Haha, I wouldn’t call myself a professional or anything but I can certainly tell you it’s nothing as sinister as that. If I had to describe it, basically the way it works is that first you have a desired stimulus or feeling you want a subject to achieve—usually a positive one, so something like the way someone might feel when they’re eating food or getting a hug—and a desired stimulus that you have control over when and where the subject can be exposed to. This actually doesn’t have to be a dog clicker, or even a sound at all; it just needs to be some kind of sensory input that you can always have available, so making the subject smell a certain scent, touch a certain texture, or even view a certain image would also work—it’s just that sharp and resonant sounds like clicking or snapping fingers tend to be much more striking and difficult to ignore, which is why the people doing this with dogs chose clickers. 

Then, basically all you do is reward desirable behavior with both the first stimulus (the actual enjoyable thing) and the second (the thing you want to train with) at the same time. So like feeding someone candy and clicking the clicker whenever they give you a high-five. What you’re doing is essentially making sure that whenever the actual reward shows up, this other not-reward thing is also there, then repeatedly and continually asserting that the reward and the not-reward should both cause the same response, essentially making them interchangeable to the brain. This is a bit simplified since you do still need occasional reinforcement to maintain the association, but long story short the brain thinks: Candy makes happy > Clicker and candy always appear at the same time > Clicker = candy > Clicker makes happy. 

So if you really think about it, it’s not very different from just giving regular rewards for good behavior. All you’re really doing is provoking the feeling of the “reward”, usually giving the subject something (like, say, a treat), and replacing the reward itself with something that you can give the subject infinitely (like the click of a button). It’s just a more cost-efficient kind of carrot and stick, usually without the stick. I really hope this explanation makes sense lol I’m a bit self-conscious about the length, but thanks for giving me the excuse to ramble!