Counter-Intelligence: An Interview with Scott Noble

August 23, 2014

Part I

We are currently living under a hybrid of plutocracy (from plouto, “wealth”) and cryptocracy (from krypton, “hidden”) that benefits about 1 percent of the human population. It’s no secret we’re ruled by the rich, but there is a relative lack of understanding about just how much information is kept hidden from the public. A 2004 study by Peter Galison at Harvard concluded that “the classified universe is certainly not smaller, and very probably much larger than this unclassified one.”

Part II

When US proxies practice torture they do not do so in defiance of Washington, they do so because torture is understood to be an important component of counter-insurgency warfare. Torture techniques have been taught by the School of the Americas since 1946, and the CIA even wrote a manual on the subject. Widely known as KUBARK, the word is actually a cold war cryptonym for the CIA itself.