Unethical Inhumane Research and The Belmont Report
In the constitution of man there are inevitably good and bad behaviors. Some people possess more goodness and less badness and while others possess more badness and less goodness with regard to behaviors. Evil is an entirely different aspect and is a separate issue from good versus bad behavior.
For example, to carry out unethical inhumane research studies on Jews and other minority populations during the Holocaust was evil. To travel in your car, above the posted speed limit demonstrates bad behavior although not necessarily evil. If your intention was to travel at a high rate of speed in order to run over someone’s beloved pet, well then, that is evil.
Between the years of 1974 and 1978, the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research compiled the Belmont Report in response to the inhumane, unethical research of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study that spanned from 1932 to 1972. As a result, the Belmont Report prompted revisions to and expanded regulations for the protection of human subjects 45 CFR part 46. In 1978, the Commission’s report Ethical Principles and guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects was released. It focused on three primary principles:
1. Respect for persons: protecting the autonomy of all people and treating them with courtesy and respect and allowing for informed consent. Researchers must be truthful and conduct no deception.
2. Beneficence: the philosophy for looking out for the well-being of research participants and “Do no harm.” That is, the research should far outweigh the benefits than the risks.
3. Justice: ensuring reasonable, non-exploitative, and well-considered procedures are administered fairly and equally.
Most people know about the mind control experiments conducted from 1953 to 1960s through a program known as MK-Ultra. It was initiated by then director of the CIA, Allen Dulles. During the course of these experiments, individuals were exposed to psychoactive drugs that were being studied for their potential use as mind control weapons. Between 1948 to 1975, the U.S. Army Chemical Corps conducted classified human subject research at the Edgewood Arsenal facility in Maryland. A man by the name of Luther Wilson Greene was the scientific director of the Edgewood facility in 1949. Greene envisioned a new type of war that did not involve killing or destroying property. As he put it, wars have been characterized by death and human misery, and the destruction of property. Each major conflict being more catastrophic than the next. Greene wrote, in no uncertain terms, he was convinced that it is possible by the means, by the technique of psycho-chemical warfare to conquer an enemy without the wholesale killing of his people or mass destruction of his property. And so, Edgewood started a research program to investigate whether psychoactive drugs were suitable to use as weapons in psycho-chemical warfare and to evaluate whether or not these psychoactive drugs were effective for use on the battlefield.
This is exactly what is happening with the phenomenon of gang stalking, electronic targeted assaults, and psychotronic torture. It is what is known in game theory as limited warfare. Limited warfare is carried out with other forms of animal life. If you think of open game season on deer and fish in which portions of these populations are targeted and become partially depleted of its population. The purpose is not to completely destroy, only maim or disable for a period of time.
The difference between the MK Ultra program and the new manifestation of the phenomenon known as gang stalking, electronic targeted assaults, and psychotronic torture is with two basic brain transmission signatures. The former was done with psychoactive chemicals like LSD and the latter is utilizing electronics in the form of radio and/or microwaves through antenna transmissions which may or may not be conducted over a relatively limited space. Whereas Greene wanted to use chemicals that temporarily disrupted the enemy’s ability to think and act rationally, today a veiled and clandestine attacker is utilizing electromagnetic frequencies and the electromagnetic spectrum to “manage” a portion of the American population.
Since the publishing of the Belmont Report in 1979, it has been recognized by the scientific community that coercion is completely antithetical to the respect for persons. Individuals are afforded INFORMED CONSENT and they are allowed to withdraw their participation at any time during the course of research. The clear and present danger to the phenomenon this form of control poses to American citizens cannot be understated. In my opinion, it is more likely this phenomenon may very well be a form of organized crime rather than an unethical inhumane mind control experiment carried out by the government. However, the reasons government agencies like the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research were formed was to defend against unscrupulous researchers. Let’s consider a new type of unethical psychological and behavioral research being conducted known as social media platforms over the internet.
Many companies now have access to a wide variety of behavioral data about hundreds of millions of human beings around the world. There are several types of social media platforms; Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. Billions of people all across the globe are estimated to use one of those apps every day! People share intimate details about their personal life over these platforms in very public spaces. Google process 70,000 web requests every second providing insight into people’s interests and thoughts that corresponds to 2.2 trillion searches every year. Then, if you consider all the data collected by Smartphone apps like Fit Bits or other wearable technology and combine that with GPS location tracking and physical activity, as well as information shared about diet and exercise, we can see how virtually every aspect of human life and human behavior can be analyzed.
This brings up important antithetical issues regarding who gets to acquire this data and whether or not these individuals or groups pose a threat for this data to be used in very malign ways against targets for the purpose of evil INTENT. Is this how gang stalking, electronic targeted assaults, and psychotronic torture is allowed to proliferate? Consider the United States vs. Matusiewicz.
Though many scientists think the amount and depth of the digital data collected allow for some exciting possibilities about psychological research. The very interesting aspect for the collection of data over platforms such as Google, Facebook, GPS cell phone tracking is that human behavior gets observed “in the wild” and you get to see how people behave when they don’t think they are being studied.
Because people aren’t always honest over Facebook and Twitter, the enormous amount of diversity of the sample allows for the results to be much more reliable and generalizable. This also eliminates the need to conduct expensive research and the need to hire research assistants. This is a much more cost-effective way to conduct research because the data has already been collected.
However, “Under what circumstances is it appropriate to analyze digitally sourced data?
One idea is that if the data is not personally identifiable then it's fair game for researchers. Current regulations don’t consider the analysis of such secondary data sets to be human subject research if those data sets don’t include personally identifiable information like names, social security numbers, and birth dates. So as long as that kind of information is stripped, then what’s the harm?
But when you have a lot of various individual data sets it’s very possible to figure out who the individual data belongs to. For example, if you visit general websites in your local school district or visit your municipality’s main website it’s pretty easy to figure out where you live. Also, it is pretty easy to figure out your gender and age from the types of items you purchase online. When you throw in GPS data, identification becomes trivially easy. This creates the digital panopticon to which gang stalking, electronic targeted assaults, and psychotronic torture may be allowed to operate and flourish.
Researchers should only be able to analyze data that is publicly available. Tweets from Twitter and posts from Facebook are out there for the entire world to see. Researchers would argue that the information is there is fair game for researchers to analyze. Likewise, the information provided over my medium account reveals information about me since I use my real name over this writers’ platform. It’s entirely possible for people like me and you, while conducting our online social and blogging lives over the internet, to be secretly used as research subjects for a particular platform's purpose. Consider the Facebook Research Study conducted on 689,000 Facebook users over a period of one week in 2012. Did Facebook cross an ethical line in conducting this research? Some say yes. Here’s an article addressing the Facebook Research Study Link: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28051930
The problem is that people don’t understand the privacy regulations imposed on them over the various media platforms and it would be much better if researchers could provide online INFORMED CONSENT when research is being conducted but this would make it virtually impossible for the researchers to conduct these research studies because it provides for an opportunity for individuals to politely decline.
Another problem with psychological research is INTENTIONAL RESEARCH MISCONDUCT by unethical psychologists. Researchers have been caught or have admitted to intentionally fabricated data or falsifying their results.
So, what do you think? Do you think the creation of this “new digital panopticon” has allowed for the transformation of a relatively new form of gang-related criminal activity in organized crime? I do.
