CAPITAL FOCUS; Darpa, like it or not, must push envelope FINANCE Ted Bunker 04 August 2003 Boston Herald 027 Tony Tether should just say no if John Poindexter offers to resign from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the wake of a flap over a planned futures market to predict, among other things, terrorist attacks in the Mideast. Letting a little congressional heat force anyone from Darpa, as it's known, would undermine the tiny Pentagon unit's future. And that would threaten a calamity of immense proportions. Darpa's mission is to "think outside of the box," said Vinton Cerf, a one-time Darpa scientist who helped construct one of the agency's signature achievements: the Internet. Cerf, who worked at Darpa when the Internet's precursor, Arpanet, was being perfected, helped invent the TCP/IP computer protocols which still lie at the heart of the Net's operation. Yet many people might have found the Arpanet's creation to be morally reprehensible. It's a good thing U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D- Calif.) wasn't in office in those days - we might not have the World Wide Web today. Boxer has demanded the agency end the "career" of the person who thought up the futures market project. In creating what became the Internet, Darpa scientists wanted to find a way to make distant computer links capable of surviving nuclear war. That would ensure that U.S. forces would remain operational after an initial attack and able to deliver a retaliatory strike - the basis for the Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD, policy that many believed deterred aggressors. While the rationale recalls Dr. Strangelove, no one was fired for creating the Internet. And just to mention a few other notable Darpa achievements, no one has been punished for coming up with the M-16 rifle, "stealth" technology or the unmanned aircraft recently used in Afghanistan and Iraq. Among current projects, one that will surely enrage animal rights activists involves wiring a monkey's brain to a remote device, in this case a mechanical arm at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It appears that the monkey's brain activity alone can move the arm in intended ways. Darpa's mission, since it was created at the height of the Cold War, has been to roam the realms of what Tether, the current Darpa director, calls "the far side" and cultivate off-the-wall, but good, ideas. Doing that means working with people who have those ideas. And that's what the current outcry over Poindexter threatens to make far more difficult. "The agency continues in my view to be oriented toward really unusual, challenging ideas - things that are potentially very risky, that may not work out at all, but could have a big payoff," Cerf said on Friday, as reports circulated that Poindexter might resign. Poindexter, the director of Darpa's Information Awareness office, became a political football again last week after two Democrats denounced the futures market project. The market would have let participants bet and win money - what critics decried as a morally repugnant idea. Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) raised alarms about it on Monday, and by Thursday other senators were calling for hearings and for Poindexter's head. Poindexter's been in the political hotseat before - as national security adviser to President Reagan, and more recently, as the overseer of Darpa's data analysis Total Information Awareness program, since renamed Terrorist Information Awareness. But canning Poindexter - or even letting the retired rear admiral quit - would send a chilling signal to the creative people out there on the far side: Don't come here with your wild ideas, unless you want to risk a political lynching. Darpa has shown how political concerns can rein in its activities, by halting work on the futures market concept. Cerf, now a senior vice president at MCI, said the reaction on Capitol Hill "bears all of the trademarks of the usual, kind of shallow analysis of what's going on there" at Darpa. But Cerf said he understands the "politically awkward" situation that Tether found his agency in, given the characterization of the futures market project. While he was at Darpa, from 1976 to 1982, Cerf said he learned that a key element was in describing problems you wanted to solve, so that academic researchers would work on them and not be turned off by potential military applications. "The other side of it was to explain to the Congress what it was that we were trying to do, why it had value." "You learn very quickly that you had to sell the ideas in the right context," Cerf said. So far, Darpa has shown it has a tin ear for the public relations aspects of what Poindexter has been up to, even though his unit was set up after Sept. 11, 2001, to find new ways to deal with terrorist threats. It needs to work on that, and quick. Caption: FALL GUY? John Poindexter may become a victim of politics in Darpa's futures market flap. AP photo