CDR: Re: Anthropologists as Spies

[Tim May]

At 8:42 PM -0500 11/4/00, anonymous at openpgp.net wrote:
>http://www.thenation.com/docPrint.mhtml?i=20001120&s=price
>
>by DAVID PRICE
>
>On December 20, 1919, under the heading "Scientists as Spies," The 
>Nation published a letter by Franz Boas, the father of academic 
>anthropology in America. Boas charged that four American 
>anthropologists, whom he did not name, had abused their professional 
>research positions by conducting espionage in Central America during 
>the

....

>The American Anthropological Association also secretly collaborated 
>with the CIA. In the early 1950s the AAA's executive board 
>negotiated a secret agreement with the CIA under which agency 
>personnel and computers were used to produce a cross-listed

....

>neither to explicitly prohibit nor to penalize secretive government 
>research. It is time for US anthropologists to examine the political 
>consequences of their history and take a hard, thoughtful look at 
>Boas's complaint and the implications implicit in the association's 
>refusal to condemn secret research and to re-enact sanctions against 
>anthropologists engaging in espionage.


Wouldn't it be much more efficient to use Cypherpunk technologies to 
make their espionage widely known to their subjects? That way the 
targets of the CIA spying could simply find ways to dispose of the 
spies locally.

That would presumably deter anthropologists acting as spies and 
saboteurs more than all of the "official denunciations" ever could.

Note: This has happened several times, actually. A list of spies 
pretending to be cultural attaches resulted in the assassinations of 
CIA agents in Athens, Bogota, and other cities. Sounds fair to me.

--Tim May





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