The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec) August 16, 2003 Saturday Final Edition SECTION: Review; Pg. E1 / BREAK LENGTH: 1346 words HEADLINE: Shadowy agency mixes triumphs, disasters: DARPA encourages offbeat thinking but terrorism futures were a bust SOURCE: Los Angeles Times BYLINE: CHARLES PILLER BODY: Over the past half-century, an obscure Pentagon group, the Defence 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 Senator Barbara Boxer. 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. DARPA has always shunned conventionality, using "radicalism" as its coda. 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 asks 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 University of California, Los Angeles 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 United States 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. 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 also was 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, a prescient vision of real-time, interactive computing. 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. This year, the agency's 160 program officers will dole out $2.7 billion on more than 200 projects in computing, space weapons, counterterrorism, drone aircraft and biological defence, plus classified programs. DARPA rotates program officers out after an average of four years there, to promote blue-sky thinking, said DARPA's current director, Anthony J. Tether. DARPA's unlikely triumphs have come at a high cost - 85 per cent to 90 per cent 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. 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. One project aimed to create a "mechanical elephant" ostensibly capable of traversing on "servo mechanism 'legs' " through a jungle. 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. 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 Admiral John Poindexter, the former national security adviser under President Ronald 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. 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. 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."