The Bad Penny
… some things keep turning up.
Nukes & Spooks wonder What’s IARPA?.
The name, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, is apparently designed to make people think of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA] which known for supporting wild and crazy research that results in things like, well, the Internet, but IARPA would seem to have a different purpose.
The guess is that this is the latest iteration of the Total Information Awareness project, the incredibly invasive and worthless project started under Rumsfeld by John Poindexter. Congress keeps thinking it has been killed and it keeps being resurrected by its faithful believers.
They don’t seem to be aware that psychohistory is from a piece of fiction, and wishing it were true won’t make it happen.
13 comments
OH Geez! Yeah… I agree.
Oh.. and ROFL @ the psychohistory reference! *shaking head and grinning like a fool*! Ahhhh… I miss Asimov! 🙁 *sigh*
Hmmm. I just used Google… not laughing now. As you know Bryan, you can tell a LOT about what’s happening by the people being hired and the org’s want ads.
IARPA Employment Opportunities
IARPA and the Virtual Long Tail by Lewis Shepherd
There is something about the location, Prince George’s County, MD, that I can’t put my finger on! I’ll blame the codeine. Hmmm. Something is tugging at my memory strings…
IARPA’s First Director: Dr. Lisa Porter
Lisa Porter Has Her Head In The Sand
Oh yes! She’s a Bushite! What else? But nice to have some evidence. *sigh*
This will be fun.
Just found some more….
Read the full report (PDF) at: FAS DNI Datamining Report
That’s a slam-dunk.
I was thinking of a former posting I had in Anne Arundel County, MD at an Army installation named for a Civil War general.
Yep, TIA never dies, it just changes it’s initials.
This is such a total waste of time, like questioning people at random to solve a crime. You gather intelligence by targeting your efforts.
Since they don’t seem to be catching any real terrorists, how will they know if the system works? Realistically, there’s plenty of evidence that terrorists are from the upper-middle class and above with a good education. It is the children of the elite that we should be watching, not vegen Quakers.
That of course that assumes that they want to catch *Terrorists* and not vegans (Quakers or not). This is all just part of their *Conformity with our view at any cost!* program.
STASI by any other name, still stinks!
It’s been a long time but isn’t Prince George’s where Ft. Meade is? The main headquarters of NSA and a whole bunch of other spook outfits. When I was there for a short time we were working on advanced intelligence gathering stuff. Besides maybe some of the underground stuff out west Fort Meade is one hell of a secure place.
As you say Bryan TIA just morphs its initials but it’s mission never changes.
Ahhh yes! Of course… Thanks Fallenmonk! 😀 I was about to do some more research into that, I’ve been busy the past several hours with other things. 🙂
Of course, now that I’ve just reread the article Bryan posted:
However… that wasn’t what was tugging at my memory. It was this:
IARPA Will Locate at UM’s Research Park
M-Square, the *respectable face* (front) for a a lot bad things. I remember now learning about things that eventually passed through UMD, or has some connection to it somewhere along the torturous thread during my own “data-mining” foray into the USA. 😉 🙂
And it becomes obvious now why the Dem’s caved on FISA:
Democrats… Republicans… what was the difference again? I’m confused. They look the same to me.
I see Hoyer has been getting a lot of IT & Telco related contracts in his district since 2006. (I sorted the results by Product/Services Look for: ‘Automatic data processing and telecom. services’).
Contracts Performed in Maryland 5 (Steny H. Hoyer)
I like this site! LOL
This was fascinating!
Federal Assistance by Recipient Congressional District
Seems Florida got the biggest chunk of that pie! Almost $2trillion all up, most of it in unknown districts. Hmmm.
NAS Pensacola, NAS Whiting Field, NAS Key West, Eglin AFB, Tyndall AFB, McDill AFB are all in Florida.
They include Naval, Air Force, & Ranger training, weapons development and testing, HQ Central Command, HQ Special Operation Command, two fighter wings, etc.
“Shock and Awe” is brought to you with a serving of orange juice.
Fort Meade is in Anne Arundel County, but there are “annexes” in other areas.
All politics is local, and Congresscritters have no problem throwing away any scruples they might have left if it means more Federal money for their district.
BTW, with all that spending, overall Florida doesn’t get back all of the money it pays in Federal taxes.
Could we rename Steny “Unge,” so that he becomes Unge Hoyer? (Ungeheuer…)
Now that you mention it, he does look a bit like Shrek.
Hmmm, you guys seem a little over-caffeinated. Since when did “disruptive technology” go from being a bad thing – when the US Government decided it could be used not only to sell ads & mp3s, but to find the people who’ve declared war on our country?
IARPA is not “TIA renamed.” Elements of TIA were badly misguided, and killed for a reason.
Welcome, Lewis.
You know Lewis, the military, intel people, cops, and computer geeks all seem to be attracted to caffeine. Since the people commenting on this, with the possible exception of you, are all computer geeks, and the majority are also veterans from one or more of the other groups, there is a major chance of a lot of caffeine involved, and a solid understanding of what’s going on.
The problem is that it is unConstitutional for the government to do it without a warrant. We remember what happened during the Hoover years at the FBI, and the Nixon years. We don’t like it.
The separate problem is that it doesn’t work. What is the pattern of a terrorist? Without a pattern it doesn’t do you any good to gather the information. When you are selling something you can discover who your customers are and target similar people, but there is no pattern for a terrorist.
What you may not understand is that the best and most dangerous operatives make damn sure they don’t settle into a pattern. It’s the same with encryption which why random number generation is so important – to prevent a pattern that can be exploited from developing.
Rather than wasting time, money, and resources on something is isn’t legal or effective, we would rather they started to actually use those resources to do something that is proven to be effective – following the evidence collected back to the people responsible.