Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military.

Mission

According to DARPA's website:

“

The genesis of that mission and of DARPA itself dates to the launch of Sputnik in 1957, and a commitment by the United States that, from that time forward, it would be the initiator and not the victim of strategic technological surprises. Working with innovators inside and outside of government, DARPA has repeatedly delivered on that mission, transforming revolutionary concepts and even seeming impossibilities into practical capabilities. The ultimate results have included not only game-changing military capabilities such as precision weapons and stealth technology, but also such icons of modern civilian society such as the Internet, automated voice recognition and language translation, and Global Positioning System receivers small enough to embed in myriad consumer devices.

”

George Friedman on DARPA

George Friedman, chairman of Stratfor, speaking to students noted about DARPA:

“

the iPhone...carries such superb tools on it, as YouTube and Pinder, and all the essentials...you know that this represents the future and makes you completely different...The foundation of this phone is a microchip. The microchip was developed to guide U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles against Soviet targets. It had to have a small computer. It had to be very light. It had to be very accurate. And the microchip was the solution. And all of the weapons that we used during the Cold War, that threatened the annihilation of humanity, was built on the microchip.... You have a camera in your phone, the digital camera. That was developed by the US National Reconnaissance Office for spy satellites. The problem that we had was, that if you took regular pictures with film, how do you get them to earth. So you have to have a way to take pictures of targets of various sorts that didn't require you to drop a Kodak film pack down to the earth. Of course that's what they did at the beginning. And they had to develop some sort of way to take pictures that could get back to earth fast...Your innocent little camera had its birth in spy satellites.... GPS was invented by the United States Air Force, it was called NAVSTAR, to guide cruise missiles to their targets, and our army units precision in their land navigation. In other words, it was invented to let soldiers know where they were.... Now all this is designed to get to the place where all humanity lives, which is the internet. The internet was developed by Defense Advanced Research Project agency to move classified data from one secret lab to the other. So, something in Oak Ridge Tennessee labs there, would move to Los Alamos, and that would be moved to Brookhaven National Laboratories. What were they doing in these laboratories? Doing research on nuclear wars, because that was the big story then. It was developed with only one thing in mind: to make research more efficient. And when you get on the internet, all the protocols you get, and all the cool stuff to get you around, were developed by American scientists who were deeply involved in the Cold War.... The cell phone was first deployed in 1985 by the United States Army, and was used the first time in Operation Desert War. And it was entirely invented to facilitate military communication. Bottom line is, there is nothing in this phone...that was not created for war.... Now the Americans are peculiar. In the United States government, they're not allowed to own patents. Basic rule is, if the US government invented it, and it's not secret, it's yours for the taking. It's an odd rule, but it works for us. It means that everything we do in preparing for wars, design of aircraft, everything else, ultimately comes down to being available. So Steve Jobs, so cool, invented nothing. He took other people's inventions of the government, put them together, and the only thing he invented was marketing. And that was pretty cool. Bill Gates invented nothing. MS-DOS was a program he bought from someone that had originally been developed for the Air Force. Zuckerberg invented even less. Your whole generation lives in a fantasy of creativity. The basic tools that guide your life, that permeate you, were developed by warriors, or scientists of warriors. It got to you by a bunch of really smart marketing guys, put them together, and convinced you they were geniuses. The real genius made $50,000 a year and retired poor. The marketing guys, they made the money.

”

See also

• Bayh-Dole Act
• HAARP