Not That Kitty
Alexandra Kitty is not the CIA's Acoustic Kitty. The Agency could never afford her, and she is strictly unbuggable.
Acoustic Kitty was a CIA experiment to implant a microphone, transmitter, and antenna into a live cat so it could record conversations between foreign targets in public places.[1]
The project ran for several years, cost millions of dollars, produced at least one fully wired cat, and was later described as innovative but impractical. [2]
On paper, this is just a memo. In practice, it is a living creature turned into hardware.
AK and Plex read the memo
Clarification: Alexandra Kitty is not Acoustic Kitty. The former writes about elite hubris; the latter was cut open in the name of elite hubris.
It is funny to mix them up. It is less funny to forget which one had no say.
One question. Within its own Cold War logic, was Acoustic Kitty defensible?
Telescope debrief
Empathy here is not sentimentality. It is the refusal to rename cruelty as ingenuity.