To keep up with ever advancing technology in the U.S., a new Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program, titled "Improv," will recruit skilled workers in multiple fields and ask them to consider how technologies that are easily obtainable by the public may be subverted to create security risks, DARPA said late last week.
“DARPA often looks at the world from the point of view of our potential adversaries to predict what they might do with available technology," DARPA Program Manager John Main, who will oversee Improv, said. "Historically, we did this by pulling together a small group of technical experts, but the easy availability in today’s world of an enormous range of powerful technologies means that any group of experts only covers a small slice of the available possibilities."
Main said DARPA is adapting to the reality that the arena for spreading terror encompasses the commonplace as well as the sophisticated.
“DARPA’s mission is to create strategic surprise, and the agency primarily does so by pursuing radically innovative and even seemingly impossible technologies,” Main said. “Improv is being launched in recognition that strategic surprise can also come from more familiar technologies, adapted and applied in novel ways.”
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