aforementioned manner before passing it to me, and the owners wanted some reason they could put on paper for letting me go (?) H.R. was rather vague in informing me why I was let go. I did manage a few years later to get my name on a couple patents based on work I did on another project while I was employed there (the patent agent tracked me down, as it is extremely important from a legal IP perspective to include all scientists on a patent who make substantial contributions).
2013d – I want to make it clear that I never harbored any ill will towards my coworkers for their cooperation. How could I blame them for cooperating when I couldn’t know what was being communicated to them? The same has applied to my friends and family and coworkers in Munich. I cannot judge them without understanding what their side of it was. It seemed increasingly clear as the months went by that federal agents were having to manufacture some kind of pretext for inserting themselves into my work environment. I felt bad for my coworkers being put in this situation but didn’t know what I could possibly do about it. I never brought up my awareness that they were cooperating, but I’m pretty sure that they knew that I knew. If they were misled by federal agents about the reasons for requests being made of them, then they were also made into victims of what I suspect was an unlawful operation that was ultimately designed to discredit a citizen and distract from what federal agents knew to be prior transgressions by themselves and/or their colleagues.
2013e – Any accounting of my time spent at Nanosyn that does not allow for candid discussions of what my coworkers went through in their engagement with federal agents is necessarily incomplete. If those agents wish to say that their daily requests were innocuous and did not affect my relationship with coworkers, I think this would be incredibly disingenuous. Let’s get everything out on the table and then evaluate their actions and requests. If agents are saying that I was doing anything except going into work every day like everyone else and doing only the work requested of me, then they are flat out lying and I suspect that one or more of their own supervisors at some higher level would have been lied to as well. I demand as a citizen an open and direct reckoning for this highly intrusive and unwarranted invasion of my personal life and career, amongst other highly intrusive invasions over a fourteen year period.
2013f – Numerous residents in the apartment that I lived in (Stanford Gardens in East Palo Alto) were also contacted and asked to participate on occasion during the time I lived there from June 2012 to June 2014.
2013g – After being laid off, I had six months of unemployment. I sent some resumes off to other companies and I had one phone interview (Cytokinetics in South SF, in September), but I felt extremely discouraged based on my experience at Nanosyn. If the feds were willing to devote so many resources to disrupt my experience there, then why not again at the next company? It felt like a case of purposeful career sabotage for which I had no recourse. Also during the phone interview I had, the interviewer, Gustave Bergnes, made a seemingly innocuous remark that may have indicated he had been contacted already by federal agents. In which case, why would the company hire me? I could be wrong about him being contacted, but that was my impression at the time.
2013h – The last real social gathering I was invited to with friends took place this summer of 2013 after I got laid off. It should be noted that I have always been an extrovert and possessed a rich social life with many friends. I have always been able to meet persons and make friends easily. Only beginning in late 2009 when my friends started to be contacted did my social life begin to be compromised in any way. At first I think many of them may have been suspicious of the requests they received or were coerced into cooperating with, but gradually they evinced more and more discomfort around me. I think they gradually grew tired of federal personnel coming around to make requests every time I would get in touch with them, and also I very strongly suspect that one or more unfounded rumors began to be spread about me, instigated by federal agents. A friend who had already been contacted on numerous occasions previously invited me to a get together in July, and some old friends there I hadn’t seen in a while may not have been contacted. They invited me to another gathering, and at this event it became obvious that they too had been contacted and asked to cooperate. They were not happy about it. That is the last real social gathering with friends that I was invited to, more than ten years ago. Occasionally I have gotten together with one person for a meal or coffee since then. But I stopped being invited to anything after this summer.
2013i – I had already spoken to several criminal defense lawyers since 2009 in both CA and TX in an attempt to find some leverage to confront the harassment (in CA: Doron Weinberg, Richard Glen Boire, Tony Serra / in TX: George Parnham, Jerry Patchen). I was told the same thing: unless charges are filed, there is nothing they can do. After getting laid off from Nanosyn, I went to the Santa Clara police department to drop off a letter and to try to explain that some federal agents, likely FBI, had been harassing my coworkers and likely breaking into the building at night. The officer who received my complaint suggested that if I had a problem with the FBI, that I should take it up with them. They seemed highly reluctant to get involved if the suspected perpetrators were federal agents. I suggested that federal agents were still bound by state and municipal law, but the officer rebuffed my complaint.
2014 – hired an attorney on retainer, moved into my car
2014a – I survived on savings starting in January. In addition to money I had saved from Nanosyn, I had some stock from my time at Theravance from 1999 to 2003 that I began selling off piecemeal. In April or May I hired Palo Alto criminal defense attorney Daniel Barton on retainer (https://nbo.law), desiring consultation on a semi-regular basis. Mr. Barton is a member of the National Lawyers Guild and I hoped that perhaps he would at least have some contacts that may have some insight into the peculiar strategy adopted by federal authorities. I strongly suspect that Dan Barton was contacted by federal team members early in our relationship, but he was prevented from revealing this to me, like everyone else. To further save money I moved into my car in June, a 1999 Toyota Camry.
2014b – I lived in my car around the SF bay area, mostly on the peninsula close to Palo Alto. I researched the law on sleeping in one’s vehicle in different municipalities and was disturbed very little by local police. I started reading through law textbooks at this time – criminal law, criminal procedure, professional responsibility, constitutional law, as well as histories of different intelligence community branches, different chapters in IC history (COINTELPRO, etc.), histories of the Stasi in East Germany and information about methods deployed by Eastern Bloc during services the Cold War to target dissidents domestically which bore a striking similarity to the methods deployed in my case, memoirs of FBI agents, memoirs of police officers, law journal articles, etc.
2014c – In the course of this reading about the law it seemed clearer to me that the original federal team members must have screwed up somehow, probably by including information that they knew to be false in one or more affidavits. They had also likely manufactured a C.I. (confidential informant), probably in late 2009 when I was in Munich, and then indirectly led others to believe that the C.I. was myself. This would not have been their first choice of how to proceed. It is possible that when the overt surveillance began in late 2009 that events began to unfold in an unpredictable way that may have threatened a case they had been building. When began as a stopgap measure to hopefully lead things back on track and cover up their initial fabrication(s) began to slowly spin out of control as I got back to the U.S., started to metastasize as I traveled between CA and TX, and some agents may have wound up just hoping for my suicide, possibly taking steps to move things in that direction. As the year progressed in 2010, they were probably justifiably optimistic that this would come to pass.
2014d – During this time I was still followed around and harassed. My car was broken into frequently by harassment team members. They would move things around. Items would disappear, and then reappear later. They would unscrew caps on toiletry items and bottles to create spills, etc. Change controls settings in my car. The Stasi in East Germany used these exact methods against dissidents. The Stasi were known to do things like break into a dissident’s apartment and rotate the flower pots, steal their hand towels and then return them later, swap out their flavored tea with a different flavor. They were systematic and scientific about the psychology behind these activities, and agents learned how to do these things at the Stasi Academy where some psychologists wrote dissertations on the topic, describing how to slowly break a person down. A target couldn’t talk about these things to their friends without sounding crazy. The goal was to isolate someone, drive them to the brink, and sometimes to suicide. These activities were happening to me beginning in Munich in late 2009. Any German authorities taking part would surely have been coordinating with American law enforcement stationed in Germany (there are regional FBI and DEA field offices in Germany). It is possible that I was under covert surveillance for some time back in CA before moving to Munich. In my case, I cannot definitively prove the gaslighting actions (break-ins, objects moved around, etc.), but I can provide a long list of dozens of names of people who were contacted by federal team members (coworkers, friends, family members, etc.) In CA, after moving into my car in 2014, personnel would also occasionally ask the staff at cafes and establishments that I frequented to participate in the psychological campaign by inserting seemingly innocuous phrases into conversation. If any serious and determined investigators wish to confirm this after they have confirmed the easy cases by speaking to my friends, family, and coworkers, then I can provide some leads.
2014e – I burned through my savings much faster than anticipated in part because my stock price started coming down, I waited for it to go back up, and instead it kept coming down. I lost a substantial portion of what might have been my savings this way. I had enough to last into 2015 though.
2014f – I acquired a watch-sized Narrative “life-logging” camera and strapped it to a watchband in order to discretely snap photos. I took dozens of photos of suspected participants – i.e., persons whom I suspected had been passed by location data and received instructions from harassment team members. Many of these persons will surely be completely innocent random people. But in reviewing the photos I noticed some recurring faces of persons that I very strongly suspected to have been given my location data. DOD personnel are not supposed to get involved in any domestic operations, but there have been times when they do, for example to infiltrate anti-war activist circles, and if they are caught doing so and it’s reported on then official apologies are issued and the personnel are characterized as “rogue”. The NSA was also reported to have taken part in an extremely intensive effort to discredit a citizen who recorded some footage of a highly classified Air Force project from his backyard in the hills of New Mexico overlooking a military air base in the 1980s (as reported in Mirage Men by Mark Pilkington). So there are times when personnel from organizations outside of normal law enforcement groups will conduct domestic operations, but it is all non-official and off the books. The FBI has also been known to work with outside contractors in the past, but based on my reading this is usually for highly technical projects or surveillance needs that require more specialized knowledge than the average agent possesses. DHS is also reported to take part in some domestic operations. For example it was reported in the media that some BLM activists were whisked into unmarked vans by DHS agents in Portland (NPR story: Federal Officers Use Unmarked Vehicles To Grab People In Portland, DHS Confirms).
2014g – Near the end of the year I began studying chemistry patent law with an eye to becoming a patent agent, a popular alternate career choice for PhD scientists. A former supervisor in industry had moved into this field and encouraged me to give it a try. I acquired resources and spent a lot of time reading in cafes, in my car, etc. I figured that being in a work environment surrounded by lawyers might be discouraging to the kind of intrusions that took place at Nanosyn. Also, I like doing science research online and using the search tools to scour the literature.
2015 – job interview, went broke, started delivering food, made myself conspicuous
2015a – In January I started a blog, panaudicon.wordpress.com, with my initial post, “On the Ubiquity of Web-Enabled Microphones”, covering some research I had done into the ways in which the known method of hacking into microphones on smartphones or laptops might be enabled en masse via networks of hacked devices, leading to transcripts of ambient verbal chatter. Somebody (not me!) posted links to hackernews and cryptome and I got a few thousand views. One of my friends who I shared the link with must have posted it, but nobody ever told me. Links to the post were retweeted a couple dozen times, including by MossadNews, an unofficial account run by Israeli intelligence professionals. Part of my motivation for taking an interest in this topic is that I was concerned such a method might have been used against myself and my friends over the years. You only need a wiretap order if you want to present the evidence in court. Personnel or government-employed hackers without any scruples might still collect intelligence to be used as part of an investigation or operation without court approval, while at the same time taking actions that could later be defended in court. The DEA’s use of “parallel construction” has been criticized by some legal observers. If they wish to protect a confidential informant, the courts are more than willing to allow an affidavit that simply references a “confidential informant”. So this can be used to launder illegally-gathered intelligence, and to the extent that microphone hacking becomes easier for law enforcement to use, the method deserves attention. I think it is important for society as a whole to think about what the practical limits of surveillance might be from a technical perspective, because the day may very well come to the United States when all legal barriers to the deployment of maximum surveillance capabilities are removed and we very quickly find ourselves in a landscape of totalizing surveillance. There have been some calls coming from the political right to bring the military into domestic affairs. How long will it be before the NSA is invited to turn all of their capabilities inwards? In the meantime, personnel or hackers who are not concerned with securing court permission may collect domestic intelligence through whatever means are available.
2015b – Around this time, or perhaps in 2014, I came up with an idea for putting a three-way switch on a smartphone. The first position allows normal operation, the second position physically disconnects the microphone, but allows for data, and the third position cuts off both data and the microphone through a physical disconnection to the antennae. Such a design could be valuable for dissidents, activists, and journalists in countries that are prone to hiring contractors to spy on their own citizens. I think it’s safe to say that an organization like the NSA which regularly hacks into the microphones on people’s phones would never want to see such a feature become widely incorporated, and the same goes for all other government spy agencies. I mentioned this idea to a friend one day in California who had already been contacted by federal team members and was being given instructions to interact with me in specific ways. This person had a background in the tech industry. When I described the concept, he suggested I should patent the idea and that I could make “millions of dollars”. The way he suggested this to me was awkward, overly enthusiastic, and I became suspicious that he was prompted to say this to me. But he did acknowledge that it sounded like a good idea and I thought this acknowledgment was genuine. I was confused for a while about why team members would prompt him to say this, but in retrospect I think they would have liked to: 1) send me on a wild goose chase to try to patent something in a field far outside my own, with no experience writing patents up, and to basically waste my time chasing an impossible goal; 2) get me to shut up about the idea in the hopes of making money from it, still wasting a lot of time chasing a goal that would have been practically impossible for someone in my position; 3) drape my intentions and all future discussions of the concept with the color of financial gain, which is a turn-off to many persons and organizations who are committed to the cause of privacy and protection from surveillance abuses in a principled way. My response to my friend’s suggestion was to immediately write an email to him and Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, whom I was introduced to by journalist Glenn Greenwald in late 2012 when I approached Greenwald after a talk he gave in Davis, CA to describe some of the harassment taking place. In that email I described the concept of the three-way switch and my friend’s suggestion that it might be patented. I stated that if that were the case, then i would like for an organization such as the EFF to possess the patent so that they could ensure its wide availability. I didn’t receive a response from either my friend or Trevor Timm, both of whom had responded to me in email before.
2015c – Continued living out of my car. Drove to Los Angeles in late April for AIPLA Patent Prosecution boot camp. Studied for patent bar, but never took it. Was discouraged by the following events: had an in-person interview at Morrison Foerster in Palo Alto in July. They will occasionally hire someone who is studying for the bar. During the interview I suspected that at least one person had been contacted by federal team members ahead of time (Dr. Kimberly Bolin) – maybe more. If they contact one or two persons and impose an order that they cannot share the fact they have been contacted, that could still serve to spoil a target’s job opportunity while minimizing exposure. The interview proceeded amicably enough, but they declined to hire me. In a natural course of affairs, I could accept that, as I could accept being let go from a job _in the natural course of affairs_. But under these circumstances, I have to ask: were any persons there contacted ahead of time? By whom? FBI would be my best guess. And for what purpose? For an “investigation”? Is that what is still being claimed, after _fourteen years_, that there is an “investigation”? How could I be expected to find and keep work if federal agents are going to insist on contacting future employers and relaying information that I am not able to respond to? An organization like the FBI contacting a prospective employer to make requests of persons during the interview process surely cannot have a positive impact on a person’s chance of being hired. Bureau employees would know this. Federal agents have steadfastly refused to engage with me directly while at the same time contacting everyone that I interact with over a fourteen year period. As a citizen I feel entitled to an explanation, at the very least.
2015d – Signed up to deliver food with Doordash at the end of September. At this point I had less than a hundred dollars in my bank account. Daily harassment continued unabated. Numerous restaurants where I picked up food and customers to whom I delivered were also asked to participate in the psychological campaign. This would include dozens if not hundreds of persons who were strangers to me. Why would the federal team go to so much trouble? Was this actually supposed to be part of an “investigation”? Who was tracking me and then giving out these requests? If the FBI or DEA were not responsible, then who was? It may not be possible to track down all of the restaurant staff and customers that were given requests, but all of my friends and family members continued to be contacted and given requests as well over this time period, which can be confirmed by an independent investigator empowered to break through the order which prevents them from sharing this information with me. In addition to restaurant staff and customers, the team seemed to be tapping into a network of military veterans and sharing my location data with them, judging by stickers and decals and logos on their cars. I have facial-recognition quality photos of many of these persons along with license plates. I left a packet of these photos in person at the Long Beach FBI satellite office in January of 2020.
2015e – A citizen’s location data became constitutionally protected under the Fourth Amendment in Carpenter vs. United States (2018), but before this date I suppose it is plausible that team members could have defended acquiring the data and sharing it with dozens or hundreds of parties not employed by law enforcement under the third party doctrine (?) However that justification would stretch the third party doctrine to an extent that has never been held up for scrutiny in court, as far as I know, and the totality of which could serve as a platform to potentially threaten the doddering precedent of Smith v. Maryland, the fountainhead of the third party doctrine, decided in an era far different from our own. Any prosecutors interacting with federal agents should pose the question: how many citizens have been notified in advance of the target’s arrival at some location over a fourteen year period? By this I mean non-law enforcement-employed citizens that were strangers to me before my arrival. How about a rough estimate? Are there any records from all of these requests? Could it be more than one hundred persons? Could it be more than five hundred? Could it be more than one thousand? How are such extraordinary efforts being justified internally at federal agencies? It should be noted that at least one newer conservative justice on the Supreme Court (Gorsuch) has expressed outright hostility towards the third party doctrine, a sentiment shared by Justice Sotomayor and probably others. I suspect this is one precedent being overturned that would actually meet with high levels of support across the aisle.
2015f – After Carpenter was decided I believe they would technically need a court order to continue tracking my location, which continues to this day on a _daily basis_. Restaurants and occasionally customers are contacted by team members ahead of time here in Houston. Do they have official court authorization to track my movements throughout the day? Who has been the responsible party here making requests of so many strangers to me? I still don’t know the answer to this, and this has been ongoing for _fourteen years_.
2015g – Near the end of 2015 I began researching silent speech transcription from open sources in my free time a great deal more, continuing through 2016. It was like a research hobby. Declassified documents made available by the DOD on their own website reveal a three-year contract taken out by ARPA, the forerunner to DARPA, with SRI International (Stanford Research Institute) from 1972-1975 exploring the feasibility of collecting speech signals from both the brain and the speech muscles and transcribing them. The conclusion reached by SRI was that it may be feasible in the future with advances in signal processing and machine learning. Other government-funded research efforts in this area by DOD-affiliated contractors continue to the present day. The Soviets also published some work in the 1960s involving the speech muscles. It is apparent that there has been something like a quiet race between military-sponsored R&D groups over a period of many decades taking place to make a breakthrough in this area, Every intel organization across the globe would surely desire the capability to transcribe fully passive inner verbiage from a non-compliant subject. Whether that could be accomplished or not through speech muscles remains an open question, but the word error rate (WER) would surely be higher than for more active and willful forms of inner speech. Historic and ongoing research suggests the presence of multiple varieties of inner speech, with some more amenable to transcription that others. For an example of transcription of active speech with no visible speech muscle movement, see the demo video from student Arnav Kapur at MIT MediaLabs on youtube: The origin of my interest in this area, beginning in the fall of 2012, is explained below.
2015h – Also near the end of 2015 I took the extraordinary step of taping a number of handwritten signs on my car. The signs made various declarations about the impropriety of conducting domestic covert operations against citizens and suggested that misconduct at federal agencies was taking place, including local San Francisco FBI. At the time and to this day I was never sure who was following me or giving out instructions to people. The signs also sometimes included technical details from my research efforts. I did this for several reasons. For one, strangers receiving instructions from team members could easily forget a random guy in a beige Toyota Camry, but they would not so easily forget the car with handwritten signs. It seemed to me that the team’s networked strategy in harassing me depended in part on the likelihood that a random citizen being asked a favor by federal agents would forget the nondescript appearance of the person that they interacted with. Faces are easy to forget. The car would not be. I wanted persons to be able to describe me later, connect with other citizens who received instructions, and also hopefully share their experience with a group like the ACLU. The propriety of tracking a citizen daily for years on end and passing their location data to so many strangers has never been held out for public consideration or consideration by the courts, as far as I know, and frankly it’s difficult to describe these activities without sounding delusional. Again, if I drive or walk up to a random person on the street, I can have a perfectly natural conversation where there is no hint that the person was contacted in advance. It is only when the personnel tracking me are given some advance indication of my arrival somewhere, like the grocery stores I frequent, that anyone is asked to interact with me in specific ways. My car with the signs was photographed on numerous occasions around Silicon Valley. Being relatively socially isolated at this time and relatively desperate to bring the harassment to an end made me somewhat less susceptible to whatever social stigma may be attached to looking like a batshit crazy person driving around with handwritten signs on my car. Occasionally an engineer would pause to ask about the more technically-oriented signs. I could talk about the ideas in a technically informed fashion that could be appreciated by anyone who knew about machine learning or speech recognition.
2016 – food delivery, continued research, living out of car in Silicon Valley
2016a – I continued driving around with signs on my car throughout 2016, frequently rotating them out. Over this time the persons I suspected of taking part in the operation that I would see in public began to look more upset. Their demeanor shifted from smug assurance to irritation and sometimes angry glares. These would be glares I would get upon entering a cafe or restaurant on foot when I was parked some blocks away where my car was not visible. And no stranger ever seemed to respond negatively to my car anyways. Nobody ever mocked me or made any derogatory remarks. The vast majority of people completely ignored it, assuming I was mentally ill probably. To my mild surprise, I went for days or weeks without anyone reacting in any way, driving around all day. But the original recurring cast of personnel I had photos of began to look increasingly distressed.
2016b – In February of 2016, I crashed a local meeting of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) at a country club in San Mateo, CA. The meeting was open to members of the public with a ticket purchase, but by the time I decided to go there were no more tickets. There were two main speakers scheduled for the event who were supposed to engage in a friendly discussion over the proper scope and role of surveillance powers in the United States: former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden, and former CIA officer turned spy fiction novelist Barry Eisler. Eisler has been a vocal critic of expanding surveillance powers in the U.S. as well as a vocal supporter of Edward Snowden. His book _The God’s Eye View_ from late 2015 describes almost the exact same type of surveillance system of networked microphones that I described on my blog as the “panaudicon”, and many of the references in the footnotes which he uses to bolster the feasibility of such a system are the same sources that I drew upon. I had met Eisler before very briefly at his own book signing at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, CA, and mentioned my own research into networked audio monitoring capabilities. I had not managed to get a ticket to the AFIO event in San Mateo ahead of time, however, and I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do there. I threw on the only collared shirt I had in the trunk of my car to match the country club’s dress code. At first I thought I might try to verbally engage some of the attendees while they were waiting in line, but it felt somehow awkward. There were several older attendees shuffling in from the parking lot who were probably in their late seventies or eighties, and I didn’t want to be accused of harassing the elderly. So I just smiled and quietly passed out a few of the homemade cards I had printed up describing the panaudicon, which also included a quote from Michael Hayden. The card included a reference to the latest post I had written about the feasibility of collecting silent speech signals from someone’s face from a short distance with a sensor, something I described on the card as a “TEMPEST attack on someone’s face”. Michael Hayden most certainly knows what a TEMPEST attack is. Whether my proposal is feasible or not, I don’t know, that’s what the blog post is about, but it’s the sort of thing that the NSA and CIA would be keenly interested in and may have already explored through DARPA or another government lab. After passing out a few cards to people filing in, I scoped out the empty rooms surrounding the main conference room. The dining room was already set for a meal to follow the meeting, and I managed to slip a number of cards into the napkins laid out on the tables. I also went to the bathroom closest to the meeting room and distributed a number of cards where they would be seen, and in the nearby lounge I stuffed cards into the seat cushions where they would be seen peeking out. Then I sat down nearby to read a book and hang out. Within about five minutes an agitated middle-aged man came around the corner like he was looking for someone. He cast me a sidelong glance and sat down in the dining area to begin typing on his phone. A couple middle-aged females soon emerged and one of them approached me to ask what I was reading. I responded politely to all her questions and she soon went on her way. Within a few more minutes Michael Hayden came around the corner on his way to the bathroom, and he paused for a moment to give me a quizzical and expectant expression. I was quite surprised to be face-to-face with him all alone and I had absolutely no idea what to say. He went on to the bathroom and glanced at me briefly a second time on the way out. His back was ramrod straight as he passed through to the meeting room. Eventually I got bored and didn’t really have a plan to engage with anyone after the meeting, so I just laid the book I had been reading on the table next to my chair and drove away for a few hours. Later that afternoon I came back to collect the book. To this day I have no idea what the response was to any of the cards I passed out, but I’m still curious.
2016c – The team’s psychological operation continued unabated. I was followed throughout the day, every day. My car continued to be broken into occasionally. I would meet with my attorney Daniel Barton occasionally. I made enough money through food delivery to eat, keep my car running, and pay off some credit card debt. The break-ins and requests that were made of people around me were profoundly irritating, but I did my best to take care of myself and self-soothe. I generally slept well at night. I was never depressed or suicidal. It seemed clear to me at this time that federal authorities had screwed up in a major way somehow and were probably hoping that I would become financially destitute and suicidal again. I read a lot, watched the occasional movie on my laptop at night, and continued researching various topics in law and technology. While socially isolated, I still felt intellectually engaged, alert, motivated, and connected to the world. I posted and chatted on Facebook. I taught myself a lot about car repair from youtube to save money. I had some online chats and voice chats with old friends, but some longtime friends I had become completely disconnected from, and remain disconnected from to this day, which is entirely inconceivable without the interference of federal authorities in my relationships. I have been practicing progressive relaxation since 2001 and have never particularly struggled with insomnia. Occasionally if something is on my mind I can lie awake like anyone, but it has never been a persistent problem for me. When the overt surveillance began in late 2009, insomnia was an issue, and I obtained a Temazepam prescription at that time (refilled a couple times then). But as the harassment became my new normal, I became able to fall asleep as usual again.
2016d – I used cannabis throughout the year as well. I had acquired a prescription for it in the summer of 2013 on the basis of longstanding neck injuries sustained after having been in two separate rollover accidents, one in 2003 and one in 2005. I had records from physical therapy that the physician requested. Before this, while employed at Nanosyn, I had smoked maybe once or twice on weekends with friends. Nothing was out of the ordinary at all with my experiences in using cannabis throughout 2016. The experiences were entirely pleasant, often prompting a self-reflective mood conducive for taking emotional stock of my situation. Occasionally it seemed to help me empathize with team members who I suspected were terrified of having a scandal blow up in their faces, some of whom would likely be facing criminal charges. However my temporary empathy was repeatedly undercut by the ongoing harassment. It also helped me to empathize with my friends and family members who had been put in a stressful situation, being required to lie to me about their cooperation for years. I do not doubt that there is a cannabis withdrawal syndrome that some persons undergo, but I have never been able to smoke enough to trigger any significant withdrawal symptoms in myself upon taking a break. I self-calibrate my dose easily according to the potency. If it is desired to inquire about the amounts that I was smoking, dispensary records may still be able to provide that information. There was one place I went to in San Jose repeatedly for much of this year: Airfield Supply. I suspect they would say that, compared to most medical patients, the amounts I purchased were on the low end (?) Staff there were also contacted by federal team members on occasion in advance of my arrival and asked to participate. Persons employed there at the time would likely remember this. At the end of the year, I decided to take a break from cannabis. I spent New Year’s Eve alone in my car in Palo Alto, celebrating by going to bed early without smoking. I woke up and felt fine. For the following week I felt fine. Perhaps I could trigger withdrawal by ramping up my consumption for weeks before stopping, but no thank you, and my heart goes out to those who are struggling with addiction of any kind. I started smoking again a week or so later. Throughout my life, I have gone for periods of regular smoking and then taking breaks. There is a similar pattern for many of my friends. Nobody recommends taking a break to them – they all just decide for themselves when it is time. Based on my understanding of the DSM criteria, I have never met the criteria for cannabis abuse or dependence, and it is the only drug (besides prescription meds) that I have ever used daily or nightly. I have definitely experienced tolerance, but not really withdrawal. After smoking several nights in a row, it might take a bit longer to fall asleep the night I don’t smoke, but I never stay awake all night, unlike with stopping Temazepam after just 3 nights of use. At most I think I would have fallen on the technical borderline for dependence, not abuse, and I have not used any cannabis products besides CBD alone since January 2019 (no THC of any kind, no delta-8 or “hemp-derived delta-9”, etc.).
2016e – Donald Trump was elected in November. This shocked and disturbed me, like many persons. I do recall lying awake all night on election night, wondering how in the hell this could have happened. Jeff Sessions was the new attorney general, and the prospects for continued drug policy reform seemed diminished. I figured there would be some changing of the guards internally as well at the DOD and other organizations, and the prospect that someone inside the IC might become sympathetic to my situation and be able to pull some strings to force personnel to behave in a conventional manner also seemed diminished. I switched up the signs on my car, becoming somewhat more direct and aggressive in communicating details. One of the signs I used at this time included a photograph of Regina Dugan, a former director of DARPA who was living in Silicon Valley at the time and moved from Motorola Research to Google. Dugan’s name had appeared on a Motorola patent for an e-tattoo (electronic tattoo) designed to pick up subvocal signals when placed on the throat (ExtremeTech story: “Motorola patents e-tattoo that can read your thoughts by listening to unvocalized words in your throat” – TJK note: this headline is too sensational for technical reasons). DARPA as mentioned before had carried out research in this area starting in the early 1970s. I figured if anyone knew about secret government programs in this area, it would be Regina Dugan. At the time I was driving around Silicon Valley and delivering food, often to various tech campuses like Google and Facebook. It could easily have been reported to Dugan that her face was seen on someone’s car along with signs describing silent speech technology – signs that several engineers had taken photos of. Dugan joined Facebook in April of 2017 to become director of Building 8, and Facebook declared then their intention to build a device that allowed a user to type with their thoughts alone at 100 words per minute. They were going to use a non-invasive wearable device to collect brain signals though, not signals from the speech muscles. Anything Dugan had learned at DARPA in this field she would likely be constrained from sharing openly, but it would be impossible not to draw on her experience and knowledge base, as is the case for any scientist who transitions from classified work to non-classified work in the same field. And it is possible if not likely that a description of my car at the time may have disturbed or alarmed her. I would sincerely apologize to her if this were the case. I don’t hold anything against her for working in this area. DARPA also sounds like a neat place to work, and I don’t hold anything against the scientists there. I actually don’t think that projects in this area are inherently evil or anything. There is a group at UCSF exploring electrocorticography (ECoG) with electrodes directly on the brain surface to allow locked-in patients to communicate. And military personnel would prefer not to use waterboarding or other extreme interrogation methods (I would hope). So there are powerful motivations working in industry, academia, and government to realize technologies in this area. However, industry and academia will only seek to enable consensual collection, while the military and IC will always desire non-consensual collection capabilities, the latter being more difficult and representing a kind of holy technological grail, pursued for many decades now.
2016f – Assuming any kind of breakthrough were ever made at DARPA or any DOD-sponsored lab to enable non-consensual collection of passive inner verbiage, it would not be announced. The program itself would not be advertised publicly to begin with, unlike many programs, but sometimes a less controversial aspect of a technology can be advertised publicly. The controversial aspects would be highly compartmentalized within the organization itself. If a major breakthrough happened, top military brass would immediately barge in to impress upon the scientists the importance of keeping the secret. DARPA has always been known for taking moonshots. The scientists would not know ahead of time if it could be done. They might surprise themselves one day, have a collective Oppenheimer-type moment, recalling some quote from the Vedas perhaps, and immediately grow more reflective and concerned about the implications for society. There would likely be some shaking up of scientific personnel, or a removal of the program from the purview of the original team entirely. One military historian and ethicist (Jean Maria Arrigo) has described this to me as when a program “goes dark”, based on her own interviews with scientists who worked on electromagnetic anti-personnel weapons for the military. The IC and military can screen people out who may show signs of developing ethical qualms about certain projects. If a person felt deeply that this is the sort of paradigm-shifting breakthrough that the public really ought to be made aware of and openly discussed, there is only one thing they could possibly do while honoring their non-disclosure pact, and that is to join the commercial or academic spheres and work towards a similar breakthrough. The new work would have to be between boundaries and towards goals appropriate for these non-governmental spheres, and in this case that would involve the consensual collection of a more active variety of inner speech. That boundary between passive and active inner speech is not always sharp, however, based on my reading of the literature. The classified government NDA would need to be respected in theory, but technologists face this issue all the time when hopping between companies and working on similar confidential projects. It is also highly unlikely that the government would seek to vigorously and publicly attack a former scientist who could not help but draw on some of the knowledge they had gained while working at DARPA. Pulling a Snowden is one thing, and drawing on one’s knowledge gained before transitioning into the commercial sector is another. Attacking a person directly who is not disclosing actual classified documents or sharing detailed knowledge gained firsthand in government work is obviously going to telegraph the government’s interest in capabilities they may wish to keep under wraps.
2017 – team becomes substantially more aggressive, road trip to Portland, Seattle, D.C., and NYC
2017a – In January of 2017 I experienced an alarming episode one night of feeling as if I had been drugged. There was nothing the least bit different that night about my routine. I remember having just eaten some trail mix and maybe a bit of a chocolate bar from Whole Foods when some effects began to manifest. It was like a mild stimulant, but not like caffeine, and not really like anything I’ve ever taken. I have a wide variety of experience with different classes of drugs, but fairly limited experience with anything besides cannabis, psychedelics, and MDMA for the most part. I couldn’t place the feeling, but it did feel as if a foreign psychoactive substance had been introduced into my body and I became extremely alarmed. It was stimulating without being euphoric, but it wasn’t like caffeine (?) I drove to the emergency room at Stanford, concerned for my safety. Environmentally, there was nothing to trigger this event, and there was nothing particularly stressful that had happened that day either. The gaslighting and other harassment had seemed to be ramping up since the election, and I was occasionally concerned that the team might be tempted to do something to compromise the safety of my vehicle if the risk increased of their misconduct being exposed. And that is of course exactly what I hoped to do and still hope to do. I imagined that driving around with the signs of my car might precipitate some phone calls to find out what the hell was going on. So I had maybe expected a bit more harassment, but I never would have thought I would be drugged. At triage in the ER, the effects seem to have stabilized, and I was able to communicate well. I told them it felt like I had been drugged. I don’t remember if I mentioned I had been under surveillance and was concerned for my safety. They monitored my vital signs and released me after an hour or two.
2017b – The foregoing event left me psychologically scarred and paranoid about leaving food in the car, which I began carrying around at all times in my backpack, even while I delivered food for restaurants. I figured this episode was intended to scare me, and that I had gotten someone’s attention that was upset about the signs and other attempts to reach out for assistance via email, etc. I had also been out by Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL) in the outer bay area in December of 2016 the previous month for a day or two, driving around with signs on my car. I could drive around anywhere in the bay area to make money by delivering food, and I could sleep overnight in any Walmart parking lot that didn’t employ overnight security. I had put up a printout of the ExtremeTech story on the Motorola e-tattoo on a public billboard in the Starbucks closest to LLNL, along with a handwritten footnote. LLNL scientists had pioneered some research using wearable electromagnetic sensors to measure vocal fold motions for the purposes of enhancing communication between soldiers in noisy environments in the late 90s. Research along these lines has also taken place at DARPA. These are the kinds of projects advertised openly from which data that could enable more controversial capabilities might still be gleaned and funneled into other more secretive programs. The more I seemed to call attention to this class of technology, the more aggressive the team would be with the harassment. But if I removed the signs from my car and just drove around delivering food, trying to “mind my own business”, the harassment still continued, if lessened somewhat. I wanted it to end altogether, all of it, ASAP, for the break-ins to cease, for my location data to stop being passed out, and to have open lines of communication with friends, family, and former coworkers. I thought it might be possible to force the situation, to force someone higher up in the IC to make one angry phone call that would finally force the team members to deal with me directly and work through the proper system instead of acting like the goddamned Stasi or KGB. I didn’t quite appreciate at the time, but I was caught in the beginning of an escalatory spiral. If the other team members may wish to suggest that they had no choice but to ramp up the harassment to ever extreme levels, I would suggest that they go to one or more of their directors for advice on how to proceed with this situation after honestly relaying all the facts. I feel certain that this has not yet happened, and that the directors, if they receive any briefing at all, will not be told the truth about how this debacle has unfolded. If personnel are behaving in such a manner that cannot be plausibly defended in any court of law, defended to any prosecutors, explained to your own directors, or defended in the court of public opinion, then they are doing something wrong. Period. You have to find other ways of dealing with this situation. My interest in this class of technology was entirely the team members’ fault to begin with, as described below. It’s not fair or sensible to be angry with a scientist for thinking through an issue scientifically.
2017c – In hindsight I do not believe I was drugged, on this occasion in January or on any future occasions, at least with any chemical substances. It wasn’t until the summer of 2018 when I began to suspect some form of electromagnetic energy as a vector for imparting drug-like effects. However the incident in January seemed to be a one-off event. At least until June.
2017d – Besides this incident involving a physiological assault of some kind, it seemed from the evolving character of the daily psychological operation that perhaps some new personnel had been brought on board, or even that a new team had taken over entirely. Perhaps some angry phone calls had been made, some older team members got yelled at, and either a power struggle or somebody pulling rank after a personnel shake-up when DT took office led to someone new taking over to deal with the “situation” or “problem”, as it may have been described internally. However, it seemed perhaps that the old team had tried to coach the new team on what had come before in order to maintain the appearance of consistency. It’s difficult to describe the factors on which to ground my suspicion here to anyone else. I had been subjected to a daily psychological campaign since late 2009 though, and some of the tricks and devices that team members used had become familiar to me, although they were constantly trying to shake things up and throw me out of my comfort zone. In 2017 however, something shifted in the overall character of the stream of psychological provocations which suggested to me that someone else had taken over. I remember thinking the psy-ops had gotten a bit cruder. I can’t be sure though and so it’s just a hunch.
2017e – I attended the MAPS Psychedelic Science conference in Oakland in April. This time, as compared to the event in 2013, I received a distinctly cold welcome from many old friends, and I had not seen them in some time. On the surface they were polite with me, but many had been contacted and coerced yet again into participating in the psychological campaign. They had been through this before, and they were tired of it, it seemed, I didn’t say anything openly about their cooperation, because I knew they were required to lie about it to me. It seemed yet again that some information had been conveyed about me that could not possibly have been true. There has never been any reason for my friends to be so upset with me or cause them to withdraw from me. Before the conference, I had put together a 26-page powerpoint-style pdf summary of much of my research into the history of silent speech recognition. I printed out maybe 4 or 5 copies to share with persons at the conference. Before I shared this summary with anyone, people were already manifesting signs of discomfort and of having received instructions from harassment team members. I probably characterized this interest in silent speech at the time as a kind of research hobby. Most of my friends have known that I have practiced progressive relaxation since 2001. The scientist and physician Edmund Jacobson developed this practice in the 1920s at the University of Chicago and treated scores of patients with it. He was the first person to discover that when a person thinks in words and sentences, there is corresponding electrical activity in the speech muscles detectable by electromyography (EMG). Jacobson was a pioneer in the use of EMG. There is a page on him in the presentation. At the start of all of the taped lessons I use, there is an instruction right up front to “relax the sides of your face”, specifically because doing so can act to quiet the mind. So my interest in silent speech dovetails to some extent with a preexisting interest in progressive relaxation.
2017f – Continued delivering food, and started sleeping in my car up around Pacifica on the coast. I bought a second used Camry early in the year and used my first one as a mobile storage unit. My physical routine never really changed. I was well-fed, getting enough sleep, and making enough money to survive. In the middle of June however, in the early evening, I experienced another incident of feeling like I had been drugged, this one considerably more alarming than the first. This feeling was entirely different. I was in my car and I think I had just been eating a bag of peanuts or something. I don’t have any food allergies. All of a sudden my body was wracked with a physically uncomfortable feeling that was unlike anything I’d experienced before. It was almost as if my muscles were involuntarily contracting to a small degree. The feeling was all over my body. It felt toxic, like I had been poisoned with something. It wasn’t disabling of movement, and so I immediately began driving to the closest ER, which I think was at the Seton Medical Center in Daly City, south of SF and north of Pacifica. I went through the same process: triage, and then monitoring of vital signs. They may have done some blood work, I don’t remember, but unless there is an obvious source of poisoning, it is not at all trivial to determine what substance a person might have been given, even if doctors are willing to consider that possibility. The feeling gradually dissipated as I stayed there for an hour or so. I didn’t ask for nor receive any medication. If I had mentioned to the doctor any cannabis use, they may have included that as the most likely cause, because there would seem to be no other precipitating factor, but I recall distinctly that I had not used any for at least a couple hours before this incident began. I had used cannabis on thousands of prior occasions and was quite familiar with the experience of having smoked or eaten more than a pleasant amount. Eating cannabis creates a different pharmacologically active metabolite in the bloodstream through first pass metabolism, 11-hydroxy-THC, which is only present in very small amounts when a user consumes via smoking, and for this reason the experience of eating cannabis creates a different type of experience, and one that can cause a subjective feeling of greater intoxication and often lethargy for the user. I know that feeling well. I know how to titrate my dosage and avoid it. It’s not nearly as unpleasant as being piss drunk, IMO, and you just lie down for a while. But that is absolutely nothing like what I experienced on this occasion, and there had been more than ample time for any lingering cannabis effects to subside before this novel experience took hold. This did not feel like a recreational drug at all. It felt like being poisoned with some kind of convulsant. It felt extremely threatening. In retrospect, based on my later research and survey of ways in which electromagnetic energy can interact with the body, it felt maybe like what I have read of the descriptions of being hit with the Pulse Wave Myotron stun gun, a particular type of stun gun that is no longer sold in America that was supposed to lock up a person’s muscles like a police taser, but was not as powerful as an actual taser. The infomercial is said to have overhyped its capabilities. It was perhaps like being hit with a taser on a low level – extremely unpleasant, but not as incapacitating as a full-strength taser.
2017g – After this incident I became fearful that I was going to be poisoned somehow, that my body would be found, that the team would make it appear as if I had overdosed on some drug or something. I didn’t really know what to do except to continue to reach out for assistance and make myself more visible. I think I visited the police department in Pacifica around this time, maybe later in 2018, and also the police department in San Bruno (?) I may have shared a letter and/or additional documents. It seemed on occasion that regional police were being given my location data with some officers being asked to participate in the psychological campaign.
2017h – I would encourage any investigators who are genuinely trying to retrace the history here to reach out to local SF bay area police departments and inquire about the guy in a beige Toyota Camry with handwritten signs on his car. I would make inquiries in particular with Palo Alto, East Palo Alto, Pacifica, Mountain View, Santa Clara, San Francisco perhaps. These are departments where I seem to recall visiting the office in person to make a complaint or interacting with some officer on the street. On a couple occasions while sitting in a parking lot somewhere an officer or trooper approached me to ask about the signs on my car. You see the advantage here? There are a lot of crazy people driving around, but my signs were unique, and my location data was actually being passed on occasion to regional authorities, as it is occasionally done in Houston. My location is almost surely passed out under some false pretext or another. Some officers may remember receiving information from a fusion center or some federal agency that pertained to the guy driving around with handwritten signs on his car of a technical matter that also accused the feds of misconduct. So there is a trail now that can be more easily followed up on. The networked strategy of harassment adopted by the ringleaders here works best when the target remains anonymous and nondescript. The team wishes to hide the amount of effort that they are putting into this from regional authorities as much as anyone.
2017i – I decided I needed to get louder about my situation. I still envisioned that an angry phone call from the right high-level official could put a stop to the harassment and force federal personnel to deal with me directly. I still think that would be the case, but that official would have to be truthfully briefed on what has already occurred, and in the course of that briefing they would learn of various crimes that had taken place and potential abuses of classified technology (the latter to be explained in due course). It would be a scandal. The knee-jerk tendency in the IC, based on my reading, is for lower level personnel and managers to bury a scandal to prevent the dirty details from reaching the upper echelons of management. If a manager becomes aware of a scandal that their subordinates have taken part in, they may be inclined to look the other direction and ask as few questions as possible if there is a risk the scandal could reflect poorly on their management. The director has to be shielded from the dirt at all costs, and any officials for whom there is a potential of facing the press must also be shielded. This may include the Special Agent-in-Charge of any field office.
2017j – In the interest of making more noise then, I bolted a loudspeaker to the top of my Camry that was connected to a wired CB-style microphone. I put new signs on my car and drove back to Livermore in late June. At this time I also developed the first iteration of the fake conference flyer, advertising what appears to be an academic workshop event in the field of subvocal speech. All of my best ideas about how passive subvocal speech might be collected and transcribed are summarized on these flyers, which have undergone numerous revisions over the years. If I imagine some new angle for how this goal might be accomplished, I add it to the flyer immediately. At Livermore I went back to the Starbucks closest to LLNL and put it on the billboard, along with all of the nearby Starbucks where it might be seen by scientists in the morning. I have probably passed out in excess of 30,000 of these flyers at this point around the country. Most of them on car windshields, but I have also slid them under doors at tech companies and at universities, or on the windshields of cars that were parked at both. I have put them up on billboards in the electrical engineering or bioengineering departments of various universities around the country where it would be appropriate perhaps to advertise such an event, and often I will change the advertised locale of the event to match the university. The exact date and place is always marked “TBA” so nobody will ever be fooled to show up anywhere. I have slid them under the office doors of professors who could be expected to understand some aspects of the proposal. I figure if the harassment team is ramping up the assaults in response to my research in this area, then getting all of my research into the public sphere where it can be openly discussed would hopefully reduce whatever unique threat I might be said to pose. This strategy seems to have put the harassment team in an awkward position. If they attack me immediately in response to the flyering, they telegraph their nervousness over the flyer. If they play it nonchalant, then perhaps more flyers will go out. At times they have attacked me immediately and aggressively in response to some new flyer iteration, as they seem to be doing recently. My response has always been and will always be the same: to put more flyers out. I would like to be directly confronted by federal agents who will openly acknowledge what has been communicated about me to friends, family, coworkers, and strangers over a fourteen year period, or for those orders in place which prevent these persons from telling me themselves to be removed. I want the harassment to cease altogether. At Livermore in June, I also used the loudspeaker to drive by employees who were leaving for the day and communicate something about the risks of classified technology being abused, along with some technical comments on silent speech — an area in which Livermore has some published work. I might very well have appeared crazy. But I was made to fear for my life, and there is also the fact that I can talk about the topic I have chosen in a scientifically informed fashion. I suspect any employees who saw the flyer in Starbucks who mentioned it to others who may have heard my comments via loudspeaker would have made the connection that this was the same person.
2017k – August approached and so did the total solar eclipse that summer. I was not invited to any of the viewing events with any of my friends. I could forgive them on a level where I recognized they had been manipulated by the feds, but at a gut level it was extremely disappointing. Around this time I started to muse a great deal about my history in the psychedelic drug scene, and I somehow managed to convince myself that one or more persons I had known had acted as informants in the past. I was still not sure how I wound up on the federal radar in the first place, and I mused on events and things that people had said in the past that I subjected to a cascade of unfounded reinterpretation. In retrospect I think a variety of cognitive and emotional factors converged at this time to create a kind of retroactive paranoid fantasy, which was made worse by the constant underlying fear that I could experience a repeat of the emergency room visits at any time. I considered some very far out possibilities, mused about one of them online, and then was talked out of this notion by a couple concerned friends. Feeling restless, I decided to take a roadtrip up north to Oregon to check out the eclipse by myself.
2017l – As I got ready to leave, and on the way up to Oregon, I started experiencing mild physiological disruptions coinciding with the eating or drinking of some food item off of store shelves. The effects were sometimes so subtle as to make me wonder if I was imagining it, but sometimes were strong enough to be alarming. I could hardly believe that team members were arranging to have food items spiked off of store shelves. Nothing about my routine had changed. I didn’t experience anything like this throughout 2016. Once more, in hindsight, _I do not think that harassment team members were ever dosing me with any chemical substances_. But at this time, it certainly seemed that way. I always ate breakfast from 7-11, and I got the same thing virtually every time. I usually got lunch from Subway, and dinner was usually from one of a handful of stores or restaurants. Amongst several items I might purchase at any time, the effects always coincided with one item only, and not the others. The effects always came on rapidly, even before I was done eating, and were also incredibly short-lived. Within half an hour to an hour, the effects would dissipate. There were a variety of effects that seemed to be rotated in and out from day to day — maybe a half dozen distinct effects in total. Some were more stimulating overall, and some were tiring or soporific, but nothing felt like anything that people might do for pleasure. At this stage it may not have been happening every day, but by the time my road trip took an extension and I wound up in Washington D.C., the effects would manifest daily. Often only once a day, and sometimes extremely mild in intensity, just barely noticeable, as if someone had slipped me half a cup of coffee’s worth of caffeine. But my belief at the time is that there was in fact a team following me around, anticipating where I would go to pick up food, which could have been anticipated based on my habits and based on Google Maps, and then spiking a food item on store shelves that I was anticipated to purchase. I figured they would have had to garner the cooperation of staff at the store to prevent others from buying the same item, etc. etc. It wasn’t until the summer of 2018 that I started to consider alternate hypotheses besides chemical dosing. I figured the gargantuan effort that would have been required to follow me around and spike my food was in response to my silent speech research, that I had triggered some major alarm bells deep in the IC, and that the only way out of this jam was to get even louder. I could not imagine that the director of any three-letter agency would approve an operation that involved the repeated drugging or physiological assault of a citizen. That such a thing was happening suggested to me that the “problem” my case represented was not being accurately characterized inside the IC to high enough a level. I am still convinced of that, but I do not believe I was ever drugged with any chemicals when these episodes were occurring.
2017m – Before we go any further it ought to be instructive to mention some of the basic goals and capabilities that certain groups within the United States IC have explored in order to discredit and harass a person. Much of what I’m suggesting has taken place might seem at least a bit more believable in light of some well-documented abuses and experiments by military and intelligence groups in this country. While some projects and methods may have been widely condemned at the time they were brought to light, the overall desire to discredit key individuals for one reason or another, often because they pose some threat or embarrassment to the government, has never gone away. These methods are just a handful that come from journalist John Marks’s excellent history of the MK-ULTRA program, _The Search for the Manchurian Candidate_, first published in 1979. Marks is a respected journalist and former state department employee, not a conspiracy nut, and wrote the history on the basis of 16,000 pages of CIA documents obtained through FOIA requests and many interviews. Much of what we know about the program we owe to him. The book is a sober treatment of some very disturbing factual material, and still provides a relevant window into a perennial mindset possessed by some IC personnel. I did not actually read this until early 2019, but the material is presently instructive. This is from the paperback by W.W. Norton & Company: (1) chemicals to cause sickness, itching, sneezing, diarrhea, stink bombs, and baldness; “harassment substances” – pp, 15, 17, 107, 211, 237; (2) “stress-producing chemicals” – p.217; (3) discrediting with chemicals – p.213; (4) “discrediting by aberrant behavior” – p.66; (5) keeping doctors from properly diagnosing a target – p.106; (6) chemical to stimulate heart attack or stroke – p.227; (7) remote-controlled aerosol sprays – p.83; (8) beaming RF energy at the head of a chimpanzee / Dr. Maitland Baldwin – p.216; (9) radar waves to knock out monkeys – p.218; (10) find the “natural radio frequency of a person’s sphincter” -> “make him run out of the room real fast” – p.226; (11) Dr. Stephen Aldrich – brain stimulation / took over after Sidney Gottlieb – pp.224-227. I want to reassert, yet again, that I think it is unlikely in the extreme that I was being repeatedly dosed by chemical substances. The amount of effort that would have had to be expended to anticipate my food purchases and what item I would grab off a shelf would have been enormous. But at the time, I was not familiar with any other way to cause drug-like effects in a person apart from actual drugs. And the effects only came on after eating or drinking. That would eventually change, but at first I was entirely convinced my food was being spiked. However in light of historical activities and IC research, being dosed with chemicals non-consensually would not seem entirely out of the question. A few more topics from the book that may be germane to my account in terms of IC politics between different organizations and in terms of oversight: (12) hiding controversial research under a less controversial cover – p.38; (13) CIA lied to department that oversaw Narcotics Bureau – p.213; (14) incoming CIA director not fully briefed on programs – p.108; (15) local officials could not be trusted to keep state secrets – p.95; (16) CIA Inspector General as lapdog – pp.90-91, 106, 108. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. I think that every American should be familiar with the history here.
2017n – Either right before or after the eclipse in Oregon I had another alarming and dramatic episode in my car like the episode in June where it seemed like I had been poisoned. The effects were identical. It felt toxic. It felt like my muscles were involuntarily contracting all over my body. Like I had taken a convulsant of some kind. The effects dissipated after an hour or so. In hindsight it might have been something like this, set to a low level and hidden in my vehicle somewhere: “Pentagon Developing Electric Stun Grenade To Safely Zap Everyone In A Room” – Forbes, David Hambling, July 3, 2020
2017o – I spent a week or so in Portland, sleeping in my car. Then I drove up to Seattle and spent a few more days there, sleeping in my car. At this point I was becoming increasingly alarmed at the frequency of what seemed to be having my food be spiked. There were still some days when this didn’t seem to happen at all. I stopped looking for places to eat on my phone ahead of time. This actually seemed to work to stop the effects. If I drove around randomly, it seemed the team didn’t have time to spike any food or drink items. In retrospect, I believe they were withholding the mechanism used to impart the effects in order to fool me and keep up the illusion that my food and drink were being spiked. In Seattle for a few days, having experienced the effect again once or twice, I made a spontaneous decision to drive across the country to D.C. and look for help there in person. I didn’t really have anything in mind before leaving. But I figured if I was going to make myself more visible and draw more attention to my situation, that would be the place to do it.
2017p – I drove from Seattle to DC, across Montana, North Dakota, passing through Chicago and staying a few days to visit with friends, through the midwest, Pennsylvania, and down to DC. I didn’t experience any disturbing physiological effects along the way until stopping for a few days in Chicago. It seemed that if I ate at the salad or pasta bar in Whole Foods that the food there was safe. Again, in hindsight, none of the food was ever spiked. But the team would wait to strategically activate effects if it seemed they could have plausibly anticipated where and what I would eat or what I would drink. I started switching up my normal dietary habits. It was all extremely disconcerting, but also seemed to confirm for me that I had really nailed some aspect or another in my technological proposals. I’m sure there had been internal discussions attempting to predict how I would respond to these more aggressive provocations. They probably figured I would feel desperate and hopeless and become suicidal again. They were mistaken. I arrived in DC.
2017q – By now I was sleeping with a car cover over my car at night, slipping under the cover, an ordinary thing for people who live in their cars. A lot of Walmarts are okay with a small number of cars or RVs. During this time I was also continuing to make money and deliver food. Some of the apps will let you sign on to deliver in any new city. One night in DC I was signed into Postmates and received a bizarre order instructing me to drive to the ATF headquarters and pick up a bottle of Smirnoff vodka. The order came through the app as usual, and the pickup address was listed as the actual ATF headquarters address – not some bar or liquor store with a tongue-in-cheek name. It actually said in my app: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. If this was a prank by a private citizen, they would have had to go through the system to register this restaurant, bypassing the checks the company has in place to keep people from preparing food in their kitchens at home or whatnot. I thought at the time that one of the hackers that frequently messed with my phone or laptop was being a smart-ass. But they are usually more subtle about it. I started driving to the ATF HQ just to see what would happen, although it was like 9pm or so. The order was cancelled on the app as soon as I started driving there. I have a screenshot of the notification that says, “The order from Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms has been cancelled”.
2017r – One morning on a whim I decided to visit the Icelandic embassy. In June of 2013, a couple weeks before I got laid off, I had gone to a gathering at a church in Berkeley where famed whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was speaking about the recent Snowden leaks along with some other activists, including Icelandic politician, poet, and activist Birgitta Jónsdóttir. After the talks I went up and shared a copy of a chapter from British journalist Luke Harding’s memoir _Expelled_ with both Ellsberg and Jónsdóttir. Harding was the correspondent for the Guardian stationed in Moscow in the late 00s, and after writing about high-level corruption in the Russian government he experienced a series of break-ins, gaslighting, veiled threats against his family, etc. Part of his book deals with his coming to terms with the harassment and finding out about the history of these methods behind the Iron Curtain in Russia, East Germany, Romania, etc. Some intelligence personnel around the world really get off on harassing people and trying to drive them crazy, and the Eastern bloc services had refined these methods over the lifetime of the Soviet empire. So I shared a copy of this chapter with Ellsberg and Jónsdóttir without really addressing my personal situation. I was excited after having found Harding’s book because it revealed to me so many similarities with my own experience and provided some historical context. Flash forward to DC, in the fall of 2017, I went to the Icelandic embassy. I don’t remember what I said to elicit this, but the Deputy Chief of Mission Hreinn Pálsson came out to speak with me. I believe I told him I was being harassed by American IC personnel because of research I had done on technologies likely to be classified, and I shared with him the powerpoint-style presentation on the history of silent speech research. I explained to him briefly my ideas on the topic and mentioned by encounter with Birgitta Jónsdóttir several years back. He didn’t really know anything he could do for me, and that was that, but I may have asked him to share the research materials with Jónsdóttir and anyone else who might be interested in surveillance and technology issues.
2017s – I had cut back on cannabis a decent amount on the road trip. My medical script was surely not good in other states I passed through. Shortly after arriving in DC I stopped smoking completely. Stopping had no effect whatsoever on the physiological assaults I was already experiencing, which I expected, but I didn’t want this to be brought up later as a potential confounding factor. I delivered food around DC with Postmates and Caviar to make some extra cash.
2017t – One day I decided to try and track down NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake. He was reported to be working at the Apple store in Bethesda. I confirmed with employees that he was working the following day, and came back to see him. Upon parking near the store that day a black SUV, no plates, no visible dealer plates, pulled up behind me. Two guys in suits and sunglasses stared at me, not smiling, as I got out of my car and walked towards the Apple store. I remember thinking this was one of the most direct cases of overt surveillance or intimidation that I had experienced to date by persons who could easily be described later as seeming to work for the government or IC. I had been glared at in the SF bay area, but only by persons in ordinary civilian clothes in cafes or whatnot. Inside the store I described briefly my situation to Thomas Drake and he agreed to speak to me for an hour in a day or two before he started a shift. I did develop the impression he had been contacted by IC personnel ahead of my visit, either on this occasion or the next one when we got together. On the appointed day we met at a bookstore and walked to public bench on a sidewalk next to the street. Across from us sat down at the exact same time a muscular middle-aged man with a crew cut and t-shirt with Navy logo. I was used to this sort of thing, but somehow at the time I remember thinking that this was more for Drake than for me (?) The man got up and left after a couple minutes. I had prepared a written four-page summary of my situation for Drake to go over in order to bring him up to speed most efficiently, as it is difficult to verbally summarize without a thousand tangents threatening to eat up precious time. I sensed that he was maybe a little frustrated with this approach and that he may have preferred to have everything be said out loud. In retrospect, I think he may have been spooked by some personnel ahead of my visit, he was curious about me in part for this reason, because why would they be following me if I was flat-out crazy, but he didn’t want to be accused later of assisting someone who was either impinging on something classified or engaging in some crime or another. I guess he knew we were being watched, and he wanted everything out in the open so he could defend himself later, just in case. The reading only took five minutes out of the hour. I had said that the original reason for drawing federal attention was my interest in psychedelics. He didn’t have any interest in that, but maybe he had seen something in the news about clinical trials. I also went through the 26-page powerpoint-style presentation of my silent speech research. I knew he had a technical background and would be able to appreciate some aspects of it. I believe I had told him ahead of our meeting that I had never had any access to anything classified, and that any material in my possession was all culled from open sources. This is obvious from the presentation itself as everything is sourced throughout. I always try to convey the limits of my own knowledge and technical expertise in talking about this material and that I am speculating with respect to potential capabilities. I believe he followed my logic throughout the presentation. I appreciate that he took the time to speak with me. He didn’t know how he could help. though. He said that persons had reached out to him in the past who also claimed to be subject to forms of anonymous harassment, including a former NSA employee, but that nobody had offered any concrete proof of the harassment. I believe he understood why the nature of the harassment makes collection of proof quite challenging by design, and that the methods tend to thwart access to the typical levers of assistance in the legal system. If he had thought that all of these other persons reaching out to him were simply crazy, then it would be odd to agree to chat for an hour with another person who was likely crazy — especially someone with no prior background in the military or IC who claimed that he was initially targeted for an interest in psychedelic drugs. I don’t think that anything that transpired between us that could possibly be used against him in any way (?), even if the open-source material I shared did happen to overlap with classified material.
2017u – I had copies of the fake academic workshop flyer in subvocal speech that I continued to distribute. I put some up on a billboard in the electrical engineering department at Johns Hopkins one day. I think I had modified the workshop location to say Johns Hopkins. Also I put them up on Starbucks billboards that were closest to FBI HQ in DC, CIA HQ in Langley, and in Ft. Meade. At first I was driving around DC without the signs on my car. I would take them on and off occasionally to see if the team would back off the harassment completely. They never did, they would do something to provoke and upset me, and then I would put them back up on my car.
2017v – On the way to Baltimore one day, no signs on my car, I took the exit you’re not supposed to take that leads to NSA HQ. I missed the sign that said do not take this exit unless you have official business, and the exit leads surprisingly quickly to the edge of the complex. I attempted to wave down an employee who had just exited his car in the parking lot to pass him a flyer. He eyed me suspiciously, and soon the NSA police were urging me to the side and out of my vehicle. I immediately assured everyone that I did not have any weapons and apologized for causing a disturbance. The NSA police wear coats and ties and took a very polite approach with me. They had me sit down on the sidewalk about ten meters from my car while a bomb-sniffing dog was brought out and my car thoroughly searched. They just wanted to know what I was thinking. I don’t remember everything I said, but if I try to summarize my situation to anyone it becomes challenging and I have a tendency to ramble. I probably said I was on my way to Baltimore for the day, I had taken a road trip out here to the east coast, I was in the DC area trying to find help for my situation, I had been subjected to harassment, initially targeted for interest in psychedelics, etc., and I also mentioned that I had researched some technology that probably overlapped with sensitive government programs without getting into the details. I didn’t say I had met with Thomas Drake a few days prior. In the meantime some personnel were going through my car with a fine-tooth comb and taking photos of all of my documents, signs, journal articles, etc. In the front passenger seat at this time I had a box full of books, many of which pertained to subvocal speech. They seized the remaining cannabis I had and let me off with a written warning because I was so cooperative, despite the fact that I was technically breaking federal law on federal property. This is the only time in my life when I have ever had drugs in my possession taken by the police. I hadn’t been smoking it recently anyways. The NSA police seemed to gradually grow more curious about my story. I probably came across as distressed but articulate. I referred to myself as a weirdo at one point, and they laughed and said they have to deal with weirdos who are extremely combative.
2017w – It may be fairly suggested that, having upset a substantial number of IC personnel already, dragging an ever-larger number into the fold from different agencies may not represent the wisest course, considering only my self-interest. Unfortunately there is no citizen’s manual for how to deal with this kind of harassment. With the first physiological assault at the start of the year, I began to fear more and more for my life. I figured if my research that I continued distributing overlapped sufficiently with any classified programs or breakthroughs in the area of passive subvocal speech transcription, that it might rise to a level where personnel might consider causing a heart attack, or staging an overdose. It seemed that through the actions taken already, that this was essentially the implied threat being made. However if the team wanted to calm me down and steer my behavior towards more conventional activities like Netflix and walks in the park, they were doing a very poor job of it. On countless days or occasions, I would actually try to do something more conventional like go to a movie or the beach. And the harassment continued. Gradually it seemed that team members were trapped somehow — that some line had already been crossed beyond which they were unable to just let me be, and that this line had been crossed many years ago. I became convinced that numerous colleagues of the original team members, managers, and high-level supervisors had to have been knowingly lied to about the circumstances that led to this situation. Some of those lies were committed to on paper, shared internally, and were passed up the chain of command. Nobody wants to admit to their supervisors months or years later that briefings on some case have been corrupted from the start. In addition to these political considerations, it’s possible that some commitments were made on the level of technology that would also be quite difficult to walk back from. In any case, it has always seemed to me that the harassment team members are engaging in activities that could not be publicly defended, that their directors would have to apologize if the activities were exposed, possibly by discounting it all as the actions of “rogue personnel”, and that if I could get the attention of the right person in the IC with sufficient authority who was made sufficiently afraid of bad press, that it would end the harassment.
2017x – Slept in Walmart parking lots in DC and Baltimore, and then drove up to NYC in early October. Slept adjacent to a park in Brooklyn most nights, always with a car cover. Met briefly with my former adviser, Dirk Trauner, who was now a professor at NYU. The harassment continued unabated, and I continued to have the disturbing experience of feeling like individual food or drink items were being spiked with something. In addition while driving one day I experienced an uncomfortable sensation in my throat coinciding with the development of prominent CNS (central nervous system) effects, as if I had been drugged. Earlier that day the team had broken in and changed an AC setting in my car. This is the first time I had experienced such effects divorced from the consumption of some food item. At the time I remember suspecting that some kind of psychoactive aerosol spray had been released through my vents. I went to a lot of trouble to try to protect myself from future occurrences by way of purchasing a face mask from a medical supply store and attaching it to a hose that was fed through the roof of my car. In hindsight I don’t think that any CNS effects have been caused by any aerosol agents. But I have at times been suspicious over the years that my car’s AC/heater and vent system have been monkeyed with. The team has broken in on numerous occasions to change various settings in my car over the years, on the stereo or AC/heater controls. Sometimes an item disappears, to reappear later in a place I would not have left it, like the trunk. The idea seems to be to constantly convey to me that I have no privacy, no safe space, and that there will never be any escape. These are exactly the sorts of things that the Stasi and KGB did to dissidents behind the Iron Curtain, and apparently still do to dissidents and to certain foreign embassy staff in Russia.
2017y – In Luke Harding’s book, he reports on a diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks sent by American embassy personnel in Moscow to the U.S. that makes reference to constant harassment activities directed against embassy staff there. This is reported to happen in Cuba as well, where American personnel are subjected to repeated home break-ins, having their cars screwed with in typically small but annoying ways (having an individual window wiper stolen, etc.), sometimes more menacing things like finding live scorpions in their underwear drawer, and most recently escalating to claims of being physiologically assaulted with what some observers suggest are microwave-based directed energy weapons (i.e., the Havana Syndrome — I recommend the VICE podcast on the Havana Syndrome, where these types of harassment activities are described in detail in interviews with former embassy staff and CIA officers who were stationed in Havana). I would like to have believed that as an American citizen living in America, that I would be insulated from such activities. But apparently the temptation to engage in such harassment and discrediting operations is just too much for some American personnel to resist. I have taken to calling these activities REC-OPS, which stands for recreational operations. For the target it is never recreational, of course, but for the squads who have cultivated a penchant to delight in the torment of others, it’s surely a laugh riot, at least until the target starts to fight back with any degree of effectiveness. My opinion as a citizen is that American personnel engaging in REC-OPS should be taken to task, called out publicly, and punished, perhaps under new statutes that ought to be written, but in the meantime they are benefitting from anonymity and an unwillingness of their colleagues to confront such activities. I’m certain the team members on my own case were enjoying themselves a good bit more before I started getting loud about my situation, reaching out for help in multiple directions, and driving around with handwritten signs on my car that most citizens would have regarded as obviously crazy. You might think the team would be happy for me to look crazy. I was practically doing their work for them. But now and again, an engineer in the Valley would stop to ask questions, and maybe snap a photo. I wonder if perhaps at some point in 2016, the team received an angry, unexpected visit from an intimidating out-of-town visitor, and the fun level dropped off precipitously.
2017z – I continued putting flyers out in NYC. One day I put all the signs on my car and drove to Columbia University to park near the electrical engineering department. I typed up a paragraph describing a scientific proposal: the collection of signals from the speech muscles from a short distance away with a sensor of some kind, which, when combined with speech recognition of the deepest subvocal levels, I have occasionally described as a mind-reading camera. I framed the proposal in the following manner: would such a technology ever be possible? What are the technical limits to the detection of electrical signals or correlates to those signals from a person’s face? I left the car sitting there and walked a few blocks away to a bench. I later observed some students checking out the car and taking photos. This was all before I had discovered the work of Yuri Feldman, a physicist of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who showed that a terahertz sensor can pick up a correlate to the GSR signal from human skin from a meter or two away, maybe across a room, due to terahertz emissions from helical shaped tubes in the sweat ducts that act as antennae. All FBI agents should be familiar with the GSR signal from their earliest confessionals. It’s also well-established that a person’s heartbeat can be extracted from any video sample through Eulerian video magnification, which amplifies changes in skin color with each heart contraction. There’s an app for it. Watch the TED talk. So you need to find a correlate to the EMG signal from the right speech muscle or group of muscles during deep subvocalization to begin to enable my proposal. It may very well be completely impossible from any range farther than a millimeter. Just because you can get one biosignal from a meter away doesn’t mean you can get every other from that distance. The signal processing forms a very significant hurdle as well. So I would be gratified to have prompted some lively classroom discussion at Columbia, but some tin foil hat jokes would be alright too. Secret doors abound throughout nature, waiting across the centuries for their contours to be discerned, and at last for the proper keys to be fashioned. One day someone will spot something in the literature and come back to the photos.
2017aa – I drove back to CA near the end of October by way of Texas, stopping in Austin on the way back to visit some friends. Harassment continued unabated. I had the perception that at least one of my friends was still continuing to receive instructions from teamp members, something that had been happening for him since late 2009. I experienced physiological disruption sleeping in his home one night while he was staying at his girlfriend’s place.
2017bb – Continued delivering food upon return to SF bay area. Drove to Houston for the holiday to visit family whom I had not seen in years. Physiological assaults were becoming more routine at this point, but I continued my daily efforts to evade prediction of my eating choices, which seemed to work if the store or food item were entirely new to me. In hindsight, the team was continuing to trick me by making me believe that my food and drink were spiked.
2018 – harassment ramps up, sleep deprivation, Mexico City, embassy visits, NYC, making new contacts
2018a – Stopped by satellite FBI office in Long Beach, CA, on the way back to bay area on January 2nd, 2pm. Don’t remember details of encounter with female duty agent. Probably complained about harassment and probably shared some printouts. She took the printouts.
2018b – Back in the SF bay area after the new year, I stopped by the Starbucks closest to Facebook in Menlo Park in early January to put up another flyer for the fake subvocal workshop conference (advertised as taking place at Stanford in the bay area, usually). On this occasion I received a silent angry glare from a muscular man with a crew cut. The harassment continued apace and the physiological disruptions soon became an almost daily occurrence, escalating to frequent sleep deprivation.
2018c – Starting in mid-January I started to be subjected to regular interference with sleep. Occasionally I would be prevented from falling asleep, but more often than not I would be woken up in the middle of the night feeling as if I had been drugged with some kind of stimulant. It did not feel like any kind of drug that people would take for recreation. Based on my memory of what had happened in DC previously, I became convinced that some kind of aerosolizable stimulant agent was being released into my car. I would often exit my car immediately upon being woken by feeling strong effects and then let the car air out. I never smelled anything. The effects would wear off rapidly and I would try to go back to sleep, sometimes using the mask nearby that was still connected through an opening drilled through the ceiling. I would sleep soundly through the night for several nights more in a row, maybe a week, and then they would do it again. This was not like natural insomnia at all. I am adept at progressive relaxation and even in the midst of tremendously stressful times I am usually able to let go of it all at bedtime in order to sleep. At some point they tried keeping me from falling asleep to begin with, and I would try sleeping with the mask on. Eventually I purchased a tent and started sleeping outside my vehicle on a grassy slope next to the BART public transport station in Colma, CA, a parking lot where the police leave car campers alone. This seemed to work for about a week and I slept perfectly soundly, but the police told me to move one morning. I started camping outside my car in various places just south of San Francisco, sometimes by the Pacific Ocean in Daly City or Pacifica. Eventually one morning I was woken up by the same effects in my tent, and I became convinced that they had dug a hole and installed some tank nearby with the aerosol agent set to spray through the mesh of my tent (note: I do not think any aerosol or chemical was the cause in hindsight). Throughout all this I continued to deliver food during the day and continued thinking about ways to force the team out of the woodwork to deal with me directly. My car would continue to get broken into now and then, staff at restaurants where I picked up food from or ate continued to be contacted ahead of my visit unles my visit was completely spontaneous, and friends and family continued to be contacted if I reached out to them. If I had a random encounter with someone on the street, the interaction was perfectly normal though. There were some cases where I was actually kept awake all night, allowed maybe an hour or two of sleep the next night, and finally slept a full night the third night. One night in particular I recall being just on the verge of falling asleep, and then suddenly jerked awake, as if caffeine was shot into my bloodstream. And this happened over and over and over again, all night long. This was not natural insomnia. I felt I understood at this time why sleep deprivation is regarded as torture. Then maybe a week, maybe two would go by, maybe just a few days and my sleep would be normal. The incidents were always sporadic and usually just wound up costing me an hour or two of sleep on the nights this took place, with the occasional all-nighter. I don’t think I was awake all night long from natural insomnia a single night throughout 2016, except maybe on election night.
2018d – In hindsight I do not believe that any aerosolizable psychoactive agents were ever used, but the team wanted me to believe this. They were frequently breaking in and screwing with my AC controls during this period. It felt like they were taunting me. I had been concerned since the first physiological assault in January 2017 that I might wind up dead, that it could be made to look like a heart attack or whatnot. I wasn’t sure what to do in response to all this except to keep reaching out for assistance, but I had to come to terms with the idea that I might be killed at anytime — as much as a person can come to terms with that. I think the team was hoping to wear me down through these methods and drive me to suicide again, but after all I had been through by now, and feeling rather certain that much of this was in response to both their own legal transgressions and to my research, I developed a fierce determination to fight through it all and survive. I continued hoping for some kind of breakthrough. I knew that these methods could not be reflective of any official IC policy, and I kept thinking that if I got the attention of the right person, it would force the team members to start behaving in a publicly defensible manner.
2018e – It may be asked why they didn’t actually just kill me if certain team members were facing criminal charges or if my research risked calling attention to something classified. I can only speculate, but I can imagine that a willingness of U.S. IC personnel to actually assassinate someone, as considered by the media or culture at large, has been greatly exaggerated. Anyone taking part would risk a murder charge. In my case as well, there have to be a fairly sizable number of persons who have gotten involved or been briefed on my case, and not all of them would know all of the dirty details with respect to gaslighting and physiological disruption. After 2017 especially, I would think that personnel from multiple agencies would be paying attention to me, and even before 2017 I had begun to suspect some DOD surveillance. This is not something like a normal narcotics case in which regional and federal personnel will work together and share information through a fusion center. It may have started out as something like that, possibly before I moved to Munich, but the mindset of personnel shifted while I was in Munich towards a more COINTELPRO-style life disruption and discrediting campaign. I think some personnel may want to have it both ways, and on occasion when they are forced to deal with regular citizens like my friends, family, coworkers, or any prosecutors, they have to show only the respectable, defensible face. But some personnel will be deliberately kept out of the loop with respect to the dirtier aspects, and their colleagues who are willing to get dirty may simply wait for them to leave the room to talk about certain things. In any case, if personnel are uncertain who else may be watching me, they may be less inclined to think about trying to kill me. So getting the attention of as many agencies as possible may actually help to protect me. Also, I can imagine it being the case that even for personnel who have justified already behaving essentially the same as the Stasi or KGB, who have embraced these methods, that they will still like to believe that they hold themselves to a higher standard than their counterparts in Russia. So there need to be lines they can hold onto to anchor their own self-image. However this style of moral justification will guarantee a race to the bottom. Michael Hayden made this point one time in an interview to suggest that American personnel ought not to hold themselves to a relative standard, relative to China I think it was in the interview, but an absolute one. It becomes all too easy for personnel, especially personnel operating in secret with no intention to defend themselves publicly, to justify anything they might wish to do by referring to some example in another country where their counterparts take actions even more harsh or abusive. Sometimes I wonder if personnel think that I should be grateful that I haven’t been killed outright yet. Any personnel who thinks a citizen should be grateful to accept such a pathetically low standard should be permanently ejected from the military and IC, as they do not understand what it means to live and act according to standards in the first place.
2018f – It may also be inquired why, if personnel were willing to engage in repeated physiological assaults, but unwilling to cross the line to actually kill a citizen, they would not just escalate the assaults to a level that could be expected to drive the target to the brink — either to suicide, or to a crisis point that manifested publicly in a manner that demanded intervention by legal or medical authorities. Looking back over the years, based on the totality of everything that has transpired, it seems likely to me that harassment team members have sought to avoid pushing things to the brink, even when they might have, because the intervention of medical or legal authorities would raise the risk of outside parties becoming involved from within their own ranks, at the FBI perhaps, at a DA’s office, at local police or sheriff’s office where they have been giving instructions to officers and troopers, or within the medical community to whom they may ultimately be forced to furnish an explanation about why I continue to be followed around daily after so many years when the statute of limitation for just about everything I was ever involved in has expired (I think…) It will force them to add more evidence to a trail of requests that they have made on the basis of some false pretext or another, the revelation of which will lead to aspects of their story unraveling and jeopardizing the careers of key personnel. It may provide me with access to certain legal levers which they have tried to keep hidden from me, levers which could force them out of hiding. Therefore their best strategy from their standpoint seems to be to continue to try chipping away at me, making my life as unpleasant as possible, and hopefully driving me to suicide, without precipitating a crisis situation that may run the risk of leading to transgressions on their part being uncovered.
2018g – I would like to point out that any discussions that have taken place amongst personnel in which my suicide or “accidental” death has been explicitly identified as a goal to be worked towards while actions have been taken to pursue that goal have engaged in a conspiracy that could have very serious legal repercussions. I think that it is very likely to be the case that such discussions have already taken place for years. This would be a separate charge from any assault or battery charges flowing from the deployment of technologies, screwing with my car, etc. The latter types of harassment I would not be able to offer hard proof of at present, but perhaps who knows something will be willing to come forward at some point. My car has been broken into on literally hundreds of occasions by harassment team members, and beyond having internal controls in the cabin be altered, I have had issues with the alignment, suspension, and tires that are suspicious based on the ordinary life cycle of components, a life cycle I am familiar with after having owned four different Camry and fixing all of these components myself. These issues have been dramatically increasing in frequency since I moved to Houston at the start of 2022.
2018h – I kept in touch with my attorney Daniel Barton throughout these ordeals to let him know what I was going through. I’m fairly sure he was being contacted by federal personnel at the same time and occasionally receiving instructions to interact with me in some ways. By now my retainer had run out based on his hourly rate, and yet he continued to see me on occasion, volunteering his time. I suspect that he had grown suspicious of whatever he had been told by federal personnel and was concerned for me. When I described my farthest out suspicions, he agreed that it was hard to believe certain aspects, but at the same time he was familiar with some of the history of COINTELPRO and MK-ULTRA. I’m not talking about lizard people or time travel, after all. I am suggesting that IC personnel are engaged in behaviors that are extremely reminiscent of both KGB and Stasi operations which targeted their own dissidents, as well as reminiscent of COINTELPRO and MK-ULTRA. I try to keep my technological proposals reasonably well-grounded. As far as the technology goes, the most unbelievable thing is that American personnel would do these sorts of things to a citizen in this day and age. He knew that at least some parts of what I was describing were likely to be true, because federal authorities had confirmed an interest in me by contacting him, and over time I think he grew more suspicious of whatever they were claiming.
2018i – I visited the FBI satellite office in Oakland for a walk-in appointment on June 26, 2018, 1pm. I scheduled it a few days ahead of time and gave my name, but an FBI duty agent receiving walk-ins never gives their name. I rambled a bit in trying to describe the harassment and psychological elements of the campaign. I did state that I would have initially drawn attention from federal law enforcement due to involvement in the psychedelic scene. I stated my suspicion that a confidential informant (CI) had been fabricated. I stated my suspicion that the FBI was involved in the psychological campaign. He finally interrupted to inquire that if I have concerns that the Bureau is involved, then why come in? In hindsight I might have reminded him that there is a fair degree of compartmentalization at the Bureau, and that historical records demonstrate a lack of knowledge by many agents with respect to what their fellow agents in the same office are up to. This surely depends to some extent on office size and the amount of gossip, but certain things like the identities of informants are generally kept secret, even from fellow agents. I might have suggested that repeated break-ins and gaslighting and spreading of rumors about a citizen for many years in a row would likely not fall under the aegis of official policy, and that such activities taking place out of any given field office ought to be a concern for all agents, for the Special Agent-in-Charge of that region in particular, and for all citizens for that matter. And that I could also provide a long list of names in the bay area alone of persons who could confirm having been contacted by federal personnel (organization unconfirmed). At this time however, I asked if he may be able to provide any confirmation, simply verbal perhaps, with respect to whether or not I had ever acted as an informant for the Bureau. I mentioned the Delta database which had been reported in the media some years ago to organize informants. He asserted that he himself could not verbally confirm this, because he didn’t come into the meeting expecting this… and then he pivoted to assert that “we are not actively involved in any targeting or games against you”, and that he had no paperwork or anything else he could give me in that regard. “That’s just not our style”, he asserted in response to my description of psy-ops and harassment. I suppose he meant to say these sorts of activities do no reflect official Bureau policy, and that investigations are not ordinarily handled in the way I described. But much of what I tried to describe, without at this point having touched on anything to do with fancy technologies or physiological disruptions, the latter of which I never even addressed, did in fact take place at the hands of FBI agents as part of COINTELPRO. So to write off my descriptions by way saying it is not the Bureau’s “style” is historically inaccurate and perhaps disingenuous based on his knowledge of his own organization’s history and of any details surrounding my case which he may have been feigning ignorance of. I explained it was admittedly odd to ask this question, because if somebody has acted as informant, they would not need to ask for confirmation of such. I explained to him what a snitch jacket is. I suspect that he feigned a degree of ignorance around this topic. I asked him who the Confidential Human Source Coordinator was for the SF bay area. He asked me for what purpose, what was I looking for? I said to put this same question to that person: were there any files indicating that I had acted as an informant? He responded: “I can tell you that there are no files that indicate or imply that you have acted as an informant”, which of course diverged from his prior assertion that he could not verbally confirm this. I asked him how it was he could tell me that. Had he looked up my name before our chat? He responded that I did not fit the profile of someone they would have an interest in working with as a source (!) Later I wondered if this was some kind of pitch to my ego or something, as if I were to supposed to convince him otherwise (?) I laughed at this response, and he then asked, have you? (acted as an informant) I said I had not. He asked if I was sure (?!?) I said I was absolutely positive. He then asked how he could be assured that I had not. I suggested again that there may be a file that had been fabricated, I was suspicious of having been snitch jacketed, and I wanted to confirm whether or not there were any internal records of me having acted as an informant. He assured me that they did not have any files on me (!?) And he flat out refused to furnish the name of the Confidential Human Source Coordinator for the SF bay area. At this point, frustrated, having been subjected to months of stress and sleep deprivation, still fearful that DOD-affiliated team members may actually kill me, I started to tell him about my research in the area of silent speech transcription. I didn’t mention having been in DC, having my car searched at the NSA, or talking with Thomas Drake, but I did mention DARPA and Regina Dugan and the mind-reading program at Facebook that Regina Dugan had been spearheading for a year. I said that I had been stalked by military personnel and that I had photos of many people. I expressed my convictions around breakthroughs in the area of subvocal speech with a degree of assurance that I would now hedge with respect to, but would still be willing to bet a fair sum on. I became a little emotional in talking about my ideas here because I had been subject to repeated bouts of sleep deprivation and aggressive harassment since the start of the year. I asserted I was not suicidal, but that I was afraid for my life. He ended the discussion, suggesting I talk with a psychologist or psychiatrist. I have always found such suggestions offensive under the circumstances. It’s like telling a battered wife or someone who was victimized by the KGB to just take some medication. If I had to guess, I would say that this duty agent had prior knowledge, or perhaps just suspicions, of transgressions by his colleagues that he was withholding, including that a CI had been fabricated by some agent in the SF bay area. This is just a hunch really, based on more than just the explicitly verbal content of our exchange, but I could be wrong on this. That ought to be confirmed by an independent investigator. If his identity needs to be confirmed because the duty agent records from 2018 have been discarded then I’m happy to provide an audio voice sample.
2018j – This conversation may have taken place before I had read the book Don’t Embarrass the Family by state prosecutor Matthew Connolly, which covered the trial of FBI agent John Connolly. John Connolly had acted as mob boss Whitey Bulger’s handler while Bulger was an informant for the Bureau for twenty years, over which time he acted as a usual mob boss, ordering hits, etc. Bulger’s identity as an informant prompted criticism of the Bureau. John Connolly was tried and ultimately convicted after it was shown he had accepted gifts from Bulger and crossed numerous lines in a relationship that benefited his career through the information Bulger provided. The book includes details on the inner workings of informant handling by the Bureau, including the fact that informant identities are closely guarded secrets internally, usually known only to the handler, the Special Agent-in-Charge perhaps, and the Confidential Human Source Coordinator for the region. Therefore information on whether any random citizen is an informant or not is generally not accessible to all agents. I’m not sure if the policy has changed, but if it has not, I’m not sure why a duty agent wouldn’t just volunteer this information (?) It seems like the natural thing to assert here.
2018k – I had skimmed some material online as early as 2010 that described the plights of many self-described “targeted individuals”, most of whom report that voices are being beamed into their heads, and always found the material to be off-putting and depressing. I concluded that the vast majority of self-described “TIs” are likely to be mentally ill, and that if anyone was a genuine target, I didn’t have the patience to wade through the material and find them. It should be noted that “targeted individual” is a phrase borrowed from the IC itself. The phrase appears in internal IC documents and has been used by Snowden, etc., but he seems to be referring to targets of more conventional cyber surveillance. Not merely just passive collection of communications, however, because one set of documents from the batch he shared, as reported by The Intercept in 2014, discussed some highly psychological online influence operations that draw heavily on behavioral and social psychology principles. The explicit goals were summarized by the “4 Ds”: Deny, Disrupt, Degrade, Deceive. Story title on the Intercept: “How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations”. Under the slide entitled “Discredit a Target”, we have: “ Set up a honey-trap”; “Change their photos on social networking sites”; “Write blog purporting to be one of their victims”; “Email/text their colleagues, neighbors, friends, etc”. Under “Discredit a company”, we see “Stop deals / ruin business relationships”. There are references to anchoring and priming on another slide. A slide on “Identifying and Exploiting fracture points within a group”. But the most interesting slide I thought was a slide entitled “Gambits for Deception”, which contained a grid containing numerous psychological constructs and manipulation strategies dealing with “Attention”, “Perception”, “Sensemaking”, “Affect”, and “Behaviour”, with the ultimate goal seeming to be to “Channel behaviour”. I think the team assigned to follow me around would very much like to “channel” my behavior, and they have drawn upon numerous psychological constructs and strategies to achieve this. How successful they have been I leave for others to judge. But over time their tactics have become less purely psychological and more directly physical, relying more and more on physiological disruption.
2018l – Sometime over the spring or summer I began to revise my hypotheses with respect to what was causing physiological disruptions and sleep deprivation. Something I read online alerted me to the fact that electromagnetic energy in various forms can be used to perturb the nervous system and I began researching this possibility. The first report of such interactions came out Italian physicist Luigi Galvani’s work with frog legs in 1780, showing muscle twitches in response to electrical sparks. The most common device that people know making use of such principles is the pacemaker. In 2017, stories of American embassy staff in Havana suffering a bizarre cluster of health effects had surfaced, dubbed the Havana Syndrome, and some had already speculated on a microwave-based directed energy weapon. However my own experiences did not really match what I was reading about the victims of Havana Syndrome. I had never experienced any acoustic effects like many Havana victims, except for the barely audible beeping noise that had tormented me in Munich, which I had not heard in years. I began researching the ways electromagnetic energy can impact the body. For example, in 2014 it was reported that the U.S. military had begun testing troops to see if low level shocks of electricity could keep them alert when they are in combat. They explored tDCS, or transcranial direct current stimulation. They successfully kept soldiers awake for 30 hours at a time, with no caffeine-style jitters, and reportedly no psychological crash. The team behind it hoped that in the near future soldiers would be able to carry a pair of electrodes with them that they can easily apply to themselves to carry the electric current. See the story at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/, “The shock troops: U.S. military trials electric pulses to keep soldiers alert during combat”. I’m curious whatever came of this. This is the sort of uncontroversial program which may or may not ultimately bear utility for soldiers and that might even have application to other life domains, but the results could be funneled into more controversial programs that an agency like the CIA would take interest in. Sleep deprivation is torture under international law, but what if there was a way to keep people awake or cause other forms of discomfort that a detainee would not be able to report to any pesky lawyers or have properly diagnosed? This is the type of thing that certain DOD and IC personnel would get very excited about, while the official line would always be that the United States doesn’t engage in torture or sleep deprivation. Based on further research it seems plausible that a source of electromagnetic energy may be able to induce similar effects at short range, without the use of electrodes attached to the skin, but this is the sort of thing that would _only_ be researched by an organization like the CIA, because the power and battery requirements would be unnecessarily increased relative to tDCS, not to mention the potential for the energy to exceed recognized safety limits for RF energy absorption and spill out to affect nearby persons. In the context of medicine then, there is no need to deliver energy at any distance greater than direct skin contact, and considerable disadvantage in doing so. This absence of motivation for commercial and academic interest in bioelectromagnetic effects from a distance thus provides ample space for secret developments to be made by the military and IC, and the interest of the CIA in doing so as part of the MK-ULTRA program was already reported on by John Marks in his history of MK-ULTRA, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. See section — above.
2018m – There are some older documents available on the CIA website pertaining to the Agency’s interest in “electro-anesthesia”, “electronarcosis”, or “electro-sleep”. With electrodes on the forehead and neck delivering current at the right frequencies, a narcotic-like or anesthetic state can be induced. This might be effected at short range as well, which is what has been claimed for the Russian LIDA machine, a medical device that transmits a 40 MHz VHF signal at pulse rates designed to match relaxed and sleeping states. The Soviets devoted considerable resources to research in bioelectromagnetics, with an output that is still being processed by scientists in the West, but the quality and reproducibility of some of their work has been called into question. After WWII, when Nazi scientists were being poached by the U.S. as part of “Operation Paperclip”, the Russians were grabbing talent as well. The U.S. supposedly got most of the chemical experts, while Russia got the electromagnetic experts (source: Undue Risk – Jonathan Moreno). So there have been some lingering concerns over the decades that the Russians were ahead of the U.S. in this area.
2018n – Early in the summer I identified for the first time an account of a self-described “targeted individual” whose sanity I did not immediately call into question: New Zealand activist Suzie Dawson. Dawson had been active in the Occupy movement in New Zealand, a critic of state surveillance in New Zealand and elsewhere, and later a vocal supporter of Julian Assange, establishing contact with him. She describes in a youtube video the same type of harassment that I have endured: break-ins, having her car tampered with, her gear hacked, communications interfered with, etc. Her account seemed convincing to me. She has never heard voices. As a single mom the harassment got to be too much and she moved to Berlin with her kids to try to escape it. It continued there, which might warrant pause to consider whether it was all in her head. But in 2017 she moved to Moscow, Russia, where the harassment immediately ceased, never to return. And there she lives now, at some stage in the asylum process. If she was psychotic, then it would appear that Moscow provides an environment conducive to the curing of psychosis xx — at least for dissidents from the West who have been vocal supporters of Assange. xx It should also be noted that American hacktivist and Assange supporter Jacob Appelbaum has reported break-ins and gaslighting while living in Berlin. This is perhaps not too surprising given the substantial DOD and intelligence presence in Germany, and the propensity for anyone who comes within a half-mile radius of Assange to be subject to harassment through official and non-official means. Official harassment refers to things like being detained at the border for hours after visiting Assange and having your laptop password be demanded, etc., which happened multiple times to journalist Laura Poitras. Non-official refers to break-ins, gaslighting, disruptive hacking, etc. Would American personnel work with German authorities to coordinate break-in activities? They probably did in my case, and in Jacob Appelbaum’s case the American IC surely suggested it at the very least. Dawson has received vocal public support from former CIA analyst Ray McGovern and former CIA officer/whistleblower John Kiriakou. The prospect of connecting with someone who had endured similar treatment after almost nine years of my own constant harassment, as well as a potential respite from such harassment, was extremely appealing. I started researching taking a trip to Moscow. And let me say for the record that, while the contributions to literature, art, music, and science by scores of Russians over the decades are indisputable, the country seems to have had exceptionally bad luck with government and a nasty habit of installing autocratic leaders. I have never been a Putin fanboy and I have no illusions about the oppressiveness of the past Soviet regime. But it’s not North Korea, and people from the “free world” travel there often on business and vacation. This was all before the war of course.
2018o – Unfortunately the Russian Consulate in San Francisco had been closed the past September due to accusations of espionage, culminating in a column of smoke above the chimney as the Russians prepared to vacate. My own paperwork to prepare in advance of a visit was substantial compared to other European countries. For numerous reasons then I booked a flight to Mexico City in early October to deal with the embassy there in person. During my stay in Mexico the coordinated psychological harassment and distribution of my location data, as judged by the requested participation of citizens in advance of my arrival, seemed to largely disappear, with a handful of exceptions by some restaurant staff inside the two hotels where I stayed, who seemed to have been relayed something about me that was disturbing to them. The first night I arrived, I received a kind of knowing smirk or smile in the hotel by a middle-aged man passing in the hall who did not have a stereotypically Latin appearance. I have received these kinds of smirks or smiles, as opposed to the angry glares, from numerous persons hanging out in cafes around the SF bay whom I also suspected of having an IC connection. While the domain of non-verbal communication provides ample space for psychological projection, there are also cross-culturally universal facial expressions that are arguably hard-wired into the emotional and facial recognition centers of our brains that have been characterized by scientists for decades. If you want to spook or confuse someone by flashing a knowing smile at them, it’s very easy, and some would argue rude. I know, because I’ve done it to people that I have momentarily suspected of receiving info about me, and their discomfort in receiving this expression is palpable. It’s like a non-consensual hijacking of another person’s cognitive and emotional resources to figure out what in the hell you are smirking at them about. If you want to communicate to another person, “I know something you don’t, and I have power over you,” you can do this throughout the world, in any country, without ever opening your mouth, but you’re liable to get punched in the mouth eventually. If you were to organize a campaign to simply have strangers smirk at a person all throughout the day, day after day, but have everyone deny the conspiracy, you could probably drive a person to psychological breakdown in a week or two. It would be regarded as cruel and inhumane by every recognized psychological authority. How do the methods used against me compare to this? I think we ought to get some psychological authorities involved to evaluate and have a public discussion.
2018p – Despite the considerable abatement of distributed psychological harassment in Mexico, the physiological disruptions continued. In my hotel room at night, on the first night, I was subjected to what felt like unnatural sleep disruption. There were other kinds of provocations as well, of the same variety that I had experienced in the U.S. There were about a half-dozen or so different drug-like effects that could be induced, all of them short-lived.
2018q – At the Russian embassy it seemed right away that something had been communicated about me to embassy staff to make them wary of me, based on nonverbal signals. I had worried this might happen. I also learned that, despite having researched the paperwork requirements for obtaining a visa, my application was deficient in one or more ways. I had to reschedule the flight I had already booked to Moscow and extend my stay in Mexico. Upon fulfilling what I understood were the new requirements, I was informed that my passport would need to be physically retained for ten days, a point that was not mentioned initially. Later I learned that this was or had become standard procedure, but the information I had digested online in the States didn’t mention this. At this point, feeling frustrated, and being subjected to continuing physiological disruptions, I made a request to speak to some other staff to explain the special circumstances around my desire to visit Moscow and to visit with an ex-pat from New Zealand who was seeking asylum there. I suspected that some American IC personnel had already visited the embassy here in order to sabotage my trip, and I wanted to make sure there were no future hindrances. Two members of the staff listened to my account in a separate room and took notes. I described the harassment that I had endured since 2009, starting in Munich, and how it matched the descriptions of Suzie Dawson’s harassment. I said I wanted to visit with Suzie Dawson in Moscow. I described my research into subvocal speech transcription, the escalation of harassment coinciding with the sharing of this research, and how there was a long history of this research in Russia as well, with numerous Russian scientists being inspired by the discoveries of Edmund Jacobson. Inner Speech and Thought by A.N. Sokolov, published in 1972, is a classic work in this field. The staff members said they would need some time for everything to be reviewed. In the meantime I had to go through the normal visa process. As I had not been prepared to relinquish my passport to be physically held for ten days, I made plans to return to the States in a few days time.
2018r – I booked a flight to DC a few days out. I was feeling desperate and didn’t even know exactly what I would do again in DC, but I wanted the harassment to stop. It still seemed to be the case to me that I was essentially being victimized by a domestic covert operation, carried out by personnel who were not going through the proper system, and who did not possess authorization from the highest levels of any organizations they may have been a part of. I still found it inconceivable that the directors of the FBI, CIA, or NSA would approve of such tactics, or be briefed on the dirty details and then turn a blind eye. J. Edgar Hoover may have allowed this sort of thing to happen, but it seemed to me that a detailed account of these KGB or COINTELPRO-style methods being explained to the director of any three-letter agency, with the sole exception perhaps of Mike Flynn when he was head of DIA, would go a long ways towards bringing the harassment to an end and forcing personnel to behave within democratically approved constraints defined by the law, internal regulations, international human rights standards which carry the force of law by virtue of treaties, etc. Therefore I had to continue getting louder in the hope that some FBI agent, group of agents, or some other IC personnel would figure out what was actually going on in my case, and finally bring it to the attention of someone with the power, authority, and commitment to proper procedure who could help.
2018s – It occurred to me that now might be a really good time to visit some other embassies in Mexico and share copies of my subvocal research presentation. Before I had come to Mexico, I had printed out a copy of this 26-page presentation and plastered it over every square inch of my Camry, parked in the BART station parking lot in Colma, CA. I had booked the parking spot for about 30 days, expecting to stay in Moscow for three weeks. I had also driven around with it like this for a couple days and posted it in pdf format on my blog. However I had come to have doubts about the accessibility of my blog to the wider world, for a number of reasons. I thought it was possible that I might be shadowbanned or selectively censored in a way that was invisible to me. These concerns have prompted my overall strategy of flyer distribution too. Now in Mexico City, I proceeded to share this presentation, all of it from open sources, with more than a dozen other embassies, but none of them from any countries that could be thought to have any adversarial relationship with the U.S. If it’s posted online and accessible by all, then that shouldn’t even matter.
2018t – Security studies professor Armin Krishnan advocates in the preface to his book Military Neuroscience and the Coming Age of Neurowarfare for a position of “radical transparency” with respect to military developments in the area of neuroscience, a position that I share. His interest in this area and concerns about abuses were prompted by the same history of MK-ULTRA by John Marks that I recommend, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. Krishnan is not a diehard pacifist or suggesting that all government secrets be spilled. His position of radical transparency is confined to the area of neuroscience. I have laid out further arguments at length in another email to DC whistleblower attorney Mark Zaid. Mr. Zaid has represented some Havana Syndrome victims. Based on my survey of the area, the United States is unlikely to be caught off guard by any future technological developments in neuroscience that may take place secretly in other countries that could shift the balance of power to any appreciable extent or give another country’s military any kind of decisive edge. All nations are constrained by the laws of chemistry and physics. Electromagnetic energy is fundamentally constrained by power, range, etc. And the CIA’s perennial quest for something like mind control, ideally the ability to completely puppetize a selected target, will likewise be constrained by the vast complexity of the brain itself, with an act as simple as walking requiring the exquisite coordination of multiple disparate areas spread throughout the cranium. An open discussion of the technical limits in this area, of where the scientific ceiling is for R&D efforts in all nations, will serve to alleviate some of the institutional paranoia that adversarial military and intelligence organizations tend to reflect back towards each other. There is some scientific hype in the field of neuroscience, like many fields in science, and researchers seeking grant money may be tempted to hype the potential of their own work in a way they know the DOD will respond to. This happens in other countries too, and so we should be cautious not to freak out about overhyped grant proposals or military R&D efforts taking place in countries like China or Russia in the field of neuroscience. They have great scientists, no doubt, and they could make a breakthrough or two that temporarily gets ahead of us by some margin, but we are all beholden to the laws of nature, and so we should be mindful of those limits as we take note of what other countries’ stated goals might be and not lose our better judgment over hype, theirs or our own.
2018u – I flew to DC in October and rented a car. The day after my arrival, I learned of a symposium at NYU law school focusing on national security issues and whistleblowing, featuring Thomas Drake and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou as part of a roundtable discussion to be taking place that very evening in New York. I drove to NYC. After the event I caught Thomas Drake in the hall. He seemed somehow spooked when he saw me and said he was skipping the reception, but that he would consider chatting again. At the wine reception I approached John Kiriakou and introduced myself. I solicited his advice pertaining to my unusual situation and described the harassment. I developed the suspicion during the chat that he had already been contacted by team members, but he still seemed genuinely friendly and curious about my story. He was familiar with the TI community and these types of stories. I took pains to emphasize that I was not hearing voices and that I thought the bulk of TIs (targeted individuals) were mentally ill, with the exception of Suzie Dawson and maybe a few others. He knew Suzie Dawson and had spoken to her personally, believing her account to be valid. He gave me his email and said he would put me in touch with some persons.
2018v – A day or two later John Kiriakou responded with an introduction by email to social psychologist and military ethicist Jean Maria Arrigo, former contract psychiatrist for the military Kernan Manion, and a self-identified targeted individual on the east coast whose name I will keep private here. Kernan Manion had experienced the same kind of harassment as myself and Suzie Dawson, commencing at the time he was making complaints about poor conditions and lack of resources at the mental health clinic at Camp Lejeune. He also relayed information about an abusive commander at the base who it was later reported in the media had told a traumatized soldier subjected to racist abuse by fellow Marines to go right ahead and kill himself (truthout.org – article: The Psychological Implosion of Our Soldiers, Dec 7, 2009) The sergeant referred to in the article is Garritt Duncan. The contractor which hired Manion rebuffed his complaints and told him not to rock the boat. Manion rocked the boat by going to the Inspector General, and then to the press. After going to the press the harassment started, with break-ins, noise harassment, coordinated stalking by military personnel, disturbing physiological disruptions, including bodily symptoms, etc. While Manion was subjected to noise harassment, use of power tools late at night in neighboring apartments, etc., something I have experienced too. The Stasi would also use noise harassment against its targets. He has never heard voices. The contractor fired him after he got loud about the poor conditions at the clinic and abuses by base commanders. He moved five times trying to get away from the harassment, and over this time he gradually shifted his energies from trying to shine a light on deficiencies at Camp Lejeune and abuses by military leaders there to dealing with the constant harassment. It seems likely to me that military personnel taking part in his harassment may have been fed some kind of fabricated narrative to motivate them, as I have suspected in my own case. In the course of trying to get help, he would of course have to reference his experiences at Camp Lejeune. His descriptions of the harassment made the police suspect that he had had a psychotic break and they reported him to the medical board. After going back and forth with the medical board, which was convinced that the harassment could not be real and that Manion was suffering from delusions, he was stripped of his medical license after failing to show up for a meeting at which he knew he would not be believed. The harassment only abated years later as he grew increasingly exhausted from trying to reach out for help. Over that time however he was introduced to John Kiriakou by Jean Maria Arrigo, who took his account seriously. What military personnel in Manion’s case were trying to prevent by silencing and discrediting him was surely something like the scandalous story in the media about Ft. Hood in Texas, which led to the firing or suspension of fourteen U.S. Army leaders following the revelation of longstanding patterns of violence, sexual assault, and abuses by commanders, including a suggestion by one commander to a traumatized solider that he kill himself.
2018w – Noteworthy is a suggestion made by Kernan Manion’s friend, former FBI forensic chemist turned whistleblower Fred Whitehurst, that Manion’s physiological disruptions may have had as their origin some electromagnetically-based technology like whatever had produced the Havana Syndrome. Whitehurst also took Manion’s account of harassment seriously. I would hope that cases such as Manion’s and Dawson’s at least throw a pinch more credibility on my own account. Neither Dawson nor Manion have either heard voices, like myself, and my own research into technologies which are likely to be highly classified impinges on territory that is considerably more sensitive than interests that Dawson or Manion might be said to have compromised. My attorney Daniel Barton also spoke to Kernan Manion over the phone at one point and described him as quite articulate. Manion reported that the harassment had abated to a good extent for him after he stopped trying to bring attention to everything that had happened to him, but that it had become suddenly more intense again at the time I started communicating with him. I suspect that personnel who organize these campaigns do not want the bona fide targets to compare notes.
2018x – I began to have regular phone contact with Jean Maria Arrigo, who lived in southern California. We have also had numerous in-person meetings over the years (a dozen or so since late 2018). Arrigo caused a stir as part of a task force established to evaluate the propriety of APA involvement in interrogation operations during the War on Terror (APA = American Psychological Association). According to Arrigo, the task force had been stuffed with military and IC insiders and was designed to green light the APA’s participation in abusive interrogation practices. She was fully vindicated years later, won awards from various organizations for blowing the whistle, and was shown to have been the subject of a smear campaign when she challenged APA leadership at the time. She has not been subjected to the kind of harassment campaign that Manion and myself have, but she believes in the veracity of my own and Manion’s accounts. She understands from her own historical work and interviews with former IC personnel that military and intelligence folk do not always toe the lines laid out for them and will sometimes go to great lengths to discredit a person who poses some risk to their interests or reputation. She also interviewed a scientist who worked for the Navy, Eldon Byrd, who had been responsible for the development of electromagnetic anti-personnel weapons. Byrd described how results from a project can sometimes lead to the project being removed from the purview of the original scientific team. He also described an electromagnetic weapon developed in his lab that was supposed to instantly cause flu-like symptoms by the release of histamine. This sort of thing dovetails with capabilities that the military and CIA have desired for decades. As recently as 2004, a US Air Force directorate entitled “Controlled Effects” stated the following: “For the Controlled Personnel Effects capability, the S&T panel explored the potential for targeting individuals with non-lethal force, from a militarily useful range, to make selected adversaries think or act according to our needs. Through the application of non-lethal force, it is possible to physically influence or incapacitate personnel. Advanced technologies could enable the war fighter to remotely create physical sensations such as pressure or temperature changes. A current example of this is [description of the Active Denial System, the infrared directed energy heating ray that has been proposed for domestic crowd control purposes or use in military conflict].” … “By studying and modeling the human brain and nervous system, the ability to mentally influence or confuse personnel is also possible.”
“ British journalist David Hambling goes over this
Air Force hack the nervous system make the adversary think and act according to our needs.
2018y – After driving back to DC, I had a couple more days. I purchased a megaphone and some posterboard, made a sign with some technical descriptions of silent speech technology, and drove to DARPA HQ in Arlington, VA. I stood on a sidewalk across the street from the main building with my sign and made various announcements that may have only been intelligible to scientists who worked in the area. I did not do this with any kind of angry, accusatory tone. I explained my own scientific background, that I didn’t blame any scientists there for working on this problem, and that I was sure DARPA was a neat place to work. A small group of maybe 7-8 persons gathered inside the front door on the ground floor to watch and listen.
2018z – One day on a whim I decided to pay a visit to Special Collection Service, the highly secretive joint CIA/NSA agency tasked with installing eavesdropping equipment in hard-to-reach places, like foreign embassies. I was shocked to find the exact location revealed by Google Maps in Beltsville, MD, between DC and Baltimore. I drove there expecting to be turned back at a heavily armed guard station or something. The compound is tucked away in some deeply forested area. On the sole road leading there along a curve, I noticed some cameras, and so I drove slowly holding the big sign I had made for DARPA out the window. I never even saw the actual building, and close to a guard station I was met by four persons casually dressed who came out to talk to me, three men and one woman. Nobody had any weapons as far as I could tell, and nobody had a uniform, but there was an armed guard or two in a station close by. I got out of my car and everyone seemed calm and curious, although one male employee seemed rather irritated. They definitely did not seem like they were part of any security detail. They first asked if I knew where I was. I responded to all questions politely. A fifth casually dressed man came out to join the conversation. I don’t actually remember the exchange, it was maybe 10 or 15 minutes at most. I probably explained that the sign was the product of my research. It seemed that they wanted this non-threatening weirdo to feel totally comfortable to explain himself. I was kind of surprised overall, in that I might have been surrounded by armed, uniformed, angry personnel. There was no car search.
2018aa – To any IC personnel who may read this: I’m sorry to everyone caught in the middle here. I didn’t just set out to be a pain in the ass for its own sake. Before the fall of 2012, I was never interested in anything that might have been said to overlap with any classified programs. I knew hardly anything about the law. The only piece of legal advice I knew was don’t consent to a search of your car. I knew nothing about IC history for the most part, except maybe a little about COINTELPRO, and a little about MK-ULTRA. I was never fascinated by the intelligence world to any extent at all. I had no idea what the CIA did really, and hardly more the NSA. I may have seen one James Bond movie as a kid, which I don’t remember, and I only ever read one spy novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, when I was living in my car. After a decent amount of reading on the law, IC history and culture in the U.S. and the Soviet empire, I think it is fair to characterize much of what I have experienced as a domestic covert operation, involving numerous Eastern bloc harassment and discrediting tactics. There may be an aboveboard face required to interact with my friends and family, coworkers, attorneys, doctors, dentists, neighbors, grocery store clerks, etc., but a huge percentage of the effort that has gone into targeting me, all the break-ins, the digital harassment, physiological disruptions, etc., will never be admitted to by the responsible personnel, who I would guess are from a different organization than FBI or DEA. In other words, there are probably two groups at work, an aboveboard face comprised of FBI and/or DEA, and a kind of dirty tricks squad that probably has some personnel with DOD connections, possibly a contractor with DOD connections. The FBI has been known to use contractors in the course of aboveboard investigations, but usually for technical expertise on something a bit removed from their usual knowledge base. The official face doesn’t really want to know what the other group is up to, but there is probably some loose coordination with operational security designed to leave no records. The teams benefit each other and likely both have dirt on one another. It’s just a theory, based on my reading about IC dynamics and my experience of having this situation be drawn out over a period of _fourteen years_. So under these circumstances, it still seems like the best strategy for me to try to make as much noise as possible, trigger the highest level briefings that I can, and hope that those briefings will be truthful. I sincerely hope that one or more managers will be proactive in creating an environment for personnel to come forward with information that nobody wants to hear. It’s now October 2023 and I still don’t think that’s happened yet. I am not just “looking for attention”. It is not fair or accurate to describe any of the actions I have taken as “stunts”. This is not a problem that can or ought to be addressed through medical treatment, any more than the victims of Stasi or KGB harassment should have been treated as medical cases. The Soviets pathologized dissent and a system of “Soviet psychiatry” grew up to medicalize resistance to the state. But that form of oppression is still distinct from the plausibly deniable, systematic gaslighting that Eastern bloc services engaged in that victims could not even talk about without being accused by well-meaning medical professionals of persecutory delusion. The latter accords more with my own experience. Besides this form of plausibly deniable harassment that I have been subjected to for fourteen years, I very strongly suspect that federal law enforcement agents began to cross more conventional legal boundaries as far back as late 2009, and that numerous personnel and managers have been intentionally misled about this. If I am discredited in certain ways, it may make it more difficult for me to challenge these more conventional transgressions. I may not have gone about bringing attention to my situation in the most effective way, but there is no manual for dealing with these methods and the attorneys I have spoken with seem generally powerless to help. It still seems the case to me that a truthful briefing at the highest possible level is my best shot at getting personnel to behave like they are supposed to. I’m tired of being dealt with through indirect harassment and my friends and family are surely tired of being contacted every time I reach out to them. This has gone on for _fourteen years_. What country am I living in?
2018bb – Back in the states, harassment continued. I got together with Jean Maria Arrigo for the first time in person in Berkeley, the beginning of a friendship and many very interesting conversations on military and intelligence matters. Arrigo made some further introductions for me in early 2019, discussed below.
2018cc – I talked to Suzie Dawson in Moscow. Her asylum application was being held up because she said the woman responsible for making the decision did not like Wikileaks because something had been revealed on the site to compromise Russian interests. I mentioned my original reason for being targeted was my interest in psychedelic drugs, and she took pains to emphasize that she did not do drugs and was not interested in drugs at all, a wise commitment for an expat living in Russia. She has produced a voluminous amount of video content, with one early video describing for the world her own harrowing story of being targeted, and much of the rest covering surveillance state issues in general, with the use of private contractors in domestic surveillance a particular focus. The use of private contractors in domestic spying was later revealed in New Zealand by the mainstream press, after she was already in Moscow — a significant vindication for her. I have wondered about the use of private contractors in my own case from time to time. I asked if there were any written transcripts of her videos that would be quicker to scan through, and she said there were not. She seemed somewhat more prone than myself to give self-described targeted individuals the benefit of the doubt as to their sanity, while allowing that many cases of mental illness did exist. I asked if she had ever tried contacting the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), and she expressed a suspicion that they were too cozy with Big Tech and that their integrity had been compromised. I have a few bones to pick with some aspects of her approach to bringing attention to her cause, and I would personally be more inclined towards trusting organizations like the ACLU and EFF, if they could be convinced of the reality of targeting in the bona fide cases, but I am deeply sympathetic to her position overall as a victim of KGB-style state harassment in the West, and sensitive to the irony of her finding sanctuary from these methods in Moscow.
2018dd – Near the end of 2018, after returning from Mexico City and DC, I experienced another escalation of the harassment campaign. It seemed now that the team was inducing strange bodily sensations, as if particular nerves or muscles were being tweaked or stimulated. This was in addition to central nervous system disruptions, which continued apace. There were only a handful of instances at the end of 2018, but these gradually increased in frequency as 2019 unfolded. They often seemed timed in an effort by the harassment team to dissuade me from reaching out to certain persons for help or putting more flyers out or evolving my own strategy in some way to confront the ongoing harassment. They did not correlate with the vicissitudes of stress. The sensations varied quite a bit, both in qualitative aspects, intensity, and region of the body. Later in 2019 I described to my general practitioner at Kaiser Permanente, Dr. Christopher Rodriguez, what I was experiencing. I had been open about the harassment campaign as well. He said my “symptoms” were not consistent with multiple sclerosis and seemed peculiar. Persons who develop the tactile symptoms of MS will usually have a persistent tingling of some kind in one or more extremities. I didn’t really have tingling or numbness. Later in 2020 when I complained again he referred me to a neuropsychologist, Dr. Courtney Murphy. I couldn’t get a video appointment with Dr. Murphy until Dec 2020 or Jan 2021. I told her everything that was going on with the harassment as well. She also ruled out MS after an interview and seemed to discount the possibility of a neurological etiology. She referred me to a psychologist/therapist, Dr. Alan Caesar, and not a psychiatrist. I told all doctors, Dr. Caesar, Dr. Murphy, and Dr. Rodriguez that I had considered that some kind of novel technology using electromagnetic energy had been deployed against me. I referenced the Havana Syndrome in doing this, although I was careful to emphasize that my symptoms did not match what had been reported for the Havana Syndrome. I told all of them about my history in the psychedelic scene, having my car searched at the NSA, meeting Thomas Drake, John Kiriakou, Jean Maria Arrigo, and communicating with Kernan Manion. Manion had also experienced strange bodily sensations coinciding with break-ins, etc. Suzie Dawson did as well once or twice, and she had suspected that some technology had been used against her, but this was not as prominent a feature of her harassment as it was for Manion and I, and then she escaped everything by going to Moscow. I also believe that federal personnel reached out to all three of my doctors here and communicated something to them about me, without them being allowed to share with me. I have never found out what this was or why it was deemed necessary to contact them, the dentists I have seen since late 2009, and dental support staff as well. Did the information relayed impact my relationship with any of them? To me it felt intrusive and made me question whether it was even possible to diagnose me correctly, although I suspected that the “symptoms” I experienced did not have a medical origin per se. I suspect that Dr. Murphy was given prompts to ask me certain questions in the course of my description of my history, and perhaps Dr. Caesar as well.
2019 – escalated harassment, met non-lethal weapons researcher, trip to ER in May, a crazy idea, and a trip to Houston over Christmas
2019a – Shortly after the New Year I took a road trip to Los Angeles. At a rest stop on the way down was the last time I smoked cannabis or used any product containing THC. Since then I have only used CBD-only products, starting in February 2021 after a whiplash injury sustained in San Francisco. I have not taken any psychedelic or anything besides prescribed medication or OTC medication in over a decade (apart from the THC which I have abstained from since this road trip). I have ongoing concerns that this assertion will be challenged by personnel who would like for others to quickly write off my claims about technologies being used to screw with body and nervous system. Only the smallest possible circle of personnel will know what is actually going on in my case, and any technologies that could actually disrupt the nervous system would only be made available through Special Access Programs, excluding the average FBI agent or anyone who not been granted the special clearance required. It would seem easier for others to accept or believe that the “symptoms” I am describing have arisen as some kind of side-effect of drug use. But the specific details would not support this conclusion, and I was hardly making any such claims before January of 2017, when the first such instance occurred and I thought I had been drugged. There were a couple isolated cases when the overt harassment began at the end of 2009 where I thought I’d been drugged, but I later thought back and wrote these instances off as the product of stress. Now I’m not sure about these cases either, but from 2010 through January of 2017, while I dealt with mountains of stress, suicide attempts, losing my job and becoming homeless, I felt relatively secure at least within the boundaries of my own skin, and that whatever the harassment team would do to me, that they would not physically harm me or drug me. That all changed in January of 2017, when it seemed that some new personnel got involved. To not be able to recognize the side effects of a drug as such and confuse myself in this manner day after day, for years on end, would be bizarre and highly unusual for any drug user. Also the “side effects” would appear to be highly variable. The other obvious suggestion would be to suggest that there is some medical condition that has gone unrecognized as such, but the doctors I have spoken with are at a loss to diagnose me, and Dr. Murphy the neurospsychologist appreciated that whatever was going on with me, that I was dealing with a lot of stress. Hence she recommended therapy. However neither medication nor therapy are going to address the root cause of my distress, which is that I have been harassed non-stop by intelligence personnel since late 2009, personnel who continue to interact with everyone I have ever known and loved and require them to lie to my face about it.
2019b – I have never heard voices. Not once. Neither had fellow harassment victims Suzie Dawson or Kernan Manion. However, I did read a fascinating book on the topic at the beginning of 2019 as part of my research into subvocal speech: The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves by psychology professor Charles Fernyhough. It gave me an idea for how the transcription of passive subvocal speech might be developed in the commercial or academic sectors, where, apart from one uncontroversial purpose, it would normally be avoided. In the past decade there has been significant progress in transcribing speech signals from the brain itself with electrodes placed directly on the brain at medical research institutions like UCSF, with the goal of allowing locked-in patients to communicate. Nobody would argue against this purpose. But this requires surgery to place electrodes under the skull. The speech muscles may provide an alternate means of transcribing inner speech. As Fernyhough reports in his book, it has been known for decades that voice-hearing in schizophrenics correlates with strong subvocalization. It is sometimes possible to observe a patient’s lips moving during a voice-hearing episode, and in one famous case from 1981, the clinicians used a microphone to amplify the patient’s barely audible whispers to orchestrate a dialogue between the patient and his voice. Fernyhough goes over the different varieties of inner speech that have been characterized in his book and in journal articles, but the subject is notoriously slippery to study. There is evidence for an expanded variety and a contracted variety, and subdivisions within those. The kind that seems to occur during voice hearing is of a more intense, expanded variety that would probably lend itself well to the kind of transcription that MIT student Arnuv Kapur at MIT MediaLabs has demonstrated with his AlterEgo device (watch demo on youtube). Kapur’s demo includes a fairly limited vocabulary, and to transcribe a voice-hearer’s voices in their own language would require extensive back-end development by training a recognition engine with thousands of samples of subvocal speech. But in principle, it should be possible to transcribe the voices heard by voice-hearers, such that a voice-hearer could actually see a read-out of the voice unfolding in real time on their smartphone. If whispers are loud enough to become intelligible with a microphone, then the muscle activity is most certainly strong enough to be funneled through a trained recognition engine and transcribed. Less intense voices stemming from weaker muscle activity would result in a higher word error rate (WER), as with conventional speech transcription under less than ideal conditions. So this could serve as a therapeutic aid in a number of ways, if only to convince a voice-hearer that their voices were internally generated and not externally induced through beams aimed at their heads, as many targeted individuals believe. Fernyhough has been involved with a project called Hearing the Voice that helps a community of voice-hearers find ways to live with and process their voices apart from medication, and for some participants the results have been vastly preferable to being on medication, with significant reduction in voice-hearing episodes and substantially higher quality of life than medication afforded. Participants are encouraged to engage in a dialog with their voices (youtube: TED talk by Eleanor Longden). It’s hard to say exactly how a visible confirmation of a person’s internal voices might impact a person, something that would surely vary from patient to patient, but in the spirt of dialog that Fernyhough’s project encourages, it might be helpful for some patients to work with a material handhold for something heretofore invisible. They could share the dialog or not, and delete the transcript instantly if desired. The inevitable transcription errors would hopefully provide comedic fodder to shake up the abusive hold that some voices have on patients. And even a display of the raw EMG signal from the speech muscles, before any transcription occurs, could be a useful visible representation of the intensity of one’s voices in real time, helping them appreciate their internal origin, and providing a biofeedback signal to potentially aid relaxation of those muscles. The most prohibitive aspect of developing this technology would be the collection of thousands of samples of subvocal speech. The process could be facilitated on an individual basis by collecting vocalized samples from a patient willing to speak aloud or quietly mouth the usual phrases that their voices say and feeding the data into the system, bringing down the WER for what would then be “speaker-dependent recognition”. A handful of such phrases may suffice to establish proof-of-concept without needing to train for the usual large dictionary in speech recognition. I proposed calling this project “Seeing the Voice” in an email sent from Los Angeles in February of 2019 to Fernyhough, Arnav Kapur, Kapur’s adviser professor Pattie Maes at MIT, psychology professor Russell Hurlburt at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (author of Sampling Normal and Schizophrenic Inner Experience), and others.
2019c – I only know for sure that the email was received by Professor Hurlburt at UNLV, because I visited him in person there later that month. But I can’t know if the email he received was modified in any way, something I have been constantly paranoid about since late 2009, when friends and family members who were contacted by the authorities began responding in peculiar ways to my emails — responding obliquely to some of my queries or not at all, and making me wonder if they were actually seeing the exact words I had written to them. This has occurred repeatedly and was never a concern before late 2009 when the harassment began. These concerns persist to the present day with all of my digital communications. In the case of the project I am proposing, some groups within the U.S. intelligence community would surely like to delay any development in this direction indefinitely, because a demonstration of the transcription of passive inner speech from the speech muscles, even for an uncontroversial and medical purpose, would instantly raise questions about the application to intelligence work and interrogation that would draw the attention of militaries and intelligence groups around the world. If it’s possible to transcribe passive inner speech, then the U.S. intelligence community would prefer to make the breakthrough themselves and keep it quiet for as long as possible. The ethics of mind-reading are already being grappled with by scholars of bioethics and law, e.g., Professor Marc Jonathan Blitz of the Oklahoma City University School of Law, Professor Laura Cabrera of Penn State, Dr. Hannah Maslen of Oxford, etc. Suffice it to say that mind-reading is no longer the province of the tin foil hat, but a topic of serious and sober discussion. The discussion at the present time would be more forward-looking and theoretical, but an actual demonstration that passive inner verbiage could be transcribed through some technology that didn’t require brain surgery would supercharge the discussion and probably draw immediate global mainstream media attention. And the commercial and academic sectors will never pursue the transcription of passive inner speech unless there is a compelling medical reason, because the consequences of a breakthrough would be deeply spooky to most people. Facebook was always emphatic that the device they hoped to create to allow a person to type with their thoughts would only be willfully directed, but based on my own survey of the literature, that boundary may be tricky to enforce depending on a number of variables. In their case, you could always just take the device off, but leaving it on and letting your mind wander may still result in bits of idle chatter being transcribed. Fernyhough’s discussion of the varieties of inner speech leaves the impression that only some forms would ever be amenable to transcription, but it remains an open question. Edmund Jacobson showed in the 1920s and 30s significant electrical activity in the speech muscles during the imagination or recollection of a conversation, but that doesn’t necessarily mean these signals contain enough detail to be transcribed. So anyone who is tasked with protecting government programs in this area, at any stage of development, is not going to be pleased with my proposal, because its fruition would immediately focus attention on a discussion that has only begun on the fringes of public discourse in academia. But I believe for a number of reasons, amongst them the widespread ascendancy of authoritarian impulses coinciding with unprecedented surveillance powers, that fundamental concerns of privacy, cognitive liberty, and freedom could best be served through a commitment to transparency in the development of neurotechnologies. It is transparency that will protect us most in this area moving forward, not government secrecy, and so I would like to give the commercial and academic sectors a reason to pursue this goal, apart from the usual satisfaction a scientist gets from coming up with novel proposals that help to drive progress in science or medicine. For all of these reasons then, I made the spontaneous decision to drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas — a not uncommon decision, but for reasons considerably more sane in my case.
2019d – I found Russel Hurlburt’s office at UNLV and caught him at a busy time. He said he had received the email but expressed skepticism that subvocal speech could be transcribed. He wasn’t familiar with developments in the field of silent speech tech, as I recall. I asked if he had time to watch Arnav Kapur’s demo of the AlterEgo device on youtube. He said he had not. A video is worth a thousand words in this case, and anyone who harbors doubts about the feasibility of what I’m suggesting need only to watch this video. Kapur’s device transcribes a level of subvocal speech without any visible mouth movement, but it is still active subvocal speech and his tongue cannot be seen. Hurlburt’s fascinating work was discussed in Fernyhough’s book, and so I included him on the email, but his background as a psychologist would not permit a technical assessment of the proposal. I am still curious to know if my email was received by the other parties, and if the harassment team reached out to any of them at the same time I reached out to them. They usually do, even in exchanges I have with persons over utterly trivial matters, in what might be an attempt to instill a sense of helplessness and alienation in me. With Hurlburt, I think this might telegraph nervousness on the part of the intelligence community with respect to my idea, and so some kind of pretext would need to be manufactured. The difficulty for me in assessing responses, or lack thereof, is that the harassment team has contacted practically everyone I have connected with since late 2009, communicating something that often seems to make them uncomfortable with me. So they have some tried and true methods for discouraging communication with me. Do these activities implicate my First Amendment rights? They would certainly seem to violate the spirit of the First Amendment. I have been mired in uncertainty with respect to all of my digital communications for fourteen years, and this was never the case before. It is discouraging to have this go on for years.
2019e – While in Vegas I didn’t pull one slot. I felt restless and wasn’t eager to return home. I delivered a few meals with Postmates, slept under the car cover, and wondered what to do next. I had a brief email exchange with Cheryl Welsh, the director of Mind Justice, a non-profit that has assembled an impressive collection of articles and resources on government abuses of neurotechnologies. I had been introduced to Ms. Welsh by Jean Maria Arrigo and had gotten together in person the previous month in Davis, CA. Ms. Welsh had herself reported being a victim of government surveillance and abuse at one point, but at the time we met in Davis she said this activity had largely abated. She never heard voices. When I mentioned being on a road trip in Vegas, she brought up the possibility of connecting with a physicist and former researcher of electromagnetic weapons living in Arizona, Elizabeth Rauscher. I looked up Rauscher online and expressed interest to Cheryl, based on Rauscher’s work in the field of bioelectromagnetics. After chatting on the phone, Rauscher invited me to visit her home outside of Phoenix. I drove to Phoenix.
2019f – Elizabeth Rauscher, deceased in July of 2019 at age 82, possessed a PhD in nuclear physics from UC Berkeley. She held a number of roles conducting R&D for the military since the 1970s as a contractor, amongst other jobs and projects. She had a contract with the Navy to research non-lethal weapons. Her contract manager was Captain Paul E. Tyler, head of electromagnetic weapons development at the Navy in the 80s. She was also part of the military program which studied remote viewing, a form of clairvoyance, contracted out to the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA. The U.S. military’s peculiar interest in psychic phenomena during the Cold War is well documented. While Rauscher avowed an interest in this topic until her dying day, I expressed my skepticism in person. I did show interest in her research in bioelectromagnetics, however. Over the years Rauscher had been engaged in a program of self-experimentation with her husband, electrical engineer William van Bise (deceased), and together they subjected themselves to a variety of electromagnetic frequency combinations, looking for bioactivity. She claimed to have discovered several distinct frequency combinations, a couple of them subjectively pleasant, but the majority she described as unpleasant, with all other combinations completely neutral and biologically inactive. Her general description of the signal requirements for bioactivity bear a striking resemblance to some work I discovered two years later by Professor Boris Pasche of Wayne State University School of Medicine, who in the 1990s showed that with a low power amplitude-modulated 27 MHz radio signal delivered through a spoon-shaped antenna held in the mouth, relaxing and/or sleep-inducing effects can be achieved in human subjects. The effects depended on utilizing a specific combination of modulation frequencies, a claim mirrored by Rauscher. Dr. Pasche speculated that this arose from a stimulation of GABA release (a neurotransmitter), but this was never confirmed, as far as I know. These effects were confirmed in a multi-site blinded clinical trial with the goal of marketing a device for insomnia in the 90s, but commercial development was hampered by investors who were skeptical that an antenna held in the mouth for ten minutes before bed would go over well with consumers. At the time I visited with Rauscher, I had only begun to dive into this field, and I was not well prepared to ask technical questions. She encouraged me to keep in touch after our visit, but unfortunately my subsequent attempts to reach her by phone and email went unanswered, and she passed away in July. I started looking through the literature around this time for other research in bioelectromagnetics that was similar to hers. The only work that Rauscher seems to have published in this area are a few patents, one of them for a pain control device using a signal generator and an applicator coil held close to the body. There are similar to devices which are on the market in Europe, for which the literature shows evidence for endogenous opioid release, but clinical evidence for pain management is mixed. Rauscher told me in person and described in a prior interview that Capt. Tyler had threatened her to remain silent about certain discoveries, or her funding would be cut. While she did some work for the military, she conveyed to me that some of her military contacts did not entirely trust her to keep confidences and that she was under surveillance at one point in the past. It would not have been the only time, as I found that after leaving her home, my car had been broken into by harassment team members who are skilled at leaving plausibly deniable mementos of their entry, and are always coming up with new ways to remind me that I never have any privacy with anyone, ever.
2019g – One of the bioactive frequency combinations that Rauscher and van Bise discovered is supposed to simulate the effects of THC from cannabis with remarkable fidelity, and I spent a large amount of research effort over the next two years going through the literature to assess how plausible this was and what the biochemical and bioelectrical underpinnings of this effect might be. Her description of subjective effects accords with the elevation of natural endocannabinoid levels. My research efforts are summarized in a separate document that I shared with multiple science professors, receiving positive feedback from two, including the recently deceased Israeli professor Raphael Mechoulam, the “godfather of cannabis chemistry”. This is exactly the sort of thing that the military and CIA have been interested in for decades. Efforts were made during MK-ULTRA and Project Pandora at DARPA to look for ways that the nervous system could be manipulated with electromagnetic energy, and DOD branches have had their own programs as well. It’s not out of the question that one or more of Rauscher’s discoveries has been used to perturb my own nervous system, achieving a level of serendipity with this meeting that is frankly hard to square with the known laws of the physical universe. If I had known the right questions to ask when I was there, I would have gathered as much technical information as I could. She may have been visited ahead of time and dissuaded from sharing, I can’t know, but I was frustrated to not be able to speak with her again before she passed away. This did not appear so imminent during our meeting. I made contact with someone during an online virtual wake for her remembrance that claimed to be in possession of her lab notebooks, and then I lost contact with him. The fields of medical bioelectromagnetics and bioelectronics are undergoing a substantial blossoming at present, and I’m quite certain that information pertaining to bioactive frequency combinations like Boris Pasche or Rauscher discovered could have relevance for basic science and medicine. There are numerous ongoing efforts in the pharmaceutical industry to find ways to raise endocannabinoid levels, and so a means of achieving this without the usual liabilities of medication or exorbitant pharmaceutical R&D costs should prove useful. For example, a research group in China sponsored by the Chinese military published an article in 2017 describing an in vitro elevation of endocannabinoids in response to an electromagnetic signal, with the ultimate goal of treating traumatic brain injury in humans.
2019h – Back in the SF bay area, I continued living out of my Toyota Camry and delivering food. The harassment continued at full throttle, with escalations in disturbing bodily symptoms that became increasingly alarming. The bodily symptoms are quite distinct from the central nervous system effects and did not emerge until after I got back from Mexico City. Up to that point, there had only ever been drug-like effects. I continued to have frequent phone contact with Jean Maria Arrigo, and occasionally she would visit the SF bay area in person to see other persons she knew. I tried multiple times to contact Rauscher again by phone and email, but to no avail. In May I experienced a traumatic event that resulted in a trip to the emergency room in Redwood City. It felt like needles were being shoved into my urethra. It did not feel like a kidney stone, which I have gone to the ER for in the past. The kidney stone was substantially more pleasant than whatever this was, which mystified the medical personnel in the ER and the urologist I saw a day or two later, Dr. Eric Ohsun Kwon of Kaiser Permanente. A soft tissue x-ray did not reveal any abnormalities, although I had a moment of confusion in viewing the x-ray to wonder if there had been a mix-up. Dr. Kwon had been contacted by harassment team members in advance of my visit, like every medical staff member I have had cause to interact with since late 2009, with a few uncertain exceptions. In the weeks building up to this incident I had experienced a variety of unprecedented low-level sensations around the pelvis that were more disturbing than the anomalous sensations that I had already experienced around my neck area, in my ears, along my legs and into my feet and toes. But never my hands or arms or torso. The character of the sensations has varied between dull muscle tension and sharp, painful, stinging sensations. It is not at all like when a limb falls asleep after being compressed and the nerve awakens to create paresthesia. The location and intensity vary from day to day. I never experienced anything like this before in my life until after I got back from my trips to Mexico City and New York City, and then the frequency of these incidents gradually increased. My stress levels were not increasing at this time, except in response to these novel disturbing sensations. I had gotten used to living in my car, I had a second car as a backup, and I was making new connections with persons who it seemed might be in a position to help me. So there were some developments in my situation that were encouraging. But the harassment team was becoming increasingly aggressive with the usual harassment, gaslighting and break-ins, as well as the central nervous system disruptions that had been more or less continuous since late 2017. The pain which caused me to go to the ER in May of this year, 2019, was excruciating. Many times since then I have experienced flashes of pain of the same nature, but never sustained for as long as it was on this day, and oddly enough coinciding with actions on my part that harassment team members could be reasonably assumed to dislike, such as updating the flyers I continued to pass out or trying to make new contacts.
2019i – Jumping ahead momentarily, I saw a neurologist at Kaiser Permanente in Redwood City in October of 2021 to discuss these bodily sensations and central nervous system disruptions, Dr. Yana Leah Kriseman. She didn’t know exactly what to make of it because the sensations are spread out around my body, and therefore resist assignment to any particular spinal root or nerve. She ordered an MRI of my head, which I balked at getting because of the cost in part, but also because I believe that both the central nervous system effects and the bodily effects have been externally induced with technology as part of the ongoing campaign to gradually wear me down. In part, I believe this because of the timing. Sometimes when I have found something in the literature that is extremely interesting and relevant, or I have attempted to reach out to someone new for assistance, the body or CNS effects will escalate precipitously. They are thus not correlated with stress, but with events that or discoveries that I have a positive reaction to, and which the team wishes to discourage me from pursuing. When I have made new additions to the flyer that I keep putting out, the team has also sought to discourage me in this way. I would characterize it then as an attempt to “channel behavior” through a crude form of operational conditioning. The team wants “mind control”, but this is the best they can do or will ever be able to do through direct technological manipulation of the nervous system, based on my armchair survey of neuroscience as a whole. My research and network of contacts has brought me into areas that overlap with highly classified programs, but I don’t have access to any classified material. As my research and network of contacts has developed, the team has grown increasingly alarmed, but their hands are tied from confronting me directly. And if they were to confront me directly, they confirm the existence of capabilities in certain areas that they would prefer remain the butt of tin foil hat jokes. As attorney Mark Zaid has said about the Havana Syndrome cases, the government knows more than they are letting onto in this area. They most certainly do, and it is by no means the case that even the directors of various three-letter agencies, FBI, CIA, NSA, etc., would have been briefed on the full scope of the technological arsenal that the U.S. has accumulated in this area. In theory they have the authority to demand such a briefing, but as John Marks reports in his CIA history, even the incoming CIA director was kept out of the loop with respect to certain programs in the past. The director is often an outsider, usually an attorney and not an intelligence insider, and if the insiders have been sitting on something politically unsavory or explosive for some time, it can be left out of the initial briefings.
2019j – I am well aware of the extraordinary nature of these claims, and I am not happy about being put in a position to suggest this. However, none of what I am suggesting resides outside the realm of technological possibility. There were more than a thousand health-related claims recently by United States personnel as part of the investigation into the Havana Syndrome, although in my opinion only a small fraction of these, possibly 1% or less, are likely to be induced by some kind of technological attack. By no means did all of these persons present with exactly the same cluster of symptoms. Only a small number presented with exactly that set of symptoms for which the best possible explanation does seem to be, according to experts in this class of technology, some kind of microwave-based directed energy attack. Similarly, there are easily more than a thousand self-described “targeted individuals” around the world, possibly 10,000 or more, but only a tiny fraction of these are likely to have been targeted by intelligence services for KGB-style discrediting and harassment operations. While there may actually be one or two technologies capable of inducing an audible voice in someone’s head, these are limited by range, power, and the need to have personnel follow a target around and constantly aim a beam at their head. This strikes me as highly improbable from an operational standpoint alone, and so anyone hearing voices seems to me to be out of the running to establish their bona fides as an authentic targeted individual, who will be exceptionally rare by the numbers.
2019k – Reaching back to the precedents of COINTELPRO at the FBI and MK-ULTRA at the CIA affords the best historical vantage point in the U.S. from which to appreciate the type of operation I allege has been directed towards me. In the modern era, seeing how American embassy personnel are treated in foreign countries like Russia or Cuba affords another. Part of the reason for outlining the foregoing events in detail is to explain why my own case would rise to a level where some IC personnel believed it was imperative to discredit me in an extreme way and/or drive me to suicide using technological means. From the start of 2017 through most of 2018, I thought I was being drugged repeatedly. Seeing that I was fooled in this way surely boosted team members’ confidence that I could continue to be fooled. The best way I am able to describe the central nervous system effects is to say that it feels like being drugged with one of a half dozen or so different agents, all of them short-acting. The team constantly rotates out the different effects, and some days there are practically no CNS effects with only body effects, or vice versa. The short duration of the effects accords with a bioelectromagnetic hypothesis, because unnatural fluctuations in the body’s natural neurotransmitters can be dealt with more rapidly through enzymatic machinery tailored to process these molecules, as opposed to xenobiotic agents (foreign substances) for which the enzymes have not specifically evolved (in which case they are typically processed in the liver by various oxidases or tagged in some way to be excreted). The bodily effects feel like having multiple TENS devices inside of me where the settings keep changing, activating nerves or muscles alternately, with the pulse width being narrowed to cause the stinging sensations, and the frequency changed to target muscles or nerves. It is difficult to put into words how disturbing it has been to be subjected to this treatment day after day, for years on end. What could possibly justify such a gargantuan effort? You would think it would have to be something on the level of the Manhattan Project. Whether mind-reading rises to that level, I will surely never be cleared to know, but in at least two other cases — Suzie Dawson and Kernan Manion — it seems that government interests far less weighty were judged to warrant a comparable treatment.
2019l – It will be instructive now to review for a moment the types of activities that a frightening number of patriotic Americans engaged in and justified to themselves as part of the MK-ULTRA program. I am copying the list from above. This comes from John Marks’s history The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, 1979. While there are chemicals mentioned in this list, I want to emphasize again that I have moved away from a chemical hypothesis in my own case. The following methods were explored: (1) chemicals to cause sickness, itching, sneezing, diarrhea, stink bombs, and baldness; “harassment substances” – pp, 15, 17, 107, 211, 237; (2) “stress-producing chemicals” – p.217; (3) discrediting with chemicals – p.213; (4) “discrediting by aberrant behavior” – p.66; (5) keeping doctors from properly diagnosing a target – p.106; (6) chemical to stimulate heart attack or stroke – p.227; (7) remote-controlled aerosol sprays – p.83; (8) beaming RF energy at the head of a chimpanzee / Dr. Maitland Baldwin – p.216; (9) radar waves to knock out monkeys – p.218; (10) find the “natural radio frequency of a person’s sphincter” -> “make him run out of the room real fast” – p.226. The last method is of particular interest to me given my experience at the ER in Redwood City. Here is the full paragraph from the book: “They hired a group of behavioral and medical scientists who were allowed to carry on their own independent research as long as it met Institute standards. These scientists were available to consult with frequent visitors from Washington, and they were encouraged to take long lunches in the Institute’s dining room where they mixed with the physical scientists and brainstormed about virtually everything. One veteran recalls a colleague joking, ‘If you could find the natural radio frequency of a person’s sphincter, you could make him run out of the room real fast.’ Turning serious, the veteran states the technique was ‘plausible,’ and he notes that many of the crazy ideas bandied about at lunch developed into concrete projects.” The scientist seems to be suggesting here that the sphincter muscle could be induced to contract through an electroacoustic transduction of energy, presumably based on the specific resonance characteristics of that muscle, which would obviously vary within some limits from person to person. “Run out of the room real fast” probably means creating the urgency of a bowel movement, if they are referring to the anal sphincter and not the urethral sphincter. I found one patent from 2007 which uses “resonant acoustic and/or resonant acousto-EM energy to detect and/or effect [biological] structures” (US 7165451B1), which sounds a lot like what is being suggested here. It mentions bone and muscle as potential targets. I don’t know if specific nerves could be targeted in this manner (?) I would guess not, but the pudendal nerve and its branches provide much sensation to the pelvic region.
2019m – I have considered a variety of means to deliver electromagnetic energy to my body. Some kind of coil perhaps, hidden in my car seat. Living in my car and driving around all day in the same position would make me an easy target if something could be reliably hidden and powered. I have ripped apart and dug into a couple car seats, to no avail. Some kind of transmitter hidden elsewhere in the car perhaps, but power drops off rapidly with distance. I have even seriously considered the possibility of a soft-tissue implantable neurostimulator, which would have had to be injected while I was kept asleep on some occasion. How would I be kept asleep? I don’t know, maybe some kind of CIA-grade valium, slipped into a beverage during one of the innumerable car break-ins. The stimulator would be in the soft tissue, not my brain. One advantage to the team with this approach would be that no equipment has to be lugged around or hidden to zap me. Ideally the control frequency is one that a smartphone uses. All my phones have been hacked since late 2009. So I cannot escape it, except to live inside a Faraday cage. Another advantage would be that I sound absolutely 100% batshit crazy for even suggesting the possibility, and there is practically nobody who would ever believe that intelligence personnel would do such a thing to anyone, at least in the United States, except for persons who are themselves already batshit crazy, or IC personnel with a fondness for secret gadgets, dirty tricks, and a nostalgic yearning for the glory days of MK-ULTRA. One disadvantage is that it would have to be powered from the outside. Long-term batteries are often the bulkiest components of medical implants. The bulk precludes injection, based on my literature survey, and thus requires surgery. But the BION class of injectable microstimulators developed at the Mayo Clinic are a cylindrical class of devices somewhat bigger than a pet microchip, but offering the same ease of installment via injection. Each version is powered from the outside with a coil-based charger. The newer versions contain a small rechargeable battery, allowing freedom of movement without the necessity for the coil to be held up to the body during actual stimulation. There are a variety of programmable stimulation parameters that can be modified with a remote, controlling the device via frequencies that pass through the skin. Generally, neurostimulators are used for a variety of purposes: pain control, neuroprosthetics to restore limb function, neuromodulation for GI and urinary system control, etc. In one clinical test with the BION implant, a patient had 5 such devices injected into one hand for neuroprosthetics. Each device is individually addressable. In my case, recharging would necessitate some kind of system to be in the same room as me on a regular basis. The BION devices requires a coil held up to the body for some time period to charge in the near field. But the Powercast wireless charging system can charge small devices up to 120 feet away by converting RF to DC, using a range of frequencies that includes some with good tissue penetration. The company website shows charging of electronic gear like headphones, etc., but application to biomedical implants follows naturally. Their smallest receiver chip is less than a cubic millimeter. Harvesting energy from the body itself, from glucose, heat gradients, chemical gradients, etc. is on the bleeding edge of this field and still not up to the task of powering something with as much current output as a neurostimulator, based on my reading. Another disadvantage to using a device like this is that it might one day be found inside of me through x-ray or other imaging method. You might think that a visit to any imaging facility would be able to instantly settle the question. As it turns out, foreign body detection is not so straightforward, especially if you don’t know exactly where to look and what the thing is made of. For example, there are numerous papers on locating Implanon birth control rods that have migrated from the original injection site in a woman’s arm. It happened enough times to generate thousands of frustrating cases for physicians, and the next generation Nexplanon rods have a smidgen of the heavy element barium to aid detection by x-ray. The Implanon rod, with comparable density to soft tissue, was hardly visible on x-ray. The papers on lost rods explain how to use ultrasound and MRI to locate them, but it can still be challenging for experienced imaging techs. Occasionally the lost rods are never found (!) It may be possible to use component materials with as close a density to soft tissue or bone as possible to reduce risk of detection, which is what the IC would prefer in this case, but all-organic injectable neurostimulators using carbon electrodes and low density materials are unheard of in the literature, to the best of my knowledge.
2019n – So that is one possibility, an injectable neurostimulator, extremely convenient for IC personnel, but absolutely bonkers to consider, and an ongoing liability if deployed. If the team were using some kind of directed energy device, as Havana Syndrome victims believed, they would have to lug it around and point it at me. For external devices, it would be easier to use something that was active in the near or midfield, like a coil. They could bury it in a car seat. When I was living in my car, there would have been no escaping it. But I never found anything like this, and I have also experienced effects on numerous occasions outside my car. Thus I have been forced to take seriously the admittedly outrageous proposition that I have been non-consensually injected with a neurostimulator. It would be in the soft tissue, not my brain, and 99.99% of the persons online who would make such a a claim are simply suffering from mental illness. They also typically hear voices, and do not have any good reason to be targeted to begin with. Although not all schizophrenics hear voices, my own survey of the literature on tactile hallucinations reveals that they rarely if ever occur in complete isolation from other kinds of hallucinations, and the descriptions I’ve read do not match what I’m experiencing. So as far-fetched as this scenario may seem from the standpoint of ethics, it is not scientifically infeasible in the slightest, and it does fit squarely within a tradition in the intelligence community, in this country and others, of both attempting to control behavior through covert technological means, and to discredit someone through covert technological means. It should be possible to induce central nervous system effects as well, as with the spoon-shaped antenna developed by Boris Pasche. The “spoon” in this case is the implant, and you select one of a pre-programmed set of frequency combinations remotely. This is exactly the type of thing that MK-ULTRA sought to develop. The biggest risk from their standpoint is that I would locate this thing and prove my claims. At which point they will simply deny having put it there. Is it actually just a repurposed medical device? Or does it fail to match anything commercially available, leaving every doctor baffled? Maybe the Russians did it. I was at their embassy in Mexico City after all, sharing information, and they have expert break-in teams that could have found me in the hotel. But you would think the Russians would be happy for me to ferret information out of the U.S. intelligence community and advertise it, and the effects are timed to discourage me from doing so.
2019o – Assuming this hypothesis to be correct, it would be hard to overestimate the level of blowback and public hysteria were it revealed that intelligence personnel had gone and done something like to a citizen. If there were an imminent risk of discovery of a device inside of me through imaging, then the team would be extremely motivated to thwart this discovery by any means necessary, through image modification by hackers, for example. It’s like dystopian sci-fi made real, and I can hardly believe it myself, but based on the totality of my experience over many years, the timing of these escalations in response to my First Amendment activities, networking, and the research I’ve done, this really does seem like the most likely hypothesis, as crazy and appalling as it sounds. It fits the data the best. This is not stress- or drug-related. The specific ways in which the “symptoms” present do not cohere neatly with any medical diagnosis. And subjectively, the timing of effects is more than suspicious. It’s a giveaway that certain tech is being used, but a giveaway to me alone, and that sounds crazy to everyone else. Why would personnel go to such lengths? In my case, these effects manifested only after I had become extremely loud about my research on passive subvocal speech transcription. They want to discourage me, discredit me, and drive me to suicide. If I were a Russian citizen arrived in the U.S., having conducted the same research over there, and I described to persons here that I had received this kind of treatment in Russia, it would be easier to believe, both for IC and medical professionals. We would all like to believe that American personnel, the “good guys” of the world, don’t do this sort of thing, and if they did, it’s all in the past. But when I have described my situation and suspicions about technology to experienced intelligence professionals and scholars, they have taken my claims seriously, been willing to speak to me at length, and make introductions for me. We would all like to believe that IC personnel would conduct themselves in a manner that could be easily defended in courts of law and public opinion. But the entire histories of the FBI and CIA show countless examples of failing to live up to this standard, and in the case of MK-ULTRA, reveal an abiding long-term interest in precisely the capabilities I am describing. In any case, I have devoted considerable effort to both the location and neutralization of a device that shares features with the BION class of devices. I think I have a decent shot at neutralization if I knew exactly where it was. What is the lifetime for a BION device before it breaks down? The total battery life through repeated charging cycles is expected to last up to twenty years inside the body.
2019p – I would like any IC personnel who are reading this to consider: how do you think your colleagues would behave if the hypothesis I’m suggesting here were true? For persons who knew the truth, what would you expect them to do? Run around and advertise the situation? Would they even be honest to an FBI agent who was out of the loop, or would they justify denial by virtue of that agent’s lack of clearance? Do any programs come with an official or non-official authorization to lie about the programs to anyone not cleared in order to protect the program? Other personnel who were not originally involved in this case might be upset that someone had gone and done this, especially to a PhD scientist, and they might sympathize with my plight to some extent, but would they actually do anything to publicly call out this behavior? Who wants to be the one to do that? The looming question for everyone would naturally be: if they’re doing this to him, then who else would they be doing this to? If I help him out, will it compromise another mission, possibly in a foreign country? I better just keep my mouth shut. What really irritates me is that the guys who did this banked on that response from their colleagues. It’s as if the bigger the secret, the more valuable the technology or some hypothetical mission in which it might be used, the more freedom one has to abuse it. Do you think I sound a little crazy for invoking this hypothesis to explain my experience? I’m certain I do, and that helps them to get away with it, but the level at which I can speak about it makes them extremely nervous. What if they did this to you? How do you think you would fare? You better have at least a master’s in some hard science, and you better enjoy going through the literature and learning about new fields. Would your colleagues or friends or family believe you? Even if some of your IC colleagues did, why would they step in if there was some other mission that might be compromised? And how did we get to this point in the first place when dystopian sci-fi methods that seem fit for the most repressive countries on Earth have come to be part of the American arsenal? Is it fair game for other countries to do this, or only Americans? Maybe most IC personnel would agree it was a mistake to do this to me, but where does that leave me at present? The only remotely acceptable outcome for me is to have the technology and methods be exposed. I refuse to live in fear of continued assaults.
2019q – Perhaps if I just dropped all my research completely and joined a bingo club, I would be left alone. Alas, my attempts to demonstrate a willingness to “mind my own business” and blend into the population have not been reciprocated. I have never been left completely alone over a fourteen year period, and my friends and family members continue to be contacted. The team has committed themselves to this case in a way that it seems to them impossible to walk back from. Well, the technology I’m suggesting here could be a big reason for that. The feds having fabricated a CI or other evidence could be another. And I would suggest that most if not all FBI or DEA agents would be kept out of the loop with respect to the technological aspects of the harassment. Anything designed to interface with or disrupt the nervous system would only be available through Special Access Programs, and not the typical Top Secret clearance that FBI and DEA agents possess. These are not activities that the FBI would ever want to be accused of getting involved in. So as stated previously, I strongly suspect that another group has gotten involved, one with DOD ties, possibly a contractor with SAP clearance, and that this group handles the shadier, illegal aspects of the operation, and the federal law enforcement agents tasked with interacting with my friends and family members are kept deliberately ignorant of these aspects, or try to keep themselves as much in the dark as possible. By getting extremely technical about what I believed was going on, I may have created a serious problem for many federal personnel. I strongly suspect that additional personnel got involved in early 2017 in response to my advertisement of research on passive subvocal speech collection, on the web, and around Silicon Valley in person. One phone call to the right person at NSA or CIA would start a chain of events causing some persons to panic. If anyone from these agencies come knocking on doors at the FBI, they instantly telegraph their concern with respect to my research. A program in this area would itself be highly classified and probably regarded as a crown jewel or potential crown jewel of U.S. intelligence R&D efforts, at whatever stage of development it may be. It’s easy to imagine such a program receiving an extremely generous influx of investment in the wake of 9/11, and that efforts to protect such a program would pull out all the stops. To any IC professionals: how exactly would you expect the intelligence community to behave if one of their crown jewels was threatened or perceived to be threatened by an independent researcher who only works from open sources?
2019r – On that note, I actually think there is good reason to relax a bit. The flyer, no matter how many general concepts on it I have guessed correctly in terms of overlapping with a secret program, is not a roadmap or recipe for building a mind-reading system. Arnav Kapur’s AlterEgo device at MIT would surely share features with any passive subvocal transcription system that focuses on the speech muscles. No other scientists could look at my flyer anywhere in the world and immediately throw something together to accomplish what I’m proposing. It would still take years and years of expensive development. There are sparks of inspiration perhaps, but probably one or two suggestions that are completely impossible. Everything would have to be worked out through experiment. Numerous essential variables are not identified. Any top brass who look at this flyer and are told in a briefing that one ore more elements overlaps with this or that program of incredible value needs to calm the fuck down. I know it’s someone’s job to freak out about something like this, but there is a huge amount of information that would still be required to cook up the special sauce that renders something like this functional. Speech recognition, to my surprise, is a discipline that depends on loads of experimentation to bring down the word error rate (WER). You have to try out all manner of pre-processing algorithms and signal transforms, figure out where to slice up the signal into words, syllables, phones or subphones, establish how large the database is to train the recognition engine and then build it or buy it. In the case of electromyographic speech recognition based on muscle signals (EMG), in addition to all the aforementioned variables, there are questions about sensors, what types of electrodes, where exactly you put them on the face to collect the compound muscle action potential (CMAP), how much and what type of electrode gel to use, sampling rate, how to instruct the volunteers to silently mouth words to generate the signals by which the recognition engine is trained, etc. All of these things require decisions to be made by humans. It’s not at the point where a computer can tell you a priori what the best combination of all these elements will be, and thus there is an absolute need for time-intensive experimentation, systematically swapping this for that, with the ultimate goal of bringing down the WER. In the broadest scientific sense, this is somewhat like synthetic organic chemistry, which also cannot be predicted by computers yet, requires laborious experimentation, much of it failed, with the ultimate goal being the highest possible total overall yield from a multi-step synthetic sequence. The flyer gives only the most general suggestions for what topics would be in the area. Most of the inspiration on the signal processing side comes from a single resource that I digested as much as I could from cover to cover: the dissertation of Michael Wand, a student of professor Tanja Schultz in Germany — Advancing Electromyographic Continuous Speech Recognition: Signal Preprocessing and Modeling (2015). The intro sections in many dissertations are great for outsiders trying to learn a new field. I never took linear algebra or statistics or any classes in signal processing, but the gist of the methodology was easy enough to follow in Wand’s presentation. If other military R&D groups have programs in this area, and they surely do in countries as sophisticated as Russia and China, then they have surely taken note of Armin Kapur and his AlterEgo device at MIT, amongst other academic work. What my flyers suggest doing is completing the bridge from active to passive subvocal signals, which is an obvious extension to propose, but not entirely trivial, and may increase the WER dramatically in all but the most vigorous forms of passive subvocal activity. Collecting signals while a subject is reading for training purposes was an original suggestion of mine, not in Wand’s or Kapur’s work, but that may only work if the subject is specifically instructed to read slowly and deliberately while mentally voicing every syllable, allowing their tongue to move. I actually think that the idea I had about transcribing heard voices could be more threatening in the long term to any secret programs than anything on the flyer, because it would provide a successful demonstrate of passive subvocal transcription. If persons could be motivated to build that, then the implications would be obvious to everyone the world over. My work would be largely done. The IC and military and scientists at DARPA have surely realized that any secret monopoly on mind-reading will be threatened eventually by inevitable developments in the field of medicine, or maybe just a moonshot project in Big Tech led by a former DARPA director. I have proposed the collection of speech signals with a sensor from some distance away on one flyer version, and this may never be explicitly pursued outside of a military setting, but collecting vibratory muscle signals with a laser from 30cm away, dubbed laser doppler myography by one group, has already been developed by two different academic groups. That doesn’t entail that this method could extract sufficient detail from the speech muscles to enable transcription, but it shows how groups pursuing their own innocent and noble goals may lead to unforeseen consequences that are deeply spooky. Cue the controversies around gene editing. That’s science.
2019s – If I’m being assaulted in the way I suggest, how could this be allowed to go on for so long? Wouldn’t someone step in? That’s what I’ve been hoping for years now, but there are apparently barriers in place. For one, if potentially sympathetic personnel aren’t cleared for the technology and don’t know how it works or even what organization allows its use, they may not know how to help or who to reach out to even if they wanted to. Secondly, if the dirty tricks squad with the SAP access knows that FBI or DEA agents fabricated a CI or other kinds of evidence, then said agents would be compromised. They’d be reluctant to step in and attempt to put the brakes on. And if some FBI or DEA agents knew just enough about the other team to compromise them somehow, even just the identity of one person who knew something about classified gear abuse, possibly someone in one of my photos, then it would appear that multiple pairs of dirty hands from different groups are shielding one another, all hoping that “the problem” magically disappears. Harassment team members from any group surely continue to believe that if I were to just up and die already, that the problem would take care of itself. And so they continue to slowly chip away at me, while trying to keep me out of the legal and medical systems as much as possible. I would like to invite all legal professionals and federal agents to consider what laws may be impinged by a conspiracy to induce a citizen to commit suicide, especially one in which there is a staggering imbalance in power between intelligence professionals and one citizen. Extreme efforts have been made over a long period of time. Even if you only consider the psychological aspects of the campaign and completely discount all of my claims with respect to technology, a conspiracy to psychologically break someone to the point of suicide surely violates the law. You would likely need an insider to spill the beans or digital comms between participants to prove the conspiracy, however. It seems likely to me that throughout 2010 and early 2011, when I was committed to a psych ward four times and made two suicide attempts, that anyone who had already compromised themselves in any way, by fabricating a CI or anything else, could not help but have gotten their hopes up, and that this hope may have gradually transformed the mindset of some federal agents from investigative to destructive — destructive of reputation, relationships, and life altogether. Certain agents almost surely came to consider more and more how the psychological methods applied might be used to steer me towards a result that would get them all off the hook. It might be worth going back and inquiring who the agents were in TX during this period when I was living in TX. Maybe they were all misled by their colleagues in California and genuinely believed one or more things, but by observing me over time began to harbor some doubts (?) I don’t believe for a second that all federal agents, FBI or DEA, would be on the same page in my case. Some personnel know where the skeletons are buried, some may have suspected but looked away, and some may have been completely jerked around. Any independent investigators want to find skeletons? Please start with whoever was giving instructions to my coworkers at Nanosyn in Santa Clara. To all IC personnel or police doing their jobs in an ordinary, aboveboard fashion, I have no personal criticisms to offer. But there has been a sizable contingent of personnel involved in my case since late 2009 who could not plausibly claim that they were “only doing their jobs”, unless their construal of their jobs is divorced from the legal constraints imposed by the democratic process.
2019t- I want to reiterate again: these experiences of CNS and bodily disruptions are not a function of stress. I dealt with loads of stress before this all began, in the pressure cooker that is chemistry grad school. I have 20+ years experience with daily progressive relaxation. I have always managed stress without prescription drugs, with a couple temporary exceptions after the active surveillance began (e.g., Temazepam for sleep, late 2009). One of the most psychologically stressful times throughout this entire 14-year ordeal was at the very beginning in late 2009, when I first became aware I was under surveillance. The following year was terrible as well with daily harassment, gaslighting, and all of my loved ones following requests that federal agents made while being required to lie to me about it. I experienced stress, despondency, suicidal ideation, etc. But it wasn’t until January of 2017 when externally induced physiological disruptions became a regular part of the harassment methods, and then there were only two such incidents in the first seven months of 2017. The disruptions are isolated from each other in time, and there has evolved a regular set of both CNS and bodily assault types that are cycled through, with some types subjectively more threatening or painful than others. What I experienced in going to the ER that day in May of 2019 was torture, and since then I have been living under constant fear of torture that could manifest suddenly, without warning, and this team that follows me around is constantly reminding me of it through cycles of disruptions of varying intensity. Someone took over after my trip to DC in 2017, and this person decreed that I had to be reminded every single day that the team has this power over me. Some days are relatively better than others. And I have periods during the day when I feel perfectly normal. But a bodily and CNS disruption can occur at any time, without warning, and it is terrifying to live under this cloud all the time. Medical professionals may doubt what I am describing here, but that doubt must be rooted in part in their own subjective estimation of what kinds of things intelligence personnel are liable or not liable to do, and that will be informed by their own knowledge of history and intelligence culture. Again, I’m not describing anything which is technologically infeasible. It’s just outlandish to consider that people would do this to someone, and especially in the United States. In my own case, there are at least two rationales for devoting this much effort to me. One is more conventional, which is that federal agents probably manufactured a confidential informant in late 2009 in order to launder intelligence and preserve some element of an ongoing case. At that time a rumor-spreading campaign began about me at work as well, which previously friendly coworkers were not allowed to share with me, and I’m suspicious that something additional was fabricated in order to ruin my reputation and spoil my ability to finish my PhD. In retrospect, I don’t think that whatever was being spread could have possibly been true, and I would like to be directly confronted about whatever it was. In any case, fabricating a CI and spreading rumors that agents knew to be untrue could draw criminal charges and end those agents’ careers. If I up and became a CI, then all of those problems just magically disappear for those agents. I think perhaps some personnel expected that I could be manipulated with a bit more precision than it turned out. That is all relatively conventional compared to the second justification, which is that my research has overlapped with classified programs, I have advertised it widely, and team members may have committed themselves in a way that is rather challenging to undo.
2019u – For the remainder of the year I just threw myself into work, driving around all day and delivering food. The job sounds dull, but I started listening to online lectures on various topics, mostly history and philosophy, but also psychology, science, social science, history of science, and music. Mostly from the Great Courses, formerly the Teaching Company, with a subscription branch now called Wondrium. Three, four, five lectures a day, I’ve done more than 100 of their courses by now, and I have thirty or forty more on my to-listen list at any time. About the best money I’ve ever given to a company. This seems to be the best possible use I could make of my time while driving, and it keeps me intellectually engaged. I haven’t been despondent in years. I care about what’s going on in the world. I read the news and still feel engaged as a U.S. and global citizen. I care about my friends and family, and I don’t want them to be bothered anymore when I reach out to them. I know the team that follows me keeps thinking that some point will come when I am completely worn down by the harassment, become despondent as I once was in 2010, and decide to end it all, but they’re going to be perennially disappointed. They ought to think very carefully about what the legal ramifications of their conspiracy might be. I also continue to teach myself about a variety of scientific topics, many of which have to do with collecting biosignals, manipulating the nervous system with electromagnetic energy, or basic electronics. But while all this is going on, I am subjected to a continual barrage of external stressors that are related to the harassment, and in particular the daily physiological disruptions that continue to occur, car break-ins, instructions being given to friends and family to interact with me in specific ways. One way that my confidence is boosted to keep going is that I have read enough about the legal system to know that the system would acknowledge my grievances and forcefully condemn many of the actions these personnel have taken, if they could be proven. But team members would not acknowledge or be able to justify the bulk of the harassment, in particular the break-ins, gaslighting, and physiological disruptions. None of these activities are defensible in courts of law or public opinion, and at the present time are difficult for me to prove. However the team has left an extensive trail of persons they have contacted and given plausibly deniable instructions to stretching back over a period of fourteen years. I can provide a list of dozens of names right off the top of my head. Most recently, my physical therapist Jennifer Klein in Houston was contacted (summer of 2023). Why? Why have all medical staff, including assistants at dental offices, been contacted over a period of fourteen years? Why are many staff at restaurants I pick up from (not all), and many customers I deliver to (not all) contacted by team members? I would like an open acknowledgment and justification of these efforts. The fact that this has gone on daily for fourteen years is completely absurd, and it seems to me that team members will have to fabricate some kind of pretext in order to justify these efforts.
2020 – trip to Texas, visits to FBI, DCIS, etc., COVID lockdown in CA, continued research into Elizabeth Rauscher’s claims
2020a – Austin police department and FBI office in Austin. At Christmas I drove to Houston again and spent a month in Texas. I spent a couple weeks in Austin. I delivered food in both Houston and Austin. The harassment continued apace. I continued to pass out the fake flyers advertising the subvocal academic conference in both Houston and Austin. Mostly this consisted of putting them on car windshields, on billboards in coffee shops, and on billboards in science buildings at universities. I visited the Austin satellite FBI office in January and shared a cache of documents pertaining to my situation. I didn’t speak with a duty agent and don’t recall if they take walk-ins. I shared the documents with support staff in the reception area. I want as many FBI agents as possible to pay attention to what is going on, because: 1) there is an ongoing organized criminal conspiracy involving federal personnel; 2) some FBI agents are very likely a knowing part of the conspiracy, while others are caught in the middle. The office in Austin is part of the San Antonio greater regional office and not the Houston office, but previously when I was in TX moving between Houston and Austin, there was coordination between team members in both cities. When I have couch surfed in Austin in the past, my friends there have all been contacted by federal personnel, asked to participate, and forced to lie about it to me. This time around, I was not invited to couch surf with anyone. I got together with a few old friends in person still. I talked about having met Elizabeth Rauscher and . I dropped off some documents with the Austin police department as well. Local police are occasionally furnished my location data by federal personnel and some officers have been given the same type of plausibly deniable instructions that others are given. This continues to happen in Houston (as of November 2023), and has been ongoing since late 2009. I do not believe for a second that any regional police officers or managers, chiefs or sheriffs, in any state, TX or CA, will be told the truth about my circumstances. They will treated as a friendly foreign intelligence service is treated. This means using them to federal team members’ advantage, in this case attempting to cover up federal misdeeds. If there is any coordination at a fusion center, regional team members will still not be informed. Regional personnel may have had a funny feeling or two about suggestions the feds are making. Their hunches would be vindicated. I don’t have problems with any police, local or federal, doing the jobs they are supposed to do in a manner such that nothing would have to be hid from the courts.
2020b – Visited DCIS in Houston. Tuesday, January 28th, I spoke to two agents at a Defense Criminal Investigative Service office (DCIS) in Houston at the Mickey Leland Federal Building. I thought I was just going to drop off some documents there and leave, but two agents expressed curiosity and wound up talking to me for half an hour. I shared some photos of suspected harassment team members as well, some of whom I strongly suspect to have DOD connections. DCIS might avow themselves of FBI facial recognition capabilities if they do not have this ability themselves. I suggested that classified technologies available through Special Access Programs were being abused. They seemed to take me seriously.
2020c – Visited FBI in Houston. Wednesday, January 29th, from about 10:30am to 12pm, I visited the Houston FBI office for a walk-in appointment. I described my situation to the duty agent, some aspects of the harassment, and explained that a narcotics investigation had likely gone off the rails years ago. I probably explained my belief that a confidential informant (CI) had been fabricated. The overall demeanor of the agent was more receptive than the duty agent who I spoke to in Oakland had been, but I was disappointed that the questions he asked seemed more concerned with my history in the psychedelic drug scene than with aspects of the harassment I described. I would have told him that the drug activities was likely beyond the statute of limitations at this point and that I didn’t want to share anything more than what I had already volunteered. I should have taken more notes from this conversation. I don’t have a way to replay it. I’m not sure if I visited the Houston police department to drop anything off on this trip.
2020d – NSA in San Antonio. On the way back to California, I spent a few days in San Antonio delivering food, sleeping under the car cover. The harassment continued. I remained convinced that harassment team members were operating in a fashion that would be described as “rogue” by the directors of any three-letter agency that were forced to publicly acknowledge their activities. Therefore it was still in my best interest to make as much noise as possible, in as many different directions as possible. I made a large sign out of whiteboard and a wooden stake. The sign showed key phrases from my research on subvocal speech transcription that would only be intelligible to someone with knowledge of this area. I drove around the NSA facility in San Antonio holding the sign out the window at times of day when employees were coming or going. There are cameras all around the facility. I also flyered nearby parking lots like a 24-hour gym and nearby coffee shops. I didn’t try to enter the parking lot, but after driving around in circles repeatedly, I was stopped by security and my car was briefly searched. It was not as extensive as what took place at Ft. Meade. They let me go after maybe 10 minutes without doing a thorough search.
2020e – At a rest stop in west Texas on the way back, I experienced an alarming new sensation in the car as I relaxed before bed. I felt a strong sensation of vertigo and dizziness out of nowhere. I had been sober since the previous January (2019), and nothing at all changed about my routine this evening. I was relaxed, well-fed, and well-hydrated. I might say that this was something like Havana Syndrome victims experienced, except that there were no accompanying auditory effects. I have experienced something like this only once or twice since then, but never before this instance, and on occasions that seem timed to discourage me from taking some action or punish me for having already done so. I don’t think it’s natural at all. One way this might be accomplished through technological means is with something akin to a weapon described in a patent assigned to Invocon, a DOD contractor in Conroe, TX (outside of Houston). The device is referred to as Electromagnetic Personnel Interdiction Control (EPIC), and allegedly functions by affecting the vestibular hair cells in the inner ear responsible for balance. It emits a focused microwave beam that is modulated at a specific frequency designed to resonate with the hair cells. It is supposed to cause vertigo from a distance of several meters, was funded by the Navy, but nothing more has appeared in the literature beyond this patent. It stands to reason that a spoon-shaped antenna, like Boris Pasche developed, or a biomedical implant receiving power from outside the body, might also supply sufficient RF energy to travel from within the body to the ear and cause similar effects if modulated at the same frequency. This EPIC weapon was actually speculated by one journalist, David Hambling, to be potentially responsible for the Havana Syndrome in an article in Forbes on Oct. 20, 2020: “The Microwave Weapon That Could Explain Why ‘Havana Syndrome’ Report Is Not Being Released”. However another directed energy weapon developed by a US contractor might fit that bill more accurately to explain the bona fide Havana Syndrome cases: the MEDUSA weapon (Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio), a directed energy non-lethal weapon designed by WaveBand Corporation in 2003-2004 for temporary personnel incapacitation. From wikipedia: “The weapon is based on the microwave auditory effect resulting in a strong sound sensation in the human head when it is subject to certain kinds of pulsed/modulated microwave radiation. The developers claimed that through the combination of pulse parameters and pulse power, it is possible to raise the auditory sensation to a ‘discomfort’ level, deterring personnel from entering a protected perimeter or, if necessary, temporarily incapacitating particular individuals.” This does not fit my case however, as I did not experience any auditory effects.
2020f – I spent a few day in southern California on the way back to SF. I visited the electrical engineering departments of numerous universities — USC, Caltech, UCLA, etc. — and put my fake flyers up on the student announcement billboards. I also slipped the flyers under the doors of numerous university professors who were likely able to appreciate the technical details based on their online research profiles. I also flyered the RAND corporation, the neurotechnology company Kernel that is trying to create a brain-machine interface, and others I can’t remember. I also visited the Long Beach regional FBI office again on February 14th and shared a letter that I wrote up for the occasion and additional documents with the duty agent there, a female agent who seemed friendly enough. A few days later I thought of something else to share and returned. This time I was met with an older male agent who was somewhat hostile and seemed to know I was coming. He refused to accept any more documents (!)
2020g – I would like anyone who reads this to understand why I have put so much time and energy into distributing flyers in so many places and why I am bothering to go over this in detail here. Analysts from three-letter organizations besides the FBI or DEA may be called upon to evaluate my case, if they haven’t already, and this information about the quantity and location of distribution may be requested by superiors. In short, tens of thousands have gone out, probably 50,000 or more, across several states, focusing on strategic locations when possible where the technical aspects are most likely to be understood, and probably spreading out to other countries as the next section will reveal. There are two basic reasons for my doing this. The first is that I am trying to start a viral discussion about the potential for passive subvocal speech transcription and the fact that the militaries of the world are likely to make a breakthrough in this area first. It will then be keep a secret from their respective populations for as long as possible. Even in a country like the United States, and some would say, especially in a country like the United States in the wake of recent events, with a presidential frontrunner openly declaring his intention to break down the wall between civilian and military functions, developments in this area should not only be a concern for all citizens, but should be conducted with a degree of transparency that may not be necessary for other kinds of state secrets. This position of committing to transparency is being advocated by scholars in the fields of bioethics and law. There ought to be a society-wide discussion, and I hope to be able to promote that discussion however I can. The second reason is that I have been targeted for a life disruption campaign being carried out by personnel who have almost surely broken numerous laws already, and I think as surely have not been honest with their colleagues and supervisors about how it all started. I’ve been hoping that the continued flyering would help to prompt an honest reckoning internally between the highest level officials and the personnel who have been part of the conspiracy, but it appears this has not yet happened. I have suggested numerous times in Facebook posts that any high level officials who want to get to the bottom of this need to put the team members involved in day-to-day operations under surveillance — to monitor their conversations when they think no one is listening. But I think this may be a tall order in the IC when a sufficient number of personnel are willing to lie together in concert. It presents an intimidating front, even to the most skeptical, hard-ass, straight arrow manager, and to issue such an order for internal surveillance to take place would itself represent an embarrassing breakdown of authority. Managers in this case need to take a deep breath, open the door to internal dissidents, and invite persons to come forward with the worst possible news that no manager would ever want to hear. In the long run, it will redound to your professional integrity to do so.
2020h – Back in the bay area I continued my routine. I happened to be up in SF near the end of February and passed by the Moscone convention center at the start of the RSA Conference (Feb 24 to Feb 28), a computer security conference that draws an international crowd. The conference theme was the “Human Element”. I crashed the conference and passed out hundreds of flyers. The security was tight at the main entrances, but I found a back entrance across a bridge, and later a discarded speaker badge in the garbage. Some flyers I laid down in strategic locations in social spaces. Some I gave directly to people, always explaining up front that the flyer was fake and that the event was not happening. Occasionally I had a technical discussion. Some flyers I folded up and dropped into open pockets on people’s bags when they were walking in front of me or riding the escalator. I did this all out in the open where other people watched me and was only confronted a couple times. This was plantpocketing, not pickpocketing, and mostly amused bystanders could see that. I taped flyers inside the bathroom stalls where persons would be sure to have a minute or two to digest the material and maybe take a photo. There were hacker “sandbox” areas set up for hackers to socialize and hone their skillz on cars, medical implants, air traffic control, and voting machines. I have exactly zero hacking skills and know just enough to know that I am completely helpless against government-sponsored hackers who love to remind me that they control every piece of gear that I own, stretching back to late 2009. I am also convinced that the ECUs (electronic control unit) in my past two Camrys have been hacked, but I don’ t have the skills to prove this. I doubt very much that the extensive hacking that has taken place in my case, a form of harassment I call digital gaslighting, will ever be officially acknowledged. The FBI’s elite hacking squad used to be called Remote Operations Unit. Is it still? How much oversight are these guys actually subject to? Maybe it’s not them. But if not them, then who?
2020i – Since the dawn of the information age an increasing scope of ordinary life activities are claimed to be “hacked”, from sleep to exercise to relationships. Given the outsized role that computer hacking now plays in military affairs, it makes sense that the zeal to hack everything under the sun would also infect our services, and that the crosshairs would come to rest eventually on the brain. As the final frontier of the hackerverse, the human brain provides for ample speculation in military white papers, leaving no room for doubt about the importance of achieving total domination of this vital organ, by any means necessary. Gone will be the days when intelligence officers and psy-ops commanders relied on primitive vehicles of influence like words, pictures, sounds, stacks of cash, appeals to ego or conscience, sexual enticements, and threats of all kinds. Soon that gelatinous electrified battlefield beneath our skulls will lie open to elite biohacker ninjas, who will enable with just a few keystrokes what armies and kings have struggled to do for centuries. We will all be safer and more free because of it, at least so long as our own fearless warriors for freedom and democracy have the controls. Or so goes the theory laid out in some or another visionary prospsectus from the DOD over the past couple decades. MK-ULTRA proffered essentially the same goals. This perennial quest is also reflected in documents and contract proposals reported in the press, for instance a story entitled “Air Force Plan: Hack Your Nervous System” from February 2006 on military.com by David Hambling. According to the Air Force documents, the military desires technologies to “make selected adversaries think or act according to our needs… By studying and modeling the human brain and nervous system, the ability to mentally influence or confuse personnel is also possible.” It goes on to describe two distinct technologies: one to heat the surface of the skin from a distance with a microwave beam, the Active Denial System (ADS), and the Pulsed Energy Projectile which fires an intense pulse of laser energy, activating the nerve cells responsible for sensing unpleasant stimuli such as heat, damage, pressure or cold. It’s not exactly the finely grained mind control of the CIA’s dreams, but you could surely motivate someone to move away from the pain. There are obviously some fundamental limits on what can be reasonably expected in terms of technological mind manipulation — limits rooted in the laws of nature — and I have made an argument that acknowledging these limits will promote more realistic expectations in a panaudicon blog post entitled “On the Fundamental Limits of Mind Control”. I am not opposed to the military developing neurotechnologies, but I think it should be done transparently, as other professors and scholars have argued, and at the very least that personnel should not go around covertly zapping their own citizens with the latest classified gear. In my own case, I am convinced this has been taking place, and it has been able to continue in part because it makes me sound crazy to talk about it. This team has thus been able to operate under the cover of tin foil which I have been desperately trying to peel back. Please, whoever you are who is reading this: please consider stepping in to stop your colleagues from doing this. It could happen to you too, and it surely will happen to insiders at some point, as it likely already did to the whistleblowing psychiatrist Kernan Manion at Camp Lejeune. And to those would-be neuronal puppetmasters, please consider whether more traditional forms of persuasion might actually be more effective and less offensive to human dignity. Overriding a person’s will by creating unpleasant sensations hardly deserves to be called mind control or brain hacking. It’s more like torture, and such methods cannot possibly be compatible with the conception of freedom enshrined in our laws and Constitution.
2020j – COVID lockdown was announced in California at the end of March. I continued living in my car and delivering food, but with substantially less traffic. I had already experienced relative social isolation for years, and so the psychological impact was less for me than for the average citizen. Payout rates for delivery went through the roof and I started working upwards of ten hours a day to put money into savings. The harassment levels subsided a decent amount at the beginning of the pandemic, but gradually creeped back up as the summer progressed. Some staff at restaurants where I picked up from on a regular basis were requested by team members to participate, but not all locations. I also continued to collect journal articles that might be relevant to explain some of the claims that Elizabeth Rauscher had made, in particular the elicitation of cannabis-like effects through the application of an electromagnetic signal. On several occasions I had printouts of articles disappear from my car, forcing me to create an organizational system with code numbers to mark each article. Often the physiological harassment episodes coincided with my research efforts, which I otherwise found enjoyable and fascinating.
2020k – One night in Santa Cruz in early December I was involved in an oblique head-on collision with another vehicle. The fault was my own, which I admitted to at the scene. There were no apparent injuries at the time. The other vehicle’s bumper cover had a hole knocked in it. My impression was that the responding police officer from Santa Cruz PD had actually been contacted by federal team members before his arrival at the scene. This still might be confirmed by anyone investigating my case, as there was some consideration that charges might be filed against me. I was written a citation and released at the scene. But ultimately the Santa Cruz County DA’s office decided against pressing charges. How were the feds watching me closely enough that evening to respond in real time and feed instructions to a responding officer? What exactly was going on before the collision? The latter question might be answered through any extant video footage from my cabin preceding the collision, but I suspect this has been erased and/or denied having existed in the first place. It’s not wise to produce surveillance footage when you haven’t obtained a warrant. I might be watched through my smartphone camera, or a camera hidden in the dash somewhere, but I would bet any amount that I have been both watched and listened to as I have driven around for years, even before I lived in my car, reaching as far back as late 2009. At that time the team began letting me know that I was being surveilled through a variety of means, often by requesting that one of my friends bring up something obscure I had just been reading online, at a rate far outstripping sheer coincidence, or by referring in some indirect way to some non-verbal action I had taken while alone, sometimes while in the car, that could only have been observed with a surveillance camera. In late 2015, I began speaking in the car, by myself, to whomever might be listening, hoping that some personnel or supervisors who have been out of the dirty tricks loop might be able to hear and be empowered to ask the right questions of their colleagues. This practice continues to the present day. It would be possible to cut and paste together an unflattering picture of me, as I don’t always speak in the tone adopted in this letter. I’m upset at how long this has gone on, and I will sometimes insult the team members in the way that someone impulsively levels insults anonymously in an online forum. I am not anonymous of course, but subjectively the experience is similar, in that the lack of face-to-face contact draws out a nastier side of persons when tempers flare. The team might face some issues in cutting and pasting however, because to admit to having any snippet at all means that: 1) some legal authorization ought to have been obtained; 2) the presence that snippet would make others curious about what else I might be saying, and as it seems exceptionally likely that numerous federal colleagues have been misled about aspects of this case, my psychological profile, etc., then the team members who know what is going on in my case would prefer for no one to hear what I have to say. In any case, I encourage any investigators with lingering questions to please seek out the Santa Cruz police officer who responded to the collision that night of December 3rd, 2020 and ask who he may have spoken to before responding to the scene. Now ask that person, probably a federal employee: how were you able to respond so quickly to the event? You are tracking him that closely every day for years on end, but you don’t have audio or video feeds? How did you even know there was a car accident?
2021 – COVID continues, delivery continues, research continues, spent one month in a hotel
2021a – I stayed in CA over the holiday. There is not much new that happened this year that would interest any analysts or attorneys, except perhaps the technical aspects of my quest to locate and neutralize the technology I have believed the team to be using to screw with my body and central nervous system (CNS). Let’s just say I have spent a great deal of time and resources on this, and I continue to, but not having a degree in electrical engineering, and squaring off against the United States intelligence community, it’s an uphill battle. I continued living in my car and delivering food. I continued collecting literature that dovetailed with Elizabeth Rauscher’s claims. I stayed in frequent contact with Jean Maria Arrigo over the phone while COVID continued to unfold. I also had three video appointments with the neuropsychologist Dr. Courtney Murphy at this time, beginning in November of the previous year. I described to Dr. Murphy the bodily and CNS disruptions, the harassment campaign, my belief that the physiological disruptions were externally induced, my original reason for being investigated, and my suspicion that some federal personnel were facing criminal charges. I strongly suspect that Dr. Murphy was contacted by the feds, before our second visit at least, and that she was prompted to ask particular questions in the course of her assessment. What was communicated to her? What is communicated to the dental staff in offices I have visited since late 2009? What was communicated to my coworkers at Nanosyn in Santa Clara? I wager that team members are being forced to fabricate a pretext to make requests of all these persons. There has been nothing substantive to investigate for over ten years. I took a psychedelic one time the entire time I was living in CA, more than ten years ago now (the present date is November 8, 2023). The only laws I have broken in years are probably just the occasional traffic infractions. And yet I continue to be followed around daily, and anyone I interact with more than once, or whose interaction with me can be reasonably anticipated, is contacted beforehand and given some instruction to participate. Dr. Murphy referred me to a psychologist for stress management (Dr. Alan Ceaser, also at Kaiser). She did not recommend psychiatric medication.
2021b – I was rear-ended in San Francisco in February by an SUV and suffered minor whiplash with some radiculopathy. I started taking CBD for this, which I had never done before. CBD only, without any THC. I continue to take CBD daily, usually not more than 20 mg, although the CNS effects are subtle enough that I’m sometimes not even sure if I could distinguish it from placebo. It seems to have a mildly calming effect, equivalent perhaps to the over-the-counter stress gummies from Walmart that I also take. Some people take it for neuropathic pain, but the data is mixed on this.
2021c – In July, after a particularly hellish evening in my car in Redwood City being kept awake all night by artificially induced bodily and CNS disruptions, I stayed in a motel. I spent the next four or five weeks sleeping in motel rooms until finally moving back into my car. The team seemed to back off temporarily after I moved into the motel. Or perhaps it was more challenging to deploy the gear there to the fullest extent (?) It might be wondered where there would be some temporary stress reduction sleeping in a bed as opposed to my car, if anyone wishes to suggest that my “symptoms” are stress-related. At this point I had been living in my car for seven years, since the summer of 2014, and I was completely used to it. I slept under the car cover in any number of spots around the greater Bay Area and was never cold or uncomfortable at night. I had a routine down. The physiological disruptions did not begin until January of 2017. At the time I started staying in the motel, I also escalated my efforts to find and neutralize the technology that was messing with my body, for which I think the best explanation is still an injectable neurostimulator like the BION class of devices. However to date these efforts have not been successful.
2021d – In December I drove to Houston for the holiday. There I made the spontaneous decision to rent a place and move back to Houston. I am still at the same location in the Heights. I flew back to CA in early January and drove my second car back here as well.
2022 to the present (Nov 2023) – working in Houston, repeated apartment break-ins, harassment continues, visit from the FBI and HPD
2022a – Since being in Houston the harassment has escalated overall. There are relatively more intense days and relatively calm days. Every day there are one or more things to let me know I am still being watched and one or more ways that my body and central nervous system are screwed with. I basically deliver food all day, try to keep my car running, and see my parents from time to time. I stay in touch with a few old friends online, but some dear old friends I have lost touch with completely. My apartment has been broken into on numerous occasions by harassment team members who will move items around to let me know they have been inside. I developed a system of uniquely marking the door when I leave every day with a square of toilet paper and a hot glue gun, then taking a photo of the one-time seal that prevents the door from being opened without ripping the delicate seal apart. As the seal remained intact while my place continued to be invaded and items moved around in subtle ways, I concluded that team members had to be finding a way in through a trap door. Which means they have to have one of the neighboring units rented out. There is a crawl space above the 4 adjacent units on the top floor of my building that links all the units. I noticed a small hole in my ceiling one time that wasn’t there before, and also on a couple occasions what appeared to be drywall dust on the floor. So i’m guessing they use some kind of quick-seal product after cutting through the drywall ceiling? I know this sounds like an insane amount of effort to go to, but my case has taken on some extraordinary dimensions, as the history of the past fourteen years ought to make clear. There is also some precedent for IC personnel to rent out a residence next to someone for long-term surveillance. This was described in the documentary Mirage Men, in which some personnel rented out a house across from someone who had filmed a classified project on an air base and went to tremendous lengths to discredit him and drive him over the edge. The physiological disruptions are the most unsettling occurrences for me at present. At times the bodily sensations are deeply disturbing, uncomfortable, and sometimes even borderline torture, with intimations of what I experienced in going to the ER in May of 2019. There are frequent flashes of pain or sensations that, were they to continue, would easily be described as torture by anyone on the planet. I want this to stop. I have been practically screaming for help, in emails to the FBI and in Facebook posts for quite some time now. This is the not the product of stress or mental illness or drug use. I hope that the aforementioned history provides some background to help anyone who takes an interest in this case to understand why some personnel would go to such extreme lengths. I somehow doubt that it is FBI personnel responsible for deploying the gear which is affecting me, but whatever team is responsible likely has some informal link to the FBI and knowledge of more conventional crimes that agents may have committed, such as fabricating a CI. There is an aboveboard face, consisting of federal agents who are called upon to interact with persons that I interact with, and then there is the dirty tricks squad, which the aboveboard face would like to remain ignorant of as far as technical details go. In a way this is not unlike some technology projects sponsored by DARPA or the DOD in which there is a non-controversial project goal described in open sources, and then a classified purpose, not announced to the public, that the same or a slightly modified version of the technology could be used for, which some of the scientists working on the open version may not even be aware of. This dual dynamic is described multiple times by Sharon Weinberger in her history of DARPA, The Imagineers of War.
2022b – There are essentially two reasons why such extraordinary methods have been deployed, and by extraordinary I am also referring to things like apartment and car break-ins, gaslighting, having my gear be hacked in plausibly deniable ways, continuing to be followed around daily and having persons given instructions by team members, as well as the physiological disruptions. Being followed around would be able to be proven by any investigator who is empowered to break through the imposed order that persons not reveal their encounters with federal agents, but the other forms of harassment I cannot prove yet. One of the reasons is more conventional, and the other much less so. Let us discuss both.
2022c – The first reason is that federal agents almost surely lied about me in one or more ways when the overt surveillance and harassment began in Munich in late 2009. I don’t know what the initial fabrication may have been, but I strongly suspect that a confidential informant was fabricated and intelligence laundered through a fictional CI to gain leverage over other persons in my social circle. Having done that, these agents decided they needed to cause friction between me and the persons they would like others to believe I provided information on. My friends in CA and TX initially seemed sympathetic and supportive of me, even as I told them I thought I was under surveillance and evinced high levels of stress. And I know that they knew I was under surveillance because team members had contacted them and given them instructions for interacting with me. However as time went on and they kept being contacted, they seemed to grow more suspicious and wary of me. This had happened back in Munich as well with my coworkers, and in that case whatever was communicated to make people wary would not have related to any suspicions that I may have been an informant. So there are likely to be multiple rumors spread about me that would have to be spun out of whole cloth, because I have never done anything, been involved in anything, or even taken an interest in anything that would cause my friends to withdraw from me, recoil from me, or wonder if they actually knew me. I don’t have any secrets that I’ve never shared with anyone. There was one personal thing in my life, and one thing only, going back for years that I had kept to myself. I had felt bad about this for some time, but after the harassment started I wound up discussing this with multiple friends, my mother, a psychiatrist while committed, etc., and the feedback was generally comforting, while acknowledging my personal shortcoming. This would not be something that any federal personnel would ever get excited about. It is relatively commonplace. Sometimes people do this and openly announce it, but they may be chastised for it. Let’s just say that in the course of relationships, things can happen that take on an emotional valence of the most extreme weight for the involved parties, and sometimes people act foolishly. But unless something really terrible takes place, outsiders will generally shrug off the drama as part of the usual manic, weeping rollercoaster that causes so many persons to lose their minds completely. However regretful it may have been, it was not anything that would have resulted in my sorry mugshot in the paper after I was captured in Mexico, nor in any sensational headlines whatsoever. But before I had processed it with friends, it had built up in my own mind to a very extreme degree over a period of several years, and I carried around a tremendous psychological weight from this. In Munich I actually attempted to hide the evidence of this thing, or what I thought could be the evidence. This attempt would have surely been understood by any personnel who had been watching me closely for some time. But it could easily have been deliberately misinterpreted for others and held out to be prompted by practically anything they wished to say about it. I may have inadvertently presented an open-ended opportunity for some mischief-loving personnel to get creative, in other words. When it first became apparent that rumors were being spread about me to my coworkers in Munich by federal agents and I started to get looks from people like I was an alien disguised as a human, I thought that this thing I had been embarrassed about is what was being shared. Because I wouldn’t have gotten looks like that over anything related to drugs, and I still figured then that it would have to be based in reality. After sharing the regretful thing with my friends and becoming more grounded around the topic, it seemed less likely that this is what was shared with my coworkers. Team members in Munich knew what I was feeling bad about, and they exploited this, and may have exploited my attempts to hide this thing by coming up with something that would be thought to greater serve their advantage and drive a wedge between me and others around me, which this other thing could not have accomplished. Once a commitment like that is made, and the “evidence” is communicated to fellow agents and supervisors, it can be extremely hard to walk back from. Momentum builds, and nobody wants to hear any dissenting voices anymore. In law and psychology professor Dan Simon’s excellent book In Doubt: The Psychology of the Criminal Justice Process, Simon discusses the “coherence effect” in psychology whereby an assemblage of evidentiary items seems to cohere and point in one direction by virtue of one or two items which steers the interpretation of the whole assemblage, but that if this key piece of evidence is corrupted or errant in some way, it can lead to a runaway train of motivation heading in the wrong direction that becomes difficult to slow down. It leads to false convictions in which all of the prosecuting parties are innocent of malicious intent. If that one piece of evidence were removed, then the direction of the accusatory arrow becomes much less clear. Simon discusses a famous case of the FBI becoming fixated on an American convert to Islam living in Oregon after the Madrid train bombings in 2004, Brandon Mayfield. The fingerprints matched. He was put through hell and ultimately exonerated, but throughout the ordeal the Bureau was highly resistant to outside suggestions that they had the wrong guy. In the list of evidence recovered from his home was noted “Spanish documents”, which were later revealed to be his child’s Spanish homework. I’m concerned that some agents in my own case, possibly only beginning in Munich, have acted with substantially less integrity, and may have created their own runaway train that continues to this day. Once again, I do not have any secrets that I’ve never shared with anyone. If there is anything being communicated to federal agents or held out as evidence internally that contradicts what I’m saying here, then I would like to be directly confronted about it face-to-face. I would like for any FBI managers, agents who are new to this case, or other law enforcement personnel who are reading this to consider asking some tough and uncomfortable questions of any colleagues you may have who are challenging the statements I have just made. Is there something being held out that contradicts what I’m saying? Please have another look at it and ask yourselves where this may have come from. Some agents over the years may have had suspicions about what I am saying, and some may even have voiced those suspicions, but if the right manager gets excited, especially a senior manager, it can be much harder to put the brakes on and reevalute, and this only becomes harder as the years go on. Does someone want to ask me about anything besides my history in the psychedelic drug scene? Please, let us have that discussion. But first I recommend you chase a few of the internal leads that some of your colleagues have desperately been trying to ignore. Have agents been dissuaded from doing this by orders coming down from above? Is it stated in angry communications that “we’ve already been over this, and we know this or that to true”? Oh, really? Has anyone that was involved in my case, either on the ground level or as a manager, had time to climb the ladder since late 2009, and is now exerting an influence on how things proceed? Does that person have the ear of someone in the Director’s circle, by chance? How would a manager with guilty hands or knowledge behave in this case, were I making true statements here? I wager that there are some leads based on inconsistencies, or glaring discrepancies perhaps, that some managers do not wish to be pursued, because the consequences of following those leads could be devastating for some agents or managers and open up the Bureau to severe criticism. It is also entirely possible, but not at all certain, that many if not all Texas FBI agents who got involved with my case are completely innocent of any wrongdoing, and have been jerked along by personnel in California who got their hands dirty. What was communicated to agents here when I first came back to Texas in late 2009? My friends in Austin were all contacted and given instructions. What did the agents giving them instructions think was going on with me? Did they observe anything on my part that seemed to confirm or contradict what they were told? Was it perhaps ambiguous? Once a certain interpretive frame on a situation is suggested by trusted colleagues, it may be difficult to unsee things in that way, and the only thing to contradict what an agent is seeing may just be an occasional gnawing hunch, an idle speculation in the shower or driving home alone: well, hmm, that does seem odd. If such and such is supposed to be true, then why would TJ behave like this or say this? Are there any records of this before Munich? It doesn’t seem to fit. And why did my colleagues proceed in this way, instead of what might have been a more conventional manner. Why wouldn’t they have done things like this for chrissake, as this would be the obvious way to proceed. Why are my own suggestions for how to proceed being rebuffed in this case? You want to be able to trust your colleagues there, I’m sure. And to have that trust violated when there could be consequences for your own career probably instills nausea. And to confront certain persons — especially persons more senior than yourself — is to open oneself up to the possibility of severe retaliation and career derailment. I have read about the colossal frustrations that FBI and other IC whistleblowers have been made to go through. Perhaps if more than one agent feels uncomfortable with the situation, you can band together. Again, I’m going to recommend to any internal investigators who are serious about getting at the truth here and not merely going through the motions to arrive at a predetermined conclusion, that you speak first to whoever was giving instructions to my coworkers in Santa Clara. I wasn’t doing anything there at all that would have warranted an investigation of any kind. Some kind of pretext would have had to be fabricated there to persuade my coworkers to cooperate on a daily basis. The following quote from Mechanics of a Police Internal Affairs Investigation by Robert A. Verry may be instructive. From the 2nd edition, page 6, Chapter 1: “Crossing the Rubicon” (the Rubicon in this case being the line beyond which transgressions begin to occur):
“Interestingly, regardless of which one of the above is the driving force behind an officer’s misdeeds, most often it is not the initial action or inaction that ends up being the officer’s downfall. Rogue police officers will spend countless hours trying to figure out how to cover up their transgressions instead of just doing the right thing. Apparently misguided, misdirected, or just plain foolish, it is not uncommon for a target officer who is under investigation to provide false statements to the internal affairs investigator in an attempt to conceal what they’re under investigation for. Targets have also resorted to creating diversions, planting evidence, tampering with witnesses, and various other unthinkable deeds they never would have done if not for the investigation or their need to hide their unethical or criminal actions.”
I strongly suspect that something like this dynamic has been unfolding since late 2009 in Munich. I could be wrong. Maybe all agents’ hands are squeaky clean. But if someone is holding out something that directly contradicts the statements I have just made, then I’m afraid that cannot be the case.
2022d – The second reason that extraordinary methods have been deployed in my case has to do with my research on both subvocal speech transcription and electromagnetic perturbations of the nervous system, both of which constitute areas in which the United States intelligence community has invested heavily in work that is classified. As discussed above, all of my research draws from open sources and I have never had access to any classified material. Why did I become interested in these areas? The second I became interested in after my own nervous system began getting screwed with in January of 2017, but it was more than a year before I began to suspect an electromagnetic vector for the effects. The first grabbed my interest in the fall of 2012. This will entail multiple sections.
2022e – I’m just going to come right out and say that I began to suspect that some kind of technology was being used to read my thoughts in the fall of 2012, as I was working at Nanosyn one day. Before this admission is construed as evidence of mental illness however, please understand that I am not and have never been committed in any absolute way to this proposition. I wasn’t sure of it at the time, and to this day I can’t be sure. I wish I could be absolutely sure and say that according to the laws of nature, there is no possible way that this could be done to me or to anyone else, but my subsequent research has negated such absolute certainty. If some kind of major breakthrough has not already been made within the halls of the U.S. military and IC, then it is liable to be made in the next ten years based on the publicly visible state of the art in academia and industry. I was surprised to discover how far back the United States intelligence community’s interest in mind-reading goes, since before I was even born, and it stands to reason that the desire for such capabilities will never go away. The capability will also emerge at some point through ongoing commercial and academic efforts for uncontroversial purposes. In any case, there are numerous reasons that I concede are substantially more likely explanations for this suspicion that I first began to entertain in 2012. But since I have devoted a good portion of this letter to this topic, explaining my research efforts and how I’ve gone about advertising those efforts, probably stepping on some toes along the way, I figured it fair to acknowledge the origin of my interest.
2022f – From a detached perspective, as objective as I can muster, it seems astronomically unlikely that any government personnel were ever using technology to transcribe my thoughts. I concede the staggering improbability of it. At the time this idea first occurred, all of my coworkers, friends, and relatives had been contacted by the feds and were given instructions to interact with me in nearly every encounter I had with them, even through online chat or email. That can be proven. Sometimes it seemed that a person would be asked to bring up something I had just been reading about online. Of course, I know that could be coincidence. But sometimes there are nonverbal giveaways when someone is following instructions from team members. I could be wrong about what I perceive to be nonverbal tells as well.The topic could be brought up naturally, at their own volition, and thus I am projecting onto innocent nonverbal behavior. But what can be proven for sure is that my friends, family, and coworkers were all given suggestions on how to interact with me, and on numerous occasions these suggestions were for videos to show me, for music to play for me, or for topics to bring up in conversation. If the barriers preventing them sharing this with me could be removed, then it is possible that they would remember one of these things they were asked to share with me, and my google search history at the time would reveal that I had been reading about that thing the previous day. That could be a coincidence as well, but it would certainly be suspicious to have happened on multiple occasions, and around topics that are relatively obscure and not part of the recent news cycle. So this had already happened on countless occasions since late 2009, and I found it annoying. The topics brought up that I had been reading about did not intersect with any ostensible law enforcement mission. It seemed like the team just wanted to remind me that I was being watched at all times and eviscerate any sense of privacy. Then in the fall of 2012, there occurred what to me were a series of astonishing coincidences when I was at work, in which my coworkers receiving instructions from the feds were asked to bring up obscure items in conversation, not related to work, that intersected precisely with something I had just been thinking about an hour or two prior. Well sure, that sort of thing happens all the time, and it’s called coincidence. It happens to everyone, I know, including myself before I was ever under surveillance. Except this was a rapid-fire barrage that was far in excess of anything I had ever experienced, and with a degree of particularity that was dumbfounding. This might be taken as evidence of a psychotic break, since an assignment of conspiracy or connection to an innocent stream of events, especially one that involves what has been referred to in psychiatry as “thought broadcasting”, has been recognized as one criterion for psychosis. Perhaps what I experienced was simply a series of astonishing coincidences. It never became an everyday thing, but did begin happening sporadically after this occasion. To this day it still happens now and then, and I am able to respond with a kind of detached amusement, without being ontologically committed to one explanation. But on the day when I considered this for the first time, the effect was disconcerting in the extreme. The nature of the sequence and the details seemed to subjectively thwart a simpler assignment of subliminal priming or mentalist magic. Some of what was reflected back that day connected with a very personal, elaborate, imagined conversation with my mother that I daydreamed while coming back from lunch, and could not have been suggested by priming. Later instances, not all, resist the possibility of priming as well. So the walls started closing in that day, and for a second I contemplated suicide again. But within minutes I caught myself on the edge of the abyss as my scientific curiosity kicked in. OK, where are they getting the signal from? I began to consider what I would have thought was impossible, and the shock of this contemplation was immense. I figured however it might be happening though, it would have to obey the laws of nature. And the experience suddenly threw a number of past events in a new light. I had previously begun to suspect that I was talking in my sleep due to similar eerie coincidences with the instructions that persons around me were being given by team members. I figured they must have a microphone triggered by human chatter in various rooms where I had couch surfed, in case there were any late night conversations that they didn’t want to miss. I would be thinking about a person or event one day, often part of the psychedelic scene, and the next day a friend would bring up that person or event in a way that suggested they were prompted to do so by the feds. The rate of these coincidences also seemed excessive. It was always the very next day though, and never on the same day. I thought maybe Temazepam was causing me to sleep talk. Nobody had ever accused me of it before, but my younger brother talks in his sleep, and it is sometimes possible to engage with him. It also occurred to me on that remarkable day at work that if this were really happening, then the team was desperate. They were trying to psychologically break me. It seemed that they were taunting me. But their combined powers were limited somehow, or I couldn’t possibly be standing there, having graduated, having got a job and moved back out to California. It wasn’t even about me, really. It seemed to reveal something deeper about human nature, both slippery and stubborn, that transcends the interior monologues with which we self-identify, and resists attempts at control. I wasn’t supposed to make it this far. I was supposed to be dead. And during the time when the team thought my suicide was likely, a safe bet in 2010 perhaps, they may have committed themselves in ways that were going to wind up being problematic if I were ever officially prosecuted. In any case, I couldn’t be sure then, and I can’t be sure now about the reality of what happened, but whatever took place set something in motion that could not have possibly been predicted by team members, nor predicted by me if you had asked me beforehand about how I might have responded to such a startling revelation. My coworkers were receiving instructions that day, and this can be proven. And I know there are ways to give a person the impression that their thoughts are being read. Mentalist magicians make people think this. You can subject someone to some kind of subliminal priming or suggestion, getting them to think about some person, place, or object without directly referencing it, and then suddenly refer to that very thing. The art of magic and priming are even referenced in the JTRIG presentation on cyber influence operations. I’ve considered all of these more pedestrian explanations, and I can accept them as well, acknowledging their objective likelihood over my far out suspicion. But the possibility of ground-breaking new technology continued to haunt me, intrigue me, and then I started researching it. In any case, what became isolated, irregular experiences after this day are not what upsets me at present. What really bothers me at present are the physiological disruptions which commenced about four and a half years after this incident at work.
2022g – I think it will be instructive for FBI agents and any IC analysts to consider a scale of probability for why I might have begun to entertain such extraordinary suspicions in the first place with respect to inner speech transcription, and why personnel continue to follow me around to the present day, becoming increasingly aggressive in their harassment.
In order of decreasing probability:
1) The U.S. intelligence community has no interest in mind-reading technology whatsoever and anyone in the IC would scoff at the very prospect.
This is a trick, sorry. The probability of this is zero, although the U.S. military and IC would love for people to think this. A large number of open sources reveal an abiding interest in mind-reading by the U.S. intelligence community stretching back for many decades, to at least the early 70s when ARPA took out a three year contract with Stanford Research Institute to explore the feasibility of transcribing signals from both the brain and the speech muscles. Any other government-funded research on active silent speech transcription advertised to the public, like that conducted by BAE Systems or NASA, will also generate results that more secretive programs can make use of.
2) The U.S. intelligence community has a secret R&D program in mind-reading, i.e., for the transcription of passive speech signals, but the technology is still not advanced enough to non-consensually collect useful information from any given individual.
Sure, maybe. Who can say how far along it is except those who are most deeply involved and cleared to know?
3) The U.S. intelligence community has had a secret R&D program in mind-reading which has resulted in a major breakthrough, unannounced to the public, and the capability exists to non-consensually transcribe the passive inner verbiage of another human being under the right conditions.
Again, maybe, but that would be pretty earth-shaking for such a breakthrough to be made. It’s safe to assume they would wish to keep this a secret for as long as possible.
4) Number three is true, and such technology was actually deployed against myself in the course of a domestic covert operation.
I would put the probability of this last possibility somewhere between the chance of winning the biggest lottery in history, and the chance of selecting a ball of rock out in the universe somewhere completely at random and finding intelligent life. The former has happened to some lucky person before, and will happen again. The latter, one time for certain since the universe congealed. The odds are long, and not in my favor. I concede this. And yet, I retain a nagging suspicion. I have been followed around daily for fourteen years. And the amount of effort has actually ramped up dramatically over this time. It is an utterly absurd amount of effort to go to for one person. You would think I was the second coming of Osama Bin Laden. But one thing that I learned in reading about programs like COINTELPRO, the history of FBI anti-terrorism operations since 9/11, and the obscene efforts that the Stasi went to in order to influence or discredit their own citizens is that the amount of resources focused on one person sometimes far exceeds what the light of history shows to be reasonable. And the largest efforts will often be reserved for cases in which the government wishes to hide something or faces an embarrassing situation, the revelation of which could have severe consequences at a personal level for guilty parties, and at an institutional level as well. That the latter would be a factor in my own case seems inescapable. I am not a terrorist mastermind. I had some original ideas about psychedelic chemistry and broke a few drug laws. I may have been viewed back in the day as some kind of budding mad scientist, but at this point every idea I ever had about a novel psychedelic molecule has probably been patented by one company or another, and just about every drug law I ever broke is probably long past the statute of limitations. The psychedelic genie seems almost completely out of the bottle at this point, in a way that far exceeds any past level of acceptance, and which reaches across the political aisle. The amount of effort applied to me does not seem commensurate with a narcotics investigation. So why do I continue to be hounded? I would like for any FBI agents or IC personnel to ask their colleagues this who are responsible for hounding me. What gives? All my best ideas for subvocal speech transcription are condensed onto the two flyers. Take another look at them. There are two scientifically and operationally distinct versions, with overlap in the domain of signal processing. The difference is how the signal is collected. I have distributed tens of thousands of copies far and wide. I’m not holding anything back there. If something new occurs to me, I add it to the flyers immediately. It seems safer for me this way. I’m trying to spark a larger discussion in part so that I could not be said to be holding anything uniquely valuable or threatening. And besides that, the flyer is not even a roadmap for building what I propose, as I explained previously. Is there something left then that would prompt certain IC personnel to continue freaking out about me, and feel like they have no choice but to keep harassing me to the brink? What would that be? It would seem they have severely compromised themselves somehow. That I present some kind of ongoing risk of exposure or embarrassment. How exactly? What and where is the point of attachment that prevents them from letting go?
Do you think this could maybe happen to you too someday, or one of your colleagues perhaps, and leave you struggling to explain yourself to others? Do you think there is a greater or lesser risk of this happening to your well-meaning colleagues moving forward into the 21st century?
2022h – The following will be the easiest explanation for FBI and other IC personnel to believe who are trying to understand this case for the first time, or maybe after years of having your own nagging suspicions that you were being kept out of the loop of something. You will guess that in the course of a highly intensive psychological operation, I began projecting onto innocent phenomena, a stream of mere coincidences, and from this I developed some outrageous suspicions. Or perhaps in a more sinister way, that your colleagues actually used some mentalist magic tricks or psychological priming to screw with my head. Either way, it led to my research into subvocal transcription, which just so happened to overlap with some program that the IC considers to be of incredible value. As I began to advertise this research, I got the attention of key individuals whose job it is to worry about this sort of thing. These persons would be put in an awkward position. If they go knocking on FBI or DEA doors, they telegraph their concern about my research and reveal the existence of a program in the same area. They might launch their own surveillance of me, and discover that I am already under surveillance. Hackers may discover that my phone is already infected with government spyware. But I don’t have a roadmap to the technology, and that should be understandable to those who took an interest based on my research. And if it was never used on me, then the only thing that happened is that in the course of trying to drive me crazy or discredit me, personnel wound up leading me down a rabbit hole that actually leads to a room that they don’t want to acknowledge the existence of, and now I am going around shouting and pointing towards this room. Ok, so maybe it gets a little messy and overcrowded at first, and I’m kind of an annoying gadfly, but you’d think they’d be able to calm down after taking another hard look at the flyers. Has anything really been compromised? So how does this scenario lead to the present situation where harassment has only intensified?
2022i – I concede the likelihood of the prior scenario over the more extraordinary one in which I have won a galaxy-sized lottery. And yet, I would still place a wager. I would buy a ticket to this lottery, and encode my name in the chosen numbers. How modest or immodest the bet I would place depends on the hour, and that amount has fluctuated over the years. But in a way, I already bought the ticket. What can I say? It’s a little embarrassing to admit, but I have a galaxy-sized hunch. If this team was using mentalist magic, then they have some damn good tricks, and they will destroy people with these tricks in a manner that ought to draw criticism. My saving grace has been a persistent curiosity and a faith that nothing can happen without the permission of Mother Nature, whose labyrinth I am pleased to explore. If I’m wrong, I am wrong spectacularly, but mostly on a personal level. Call it a moonshot. I think I’m right about something in the bigger picture though, or why would the team’s efforts intensify?
2022j – Speaking of odds, it is noteworthy perhaps that there is exactly one degree of separation between me and the man who first measured the electrical signals in the speech muscles that correlate with mental activity, Edmund Jacobson. My progressive relaxation teacher met him in person one time. xx What are the chances? xx At the beginning of every taped lesson I use, there is an instruction to relax the sides of your face. It’s because there is a two-way street between your speech muscles and your mind that never shuts up. The eyes and the speech muscles are the hardest to relax in the whole body. So I have understood this connection on an intimate level in a way that few people ever do. When the universe started tumbling that day, I remembered this, and it helped me to hold on. It was probably just a few days later that I started collecting literature on silent speech technology. I also considered the brain and EEG. I considered whether my glasses might have an electrode and an antenna. One morning I microwaved my glasses in a 7-11 in Palo Alto. After some more reading I realized that this was an unnecessary experiment. The literature reveals that the speech signals are too diffuse for detailed transcription after passing through the skull. Maybe a very limited whole-word vocabulary might be possible, but even that would probably have too high an error rate to be of much use. Facebook was considering a near-IR laser to be bounced off the brain. If you could use EEG to enable typing with your thoughts alone, as they desired, they would have gone with that, because it’s simpler. In any case, my close connection to Jacobson would appear to be another remarkable coincidence in a grand parade of unlikely events. And now, suddenly, I am having a flashback to junior high. It’s eighth grade, and we are choosing science projects at Trafton Academy in Houston, TX. I would like to keep this between you and me, whoever is reading this, because this is also a little embarrassing to admit. My project was ESP, and with my best friend at the time, we administered the standard test to all of our classmates with Zener cards featuring the classic five shapes — circle, square, wavy lines, etc. The results were all within a statistically normal range that you would expect by chance alone, according to my friend’s father who was a biochemistry professor at Rice. We took it a step farther though, and, inspired by a video of a stage hypnotist that my parents had brought home, we sought to hypnotize two students in the darkened school library to see if a hypnotic trance could boost their performance. In case the CIA or U.S. military is feeling the urge to bring forth a renaissance of their own psychic research, I will submit that with a sample size of two, hypnosis does not augment ESP ability to any significant degree. Maybe you could try LSD? It also occurs to me that if the CIA desires the capability to discredit someone by making them bark like a dog, then this stage hypnotist should be sought out and put on the payroll immediately.
2022k – Stay with me here for a minute in the rabbit hole, please, and consider how it could possibly be that such a novel device that I’ve imagined to exist could be used on a citizen such as myself. During MK-ULTRA, CIA officers experimented on themselves and each other with various psychoactive drugs. They would actually spike each other’s coffee in the morning with LSD as an ostensibly serious experiment. But then they came down and thought about it some more, and they realized that these conditions were too dissimilar to the field conditions in which they envisioned operating. So in the quest for a more naturalistic setting, they started renting out safe houses, installing two-way mirrors, and the rest is some rather ugly history, engaging in violations that persons in my friend circle have universally condemned as psychological rape. The point is that they wanted conditions as close to the real world as possible. Assuming that the team on my case decided to try out some new technology on me, I think they have probably come to reconsider their initial hunch that I would make a good candidate.
2022l – I wonder if there is any other information that an analyst or federal agent might be able to use to help them distinguish between the second or third possibilities above, and the fourth possibility. Based on the account I have relayed, does anything seem to stand out and shift the balance of probabilities? What about the behavior of your colleagues? Was anything shared perhaps with my friends or relatives by federal agents that those persons would believe that only I would know? It’s not hard to imagine that information of that nature could be useful in human intelligence operations. Was there any information made available to federal agents that the agents themselves didn’t know the origin of or thought it peculiar that such information had been obtained without anyone ever speaking to me? Perhaps the latter emerged as an issue while I was employed at Nanosyn in Santa Clara. There might have been agents involved who were getting instructions on how to proceed and give instructions to my coworkers without actually appreciating a deeper rationale for those instructions. Or agents who were occasionally confused by their colleagues’ suggestions, or surprised by their accurate predictions of my behavior. Vague references might have been made in hushed tones to a fancy new algorithm — some kind of artificial intelligence to predict people’s behavior. It was good. Eerily good. It was almost like magic.
2022m – There would be signs of some personnel behaving with supreme confidence, with a swagger that proclaimed that they couldn’t possibly lose. That my will could ultimately be bent in the direction they preferred seemed impossible not to realize, and then it seemed that way a year later, and then the year after that as well. There was a slow boiling period. I was homeless and broke, after all. At some point, their confidence faltered. Someone may have started to panic, like the point when you suddenly realize that a fire is out of control and you have to get out immediately. I do believe they wanted me talk about certain things. Is this letter okay? Have I been doing it wrong?
2022n – I also wonder when I was in Munich what all the organizations were that the personnel belonged to who got involved in my case. Certainly some German authorities would have been involved. And the FBI and DEA both have regional field offices in Germany. But if a U.S. citizen is interacting with foreign nationals at all, might this provide a kind of jurisdictional opening for U.S. personnel who belong to other agencies that normally don’t get involved with domestic affairs back home? What is the social life like for an FBI or DEA agent living in Germany, away from the bustling beehive of a large field office like Houston or San Francisco? Do they have a way to connect with other American IC or DOD personnel who are stationed there? What about some kind of biweekly get-together at a pub? Would there be a mailing list to organize this or other events for military and IC expats? Are there one or two people from the State Department who show up? What about the NSA? Would it be more or less likely for FBI or DEA agents to gossip about their cases in such circles, far away from home? And for other attendees to have flexible schedules allowing for opportunities while waiting for their orchids to bloom? What if someone else got gossipy all of a sudden and shared something with an FBI agent that the agent was not supposed to know? The agent would in theory have an obligation to report that person, no? And if they neglected that duty, they would be carrying around a secret from then on that compromised both them and the person that shared it with them — possibly a new friend. What a terrible burden.
2022o – If any agents are ever put in a position of having to explain to your colleagues any of the extraordinary claims I have made here, then I sincerely hope to have made that task just a little bit easier with this letter. In ordinary social settings, to broach the topics of mind-reading and non-consensual implantation in a serious manner is to invite mockery, although the former has been made far easier by Facebook and former DARPA director Regina Dugan. The two may also go together, as the subdermal version of my flyer shows. I think personnel should get comfortable talking about these things seriously. Laugh now, or make little tin foil hats to leave on others’ desks at work, but you or someone you know may be put in an awkward or horrifying position someday, in this or some other country, and to have already carved out some serious conversational space with your colleagues may save your career or your life down the road. The first CIA officer to report Havana Syndrome, “Patient Zero” as he became known, interviewed extensively in the excellent Vice podcast on the topic, became suicidal in part because he found it so hard at first for his claims to be taken seriously by anyone, and he felt brushed off by an Agency that should have known better, and possibly did know better, or at least knew more than they have ever let onto. The sheer outrageousness of these topics acts as a shield for those personnel who wish to engage in such things. I cannot recommend highly enough John Marks’s history of the MK-ULTRA program, _The Search for the Manchurian Candidate_. Every member of the IC should be familiar with the details of this program, and this book would help to easily open up some serious conversational space around these topics. I actually bought a copy and donated it to the FBI regional office in Santa Rosa, CA. I dropped off various documents there in a file holder hanging outside their door, without speaking to anyone. There might have been some agents from that office assigned to my case in 2010 when I stayed for a few weeks in a cabin in nearby Boonville. Didn’t Comey have all new agents visit the MLK memorial as a reminder of past sins? Well I would add this book to the required curriculum. The people who are cleared for programs like these take them seriously, or they are supposed to at least. It’s also not hard to imagine a kind of technological mission creep taking place, whereby something invented for one purpose begins to be used in ways that the original scientists never envisioned. The obvious post-9/11 rationale for developing mind-reading is to foil the next 9/11. But why stop there? If the capability exists, what else could be done with it? Could you do more than just collect intelligence? Could you actually use it to manipulate or control someone? Personnel who favor offensive counterintelligence or covert action would feel extremely excited to try this out. It would be too good to just leave it sitting there on a shelf, waiting around for the next ticking time bomb. They would lie awake just imagining all the possibilities, like kids on Christmas eve. It would practically be shirking your duties not to use it. Hell, the country demands it. You don’t want to be caught trying to figure everything out after the shit has already hit the fan. And the bigger the mission you can imagine for it — the more you can invoke that specter and wave around the aura, even if you are not personally involved in that proposed mission, and even if it doesn’t exist yet — the less likely anyone will be to step in and complain if your trailblazing new initiative, also vital to national security, of course, doesn’t exactly line up with the original vision of the program. Which means you can effectively do anything you want with it, within boundaries you yourself have recognized as judicious and principled, and towards those ends which you know in your heart to be truly in the country’s best interests.
2022p – I want to reiterate for any medical professionals who may be called upon to read this that I am not committed to nor bothered anymore by the former suspicion, but the physiological disruptions I have experienced since January of 2017 continue to be extremely disturbing, and I am convinced that these are externally induced through technological means. My hypothesis involving a BION-type microstimulator or similar class of device is simply my best hypothesis based on all the data. This would have been a kind of last resort to try to get me to stop investigating research leads that overlap with classified programs, to stop networking with former IC professionals and talking about my research, and with suicide being the preferred outcome from the perspective of team members who would be facing a large scandal on numerous fronts. I have described for various medical specialists my “symptoms” as well as my suspicions for how these arise and my descriptions thus far have eluded an easy diagnosis. In addition all medical personnel that I have interacted with since late 2009 have been contacted preemptively by federal team members and given some information about me, which in at least one case, Dr. Eric Ohsun Kwon of Redwood City, resulted in a negatively charged interaction during our first meeting.
What kind of world do you want to live in? Do you want to live in a world where the absolute power exists to turn people into puppets? Just so long as the good guys are pulling the strings? Thankfully I do not think we will ever live in such a world, because the laws of nature, physics, chemistry, neuroscience, etc., will foreclose such a possibility as I have outlined in my blog post, “On the Fundamental Limits of Mind Control”, but for the intelligence organizations of the world, the desire to control people like puppets with computers will always be sought for as a kind of holy grail.
There seems to be a widening chasm in the country with respect to who deserves the label of “good guy” right here at home, and with respect to who can be trusted to wield the awesome power of the U.S. military and intelligence community in a responsible manner. A distrust for the concentration of power is baked into our system, rooted in a skeptical view of human nature.
is there any amongst you who would accept the situation I have been put into? How is a citizen supposed to respond to this treatment? Team members cannot say what they are really desiring with this out loud, which is for me to kill myself. I wager there have been intensive discussions about how to bring this about. Why they wouldn’t just use some fancy method to cause a heart attack or something I have addressed above.
– if you have the capability to collect intelligence covertly and non-consensually from a subject through transcription of passive inner verbiage, why do you need to covertly screw with people’s bodies and nervous systems on top of that?
Perhaps agents would like to start a betting pool as to the various scenarios I have outlined. Who’s feeling lucky?
…
The first part seems likely from a detached, objective perspective grounded in sheer probability.
I experienced a series of coincidences, astonishing to me alone, perhaps exacerbated by the stress of ongoing psychological harassment, and t
Whatever the case is for me, it is apparent from open sources that a large amount of resources has been devoted to this endeavor by the intelligence community, in this country, and certainly others as well, stretching back for many decades.
– you want to be able to trust your colleagues —
——
DEA
I’m still willing to talk to someone face to face about the situation, but if you have lied about me, which I think is likely the case, then I’m obviously not going to play along with a pile of BS. You need to check your own colleagues there. My assumption is that some portion of my wall or perhaps most of it is being censored and/or spoofed. I don’t know any other way to try to reach out. I told the FBI and others what I think is happening. I even dropped by the DEA office in SF briefly the last time I tried to visit the FBI there (six months ago or more I think…). Can’t recall if I posted this… in the lobby I told the reception I wanted to talk to the CI coordinator. Two guys came out who were in undercover street clothes. A tall African-American and a guy who looked and dressed like a shorter version of Kid Rock. I said something to the effect that I wasn’t looking to be a CI, but I thought a CI may have been manufactured, I believed federal law enforcement was involved, I think I said that I initially suspected the FBI, and at that point they both put their hands up and started to walk back, saying that this sounded like something for the FBI. Conversation over.
My
Before this day I had become convinced that
but I think I may have convinced some of your colleagues that it’s real
unless you have access internally to the rabbit vault at whatever organization you belong to. I’m not even sure it’s real,
My friends are under threat not to reveal having been contacted, but I think they would still like for me to know, and I think the team wants me to know as well to show that they are cooperating. This was probably supposed to exert a kind of a social pressure on me at the beginning. If my friends are cooperating, then why shouldn’t I? Except I knew that they were being threatened and would have only agreed to cooperate on limited terms, without actually becoming informants per se. So their delivery of what has been requested by the feds seems to me evident in many cases, but perhaps not all.
Programs have an aboveboard face with a noncontroversial application, and another application that remains secret from the public.
I will leave it to the reader to decide how successful these attempts have been.
Outsiders may doubt this has taken place, and
=
The team members are surely determined to hide the unjustifiable harassment they have undertaken, especially the break-ins, gaslighting, and physiological assaults, but they have left a trail
Freedom consists in much more than simply not being encaged.
it doesn’t benefit me to be accused of mental illness, and it infuriates me under the circumstances.
– To
*** add new faces to blog post ****
Because of my present situation, I can’t be sure the email was received by everyone, because since late 2009, the harassment team has consistently contacted persons I reach out to and asked them to interact with me in specific ways. Some emails sent to friends or family members that I know would garner a response under ordinary circumstances go unacknowledged, probably because people do not trust what the authorities are telling them about why they should modify their communications to me.
visited multiple police departments… palo alto, pacifica, etc.
– It is difficult to put into words how disturbing these experiences have been
—————
miscellaneous to be added:
Statement of purpose, who this is mostly intended for…
purpose of writing this… mainly intended for persons in the legal or medical system, or friends or family members who may have to interact with anyone in the legal system and want some insight into my behavior since late 2009. I have a set of extraordinary claims that ordinarily might be written off as the product of delusion. I am not suggesting anything to have taken place that violates the laws of physics. Some things would simply seem to highly improbable if your assumption is that intelligence personnel are always doing what they are supposed to. I have claims about two separate classes of technologies that I have suspected at time to be deployed in my case. One class I do not feel certain about and am not committed to in terms of strong belief. I accept that an objectively more probable explanation The other I feel is the best explanation for a series of disturbing experiences that mostly began in January of 2017, and continue to the present day.
– Any assessment rendered by a mental health professional necessarily reflects a practitioner’s background knowledge and assumptions about what sorts of activities police and intelligence professionals are likely to engage in as part of an extended investigation or COINTELPRO-style discrediting operation. If a person assumes that the police will always hew to the letter of the law and conduct themselves in a publicly defensible manner, then much of what I describe will be written off. And if a person possesses little to no knowledge of past intelligence community abuses in the manner of COINTELPRO or MK-ULTRA, then the sorts of activities I am describing will seem fantastic or inconceivable. But much of what I contend has taken place in my case can only be understood in light of those dark chapters of American history and the willingness of federal agents to bend and break the rules.
– My assumption, since I was employed at Nanosyn where my work environment was infiltrated daily by personnel who refused to deal with me directly, has been that some IC personnel crossed some legal boundaries… and the best way to bring attention to my situation and get the harassment to stop, to get personnel to behave in the appropriate ways, would be to spark some chain of events that would lead to the highest level personnel being truthfully briefed on what deserves to be called a debacle and very likely a scandal. I have figured that once the FBI or DEA started receiving phone calls or visits from persons from other agencies, that this would force some high-level briefings to take place. However based on my reading of I have been made to panic on numerous occasions by the aggressive methods being applied
Overt surveillance and harassment began in September of 2009. Fellow grad students were contacted by IC personnel and asked to participate in a highly intensive psychological operation. Apartment was broken into numerous times and items moved around in subtle ways (traditional gaslighting). Followed around the streets of Munich in an obvious manner that in retrospect was designed to spook and intimidate. Laptop and phone were hacked as hackers showed off to me their control of my devices. For example the mouse pointer was taken control of one time and moved around in a human-like fashion. I unplugged the router from my wall and immediately gained back control of the pointer. However later they seemed to regain control and made that european fire truck noise come out of my laptop speaker. After demonstrating control or influence in an obvious but plausibly deniable manner, the team often moves on to more subtle forms of disruption.
Overt surveillance and harassment has continued from that date. All friends that I have had any contact with and all family members have been contacted and asked to participate in the campaign. I can provide a long list of names of persons who can corroborate this if they are permitted to speak candidly to any investigators. All doctors and dentists have been contacted since 2009, with possibly one or two exceptions (?). Anyone I am called to interact with more than once or twice winds up being contacted and asked to participate in the psychological campaign. If I have a spontaneous one-off random interaction with someone on the street, then I can have a normal interaction and there is no perceived cooperation. Numerous restaurant staff where I pick up food as a delivery driver and sometimes customers as well are contacted and asked to participate. Over a fourteen year period several hundred persons at least have been asked to participate. Again, I can provide a list of names of dozens of persons who can corroborate this.
The only reason there ever would have been for me to draw attention from federal authorities was my involvement in the psychedelic scene and associations with numerous high-profile figures and chemists in the scene (Alexander Shulgin and Nicholas Sand, to name two, both deceased). In general I do not wish to answer any questions about my involvement in this scene, except to say that this is the only reason that federal law enforcement would have ever had to become interested in me. I’m not sure exactly when I may have become a “person of interest” or target for a full-blown investigation, but I can imagine that I may have become a person of interest as far back as 1996. I will volunteer some information here, but again, I do not wish to answer questions about this aspect of my life beyond what I am volunteering here.
If there is any association that may have raised my perceived threat level, it would likely be the scattering of discussions I had in person over the years with the psychedelic chemist Alexander Shulgin. I first met Shulgin briefly at a psychedelic conference in San Francisco in 1996, the Entheobotany Shamanic Plant Science Conference, held October 18-20, 1996 at the Palace of Fine Arts. I was a chemistry undergrad at the time at UT. I approached him on the floor of the conference to inquire about an MDMA analog that had not appeared in his book PIHKAL (swap the oxygen at the 4-position with a sulfur atom). This was two years after his lab had been raided by the DEA in response to the publication of PIHKAL. Before this occasion he had possessed a DEA license to work with controlled substances and had served as a consultant for the DEA. It is not unlikely that the DEA would have been investigating his associations at this time and possibly observing his interactions at a public event like this conference. A young chemistry student approaching him to ask about novel psychedelic analogs might draw their attention. Over the years I had several more discussion with Shulgin, along with numerous other individuals about psychedelic chemistry and novel psychedelic compounds that would be natural extensions of the work that Shulgin began in PIHKAL and TIHKAL. It seems possible that in whatever threat profile of me that may have emerged, that this trajectory towards the possibility of inventing new psychedelic compounds as Shulgin did may have raised my threat level substantially. In the minds of some personnel, I may have fit into some kind of budding mad scientist archetype.
In 2009 when the overt surveillance and harassment campaign began in Munich, I suspect that some personnel may have gotten involved whose mindset had shifted from a law enforcement mode of collecting evidence, determining the facts and what laws may have been broken, etc., to an offensive counterintelligence mindset reminiscent of the COINTELPRO era where the objective became the destruction of a person’s reputation and sabotaging of their career. I have read a fair amount about this history and the history of the Bureau and other IC organizations. COINTELPRO was compartmentalized from the rest of the Bureau, and not every field office had agents who participated. Hoover explicitly coached these agents to avoid the courts – the explicit goals were disruption and discrediting. When the program was revealed years later, some agents who were in the same field offices as COINTELPRO but doing normal work stated that they had no idea such a program was even going on. In my own case, I think that either what started out as a conventional investigation morphed into a COINTELPRO-style operation, or that both motivational threads have been running forward since I was in Munich in 2009, with some personnel trying to do their jobs in a normal way, and other personnel who have dirtied their hands to varying degrees by participating in activities that could not be defended in any court of law and which the FBI Director or Special Agent-in-Charge would be forced to apologize for. These activities would include repeated break-ins that were not pursuant to an actual search, spreading rumors that the agents knew to be unfounded, fabrication of evidence, etc. I think it seems likely that some of my friend were led to believe that I acted as an informant, either directly or indirectly, and I have wondered if a CI may have been fabricated back in 2009. Coinciding with this fabrication, agents may have been motivated to fabricate additional kinds of evidence or information that would serve as a kind of insurance to discredit me in case I were to wind up in court and some agent were put in a position of falsely telling a judge I had acted as an informant. I have developed various hunches over the years about the nature of the rumors that have been spread about me. But to date, that is all I have are hunches. I would very much like to be directly confronted if any statement I make in this letter contradict anything that is being claimed about me internally.
– I do suspect that some additional rumors had started to be spread about me at the end of 2009 in Munich. This may have served the purpose of driving a wedge between myself and coworkers, friends, and family members. At the time I didn’t imagine that something would be made up out of thin air. Years later, thinking back about this time, and in light of the histories I had read of COINTELPRO and Stasi operations to discredit dissidents, I started to consider the possibility that one more pieces of evidence may have been fabricated out of whole cloth when I was in Munich to serve as a foundation for rumors to be spread. I would really like to be confronted directly with anything that has been claimed about me by any federal agents – either internally, or even merely insinuated to others. I think it is quite possible that if something were fabricated, that only the smallest possible circle would know this for sure, and that a lot of agents would be caught in the middle over the years, believing they could trust the reports and profiles of me that were landing on their desks. There may have been something like a Haversack Ruse from the inside while in Munich – from the inside of the IC that is, and by this I mean something was planted that was designed to be found by one’s colleagues in order to discredit me. If this seemed to open up new avenues for rumor spreading, discrediting, or prosecution that managers back in the States would get excited about, then this information getting passed along and having certain managers get excited about it could create momentum that becomes hard to slow down if any agent were to actually register their misgivings with respect to what are likely to be glaring discrepancies or anomalies upon closer inspection. This runaway accusatory process has been known to happen at the FBI and other law enforcement organizations before when all officers and agents were honestly approaching their investigation. In this case I don’t think the initial seed would be so accidental, innocuous, or honest.
In addition, as I conveyed to Agent Villareal and Officer Gorham-Maki
We are all familiar with the notion of digging up dirt on someone. …
About anything not related to drugs, I would probably be willing to talk with agents depending on the circumstances. But if any agents have been led to believe that there is something more to be talked about than drugs that would interest them, then I am afraid they have been misled or deceived by their colleagues. In that case, I would appreciate being confronted about these things directly.
who is writing this script?
psychic renaissance
strange parallels
interesting things have happened, learned a lot of interesting things, but my life has still been destroyed
It’s essentially the “we are the good guys, so whatever we do is justified” line.