BY SHARON WEINBERGER
The only tiki bar in eastern Afghanistan had an unusual payment program. A sign inside read simply, “If you supply data, you will get beer.” The idea was that anyone — or any foreigner, because Afghans were not allowed — could upload data on a one-terabyte hard drive kept at the bar, located in the Taj Mahal Guest House in Jalalabad. In exchange, they would get free beer courtesy of the Synergy Strike Force, the informal name of the American civilians who ran the establishment.
Patrons could contribute any sort of data — maps, PowerPoint slides, videos, or photographs. They could also copy data from the drive. The “Beer for Data” program, as the exchange was called, was about merging data from humanitarian workers, private security contractors, the military, and anyone else willing to contribute. The Synergy Strike Force was not a military unit, a government division, or even a private company; it was the self-chosen name of the odd assortment of Westerners who worked — or in some cases volunteered — on the development projects run out of the guest house.
The Synergy Strike Force’s Beer for Data exchange was a pure embodiment of the techno-utopian dream of free information and citizen empowerment that had emerged in recent years from the hacker community. Only no one would have guessed that this utopia was being created in the chaos of Afghanistan, let alone in Jalalabad, a city that had once been home to Osama bin Laden. Or even more unlikely, that the Synergy Strike Force would soon attract the attention of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Founded in 1958 to help the United States win the space race, DARPA is best known for its role in futuristic technology, be it driverless cars or implantable brain chips. During the Vietnam War, DARPA had led a counterinsurgency research program that spanned the globe from Saigon to Tehran and employed hundreds of personnel, but the agency has been largely forgotten.
However, DARPA’s interest in the potential of open-source information came at a critical juncture in Afghanistan. In January 2009, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, the war in Afghanistan was in its eighth year, and a resurgent Taliban, whose regime had rapidly collapsed after the American invasion in 2001, was challenging the central government’s tenuous authority in the provinces. Counterinsurgency, the doctrine that had been promoted in Vietnam decades earlier, was back in vogue.
For DARPA, getting involved in Afghanistan represented a return to its Vietnam-era roots, after nearly three decades of staying out of war zones. In 2009, the agency launched an ambitious initiative in data mining. Eventually, DARPA brought two data-mining programs to Afghanistan: a highly secretive program meant to predict insurgent attacks based on “big data” science used by companies like Amazon to predict customers’ purchases; and a program based on the emerging science of social networks, attempting under the guise of humanitarian work to enlist an unwitting army of Afghan civilians to spy for the American military. And so DARPA’s first deployment to a war zone since Vietnam began with a group of well-intentioned hacktivists trading beer for data at Afghanistan’s only tiki bar.
In Vietnam, DARPA had made the mistake of trying to “win the war with technology,” as one senior agency official in charge of the work had later recalled. The question once again was whether cutting-edge science and technology could do any better in Afghanistan.
No comments:
Post a Comment