NEWS
Viewpoints

31 July 2003
Houston Chronicle
37

Thoughts on terror war

Internet once a `scheme'

Regarding the Chronicle's July 30 editorial, "Betting on Terror / Insane 
scheme should spell end of bizarre defense agency": While I agree that a 
"terror futures market" may be too far over the top to ever see the light of 
day, I do not agree that this should result in the demise of the agency. 
After all, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is all about 
advanced research, and many ideas coming out of research labs can seem 
rather bizarre when they first appear.

In fact, one of the ideas to come out of ARPA (the Defense Department's 
predecessor to DARPA)- the Advance Research Projects Agency, formed after 
the Soviet Union's 1957 launch of Sputnik - was a means to ensure that the 
government could continue to communicate in the event of a nuclear war using 
a "self-healing" computer network with a lot of redundancy built in. That 
network is now called the Internet.

So, please, even though it is obvious that you consider John Poindexter to 
be the military equivalent of U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay, R- Sugar Land, please 
don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Ed Truitt, Sugar Land