So, first, a preview. Why did we come up with this talk? Now, we've been asked this a lot today, and we really don't have a good answer yet, but the truth is that one night, we were just having a couple of beers at C-BACE here in Berlin, and Claudio was telling me about this fascinating program, which you'll learn about in just a moment, that took place in the 1960s,

and he had heard this story from some friends in a similar situation, and I turned to him and I said, why don't we give this talk at Republica? And for some reason, he said yes. And so that is why we're talking about spy animals today. We can go with the first video.

Volume?

We've started. Okay. So I guess the volume didn't work.

If we could just make sure it works for the second one. That was just a little introduction to this program, and what this program is. Yes. So yeah, you missed out the video, which is great, but it's an introduction to this program that we kind of found and thought was a great start for this talk. This program is called Acoustic Kitty. It's a program from the CIA in the 60s,

and the purpose of this program was to take cats, actual real-life cats, and modify them so that they would, you know, contain certain types of spying devices and microphones and so on that we're going to get in a minute, and then unleash it very close to probably an embassy

or some place in which a head of state of an Asian country was residing and having its meetings, and they thought they could, you know, let the cat go in where it couldn't, and so you could spy in the environment. From an engineering perspective, this is how it actually was done. It's not kidding. It's actually what really happened. So they surgically opened the cat.

They implanted a power supply, a battery, basically, and a radio transmitter into his chest inside. Then some cords, some cables would go up to his brain, pretty much, and do some censoring on what the cat was doing, and then he would have some microphones inside his ears, and these microphones would capture the audio surrounding him

and then transmit it back to radio to a van parked somewhere. And then along his spine, he would have an antenna to transmit this information. The problem, the downside of this program, the basic principle is that they thought they could actually direct the cat

towards certain directions. Obviously, they want to go in a specific place so that they could spy on that specific target, and they thought that by using ultrasonic sounds, they could actually make the cat go to a certain direction or the other direction and go up somehow in the place that it should possibly be. Turns out that you don't really know what work is expected.

The cat that was used for the experiment had to be cut open and have a power pack placed inside its abdomen. Wires were run up to its ear, to its cochlea,

wires to its brain to determine when it was hungry or sexually aroused, and wires to override these urges. The cat was then put on a test set across the street to eavesdrop on a conversation being monitored by a van loaded with equipment,

and as this poor little monstrosity waddled across the street, a taxi cab came down and ran it over. So it was 25 million dollars down the drain. So just in case everyone didn't hear that, they said that the cat was implanted with the device, the cat was put out to test the device, the cat was put into the street,

the cat went to walk across the street and was immediately hit by a taxi cab, wasting 25 million dollars of US taxpayer money. So there is very little documentation about this program. We know for a fact that it existed, although it lasted very shortly due to this problematic implementation of it.

There is one document, although, that has been found or released through some means coming from the National Security Archive in the US that speaks about this experience specifically, and this document is called View on Trained Cats. Our final examination of trained cats for blank use in the blank convinced us that the program

would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs, repeated checks, and so on and so forth. So where were these cats trained? Because obviously the CIA had to come in and train the cats somewhere. Well, what we found was that somewhere in Arkansas, a lovely, very pastoral, rural state in the United States,

there's a zoo in the 60s called the IQ Zoo. And as you can see, this was where children would go to look at these funny animals that did little tricks, such as a rabbit taking a photograph or a pig playing piano. Well, in addition to that, the CIA had operatives inside the IQ Zoo,

and those CIA operatives, as well as other trained psychologists and other individuals, were there to train the animals in spying. During this time, you had trainings of ravens, pigeons, cats, dogs, possibly other animals as well.

So during, excuse me. So pigeons have also been trained for surveillance, and for folks who were at Congress this year, Anya Dreval gave a talk in which she provided a history of how pigeons have been used for communications throughout history. Everyone's heard of a carrier pigeon, I assume.

So for example, during World War I, the US Army used 600 pigeons. During World War II, the UK used about 250,000 pigeons, and so on and so forth. And one pigeon, anyone French in the audience? Cherami, this lovely pigeon, was actually awarded the Croix de Guerre medal for her heroic service.

They didn't find out she was a female until after her death, by the way. For her heroic service in delivering important messages during World War I. This is a children's book about her, in case you would like to educate your children. And then we have more recently, about 10 years ago, 2006 or so,

we learned that the Pentagon had begun researching ways to use giant fish, sharks, for example, for surveillance. They created brain implants for different types of fish, including these sharks, of course, to influence their movements and to perhaps even try to decode what the animals were sensing. According to New Scientist Magazine,

the Pentagon hopes to exploit the ability of sharks to glide quietly through the water, sense delicate electrical gradients, and follow chemical trails. Yes. The researchers hope such implants will improve their understanding of how the animals interact with their environment. This is just a cartoon, not a real model.

So what makes a good animal operative exactly? Well, we know that cats are dumb. They failed completely in this program. But we also learned in our research that pigeons aren't very clever. Owls, not very smart, but ravens, as Edward Allen Poe would have you remember, are the geniuses of the bird world, the kind of Jason Bourne of the bird world,

if you're into Hollywood. This was, I think, actually a statement from one of those behavioral trainers that we talked about a little bit before. So, I'm really proud of this slide. So not all animals are guilty. Some animals have actually been declared innocent,

as was the case of these lovely birds, all of whom were accused of spying for the Israeli government. Many birds, in fact, have been accused of spying for Israel over the years. In 2011, a griffin vulture, that's the one on the bottom left, griffin vulture, it's an endangered species, it was caught by a hunter in Saudi Arabia wearing a GPS tracking device

and a tag on its leg that read Tel Aviv University. Journalists reported on the incident, with some claiming that the bird was sent by Israel to spy on Saudi Arabia. The rumor, as a result, quickly spread, but the government determined that the bird was actually just being tracked for science, migratory bird tracking and whatnot.

Israel's park and nature authorities stated that the birds wear GPS devices so that scientists can track their migration routes. Other birds that have been accused of spying for Israel, others in that previous picture, have been accused by the governments of Sudan, Turkey,

Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and others. Most of these birds have been declared innocent, however, in 2011, one of them was shot by the Egyptian government, just like Egyptians. We have another video to document this, specifically. And also, I would note that, yeah, so many birds have been accused of spying for Israel over the years

that there's actually a Wikipedia page called Animal-Related Israeli Conspiracy Theories. Turkish authorities believe that they have found a bird used for espionage purposes by Israel. An investigation to that effect was launched in Ankara several days ago after a farmer discovered a dead Marop's apiaster, commonly known as the European bee-eater,

in his field. The bird had a ring reading Israel on one of its legs. The bird beak in question reportedly sported unusually large nostrils, which combined with the identification ring raised suspicions that the bird was implanted with a surveillance device and that it arrived in Turkey as part of an espionage mission.

Meet the bird, arrested on suspicion of being an Israeli spy. The vulture was found in rural Saudi Arabia, wearing a GPS logger and a leg bracelet bearing the words Tel Aviv University. That was enough to get the animal detained by the Saudi authorities. The story first surfaced in an Israeli newspaper

and quickly went viral, with hundreds of posts on Arabic websites claiming that the Zionists were training birds for espionage. Sad but true. Tensions are still running high in Egypt, and with political turmoil comes extra caution. After all, you wouldn't want to let a spying bird slip through your defenses.

That's why Egyptian authorities are detaining this bird, a stork with an electronic device on its back found near the city of Kenna. The man who found the bird thought it might be spying on Egypt for Israel and that the device was some sort of surveillance equipment. That fits with a popular conspiracy theory about Israel using animals in its espionage operations, like when an Egyptian official accused Israeli intelligence

of being behind a deadly string of shark attacks in 2010. But maybe Egypt is onto something here. Back in January, Egyptian media reported a pigeon was found with a message strapped to one leg and a roll of microfilm to the other. That case, as far as we can tell, is still unsolved.

Now, so in 2007, the Iranian newspaper, Resalat, reported that 14 squirrels equipped with espionage systems

of foreign intelligence services were captured by Iranian intelligence forces along the country's borders. These trained squirrels, each of which weighed just over 700 grams, were released on the borders of the country for intelligence and espionage purposes. According to the announcement made by Iranian intelligence officials, alert police officials caught the squirrels before they could carry out any task. Now, why was the Iranian government suspicious

that these small animals had been implanted with listening devices? Because it happened before. All right, so despite all the information that we found, we actually thought it was not enough. So we had this idea of...

It's his idea. It was a collective effort now filing FOIA requests in the US, Freedom of Information Act requests. So we prepare a little bit of a text that Gillian kindly put together, very specifically asking for any operations and any program that had to do with animals

being used for purposes of spying and surveillance, like in the case of the acoustic kitty, specifically having to do with squirrels, ravens, pigeons, cats, sharks, and whatnot. The FBI responded rather quickly. They told us that our request was burdensome and broad, and that we would need to clarify.

I thought I was pretty clear in the first place, but, you know. Yeah, it was too vague. So we'll have to go through every single animal problem and file a FOIA request for each one of them. However, the most interesting answer came from the NSA, which did answer, surprisingly. They sent a quite long letter in a reply, and the gist of it is basically this.

And so this basically says that we determined that the effect of the non-existence of the materials we requested is a currently and properly classified matter in accordance with executive order, blah, blah, blah, and so we cannot make a proper statement about it, which is very interesting. Yes, and the short version of this was that the NSA could neither confirm nor deny

the use of animals in surveillance. Yes. So. So we moved ahead a little bit with our project and decided that we should take a stance on this issue. We're both anti-surveillance advocates, and we felt really strongly that in order to fully get our point across, that we would have to side in solidarity with the animals.

And so we decided to join the re-amylution. We started this website, animalsagainstspying.org. On this website, you can sign our petition to ensure that no animals will ever be used in surveillance again. The petition is live, so please go and find it. The website should be redirected to it right now.

And yeah, you can sign in as it is already. It's live. So that should be all. Thank you very much for listening to our educational talk, and we hope that you'll join us in signing our petition and standing against the use of animals for surveillance. So that happened.

We might have some. We go now. OK.