Yes, there is concrete evidence--specifically, the Office of Public Safety mentioned by Cyanbird, was an official cover given to CIA personnel to train local and national police forces in puppet countries how to fight a 'countersingurgency'. This included setting up national ID cards to track everyone, NSA style signals intelligence, and extensive use of torture. One of their favorite methods was to use portable US army telephones, as they had a hand crank generator capable of producing enough current/voltage to torture but were unlikely to cause cardiac arrest, they had an obvious non-torture use case so ordering them was not suspicious, and they had very fine wires that could be inserted up the urethra or stuck between teeth to deliver very painful electric shocks to sensitive areas. Dan Mitrione was a USAID OPS guy who was killed in South America in the 70s (Uruguay, i believe) in retaliation for his role in abuse and torture, who was known for adbucting homeless people upon whom his trainees could practice their torture techniques. The 1980 documentary "Inside the Company" about the CIA lays this out very well. It's long but is worth a watch, and I have seen no comparable films exposing this level of CIA activity since. Vietnam and the Phoenix Program is another classic example. John Manopoli was officially working for OPS in USAID, but was in fact CIA, and he first implemented the national ID card program they used to generate the lists of thousands of names of folks to abduct, torture, and either imprison or kill, and he was also instrumental in that part of the plan as well. Almost the only references to John Manopoli are in books about torture in the Phoenix program, or listings in USAID OPS phone books, or a handful of official OPS papers showing he did the same type of work in a handful of other countries.
That's absolutely fucked. The whole story of the Holy Land Foundation being railroaded and labeled as terrorists when all they did was advocate for human rights of Palestinians...it's an incredibly chilling story. To hear that those who merely donated to a worthy cause were also then audited...the outrageous injustice makes my blood boil.
Am I conflating 2 different issues? Before, it was a theoretical risk. So with a basestation/stingrays you could do it remotely, and now over USB as well.
Of course it's documented fact. And the CIA had a comparable program called CHAOS. Moreover, read up on JTRIG's use of sigint to conduct psychological warfare, as revealed by their own documents (GCHQ leak from the Snowden archive)-- smearing people online, destroying reputations. Presumably, they are only conducting such operations on radical terror leaders, but how do we know? And what's to stop them?
