Those folks at DARPA – that's the Pentagon’s blue-sky gadget agency -- sure like to keep you off balance. They’re now saying that their controversial LifeLog project, a vast database that would accummulate all known information on a person, is not about spying on terrorists, much less you or me.
No, instead it’s kind of a Ph.D program for a new generation of computers. Once the computer absorbs the information from various “threads” of a person’s life, the story goes, it’ll be able to think and act independently. This, in turn, would allow it to act as a Perceptive Assistant that Learns, or PAL. Sort of a PDA with a brain.
“If people keep missing conferences during rush hour, PAL should learn to schedule meetings when traffic isn't as thick,” Noah Shachtman writes for Wired. “If PAL's boss keeps sending angry notes to spammers, the software secretary eventually should just start flaming on its own.”
We can hardly wait. Nor can we believe this is the only use the Pentagon has in mind for all the information its various projects are collecting.
Poindexter’s on his way out at DARPA
Maybe they’re just nervous at DARPA because of the blowback from their most recent proposal – the short-lived notion of establishing a futures market where you could speculate on terror attacks, assassinations, coups and the like.
John Poindexter, the Iran-Contra scandal felon whose convictions were overturned on a technicality, had a hand in that one – and it looks like he’s lost his job because of the uproar it caused in Congress.
What was that weird flip-flop on air marshals all about?
First, the Transportation Security Administration said air marshals were no longer going to be on long-distance flights because … their hotel bills cost too much!
That coincided just about exactly with the new government warning that terrorists may be planning to hijack more airliners and turn them into bombs as they did on 9/11. Almost immediately, the TSA flopped the other way and said they didn’t mean it. Air marshals will continue flying. Was it all a budget ploy?Billmon has it all neatly wrapped up.
Maybe Saddam never had those WMDs
“We said all along that we will never get to the bottom of the Iraqi WMD program simply by going and searching specific sites, that you’d have to be able to get people who know about the programs to talk to you.”
-- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on May 13
Well, the U.S. captured several top Iraqi scientists, so there was renewed hope that we might get some concrete information on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. It hasn’t happened. “… all of the scientists interviewed have denied that Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program or developed and hidden chemical or biological weapons since United Nations inspectors left in 1998,” the Washington Post reports.
Maybe that’s why Wolfowitz now says, "I'm not concerned about weapons of mass destruction."
Back to top