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IAO Information: Thank you for your interest in the Information Awareness Office at DARPA. If you wish to contact someone within IAO, or would like more information regarding a specific program please send an email to IAOInfo@darpa.mil. Thank you.
IAO Mission: The DARPA Information Awareness Office (IAO) will imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness useful for preemption; national security warning; and national security decision making.
IAO Vision:
The most
serious asymmetric threat facing the United States is terrorism, a threat
characterized by collections of people loosely organized in shadowy networks
that are difficult to identify and define. IAO plans to develop technology
that will allow understanding of the intent of these networks, their plans,
and potentially define opportunities for disrupting or eliminating the
threats. To effectively and efficiently carry this out, we must promote
sharing, collaborating and reasoning to convert nebulous data to knowledge
and actionable options. IAO will accomplish this by pursuing the
development of technologies, components, and applications to produce a
proto-type system. Example technologies include:
It
is difficult to counter the
threat that terrorists pose. Currently, terrorists are able to move freely
throughout the world, to hide when necessary, to find unpunished sponsorship
and support, to operate in small, independent cells, and to strike
infrequently, exploiting weapons of mass effects and media response to
influence governments. This low-intensity/low-density form of warfare has
an information signature, albeit not one that our intelligence
infrastructure and other government agencies are optimized to detect. In
all cases, terrorists have left detectable clues that are generally found
after an attack. Even if we could find these clues faster and more easily,
our counter-terrorism defenses are spread throughout many
different agencies and organizations at the national, state, and local
level. To fight terrorism, we need to create a new intelligence
infrastructure to allow these agencies to share information and collaborate
effectively, and new information technology aimed at exposing terrorists
and their activities and support systems. This is a tremendously difficult
problem, because terrorists understand how vulnerable they are and seek to
hide their specific plans and capabilities. The key to fighting terrorism is
information. Elements of the solution include gathering a much broader
array of data than we do currently, discovering information from elements of
the data, creating models of hypotheses, and analyzing these models in a
collaborative environment to determine the most probable current or future
scenario. DARPA has sponsored research in some of these technology areas,
but additional research and development is warranted to accelerate,
integrate, broaden, and automate current approaches.
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questions or comments to: IAO
Info@darpa.mil. Thank You.