LIST 39

13 Programs From DARPA's Defunct Information Awareness Office

After 9/11, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—the group that develops technology for the military and homeland defense—formed the Information Awareness Office. The IAO's most famous project was Total Information Awareness, a system to gather and interpret in real-time the activities of whomever the government wanted to watch. The man in charge was Iran-contra felon Admiral John Poindexter.

The IAO started backtracking as soon as the public, the press, and privacy watchdogs expressed alarm. First, the biographies of Poindexter and the other senior staff of the IAO disappeared from the website. Then the IAO's famously creepy logo—a Masonic pyramid with an eye shooting a beam that envelops the Earth—was pulled. Then TIA was changed to Terrorism Information Awareness. Next, Congress outlawed funding for the program (in name only—similar projects under a different moniker could be, and probably are, funded). Finally, in late 2003, DARPA scrapped the entire Information Awareness Office. A few of its programs were transferred to DARPA's Information Processing Technology Office. Below are all the projects that IAO was working on, with official descriptions from the website before it was deleted.

1

Babylon

“The goal of the Babylon program is to develop rapid, two-way, natural language speech translation interfaces and platforms for the warfighter for use in field environments for force protection, refugee processing, and medical triage. Babylon will focus on overcoming the many technical and engineering challenges limiting current multilingual translation technology to enable future full-domain, unconstrained dialog translation in multiple environments.” The first four languages to be tackled were Pashto, Dari, Arabic, and Mandarin.

2

Bio-Surveillance

“The goal of the Bio-Surveillance program is to develop the necessary information technologies and resulting prototype capable of detecting the covert release of a biological pathogen automatically, and significantly earlier than traditional approaches…. The Bio-Surveillance program will dramatically increase DoD's ability to detect a clandestine biological warfare attack in time to respond effectively and so avoid potentially thousands of casualties. The Bio-Surveillance program is seeking to achieve its objective by monitoring non-traditional data sources such as animal sentinels, behavioral indicators, and pre-diagnostic medical data.”

3

Communicator

“The specific goal of the Communicator program is to develop and demonstrate ‘dialogue interaction’ technology that enables warfighters to talk with computers, such that information will be accessible on the battlefield or in command centers without ever having to touch a keyboard. The Communicator Platform will be wireless and mobile, and will function in a networked environment. Software enabling dialogue interaction will automatically focus on the context of a dialogue to improve performance, and the system will be capable of automatically adapting to new topics so conversation is natural and efficient.”

“Hands-on exercises have been conducted involving small unit logistics operations with the Marines designed to stress test the technology in extreme environments.”

4

Effective, Affordable, Reusable Speech-to-Text (EARS)

“The Effective Affordable Reusable Speech-To-Text (EARS) program is developing speech-to-text (automatic transcription) technology whose output is substantially richer and much more accurate than currently possible. This will make it possible for machines to do a much better job of detecting, extracting, summarizing, and translating important information. It will also enable humans to understand what was said by reading transcripts instead of listening to audio signals. EARS is focusing on natural, unconstrained human-human speech from broadcasts and telephone conversations in multiple languages.”

5

Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD)

“The goal of the Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD) program is development of technologies and tools for automated discovery, extraction and linking of sparse evidence contained in large amounts of classified and unclassified data sources. EELD is developing detection capabilities to extract relevant data and relationships about people, organizations, and activities from message traffic and open source data. It will link items relating potential terrorist groups or scenarios, and learn patterns of different groups or scenarios to identify new organizations or emerging threats.”

“EELD's initial activities demonstrated the feasibility of extracting relationships from text, and validated the detectability of patterns representing terrorist groups and scenarios.”

6

Futures Markets Applied to Prediction (FutureMap)

“FutureMAP will concentrate on market-based techniques for avoiding surprise and predicting future events. Strategic decisions depend upon the accurate assessment of the likelihood of future events. This analysis often requires independent contributions by experts in a wide variety of fields, with the resulting difficulty of combining the various opinions into one assessment. Market-based techniques provide a tool for producing these assessments.

“There is potential for application of market-based methods to analyses of interest to the DoD [Department of Defense]. These may include analysis of political stability in regions of the world, prediction of the timing and impact on national security of emerging technologies, analysis of the outcomes of advanced technology programs, or other future events of interest to the DoD. In addition, the rapid reaction of markets to knowledge held by only a few participants may provide an early warning system to avoid surprise.”

7

Genisys

“The Genisys program's goal is to produce technology enabling ultra-large, all-source information repositories. To predict, track, and preempt terrorist attacks, the US requires a full-coverage database containing all information relevant to identifying: potential foreign terrorists and their possible supporters; their activities; prospective targets; and, their operational plans. Current database technology is clearly insufficient to address this need.”

8

Genoa

“Project Genoa is developing information technology for the intelligence community to rapidly and systematically accumulate evidence, facilitate collaboration (while protecting critical information), and test hypothesis that support decision-making at the national level. Bases on successful demonstrations, the Defense Intelligence Agency has agreed to be a transition partner for Project Genoa technology.”

9

Genoa II

“It will focus on developing information technology needed by teams of intelligence analysts and operations and policy personnel in attempting to anticipate and preempt terrorist threats to US interests….

“Genoa II will develop and deploy: 1) cognitive aids that allow humans and machines to ‘think together’ in real-time about complicated problems; 2) means to overcome the biases and limitations of the human cognitive system; 3) ‘cognitive amplifiers' that help teams of people rapidly and fully comprehend complicated and uncertain situations; and, 4) the means to rapidly and seamlessly cut across—and complement—existing stove-piped hierarchical organizational structures by creating dynamic, adaptable, peer-to-peer collaborative networks.”

10

Human ID at a Distance (HumanID)

“The goal of the Human Identification at a Distance (HumanID) program is to develop automated biometric identification technologies to detect, recognize and identify humans at great distances. These technologies will provide critical early warning support for force protection and homeland defense against terrorist, criminal, and other human-based threats, and will prevent or decrease the success rate of such attacks against DoD operational facilities and installations. Methods for fusing biometric technologies into advanced human identification systems will be developed to enable faster, more accurate and unconstrained identification of humans at significant standoff distances.”

The three main modes of automatic identification planned were face recognition (including long-range and infrared), iris recognition, and gait recognition. This last would involve using radar to analyze the way a person walks and I.D. them based on that. This form of Big Brotherism was accurately predicted by George Orwell in 1984.

11

Total Information Awareness System

“The goal of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program is to revolutionize the ability of the United States to detect, classify and identify foreign terrorists—and decipher their plans—and thereby enable the US to take timely action to successfully preempt and defeat terrorist acts. To that end, the TIA program objective is to create a counter-terrorism information system that: (1) increases information coverage by an order of magnitude, and affords easy future scaling; (2) provides focused warnings within an hour after a triggering event occurs or an evidence threshold is passed; (3) can automatically queue analysts based on partial pattern matches and has patterns that cover 90% of all previously known foreign terrorist attacks; and, (4) supports collaboration, analytical reasoning and information sharing so that analysts can hypothesize, test and propose theories and mitigating strategies about possible futures, so decision-makers can effectively evaluate the impact of current or future policies and prospective courses of action.”

12

Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization (TIDES)

“The Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization (TIDES) program is developing advanced language processing technology to enable English speakers to find and interpret critical information in multiple languages without requiring knowledge of those languages.”

13

Wargaming the Asymmetric Environment (WAE)

“The goal of the Wargaming the Asymmetric Environment (WAE) program is the development and demonstration of predictive technology to better anticipate and act against terrorists. WAE is a revolutionary approach to identify predictive indicators of attacks by and the behavior of specific terrorists by examining their behavior in the broader context of their political, cultural and ideological environment.

“Test results have demonstrated the feasibility of developing automated and adaptive behavior prediction models tuned to specific terrorist groups and individuals. Specifically, WAE has developed, in conjunction with DoD and the intelligence community, indications and warning models for select terrorist individuals and organizations. These indication and warning models have been tested historically, and in some cases operationally, to predict an active terrorist group's next action (attack/no attack, target characteristics, location characteristics, tactical characteristics, timeframes, and motivating factors), and test results have been shown to be statistically significant. To date, several models have been transitioned to DoD and the Intelligence Community partners. WAE will extend its predictive technology research to model a larger set of terrorist groups and individuals, and will strive to increase the level of detail for each predictive model.”