[xi_hyperon]

Interesting article on DARPA's successes and failures, with a tie-in to the projects they worked on with Poindexter until he resigned. I'm sorry to post the entire story, but a subscription is required to read it online.

Given the controversy as of late, thanks to TIA and FutureMap, do you think it is reasonable to allow DARPA to go on without more congressional oversight, or are they out of control?

I have to admit that after the Poindexter fiasco, I am torn. I can see the benefits of unfettered research, as it has allowed for many breakthroughs in technology. Many of these new technologies have filtered down to the public, which uses the resulting products everyday. On the other hand, the potential for the abuse of some technologies by government is there too. So. There is a clear benefit, and also a clear potential for trouble too. Can we successfully have one without the other? If so, is increased congressional oversight the way to achieve this? Discuss.

Army of Extreme Thinkers

The brilliant successes of DARPA, the Defense Department's advanced research agency, are matched only by its long list of bizarre failures

By Charles Piller, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times
August 14, 2003

Over the past half-century, an obscure Pentagon group, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has been behind some of the world's most revolutionary inventions - the Internet, the global positioning system, stealth technology and the computer mouse, to name a few.

It's an impressive record of success offset only by the fact that DARPA has also come up with some of the most boneheaded ideas ever to spring from the government.

Over the years, millions of taxpayer dollars have been spent on a variety of projects, from telepathic spies and jungle-tromping robotic elephants, to its most recent fiasco - FutureMAP, an online futures market designed to predict assassinations and bombings by encouraging investor speculation in such crimes.

"Morally repugnant," said Yale University economist Robert Shiller.
A "sick idea," said Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.).
"Unbelievably stupid," said Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.).

It's the type of criticism that DARPA is not only used to, but also lavishes on itself. "When we fail, we fail big," said former DARPA Director Charles Herzfeld, summing up the agency research disasters in an official 1975 history of DARPA.
Such is life on the absolute bleeding edge of technology.

DARPA has always shunned conventionality, using "radicalism" as its coda watchword. It sniffs out tantalizing, often fantastic, ideas, then casts off bureaucratic shackles to leap forward.

As the military agency charged with developing innovative, far-reaching research, it has asked brilliant minds to court failure for a chance at greatness.
Michael Dertouzos, the late director of the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, credited DARPA-supported work with half of the major innovations in computing, including breakthroughs in microcircuits and data-management systems.

"The mantra was 'high risk, high payoff,'." said Leonard Kleinrock, a UCLA computer scientist who was among an elite group of scientists recruited in the late 1960s to develop the nascent Internet. "A long leash, a lot of funding, a lot of support."

But the price of success has been an equally impressive record of scientific kookiness. And now, in a darker era of amorphous terrorist threats, even some of its staunchest supporters are feeling a twinge of anxiety over such projects as the FutureMAP terrorism market.

"These things seem truly ominous," said Gary Chapman, director of the 21st Century Project, a science policy research program at the University of Texas. "DARPA has become a scary sandbox for people whose objectives many Americans disagree with."

DARPA was founded in February 1958, four months after the Soviet Union's Sputnik satellite stunned the U.S. with the menacing prospect of being left behind scientifically.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency (renamed DARPA in 1972) was formed to make basic research a key element of national security. Roy W. Johnson, a handsome, blunt and hard-driving vice president at aerospace contractor General Electric Co., was picked as ARPA's first director.

Johnson set up the agency to find experts in physics, information technology, materials science and other fields, then showered them with funds and freedom. ARPA initially focused on rocketry, space exploration, ballistic missile defense and nuclear test detection, then broadened its range.

Eschewing sluggish peer- review of grant proposals, ARPA relied on enterprising program officers, many drawn from academia and industry, who selected projects based on hunches about the future.

"In the 1960s you could do really any damn thing you wanted, as long as it wasn't against the law or immoral," said Herzfeld , who directed ARPA from 1965 to 1967.

The agency was so open to ideas that in 1958 Johnson recommended paying an 11-year-old boy who wrote in with suggestions on how to build a space station. The letter mirrored military plans so closely that a security investigation was also ordered, according to the DARPA history.

One legendary manager was the late J.C.R. Licklider, an acoustical engineer and early mainframe computer expert. In 1962, then-ARPA Director Jack Ruina recruited "Lick," after reading his pioneering article, "Man Computer Symbiosis," in an engineering journal - a prescient vision of real-time, interactive computing.
Licklider disdained red tape, meetings and paperwork. He freed scientists to move as rapidly as possible toward his dream, the "Intergalactic Network." His wild idea became the Internet after years of DARPA-funded research.
Early agency leaders would describe projects "in terms of what they would do for the country, not just for the military," said Robert Taylor, a former program manager and a creator of the Internet.

Two DARPA technologies - very large-scale integrated circuits, or VLSI, and graphic-design software - were originally developed, in part, to manage daunting controls faced by military pilots who made split-second decisions in advanced jets.

But the work also helped create the computer workstation industry, including such companies as Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems.

The agency has "paid back its investment by orders of magnitude," said Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster at the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park.
This year, the agency's 160 program officers will dole out $2.7 billion on more than 200 projects in computing, space weapons, counter-terrorism, drone aircraft and biological defense, plus classified programs.

DARPA rotates program officers out after an average of four years to promote blue-sky thinking, said DARPA's current director, Anthony J. Tether. "You can take inordinate risks that you typically wouldn't take at a place where you think you'll be for 30 years," said Tether, an electrical engineer and former top executive with Ford Aerospace Corp. and Science Applications International Corp.

One project, budgeted at $12 million this year, is to build a "brain-machine interface" that would allow soldiers' thoughts to be "turned into acts performed by a machine," according to a DARPA summary. So far, they've gotten a monkey to move a robotic arm just by thinking.

DARPA is also sponsoring a Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas robot race next March to foster robotic research. The first land-based, driverless, fully- autonomous vehicle to navigate the 300 miles of road and desert will earn a hefty prize of $1 million.

DARPA's unlikely triumphs, however, have come at a high cost - 85% to 90% of its projects fail to accomplish their planned goals, although they sometimes spin off unanticipated technologies, according to Tether.

The list of failures is long and strange. During the 1970s DARPA studied telepathy and psychokinesis, the psychic manipulation of objects. "The Soviets had a woman who was fantastic," Tether said. "She could feel colors."
DARPA probed such methods to see, for example, if anyone could psychically peek around the globe for military advantage. "DARPA spent, for those days, considerable amounts of money because the impact would be tremendous if you could do it" - and disastrous if the Soviets won the telepathy race, Tether said. Ultimately the agency concluded that parapsychology, if real, could not be used on demand, and killed the project.

Among the agency's greatest fiascos was the decade-long program, code-named "AGILE," which spent $264 million on a wide range of social, anthropological and technical research during the Vietnam War.

(continued below)

[xi_hyperon]

One project aimed to create a "mechanical elephant" ostensibly capable of traversing on "servo mechanism 'legs'" through a jungle too dense for jeeps.
From the outset there were doubts. AGILE's chief scientist likened the project to "sending a million dollars to chase dimes around a rice paddy," according to the DARPA history.

Nonetheless, the scientist justified it as consistent with Vietnam-era profligacy, according to DARPA's history. "We knew it, but we did it," he said. "ARPA just behaved like the nation did [on Vietnam] and was as effective as what the nation did."

When then-DARPA Director Eberhardt Rechtin found out about the robotic pachyderm, he quashed the project, calling it a "damn fool" idea that would destroy DARPA's credibility if Congress ever found out.

DARPA also threw a team of experts at the perplexing challenge of improving field rations for South Vietnamese soldiers.

"Vietnamese combat units were jumping out of aircraft into battle with live pigs and chickens under their arms because there was no supply system," according to agency history. DARPA worked for months to find a suitable container for Vietnamese nuoc mam - a popular fermented fish sauce "purported to eat through tin cans," agency history noted. It does not say whether the effort succeeded.

DARPA insiders saw AGILE as a failure. But as Herzfeld later explained in the DARPA history: It was "an abysmal failure; a glorious failure."

Today, DARPA is in the midst of yet another transformation, seeking new tools to fight terrorists, who are often indistinguishable from ordinary people. In this battle, the most powerful weapon is information - data that must be scooped up by the terabyte on innocents as well as terrorists.

One of its leading programs, called Total Information Awareness, was directed by retired Adm. John M. Poindexter, the former national security advisor under President Reagan who was convicted in 1990 of lying to Congress about his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. The convictions were reversed on appeal.
Widely considered a brilliant iconoclast, Poindexter fit the DARPA culture of visionaries who could find provocative solutions to huge problems.

The Total Information Awareness system seeks to locate terrorists by "connecting the dots" in electronic data, such as driver's' licenses, purchases of airline tickets and chemicals, intelligence reports and public records. The system looks for patterns of terrorist activity in the records of foreign citizens and ordinary Americans.

Privacy advocates howled when they heard about the project, prompting Congress to restrict its scope. The system was recently renamed "Terrorism Information Awareness."

In an allied effort to track individuals, DARPA recently requested proposals for a $3.2-million project to catalog people by smell. The goal is to "determine whether genetically- determined odortypes can be used to identify specific individuals" and develop methods "for detecting and identifying specific individuals by such odortypes."

The search for more and better information also led DARPA to create the ill-fated FutureMAP, which Poindexter also headed.

It entailed a trading system, similar to those used to speculate on the future value of commodities such as pork bellies or oil, to bet on the likelihood of terrorist bombings or assassinations. The king of Jordan was noted as a theoretical target on DARPA's Web site.

While some financial experts said the system could have predictive value, FutureMAP's problems outweighed that prospect. Terrorists could easily subvert the system by betting on hoaxes or planned actions, and enrich themselves in the process.

Poindexter resigned. Tuesday and FutureMAP was terminated, but it spurred complaints that DARPA technocrats were politically tone-deaf.

Tether, who still supports the concepts behind Poindexter's programs, acknowledged that the project was poorly communicated. He conceded the public might think "people are crazy over there."

Now he's worried that Congress could push for more controls over the agency, a move that could wither its entrepreneurial spirit. "DARPA was created to get on the far side, to prevent technological surprise," he said. "You don't want to get oversight where you have to ask, 'Mother, may I?'

Critics, however, say letting DARPA proceed without greater oversight is courting trouble. "Who are the Poindexters we don't know about?" asked Saffo of the Institute for the Future.

The sense that DARPA's managers give too little thought to the broad implications of their work was reinforced last year when DARPA-funded biologists said they had built an infectious polio virus from its chemical components, like a biological erector-set project. The virus wasn't created as a weapon, but the work prompted fears that even more hazardous viruses might be similarly constructed.

"It set back discussions about how to properly defend against [biological weapons] by at least three years," said Steven Block, a Stanford University expert in biological warfare. New calls for regulation by Congress "had a chilling effect," he said.

Such episodes have alienated scientists who support unfettered research, but view DARPA's approach to military and national security problems as dangerously prone to errors in judgment.

"We have so few places in the United States that fund truly imaginative, `'out-of-the-box' research," Block said. "I wish there were more agencies like this, but I wish they were less like the one they call DARPA."

[nonhuman]

I don't get why people seem so hung up on FutureMAP. It turned out to be a failed idea, that hardly means that DARPA, as an institution, is also a failed idea. As the article said most of their projects fail to meet their design goals. But at the same time, even when they do, great new technologies are often born from those failures. Personally, I think DARPA is a great thing to keep around, continued innovation is never a bad thing.

[The Mick]

No thanks. I want my money back. I'm supposed to be paying taxes to uphold our laws and protect our borders, not to pay a group of whack jobs to run a research think tank and come up with horsecrap ideas like robotic elephants.

[finboy]

I really don't understand the controversy surrounding FutureMAP, and most of the detractors obviously don't understand the point of it. This is basically a "Dead Pool" on terrorist events, and would be incredibly useful for gauging people's attitudes and fears. I have yet to hear criticism from someone who understood the science.

[spacefreak]

Originally posted by The Mick:
No thanks. I want my money back. I'm supposed to be paying taxes to uphold our laws and protect our borders, not to pay a group of whack jobs to run a research think tank and come up with horsecrap ideas like robotic elephants.

There are plenty of other places to save taxpayer dollars before cutting out DARPA's funding.

So many people, especially non-creatives, think innovation is something that comes easy. For every brilliant idea, there are 100 crappy, off the wall ideas. That's the nature of innovation. One has to sort through all the crap to find and refine the one idea worth while.

The elephant project was a mistake, and no one in the department contradicts that. But to characterize DARPA's entire existance by that one project is ridiculous.

It'd be like saying you don't support NASA and its 'group of whack jobs to run a research think tank and come up horsecrap ideas like machines that transport and blow up astronauts in space.

[The Mick]

Originally posted by spacefreak:
There are plenty of other places to save taxpayer dollars before cutting out DARPA's funding.

So many people, especially non-creatives, think innovation is something that comes easy. For every brilliant idea, there are 100 crappy, off the wall ideas. That's the nature of innovation. One has to sort through all the crap to find and refine the one idea worth while.

The elephant project was a mistake, and no one in the department contradicts that. But to characterize DARPA's entire existance by that one project is ridiculous.

It'd be like saying you don't support NASA and its 'group of whack jobs to run a research think tank and come up horsecrap ideas like machines that transport and blow up astronauts in space.

I know what the creative process is like, and I know that there are always more failures then successes. My beef lies with taking my tax dollars and funnelling them into all of these various scientific experiments and research projects. If you ask me, they could be done privately, perhaps even better and less expensively. NASA is an outdated department, and also should not be operated on taxpayer money unless it was to launch defense satellites, etc. Scientific missions should be paid for privately, and NASA should be operated as a private non-profit entity.

[voodoo]

I think DARPA is cool and all - but then again I ain't paying for it now am I

The abyssmal failures of DARPA are very Microsoftish so there is something wrong with them. Maybe just too much money allocated to them. That is M$'s problem.

[spacefreak]

Originally posted by The Mick:
Scientific missions should be paid for privately, and NASA should be operated as a private non-profit entity.

So should Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security. Privitize it all.

[The Mick]

Originally posted by spacefreak:
So should Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security. Privitize it all.

I definitely agree with you regarding Social Security except I wouldn't privatize it, I would kill it. Stop taking my tax dollars that I'll never see returned to me, let people who are over 40 keep putting money into it, the rest of us get an immediate refund and the program eventually goes away. However, I'm a weirdo when it comes to politics. I'm primarily a Libertarian, but I do believe in socialized health care. I just feel strongly that all (legal) Americans should have access to medical care regardless of their social or financial status.

[spacefreak]

Originally posted by The Mick:
I just feel strongly that all (legal) Americans should have access to medical care regardless of their social or financial status.

But all legal Americans do have access to medical care. When is the last time you heard of a hospital turning away an ailing or dying person due their financial status? I'm not saying that a poor cancer victim is going to be able to be treated by the best in the field, but such a small percentage can obtain that care regardless.

I feel that if medicine is socialized, the financial incentives for the best and brightest to pursue medical careers, as well as for drug companies to invest as much as they do into drug research and development (and medical devices, etc), will ultimately hurt the entire US public. In the US, if you need a certain procedure, you can get it done relatively quickly. Countries with socialized medicine are know for their waiting lists. If I need an operation, I want it as soon as possible.

Additionally, we all can see how inefficient the government runs other national programs. A socialized health system would be a disaster.

Here are some quotes on existing socialized health care systems

"Shortages of skilled workers, low morale, long queues for services, crumbling facilities and corrupt practises. Is this a picture of your typical industry in Soviet Russia 40 years ago? No, welcome to today’s British National Health Service (NHS) in all its naked glory." - Roland Watson, August 6, 2001

Whether they admit it or not, those who advocate 'making drugs more affordable for American seniors' are actually headed down a slippery slope to price controls, free-market analysts charge. They should take a look at how price controls in Europe have led to rationing of, and delayed access to, new anticancer drugs." - Stephen D. Moore, July 21, 2000

Doctors, nurses, patients -- indeed everyone involved in Britain's socialized system of medicine --say the 49-year-old plan has become so bad that words like 'deteriorating,' 'unraveling' and 'no slack at all' are being used to describe it. An aging population, more expensive technology and government funding cutbacks have all helped drive the system to the breaking point." -

About half of all British income tax payments are swallowed by the National Health Service (Britain's socialized, 'single payer' health care system). It is claimed that nobody dies because he can not afford healthcare, they just die waiting. - Stephen D. Moore

It is obvious by now that Bill Clinton and Al Gore intend to make health care a big issue in this year's presidential race. My country, Canada, has been cited often as a health-care model for the U.S. by virtue of the availability of 'free' care and low-cost pharmaceuticals. Yet it would be a costly and tragic error for American seniors to conclude that they would be better served by Canadian-style health care or for American legislators to assume that they can selectively opt for price controls on pharmaceuticals without damage to health-care quality. - William McArthur, former chief coroner for British Columbia

Imagine a world in which you're forbidden to spend your own money to obtain medical care. Imagine that, regardless of your personal needs, you're forced to rely on the government for health care, no matter how long it takes or how substandard it may be. A far-fetched Orwellian nightmare? Hardly. That's precisely how the Canadian health-care system operates. - James Frogue and Robert Moffit, December 25, 2000

While the French proudly tout their Noble Prize-winning organization “Medecins sans Frontieres” (Doctors without Borders), Canadian politicians are being forced to acknowledge that their health care system has become “Medicine sans Docteurs.” - Merrill Matthews Jr., Ph.D. and Kerri Houston, May 1, 2000

The Canadian health-care system of single-payer, socialized insurance is in trouble. Yet Congress and the president continue to push the American system in the same direction. As Canada's national government slashes spending on medical care in order to reduce the deficit, local provinces are reducing medical staff. In Ontario, pregnant women are being sent to Detroit because no obstetricians are available. Specialists of all kinds are in short supply. Patients have to wait eight weeks for an MRI, ten weeks for referral to a specialist, and four months for heart bypass surgery. - Michael J. Hurd, November 1997

I got these quotes from this website, which also has a lot of links to some in-depth studies of socialized health care systems already in existence.

Sorry for the derail.