New US agency aims to help spies with new technology

With a new laptop and a satellite link, FBI agents can find out within two minutes whether the fingerprint from a newly captured suspect overseas matches a terrorist database in Virginia.

U.S. intelligence officials are running documents in languages such as Arabic through a new computer program called "English Now." It converts the foreign characters into the Roman alphabet and makes words such as Baghdad, President Bush or Osama bin Laden jump out to spooks who cannot read Arabic.

The language software and the fingerprint-recognition system are examples of new spy gear that the national intelligence director's office bought last year. They may seem like tools that should have been available years ago, but the government is not noted for its ability to quickly develop new technology.

A fledging center called IARPA is hoping to soon change that. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity will try to develop groundbreaking technology that will give new tools to U.S. spies at any one of the 16 spy agencies.

One potential new tool sounds like it comes from an episode of Star Trek: "cloaking" technology that can bend radar around an object to make it appear like it is not there. Others include power sources that are shrunk down using nanotechnology and quantum computers that can speed code-breaking, says IARPA acting director Steve Nixon.

"The world has changed in dramatic ways with globalization of technology," Nixon said in an interview. "These are the things that might not get done otherwise."

But not everyone is convinced this is the right way to make new spy tools. The House Intelligence Committee also has questions about whether the government truly needs it.

"Much of this research is already going on," said Representative Heather Wilson, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee's panel on technical intelligence. She said IARPA raises questions about the role of new Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, who was supposed to coordinate U.S. intelligence agencies _ not get into their daily operations.

There is even resistance within the CIA itself, according to officials who spoke about the concerns privately. The agency gets money that is supposed to go for spy tools that can be shared across the government. CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano denied any friction, saying the agency welcomes ideas that promote collaboration on new technology.

In the last half-century, U.S. spy agencies have made technical breakthroughs large and small. In the 1970s, the CIA shared its lithium-iodine batteries with the medical field, which now uses them in pacemakers. Its scientists developed microdot cameras that can produce images so small that they can be hidden in the period of this sentence. They also built a robotic dragonfly that could have been used for surveillance, if only it could have handled crosswinds.

If IARPA can clear some crucial hurdles, including convincing its congressional skeptics, the new office will be modeled after a similar agency that develops technology for the Pentagon.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was created after the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, driving home the U.S. competitive disadvantage in space. Since then, DARPA researchers have brought the United States some much-heralded advances including stealth technology, global positioning systems and the Internet.

But it also brought controversy. The agency's Total Information Awareness data-mining program was launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to use technology to find terrorists; critics saw it as a step toward Big Brother-style mass government surveillance. Congress eliminated the program's funding at DARPA in 2003, but portions were moved to secret accounts at other agencies.

The new intelligence organization will be significantly smaller than DARPA, which has a $3 billion (euro2.2 billion) annual budget. It will be based at the University of Maryland and will be staffed with 56 intelligence professionals from the CIA and from McConnell's organization.

Rather than funding IARPA in the House intelligence budget bill passed this month, lawmakers directed technology dollars directly to centers that are developing various tools that can be shared across government, which includes offices within the CIA, National Security Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

The bill criticized McConnell's office for failing to provide details on how IARPA will work and raised questions about whether it would harm existing research for spy tools.

Nixon says that IARPA will not have labs and electron microscopes, but will sponsor research at universities, national labs and other organizations.

IARPA is thinking broadly, he said. It will not limit itself to hard sciences, but will also tackle social-science problems such as finding tools for language research or to help analysts measure cultural habits of another society. He also said the organization will work on privacy protection. NSA and other agencies want to be able to make better use of foreign intelligence information scooped up overseas, which often contains information on U.S. citizens.

Given the lack of oversight in intelligence agencies, "this is an area where the research community has to step gingerly," Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center.