Dumbass plan to redesign Internet shored up by crooked, lying consultants

Darpa hired a consulting firm, SRI, to investigate the feasibility of re-designing the Internet to eliminate online anonymity to catch terrorists and evil underpants gnomes. The consultants gathered a whack of experts from various disciplines who told them it was stupid all around: bad for privacy, bad for the Constitution, technologically unsound, and unlikely to provide any assistance to the nation's intelligence agencies whose problem isn't an absence of information, but rather an absence of analysis -- you don't get faster analysis by throwing more chaff into the radar-field.

Anyway, the snake-oil consultants decided that the group was far too negative and basically made up its own conclusions, submitting them to Darpa as the "consensus" of the august experts they met with -- a positive outlook would mean more consulting dollars.

And then someone leaked the whole story to the NYT.

You know, Darpa could have paid out $60,000 to EFF or ACLU instead, and they woulda told them it was a dumb idea. Hell, I bet they woulda done it for $30,000.

In e-mail messages, several participants said they believed that Dr. Stavridou was hijacking the report and that the group's consensus would not be reported to Darpa.

"I've never seen such personal attacks," one participant said in a subsequent telephone interview.

In defending herself by e-mail, Dr. Stavridou told the other panelists, "Darpa asked SRI to organize the meeting because they have a deep interest in technology for identifying network miscreants and revoking their network privileges."

In October, Dr. Stavridou traveled to Darpa headquarters in Virginia and — after a teleconference from there that was to have included Mr. Blaze, Mr. Rotenberg and Mr. Vatis was canceled — later told the panelists by e-mail that she had briefed several Darpa officials on her own about the group's discussions.

Link Discuss (via Werblog)