What is IARPA Works

How IARPA Works

"Game-changing," "paradigm-shifting," "disruptive." These are all catchwords government officials use to describe the desired outcomes of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or IARPA for short. And they aren't kidding around. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) created IARPA to give the U.S. Intelligence Community a booster shot of fresh science and technology innovations for combating enemies in a globalized world.

You can call this new weapon in the American spying arsenal "eye-ar-pah," "yar-pah" or just plain "I-A-R-P-A". Spurred by the information lapses surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks, the ODNI recognized the need for an organization to fill in the gaps between the 16 member agencies of the Intelligence community [source: Adee]. Its plan was folded into the ODNI's overarching strategy for increased cohesion among the scattered organizations (dubbed the 100 Day Plan for IC Integration and Collaboration) [source: 100 Day Plan]. According to its Web site, IARPA will engage in "high-risk/high-payoff" research projects to accelerate the pace of intelligence gathering and analysis and ensure that the U.S. information systems are safe from intrusion. First presented to the Congress in January 2007, IARPA has made swift progress in its brief history, naming its first director, Lisa Porter, in January 2008 and publicizing the first unclassified project proposals [source:Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008].

Such rapid progress is key for the fledgling organization to meet its primary purpose of accelerating the pace of U.S. intelligence capabilities. But while the media have compared it to the "James Bond" "Q Branch," IARPA isn't all about exploding pens or tiny guns. It aims to build better spy devices and technologies and also focus heavily on the social and cultural backgrounds of its targets. As you'll learn in this article, these efforts take on many different forms, such as a radar-cloaking device, software that rapidly translates foreign languages and video-scanning programs.Up first, let's take a closer look at IARPA as an organization and how it plans to facilitate these cutting edge research projects.

IARPA Plans: Today and Tomorrow

For brilliant scientists and engineers who want a shot at IARPA, the organization actively recruits project managers, and your brilliant idea could be blessed for federal use. The public most likely will never know which ones make the cut because most IARPA efforts are classified [source: Adee]. But the intelligence organization has publicized some projects to give us glimpses into its high-security domain.

A project called "Reynard" has received a lot of buzz across the Internet because the next time you're playing "World of Warcraft" or exploring an online realm, an IARPA researcher could be watching you. An overview titled "Information and Behavior Exploitation in Virtual Worlds" explains the need to investigate the potential role of virtual reality platforms with cyber terrorism [source: Bush and Kisiel]. Since people can now exchange money through online games such as "Second Life" and covertly recruit and communicate with others around the globe, Reynard's goal is to find out just how much enemies could accomplish through these portals. Depending on what they learn, Reynard could evolve into a larger, longer-term study.

Watching people's casual online activities as described in Reynard is a mild example of data mining. More formalized data mining involves using special queries and codes to electronically filter information for signals of criminal or terrorist activity [source: Federation of American Scientists]. Interestingly, DARPA got in trouble with Congress in 2003 for a data mining project Total Information Awareness that zeroed in on too much private information [source: Shrader].

According to the February 2008 Data Mining Report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, IARPA has a handful of related ventures in the pipeline as part of its incisive analysis program office. In addition to Reynard, the report included four other data mining projects:

1. Knowledge Discovery and Dissemination: develop the technology that can pull information from multiple intelligence databases at once
2. Tangram: keeps tabs on people known as potential threats for any pattern changes that could warn of an elevated risk
3. Video Analysis and Content Extraction: like Google search for video -- software that can scan video for specific things or people
4. ProActive Intelligence: examines activities of enemy targets to try to find any distinct patterns

[source: Federation of American Scientists]

To handle the massive amount of data that intelligence employees must sift through, IARPA is also funding development of quantum computing capabilities [source: Porter]. These types of computers have the potential to process data much faster, which would undoubtedly make U.S. intelligence organizations more agile. For more information on the specifics of this technology, read How Quantum Computers Work.

IARPA has also started an endeavor called socio-cultural context in language (SCIL). As we discussed with the incisive analysis office, the purpose of SCIL is to incorporate the social and cultural background of language into the technology that interprets it. By understanding these contexts more clearly and immediately, IARPA believes that people will be better prepared to detect subtleties in language that can clue them in to targets' upcoming schemes.

With all of this and more going on, you may be wondering if the public will feel the effects of IARPA's work, as with DARPA and the Internet and GPS. Porter, the IARPA director, has predicted that since the technology that comes out of the research will be incredibly cutting-edge, there's a good chance it will trickle down to the stuff we use every day [source: Adee].

Retrieve from :HowStuffWorks