A House Oversight Committee panel on Tuesday morning will weigh in on the CIA’s former MK-Ultra project — which for two decades used universities to test behavioral drugs and modification theories. The Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), has amplified her push to uncover more details… Source link
On a blustery March day, the artist Jim Sanborn received visitors at his studio on an isolated island in the Chesapeake Bay. The visitors sat him down in front of a laptop, and he typed in a secret message. They compressed the message using a unique hash function, sent that to the cloud, and wiped the laptop clean. Sanborn hoped that this action would set him free. But did it? That’s the latest twist in the story of Kryptos, the famous Sanborn sculpture that’s been sitting outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, since 1990. The artwork is a copper S-curve that stands 9 feet, 11 inches tall, into which Sanborn had punched four panels of encrypted text. Professional and amateur cryptanalysts alike have been trying to crack the code ever since. Within a decade, three of the panels were solved—but not the 97-character fourth panel, known as K4. For decades, Sanborn has been fielding solutions, every one of them wrong. On the one hand, the mystery of his message was a brilliant reflection of the …
Cubans on electric tricycles decorated with Cuban flags ride past the US embassy during the anti-imperialist youth march in Havana on April 2, 2026. Yamil Lage | Afp | Getty Images The U.S. has reiterated its offer of assistance to Cuba in exchange for “fundamental changes” to its communist political regime after CIA director John Ratcliffe visited the Caribbean island nation on Thursday. Ratcliffe’s trip is thought to be only the second time the head of the U.S. intelligence service has been to the country since its 1959 communist revolution. The CIA director delivered a message to top Cuban lawmakers, according to news agency Reuters, stating that Washington would “seriously engage” with the country’s government — but “only if it makes fundamental changes.” On Thursday, the CIA posted photos on social media of Ratcliffe in the Cuban capital, Havana, with no context. CNBC reached out to the CIA for comment. In a statement, the Cuban government said that during Thursday’s meeting, “both sides … underscored their interest in developing bilateral cooperation between law enforcement agencies …
