Risk Assessment / Security & Hacktivism

Paying for secrets: national security versus tech innovation

For a few years now I've been covering the decline in US federal funding for …

In his testimony before Congress earlier this month, Microsoft founder Bill Gates touched on a number topics that are critical to US competitiveness in the globalized, post-industrial knowledge economy. Of these, his remarks on the H1-B visa program were the most widely reported, but his less-heralded comments on the perilous state of US funding for science and engineering research were just as important, and even then they didn't go nearly far enough.

Gates told Congress that the 50 percent decline (as a share of GDP) in federal investment in science and engineering research since 1970 is hurting our ability to compete in a world where our rivals are massively increasing their R&D spending. But pointing out America's growing R&D deficit vis-a-vis China and the EU tells only part of the story. To grasp the bigger picture of the coming shortfall in US technological innovation, you have to look at where the money that is being spent is going.

In a nutshell, a significant portion of the federal funds that once went to universities for the promotion of basic science and engineering research are now headed into the "black"—i.e., into kinds of classified projects that the Pentagon hopes will give America an edge in the fight against terrorism. Not only are these strictly near-term and results-oriented projects the opposite of the fundamental research that computing desperately needs at this pivotal point in the history of the hardware/software relationship, but the fruits of these costly, secret labors will never make it into the public domain. And therein lies a challenge not just to US economic competitiveness but to national security, as well.

Back to black

The Computing Research Association has been sounding the alarm about the post-9/11 "blackening" of the money that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) spends on R&D. The following portion of one of the CRA's many blog posts on the topic is worth quoting:

In congressional testimony and blog posts, we've pointed out that a shift at DARPA -- a focus on nearer-term efforts with an emphasis on go/no-go milestones at relatively short intervals and an increased use of classification -- has sharply reduced the amount of DARPA-supported research being performed in U.S. universities. In fact, between FY 2001 and FY 2004 (the last year for which we have good data), the amount of funding from DARPA to U.S. universities for computer science research fell by half -- and informal evidence suggests university shares are even lower today.

To summarize, the attacks of September 11, 2001, had a direct and devastating impact on the amount of basic R&D money flowing into the nation's computer science departments for long-term, fundamental, "blue-sky" research. That money has instead gone into, among other things, the types of massive information vacuuming projects that you often read about here at Ars.

It's also the case that the DARPA is prohibiting foreign nationals from participating in some of the research that it funds, due to national security concerns. Anyone who has spent time in even a third- or fourth-tier science or engineering department knows that they're dominated by noncitizens; thus even when it does fund basic research, DARPA often blocks the best and brightest from contributing.

The CRA made this point about the post-9/11 funding drought most recently in response to the formal announcement (previewed here) that Microsoft and Intel would be investing $20 million in two parallel computing research centers, one at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and another at the University of California-Berkeley. The organization pointed out that the Microsoft/Intel money was a drop in the bucket compared to $91 million annual shortfall in DARPA funding for university computer science research from 2001 to 2004.

Computer science departments certainly could've used that money to prepare the field for the tectonic shift that was about to take place in the second half of the decade, as the limits of process technology and power dissipation began to rapidly alter the computing landscape in fundamental ways.

A revolution on a budget

From a computer science perspective, the timing of DARPA's flight from university-led basic research to applied defense and classified research couldn't have come at a worse time. Intel's Pentium 4 passed the 2GHz mark in the summer of 2001, and an ongoing march of process-based performance increases continued to yield essentially "free" performance boosts until about 2004, by which point it was clear to everyone who was watching that the clockspeed party was over and that software was about to get a both more important and more complicated.

So software makers were thrown into a multicore world—a world that's rapidly going from multicore to many-core—where most of the important questions about how best to exploit massive amounts of hardware parallelism had yet to even be asked, much less answered. Projects like the Microsoft/Intel-funded parallel computing laboratories will make important contributions to mapping out computing's new many-core terrain, but as the CRA pointed out, the amount of R&D funding that they represent is paltry compared to what our own government used to spend on such research.

But while industry struggles to wrap its collective mind around how to design software for many-core processors, there's one group of folks who are very, very happy with the way computing is headed: defense contractors and their patrons at various three-letter agencies and executive branch departments. "National security" is becoming increasingly synonymous with signals intelligence (SIGINT), and SIGINT's data-intensive workloads represent exactly the types of "embarrassingly parallel" problems for which many-core machines can easily yield significant speedups.

Or, to put the problem of SIGINT in terms that fans of a certain "news for nerds" web site might understand: read this excellent description (PDF), published in last year's IEEE Security & Privacy magazine, of the likely hardware behind the NSA's massive data collection efforts and "imagine a beowulf cluster of these... on a single chip." Many-core processors are just what the doctor ordered for grinding through massive amounts of real-time telecommunications data in order to build detailed pictures of suspects' behavior and social networks.

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of this entire basic science funding story is how well-documented and widely acknowledged the problem is. Take a look at the "Further reading" section below for a few more recent links, each of which cites myriad predecessor reports and studies, along with a mountain of press coverage. Nobody in Washington can claim ignorance of the dangerously weakened state of American research funding, but there doesn't seem to be much political will to address the problem. Instead, the same national drive that spurred us to out-innovate the Soviets by investing in basic science is now being channeled into the growth of a surveillance-industrial complex that competes only with the still-growing military industrial complex for whatever remains of the post-Cold War "peace dividend."

Further reading

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