Posts Tagged ‘darpa’

This semester, in my Science and Technology in the Global Arena course, I wrote a five page assessment of “knowledge discovery” tools for counterterrorim efforts. I focused primarily on the most famous effort, DARPA’s Total Information Awareness project, but the concerns apply to the many data mining endeavors of counterterrorist organizations. Here’s an excerpt and the PDF of the paper (licensed CC-BY):

“Total Information Awareness and its progeny remain a much sought after tool in the fight against asymmetric threats. However, in their history and current forms, knowledge discovery systems remain woefully unprepared to deal with the unique technical difficulties presented by terrorism. A lack of modeling and presence of inaccurate data, resulting in a crippling amount of false positives, seems to confine these efforts to the realm of highly speculative research unfit for wide deployment in the law enforcement and intelligence communities. “

Paul Starr’s history of media is getting better with the page:

“…the long absence of military concern from communications policy may have helped to create the lead in telecommunications in the first place. In early nineteenth-century continental Europe, the original military conception of the telegraph impeded its commercial development. Security-minded telecommunications policies tended to militate against easily accessible, widely distributed networks, distorting both allocational priorities and architectural choices, to the disadvantage of long-term growth. A mere tool of civil society and local commerce, the telephone originally had little appeal to the military, in particular, and to the state, in general. States that were strong relative to civil society did not invest heavily in telephone service. That was the case in the major European states compared to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Similarly, the far greater domination of the state over civil society in the Soviet world helps to explain its lag relative to the West in the development of the telephone during the twentieth century. As World War I illustrated, wartime state support could generate technological innovation in communications. But it is one thing to have individual spin-offs from military projects, and quite another to have a framework for communications shaped by state-security concerns.

Although the Pentagon’s research division, DARPA, played an integral part in the creation of the net, it has developed in large part without military control. Civil society has made the Internet the amazing tool it is today, but that may be changing. Nations across the globe are developing plans to militarize the Internet and see it as an integral part of future war-making. In the USA, the Air Force has created a central command for cyberspace and has plans to continue down the path of framing the Internet’s development as a security question. Is it inevitable? Has the Internet developed enough in civil society that state control won’t harm it?

Paul Starr’s history of media is getting better with the page:

“…the long absence of military concern from communications policy may have helped to create the lead in telecommunications in the first place. In early nineteenth-century continental Europe, the original military conception of the telegraph impeded its commercial development. Security-minded telecommunications policies tended to militate against easily accessible, widely distributed networks, distorting both allocational priorities and architectural choices, to the disadvantage of long-term growth. A mere tool of civil society and local commerce, the telephone originally had little appeal to the military, in particular, and to the state, in general. States that were strong relative to civil society did not invest heavily in telephone service. That was the case in the major European states compared to America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Similarly, the far greater domination of the state over civil society in the Soviet world helps to explain its lag relative to the West in the development of the telephone during the twentieth century. As World War I illustrated, wartime state support could generate technological innovation in communications. But it is one thing to have individual spin-offs from military projects, and quite another to have a framework for communications shaped by state-security concerns.

Although the Pentagon’s research division, DARPA, played an integral part in the creation of the net, it has developed in large part without military control. Civil society has made the Internet the amazing tool it is today, but that may be changing. Nations across the globe are developing plans to militarize the Internet and see it as an integral part of future war-making. In the USA, the Air Force has created a central command for cyberspace and has plans to continue down the path of framing the Internet’s development as a security question. Is it inevitable? Has the Internet developed enough in civil society that state control won’t harm it?