>>2847730 ———————————— [DARPA]
Sorry for the NPR, but very good short history on DARPA.
Agent Orange, parapsychology, Star Wars, drones & more
https://www.npr.org/2017/03/28/521779864/inside-darpa-the-pentagon-agency-whose-technology-has-changed-the-world
What DARPA had at the time was a man who eventually rose to be deputy director. And his name was William Godel. He was actually not a scientist or a scientific manager. He was an intelligence operative who'd been put at DARPA in the early days to represent the interests of the spy community, of the intelligence community. And so he looked at this young agency that now didn't really have a mission. And he thought, well, maybe we can mold this agency around the strategic threats that I see.
Well, what happened was there was a great deal of interest in parapsychology in the late 1960s, early 1970s particularly from the intelligence community. So there was a man named Sidney Gottlieb who was the head of the Office of Technical Service at the CIA. He is today most famous for the MK Ultra program.
So I believe it was in the early 1970s that he invites Steve Lukasik who was then a director of DARPA over to his offices, and he wants to talk to Steve about this exciting program that he's doing in parapsychology.
Well, so the director who came in right before 9/11, Tony Tether, really had a vision. He had been at DARPA prior to that. And so he basically said, look, you know, 9/11, terrorism is clearly going to be one of the number one if not the number-one threat facing the United States in the coming years. We need to address this problem. And when he looked at what happened on 9/11, he said, this is a problem of data, that we probably had all of the information we needed to stop this attack, but we didn't have a good way of integrating it, of centralizing it, of analyzing it.
And he said, this is the area we need to get into, data mining, data analysis, pattern recognition. And that's what he did. He - things went downhill from there. After 9/11, the agency focused on combating terrorism and tried to find ways to mine and analyze public records with the goal of discovering terrorists before they attacked. DARPA organizes the TIA - Total Information Awareness - program designed to mine data, including from American civilians and kind of, you know, coordinate and read the data. And there's a huge uproar over that.
One of the first things that happened was that Tony Tether, the DARPA director, hired John Poindexter.