The dark and fascinating history of DARPA

If you’re reading this right now, you have one federal agency to thank: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

But DARPA (just ARPA prior to 1972) didn’t only invent the internet and GPS many decades ago; it's also deeply involved in researching everything under the sun, for better or for worse. This includes killer robots, maneuverable bullets that can travel six miles (or more), fully automated No Manning Required warships, self-repairing biological homes, plant-eating robots (EATR), self-driving cars (which already existed by 1984), light-bending invisibility technology, gene editing, and smart-powered exo-suits to create super soldiers. DARPA funds many projects that find their way onto the battlefield itself.

DARPA is understood to generally be at least several decades ahead on technology and discoveries that it keeps under wraps. The true limits of what it’s testing now remain speculative, but we can be sure it would make the most dystopian episode of 'Black Mirror' look tame.

As Sharon Weinberger writes in her 2018 book “The Imagineers of War”: “Today, the agency's past investments populate the battlefield: The Predator, the descendant of Amber, has enabled the United States to conduct push-button warfare from afar, killing enemies from the comfort of air-conditioned trailers in the United States.”

The list of DARPA’s greatest hits also includes spreading the reach of America’s vast surveillance state with DARPA’s first AI-related projects launched in the 1960s and testing out various deadly bioweapons and bioengineering projects from Agent Orange to the Brain Initiative Program, exploring the potential of humans controlling devices and technology with their minds.

Then there are HI-MEMS and Project Dragonfly: mini flying cyborgs that can spy and are outfitted with solar-powered guidance systems. Remote-controlled rats; mine-finding bees; and programmable, shape-shifting claytronics are just some of the items that we know of from unclassified, on-the-record projects that DARPA has disclosed, some of which are now in civilian and commercial use. How much is going on off the books?

A history of shadows

DARPA was first established in 1958 to counter the USSR after the launch of Sputnik, but it quickly switched away from a space focus after NASA was created a year later in 1959. It became a remarkably unconstrained agency with enormous funding and a constellation of research to invest in that would bolster military readiness and technological dominance. Its mission is to stay ahead of the curve at all times and innovate technology beyond the knowledge or capacity of adversaries.

The Heilmeier Catechism, named after former DARPA director George Heilmeier, takes on or rejects new projects, and research flows through industry and universities via DARPA funding. DARPA is remarkably small. As its official site notes, the agency “comprises approximately 220 government employees in six technical offices, including nearly 100 program managers, who together oversee about 250 research and development programs.”

First, the obvious: Many of DARPA’s innovations have improved people’s lives in various ways, even though they were originally designed to end lives or respond to situations where massive loss of life was imminent.

Some of the negatives have also become well known. Looking at past endeavors such as Operation Ranch Hand, DARPA developed Agent Orange to deforest jungle cover that the enemy in North Vietnam was hiding and operating under. Millions of gallons per day were sprayed out, ravaging enemy and civilian farms alike and leading to generations of cancer, health problems, and birth defects, including among veterans. First used in 1962, the presence of dioxin in Agent Orange was fully known by 1965, along with the discovery of its damage to unborn infants by 1967. Its use was discontinued by 1971.

When DARPA and its ally Monsanto were sued by veterans due to their illnesses after exposure to Agent Orange in the Vietnam War, DARPA simply denied it, cherry-picking scientists to cast doubt on the hundreds of thousands of suffering veterans. In the case of Monsanto, it quietly settled the case of domestic producers who developed cancer and diseases from producing and being in the environs of the substance stateside without taking official blame.

Killer tech

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The critical issue with DARPA lies in how much of its work is secret and its tight links with the intelligence community and high-tech industry. We just don’t know the full breadth of what it's working on because much of it is protected under national security confidentiality. We know that DARPA is very interested in tracking people's thoughts, feelings, and words.

By 1994, a little-known think tank named the Highlands Forum began working more closely with the Pentagon, providing an off-the-record link between the tech world, the defense industry, and the government. Private and off-the-record meetings operating under Chatham House rules are regularly held without fanfare. The organization is crucial for understanding how the military-industrial complex , which President Eisenhower warned about, is all about building bridges between public and private, civilian and officer. It’s also increasingly come to be defined by information operations in terms of shaping belief and tracking people’s beliefs as they winnow themselves into demographic and ideological categories formed by what they serve themselves from the internet’s vast buffet.

Whereas the early internet (ARPANET) arose out of military interest in maintaining wireless communications if phone lines and grids went down, later work on data mining, pattern recognition, and profiling became much more focused on anticipating, understanding, influencing, and even building the choice architecture to shape the actions of individuals and groups.

Researchers who can orient their work or lab around topics and areas that may interest DARPA can hit the jackpot and tap into a massive funding structure backed by the U.S. government to the tune of several billion dollars or more per year. By tapping into inchoate technologies and helping them out, DARPA can keep a finger in the pie of the cutting edge of research.

The Massive Digital Data Systems funding mechanism succeeded in moving massive funding through the National Science Foundation, academia, and other groups to get money to come up with a way to surveil people more effectively. This eventually found popular fruition with query flocking and association rule-mining in the Google search engine developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page and invested in by DARPA. Information people voluntarily gave out (and withheld) could now be put through vast AI systems to assign them reliable and telling digital fingerprints and predict and influence their behavior at scale. It’s no exaggeration to say that the CIA, NSA, and DARPA helped form Google into what it is today via the intelligence community’s Massive Digital Data Systems initiative, which operated between 1993 and 1999.

The U.S. intelligence community has financially backed numerous startups in order to dominate the information age, while the Highlands Group, DARPA, and confidentiality rules have succeeded in doing an end run around any real accountability for what’s being tested and implemented. What we do know is that ongoing U.S. involvement in global conflicts, mass surveillance, and increasingly heated rhetoric and profiling of the domestic population have all become a glaring reality in the past several decades.

When former CIA director and top Obama administration national security adviser John Brennan announced that the government’s security apparatus would track down every participant who broke the law on January 6, 2021, with a “laser-like” focus, he wasn’t lying, as subsequent jailing of people for taking photos, jeering at police, or walking into the Capitol began playing out across the country. As Brennan threatened at the time, “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians” are all very much on the government’s radar. Tracking down the government’s domestic enemies was helped along by, in some cases, family members informing on each other for participating in the January 6 protests in a manner reminiscent of socialist East Germany’s legion of citizen informants.

The Age of AI

As I wrote in a previous review of Shoshana Zuboff’s book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism," Zuboff contends that power structures want to “force a new collectivist order on humanity founded on the certainty of AI systems and to steadily take away people’s rights, freedoms, and even conscious thought, by limiting the choice architecture around us and conceptually shepherding people into increasingly tightly controlled avenues of mentation, decision, and action.”

There’s always an official-sounding and supposedly legitimate reason why surveillance and high-octane military technology and acceleration are necessary to use on the domestic front. But as Brennan’s threats above showed, the power to define who is a “religious extremist” or a “nativist” as well as to define why, exactly, that is “evil” or “illegal” has no controls on it except by those in control. The goalposts can be moved at any time, and powerful AI systems are there to click into place and comply.

Military dominance and technology development tend to go hand in hand. The danger, especially in the latter half of this century, is that technology is accelerating so rapidly and accountability so thin that the possibility of malicious actors within government or bureaucratic circles using tech to negatively control populations or accomplish nefarious goals is increasingly real, not to mention the prospect of enemy foreign powers copying or infiltrating such projects.

We already know American universities are heavily infiltrated by Chinese communist spies and others who run counter to U.S. interests. DARPA’s surveillance technology and AI investments are speeding ahead without brakes. Even if it hasn’t been publicly unveiled, we know that it’s only a matter of time until tools that can be used on foreign adversaries will also be unleashed on domestic enemies, even for purely political or cynical purposes. There’s no guarantee on who will deploy these technologies or why. To put it in the starkest terms: You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

DARPA is understood to generally be at least several decades ahead on technology and discoveries that it keeps under wraps. The true limits of what it’s testing now remain speculative, but we can be sure it would make the most dystopian episode of "Black Mirror" look tame. Groups like Highlands need more oversight. Regardless of its benefits, the truth remains starkly obvious: Out-of-control technocracy is a real and present danger to American liberty and vitality.