DARPA Severs Ties with Jason

An anonymous reader submits: "DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has severed its ties with a secretive advisory panel of elite scientists called Jason."

Re:Help, I think I'm being fucked

[TRACK-YOUR-POSITION]

So they put the fucking kibosh on that.

Geez, "put the kibosh"? The only person I know who talks like that is my grandpa!

Grandpa, is that you?

Re:Jason??

[3waygeek]

No -- the people who interface between the NSA and the Grays [milk.com]

Jason needs a CIO

[tchdab1]

According to the article, too much physics and too little IT:
>>
Though Darpa refused yesterday to confirm the dispute over the nominees, a spokeswoman said the move was in fact a reflection of Jason's inability to adjust its priorities to a post-cold-war world, where the physical sciences are no longer as important as information and computer sciences to the nation's security.

Wow. You can be a nobel laureate but without your MS Certification, you're out of a government job!

NPR had a bit on this

[renehollan]

Apparently, JASON wants to appoint it's own choices to it's organization, and others want political appointees (all of which, to date, JASON says, were not up to snuff technically). So JASON lost it's funding. That may explain DARPA distancing itself.

Re:NPR had a bit on this

[phr2]

It's obvious both sides are bullshitting. If te Pentagon just wanted more CS geeks and the Jasonites thought the Pentagon's nominees weren't good enough, Jason would have come up with some counterproposal naming some different CS geeks instead. Maybe it would have gone back and forth but the two sides wouldn't have walked away from each other so easily. There is clearly behind the scenes crap going on.

Re:NPR had a bit on this

[renehollan]

There is clearly behind the scenes crap going on.

No doubt. I suspect that the Pentagon wants more control over the makeup of JASON (named after the first letters of the months of the annual contract term - July to November) with it's own appointees and is using the lack of relevant research in recent years as an excuse to seek this kind of control.

Personally, I think some pure research is always a healthy thing, even if the results are not immediately applicable.

Yes!

[Hard_Code]

Now DARPA can hook up with Greg!

Jason members

[apsmith]

How public are/were the Jason members? I met somebody from the Dept. of Energy about 6 years back who claimed to be on Jason (he claimed to have been involved with resolving the "Morris worm" problem, which I seriously doubted since I'd been at Cornell when it was released and was very aware of how the spread of the worm was detected and stopped). This guy was at Los Alamos anyway and involved with the "behind-the-fence" computing environment there, so he could well have been a member of Jason. But I always wondered whether he'd been telling the truth on this one or not...