Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander
Hacking network-connected computers wouldn't yield anything truly useful.
It might serve to make foreign intelligence agencies curious, but frankly, I'd guess that most who saw emails or other secure communcations about supersoldiers and drug trials would either assume that they'd been detected by someone with a sense of humour or that they'd stumbled across a pet project by a senior bureaucrat with crazy pseudoscientific beliefs, like the Trojan Warrior Project or the Stargate Project.
Any actual evidence is probably not kept on networked computers. For one thing, it's evidence against a lot of senior officers in the US Army about falsification of records for Project Jade Serenity. They are probably trying to keep it from their own government, let alone others. Other factions of the conspiracy seem to be holding on to any potential evidence, possibly for leverage. No one is actually filing scientific data about test subjects of Project Jade Serenity into government computers, where all sorts of people might take official note of it. |
That would be a HUGELY significant deviation from our modern world. Nothing is kept 'off computers', and it would be basically impossible to study the effect using above TL 6 technology and techniques (Or create a VERY significantly 'interesting' blip as you start resurrecting the TL7 tech that has been completely supplanted by superior TL8 stuff. I mean, if this is an issue of 'oh god we accidentally made supermen, lets pretend this never happened' that's one thing, but I can't see any situation where running at least one of the participants head to toe through an FMRI is not something like #1 on the list, immediately followed by a full gene sequencing, a prion sequencing (is the secret of superpowers in protine folds instead of genes?), full spectrographic bloodwork, whole body high contrast x-rays, microwave backscatter imaging. All of these peices of equipment are useless without the computers to analyze them, and many of those computers are networked, some of them HAVE to be networked (gene sequencers rely on connecting to massive databases in order to work). If you are buying an offline version of one, your generating significant 'blips' of interest to an intelligence analyst.
Further compounding things is that no one produces these high end pieces of equipment in america- they are a mixture of german/japanese/israli components, build from chinese parts, assembled in germany, japan, france, or america, and they are all private industries- which means at some point in time money needs to be transfered from an american government organization to one of the producers, digitally, over open networks.
Even if you can somehow stop anyone from mentioning the SUPER SECRET AND AWESOME project on public networks (Int op: "jade serenity- wasen't that the failed super-drug project form the 2000's, why is it getting mentioned more often than any other project this month?"),
Further its not like physically separated networks are actually secure, just harder to penetrate by casual hackers (
https://arstechnica.com/security/201...audible-sound/ )
On top of that, there have been THREE FBI directors THAT WE KNOW ABOUT, who could not exercise enough restraint to not download porn and malware on their work computer. You think those three DIRECTORS of the FBI who can't stop themselves from downloading porn can stop themselves from mentioning the super-soldier project they are supposed to keep tabs on?
You think that military medics and doctors being posted every two years and routinely getting drunk at local bars are not going to have a slip up and talk about the 'guy who can bend metal'.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander
I don't think that anything worth selling came from Project Jade Serenity. The drug experiments were discontinued as a failure in the year 2000 and while the former subjects have developed powers many years later, no one knows exactly what about the many experimental drugs they took had those effects.
Even as far as the scientists who took part knew, it was an embarrassing professional failure which damaged their careers, not something which yielded actual marketable results.
|
That's not normally how research works. The researchers would still be following there patients for 30+ years to look for adverse side effects. Once they started observing counter-indicators they'd talk with their peers about it to see if its something they have encountered (even if they can't say 'I injected a guy with nutropics for a year', they might ask 'so, have you ever seen any long term results from nutropic xyz?'- if after making inquiries like that they suddenly STOP asking questions, that's suspicious).
Unless the emergence of the superpowers was explosive, potentially literally, with no slow ramp up.
As far as criminal groups- they want salable product, and the demand for working nutropics is high 'Yea man, these drugs totally make you better, US government was doing it'. If they find out they give you super-powers they'll be selling 'super-poweres in a jar' (likely trying to cut corners on costs by using cheaper and more unstable drugs, with who knows what effects)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander
Theoretically possible, but none of these polities are likely to value their security partnership with the US lightly enough to consider providing asylum to fleeing test subjects who will be branded deserters and traitors.
|
[/quote]
The 5 eyes community would, in theory, be informed of the result of the reasearch so that they would share there own research into similar projects. I was considering willing sharing of information between the US and those other countries, not some sort of asylum seeking situation.
Another note I came up with- Russia and China likely have there own supers from roughly the same time period. If jade serenity was not an impossibly well kept secret than likely china (having a huge population base to experiment on) would have done the same regime 'just in case', russia would only have done it if seemed the americans were investing significant funds into it.