Googlestalking For Covert NSA Research Funding

James Hardine writes "Wikileaks is reporting that the CIA has funded covert research on torture techniques, and that the NSA has pushed tens or hundreds of millions into academia through research grants using one particular grant code. Some researchers try to conceal the source of funding, yet commonality in the NSA grant code prefix makes all these attempts transparent. The primary NSA grant-code prefix is 'MDA904'. Googling for this grant code yields 39,000 references although some refer to non-academic contracts (scolar.google.com 2,300). The grants issue from light NSA cover, the "Maryland Procurement Office" or other fronts. From this one can see the broad sweep of academic research interests being driven by the NSA."

oid

[epine]

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/index.php?title=On_the_take_and_loving_it&oldid=6476 [wikileaks.org]

One would think it would be better for slashdot discussion if TFA was not a moving target. To think slashdot is ten years old. That's one hell of a slow clue train.

Re:What's the Story here??

[mbkennel]

The actual story is that the traditional source for engineering funding, DARPA, has been ordered to change to short term projects, as in "a widget for a soldier in 18 months."

That is not what academics do, it is what private sector contractors do.

Hence the academics have been overwhelming the National Science Foundation since 2001 or so. Acceptance rates for NSF research proposals are at all time lows. If the NSA also gives money for mathematics and certain segments of computer science, apparently all publicly published, why not take it?

It has been usual since 1945 that source for non-biological scientific and mathematical research have come through multiple government agencies, many military-affiliated.

What happens if you don't accept this funding? Somebody else gets it, and they get papers and grants and they stay funded. You don't. You probably won't get promotions or tenure without signficant government funding. If you're on soft money, you're just plain unemployed.

What will your protest do to stop torture by CIA or whoever? Nothing. BTW those policies didn't come spontaneously from CIA---they were ordered and approved by political appointees.

BTW: "MDA" usually means "Missile Defense Agency".

NSA funding != breach of ethics

[xPsi]

I'm not sure why this is considered controversial. I do personally think it is sort of interesting, but I'm not sure where the "real" story is. It would be like if someone who just discovered the internet posted "did you know that the suffix .org is meant to be for non-profit organizations but in reality anyone can use it?" Shocking! Must be a conspiracy. This strikes me as the same kind of thing. It is a bit of common trivia not generally known by people who don't write research grants. But its not a whistle-blower revelation regarding a large scale breach of ethics. Is it really surprising that academics who get NSA funding want to keep a little quiet about it? I can think of a lot of practical reasons this might be the case. What bugs me is that the article makes it sounds like chagrin is the motivator: they are ashamed of their funding source because academics are suppose to be free thinking anti-establishment types. But I think the reality is much simpler: academics have a spectrum of beliefs like everyone else and moreover are happy to get funding where they can get it. Although I may not agree with everything the NSA does, taking money from them in the form of formal research grants does not constitute a breach of ethics of any kind (as this wikileak thing implies). Besides, a research grant probably created this really cool kids page [nsa.gov] (its sort of psychotic if you think about it). Another interesting thing is that a huge amount of computing the NSA does has to do with linux-based security issues [nsa.gov]. Perhaps this whole story is just an NSA cover to get a mildly amusing NSA story on the front pages of slashdot. Come on, Dr. Malda and reveal your true funding sources.

Re:NSA funding != breach of ethics

[enrevanche]

It may not be necessarily controversial when taken on the small scale, but its says a lot about the level to which covert organizations are controlling our lives. That should be controversial. It shows the increasing lack of respect for our society in academia and its independence from both government and industry. This may have always been just a myth, but that does not mean it shouldn't be controversial and up for debate.

What should be controversial is that due the lack of other funding provided by our government, academics have to go to agencies like the NSA to get funded. Our society becomes ever more beholden to the military-industrial complex.

By the way, university selection process has little to do with free thinking. Universities want staff that gets funding and in this they select those who will not challenge authority. Those who will not question these policies.

are you kidding me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nevermind the amusing misspell of "Securety" on the linked page, let us just look at the titles of the NSA "Example Documents" :

• Finding Person X: Correlating Names with Visual Appearances
• Speech Activity Detection on Multichannels of Meeting Recordings
• Enriching Speech Recognition with Automatic Detection of Sentence Boundaries
• A Chinese semantic lexicon of senses and roles

Are you serious? This is bread and butter artificial intelligence research: computer vision, computational linguistics. If you want the computer from Star Trek then you should be happy at least someone is pouring money into this work.

We wouldn't be working on it if we couldn't publish; everyone gets the results no matter who pays. I am annoyed that the article summary saw fit to mention torture but not "Automatic Detection of Sentence Boundaries."