Q&A: DNI Chief Scientist Eric Haseltine
I'm not sure what you're talking about.
Let's go to a realm a little safer for us to talk about–astrophysics. If you look at astrophysics over the last 20 years, it's the history of taking today's noise and turning it into tomorrow's signal. How do we find extrasolar planets? We found them by looking at very subtle wobbles in stars, many light-years away, and by looking at the slight wobble in the sun, we were able to infer that there was a planet rotating around it of a certain mass. Once we knew where it was, we were able to use other sensors on it.
Things that look like noise yesterday, by very sophisticated improvements in sensors and computers, we were able to turn into a signal, so a wobble turned into a planet. So where science is going is moving the decimal point farther and farther to the right on signal to noise.
Another example is cosmic background radiation–it used to be that we heard this hiss, and now we have a complete map that tells us about the creation of the universe. He's done that sort of thing, where he's taken what would sound like a hiss in radio, just like the original cosmic background radiation, and he's turned it into a signal that tells us where a terrorist is.
That's fascinating.
To me, the audacity and the vision of someone who could do that was very gratifying. You know, at NSA [the National Security Agency], you see that all the time in the math world. These are Fields Prize-caliber mathematicians, who are inventing new mathematics and doing cutting-edge basic research in math which the very next day may be used in a code-breaking or code-making application. So there's another example of incredible depth, that there is hard-core, cutting-edge science going on in these mission agencies. And that is surprising and encouraging.
What surprised me the most? What surprised me the most is maybe I had believed some of that press about, you know, we're not that sophisticated, we've not kept pace and so forth. Lo and behold, not just at NSA, there's some astonishing work going on that's really cool.
Where is the intelligence community's science and technology brain trust? Is it at the National Labs mostly?
Well, most of it is inside the intelligence community. You know about NSA, but the other agencies all have science and technology groups that are doing research. CIA has a very large activity.
I thought the CIA's S&T section had fallen on hard times.
Well, it's true that they reorganized and did away with what they called the Office of Research & Development, but the fact is, there is still a lot of healthy R&D going on inside CIA. There's an activity there called ITIC–the Intelligence Technology Innovation Center. There's an activity there called the Advanced Technology Programs Office, and let me tell you, there's some really great stuff coming out of there.
Tell us about some of the work being done.
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