DARPA was founded in January, 2002 to provide the U.S. with "total information awareness". It was born in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. DARPA stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and they are responsible for creating new technology for the military. Searching "DARPA" and "Conspiracy" in Google brings up some interesting links.
DARPA launched some balloons yesterday in a fun PR-style contest to test social networks.
Here’s a desciption of the contest from the DARPA website:
"The DARPA Network Challenge is a competition that will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team building, and urgent mobilization required to solve broad-scope, time-critical problems. The Network Challenge winner will be the first individual to submit the locations of 10 8-foot balloons moored at 10 fixed locations in the continental United States. The balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roads."
My first thought upon reading this a few weeks ago was. . .neat!
Then the conspiranoid brain kicked in. Here’s a possibility – what if the role of this experiment was not to, "explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication" but rather to test DARPA’s ability to monitor disparate areas of social networks as a specific event breaks out.
This would be a perfect test scenario. At a specific time, DARPA knows that at some "place" in the non-local internet, some people are going to start hammering on social networks. In this instance their conversation would be about Balloons. DARPA follows the red balloon memes around social networks as the participants in the contest relay messages. In this way they get to test their "Total Informational Awareness" software.
Has DARPA created the next version of PROMIS? Did they test it yesterday?
What happens when this isn’t red balloons, but say, a man-made outbreak of the next super-flu? Or some other illuminati created malevolence?
Now they know how memes travel through social networks and will be able to better control information as it flows through the stream.
