Defense agency makes progress on homeland technologies

PHILADELPHIA - Seven months after its launch in response to the Sept. 11 attacks, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's counterterrorism division has made significant progress on a wide range of unconventional homeland security technologies, a top DARPA official said Wednesday during a conference sponsored here by the Government Emerging Technologies Alliance.

Those tools include bio-surveillance programs that could help spot unusual outbreaks by tracking over-the-counter medication sales, and multi-modal biometric tools that could identify terrorist suspects from a distance by focusing on "face and gait."

"Gait is the way people walk, and the signature it creates," Robert Popp, deputy director of DARPA's Information Awareness Office (IAO) told high-tech professionals from the government and private sector during a panel discussion on emerging counterterrorism technologies.

Popp said the IAO, headed by retired Navy admiral John Poindexter, who served as President Reagan's national security adviser, is developing ways to track a wide range of other "signatures" left by potential terrorists, such as credit card purchases, pilot's license applications and scientific degrees that could indicate expertise with weapons of mass destruction.

"Our view is that if terrorist organizations are going to engage in adverse actions against the United States, it's going to involve people, and those people make transactions, and those transactions leave a signature in the information space," Popp said. "So much of what we're trying to do is utilize information technology to detect and classify and identify these different signatures that correspond to terrorist organizations, activities and events."

That type of "transactional data" will help "key nodes" within the national security and intelligence communities to identify and prevent terrorist threats, according to Popp. "What we're trying to do is supplement traditional intelligence with this kind of information, and provide access to that through a collaborative, multi-agency analytical team," he said.

Popp's office is developing other technologies to provide that type of transactional data, including language translation programs to allow English-speaking intelligence analysts to quickly exploit foreign-speaking text, and an automated "speed-reading" system to enable counterterrorism officials sift through enormous amounts of intelligence data more efficiently.

"You feed your document into the technology, and it will highlight the things that you would normally focus on, if you were to speed-read," Popp said.

He added that the IAO's "hodgepodge of technology programs" is part of an overarching "total information awareness" system. A prototype of this total information awareness system is being tested at the Army's Intelligence Security Command in Fort Belvoir, Va.

"A key strategy to us, in terms of getting technology transitioned into the hands of the warfighters and the analysts, is to do the development and the integration and the experimentation ... right on site," Popp said. "On-site development ... is a key ingredient in our mission."