Cliff Montgomery – Feb. 26th, 2013
Kade Crockford is hopping mad.
“The government has largely gotten away with blowing up the parts of the Bill of Rights” that in a bygone era had hampered officials’ attempts to spy on anyone they wished. Now the feds may investigate you “absent any suspicion of wrongdoing or probable cause,” recently wrote the rights activist.
Crockford serves as Director of the Technology for Liberty Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Massachusetts.
“Still, the most secretive and powerful intelligence agencies want something that […is…] potentially a lot more dangerous for civil liberties,” added Crockford.
“In a Federal Business Opportunities advertisement dated January 14, 2013,” continued the ACLU official, “the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) offered up a challenge to companies like Raytheon and the innumerable other military and surveillance contractors that work on data management solutions.”
IARPA’s “Broad Agency Announcement” declared its Office of Incisive Analysis (IA) “is soliciting proposals for research that will maximize insight from the information the Intelligence Community collects, in a timely fashion.”
Established in 2006, IARPA (pronounced, ‘yarpa’) is “a fledgling office charged with outfitting US spooks with the highest-tech information-gathering gadgetry,” according to a Wired Magazine article published in 2008.
IARPA is a research agency under the care of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence. The agency is an amalgam of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Intelligence Technology Innovation Center, the National Security Agency’s Disruptive Technology Office (DTO) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s National Technology Alliance.
The agency “invests in high-risk, high-payoff research that has the potential to provide our nation with an overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries. This research is parsed among three Offices: Smart Collection, Incisive Analysis, and Safe & Secure Operations,” stated the announcement.
“We are pursuing new sources of information from existing and novel data, and developing innovative techniques that can be utilized in the processes of analysis,” added the announcement.
And just what should these “innovative techniques” entail? That is made clear in IARPA’s announcement.
“The following topics (in no particular order) are of interest to IA:
- Methods for developing understanding of how knowledge and ideas are transmitted and change within groups, organizations, and cultures,
- Methods for analysis of social, cultural, and linguistic data,
- Multidisciplinary approaches to assessing linguistic data sets,
- Methods for measuring and improving human judgment and human reasoning,
- Methods for extraction and representation of the information in the non-textual contents of documents, including figures, diagrams, and tables,
- Methods for understanding and managing massive, dynamic data,
- Analysis of massive, unreliable, and diverse data,
- Methods for assessments of relevancy and reliability of new data,
- Methods for understanding the process of analysis and potential impacts of technology,
- Multidisciplinary approaches to processing noisy audio and speech,
- Development of novel top-down models of visual perception and visual cognition,
- Methods for analysis of significant societal events,
- Methods for estimation and communication of uncertainty and risk,
- Novel approaches for mobile augmented reality applied to analysis and collection,
- Methods for topological data analysis and inferences of high-dimensional structures from low- dimensional representations,
- Methods for the study of algorithms stated in terms of geometry (computational geometry),
- Methods for geo-location of text and social media,
- Novel approaches to bio-surveillance,
- Methods to make machine learning more useful and automatic,
- Methods to construct and evaluate speech recognition systems in languages without a formalized orthography, and,
- Methods and approaches to quantifiable representations of uncertainty simultaneously accounting for multiple types of uncertainty.”
“Offerors should demonstrate that their proposed effort has the potential to make revolutionary, rather than incremental, improvements to intelligence capabilities,” the IARPA announcement declared.
The agency’s search for proposals will span from January 14th, 2013 – January 31st, 2014.
