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Iran-Contra scandal. In early 2002, the edge of American high technology. lips, the executive administrative director

issue
Bush administration enlisted Poindexter The center’s overlapping relationships at IMSC, repeatedly promised but never
to “break down the stovepipes” that have with Darpa and several key corporate delivered a list of Darpa grant-recipients
separated the military and commercial contractors at the Department of Defense at IMSC. (Somewhat ironically, an Inter-



Fluxion
components of the Internet for the past —including Raytheon, Boeing, General net search quickly yielded the list that had
quarter-century. Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman—has been withheld.)
While some members of Congress fret fostered a short-term, product-focused And IMSC researcher Cyrus Shahabi
Culture
over quaint intrusions like wiretapping, ethos that some IMSC researchers see —whose work on programs that allow
the Department of Defense—despite the as a threat to the traditional ideal of powerful computers to sift through Inter-
furor over TIA—deploys technologies that university-based science, which tends to net data at extraordinarily high processing
can instantly assemble a psychological value knowledge for its own sake rather speeds is most closely related to the Total
profile of an unsuspecting person from its utility for producing profits or serving Information Awareness controversy—
digitized voice or surveillance-camera political ends. initially denied any connection with Darpa,
data or from keystrokes at a computer “It’s painful,” said Shri Narayanan, a then failed to reply to requests for an
connected to the Internet. Powell did not professor of computer science, linguis- interview after being e-mailed a list of his
shrink from the implications of this dra- tics, and psychology. His Darpa-funded Darpa-funded projects.
matic expansion in the scope of electronic research has produced software capable None of this will come as a surprise to
information. of isolating individual voices in digital almost anyone familiar with the history
“Yes, it means Big Brother goes to the audio streams and real-time, speech-to- of Darpa. Though it has used billions of
next stage,” he said, “but the information speech translation of Farsi into English. dollars in public money to influence the
and technology are available to everyone, “They want answers now. Project cycles culture of university research in the hard
so everyone goes to the next stage.” have changed quite a bit—they’re now sciences for more than six decades, a
“TiA's [Total information Awarness program] going to happen,” said the former Wyden staffer.
“it’s just not going to be called TiA, and it might not be the government doing it.”
Everyone, that is, with a financial stake on a quarterly business model, but ideally manic sense of urgency and an aversion to
in IMSC’s research. In addition to the $32 university research should support faculty fresh air and sunlight are traits with which
million founding grant that the IMSC won and students over the longer term.” the agency was endowed at its concep-
from the National Science Foundation a Alexandre Frannullois, another IMSC tion.
decade ago, the center and its comple- researcher, expressed a similar lament.
ment of about a dozen researchers have Frannullois has been involved in developing Beleaguered Outsiders
received tens of millions of dollars from the software architecture for “immer- “Darpa was born of America’s post-
corporations and other government agen- sipresence,” IMSC’s mind-bending Sputnik Cold War hysteria,” said Ann
cies with an interest in specific areas of signature project, in which an “aware” Finkbeiner, author of The Jasons: The
IMSC research. computer system uses its perceptions Secret History of Science’s Postwar Elite.
All of the projects that support the de- of a user’s responses to audio and visual “Some of the payoffs of Darpa-sponsored
velopment of sensory awareness technolo- components of a specially designed media research”—like the stealth bomber,
gies and the deep Internet architectures environment—in other words, a semi-sen- satellite-based global positioning systems,
required to expand this awareness—including tient version of Star Trek’s holodeck that and the Internet, which was born in the
research into high-speed recording and can be used either for civilian or military 1960s as Arpanet—“are spectacular. Oth-
sorting programs that can sift through training purposes—to produce an experi- ers are not so spectacular. Darpa’s fatal
vast amounts of Internet data—have been ence indistinguishable from reality. flaw is that it tends to support scientists
funded in whole or in part by the Defense “Funding agencies have begun to who feel like beleaguered outsiders.”
Advance Research Projects Agency, a half- want instant gratification,” Frannullois said. Finkbeiner may have inverted the
century-old division of the Department of “They say, ‘If we give you 10 times the re- factors in this equation; if the experience
Defense better known as Darpa. sources, can you get it next year?’ That’s of IMSC’s researchers is any indication,
For all its ruddy-brick and linoleum not research.” it may be that Darpa infuses a feeling of
mid-’70s innocuousness, the cramped The influence of Darpa at the Inte- insecurity into the research communities
engineering building that houses IMSC grated Media Systems Center has also that seek its support.
is emblematic of the power that business nurtured an ethos that tends more toward In any case, the events of September 11,
and military interests exert at the leading opacity than transparency. Nichole Phil- 2001, exposed and amplified the pat-
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