Homeland research agency seeks to clarify mission

Anthony Tether, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has finally gotten his wish.

Long before the current flap over DARPA's Terrorist Information Awareness program, Tether said in an interview with National Journal that he wanted to see the agency return to its glory days in the 1970s and 1980s, when "program managers were constantly getting the director in trouble with ideas and never taking no for an answer."

TIA, which seeks to create a system to let federal officials review billions of records of American citizens in a hunt for clues to potential terrorism, has done just that. The idea has been under assault by a wide swath of privacy advocates, and even the August resignation of program driver John Poindexter may not be enough to get TIA out of Congress' sights.

That may lead some people to question why Congress created a similarly named agency, the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency in the Homeland Security Department. The mere existence of HSARPA sparked widespread concern that in creating the department, Congress was authorizing the kind of data mining that TIA had been seeking.

But HSARPA Deputy Director Jane Alexander tried to clarify her agency's mission in July at a conference in Silicon Valley. She said her agency is trying to "stitch together" tech systems across the department's 22 agencies, including issues dealing with cyber, biological, chemical, radiological and nuclear security.

Alexander, who for years was a program manager and later became deputy director of DARPA, also said the privacy of Americans will be a key component of HSARPA research.

"The technology choices we want to make are ones that make Americans more comfortable rather than contributing to a sense of unease," she said.

Close observers of the two agencies said HSARPA is likely to have a shorter-term focus than DARPA, whose long-term timeframe has enabled it to engage in research that has led to major breakthroughs. The agency is the father of the Internet and created technologies leading to global positioning systems, microprocessor technologies and unmanned surveillance aircraft.

"In order to have a culture in which people do feel free to take technical risk and to think out of the box, you can't put in place a bureaucracy that is risk averse," a DARPA spokeswoman said.

Policy considerations about whether to deploy a technology are not up DARPA, she said; its mission is to ensure that the United States is not caught technologically unprepared.