DARPA Wants Ideas On Weaponizing Off-the-Shelf Tech (ieee.org)

An anonymous reader writes: The good news is that some of today's most advanced technologies are cheap and easy to find, both online and on the shelves of major chain stores. That's also the bad news, according to DARPA. The defense agency is nervous that criminals and terrorists will turn off-the-shelf products into tools and devices to harm citizens or disrupt American military operations. On Friday, DARPA announced a new project called 'Improv' that invites technologists to propose designs for military applications or weaponry built exclusively from commercial software, open source code, and readily available materials. The program's goal is to demonstrate how easy it is to transform everyday technology into a system or device that threatens national security. See also this story about transforming into weapons items commonly found in the purportedly secure area of U.S. airports.

Comments

let's go fishing with DARPA

[turkeydance]

for readily available materials which will be 'tracked' in the future. please submit your ideas so we can watch you, too.

Huh?

[khasim]

The defense agency is nervous that criminals and terrorists will turn off-the-shelf products into tools and devices to harm citizens or disrupt American military operations.

As opposed to just buying a gun?

The average "criminal" is NOT going to re-write code or anything like that. S/He will use the same tried-and-true methods that have proven successful for so many years.

This is STUPID.

The horse is way out of the barn

[Bruce Perens]

It's pretty easily possible for an amateur to put together their own cruise missle, encrypted communications that admit to no theoretical methods to break them if they're used correctly, spread spectrum radio that you can't tell is there, various sorts of jammers for GPS, phones, etc., various bombs and poisons.

Not that I really want to tell this to Congress.

Re:The horse is way out of the barn

[Bruce Perens]

Look into DIY Drones. Ardupilot is sufficient for a lot of what you are asking for. There's a guy who has successfully flown a model plane across the Atlantic twice. He didn't have constant communications, but it had an HF transmitter and GPS, and it kept hams informed of where it was.

Some of the things you ask for aren't really necessary. Shelf life, for example. Constant communications. Hack proofing. It's really just necessary for a bad guy to put it together and send it toward the nearest city with a few sticks of dynamite. Effective terror weapon. Can distribute poison too. And if one fails, the authorities won't necessarily notice.

Re:I got one

[khasim]

Better yet, how about mounting sharks with frickin' laser beams in the back of a pickup truck?

Tried that.

Cats came to chase the laser beam and ended up eating the shark.

v2.0 will have a truck-mounted-aquarium for the shark. With laser-transparent walls. And a guy shaking a can filled with quarters to scare the cats away.

Re:I got one

[amicusNYCL]

Here's my idea:

1. Walk into a gun store.
2. Take a gun off the shelf and buy it.
3. Boom, a weapon using off-the-shelf parts.

Visit hell on a city for $1 a day.

[AnotherBlackHat]

Any engineer worth their salt could disrupt a city for under $500;

- A hammer and nails can disable emergency response vehicles.
Self lighting charcoal and a road flare can set a house on fire.
Combine the two, and you can burn down a city.

- Most cities have a small number of major traffic arteries that could be shut down with a similar number of people armed with rocks.

- Drop a bag of flour on the freeway and call in a chemical spill.

And there are far, far more effective things I can think of that I'm not willing to post on a public forum.

Once you start to think about how vulnerable we are, you realize that terrorists must be extremely rare.

Re:I got one

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Or strap a laptop or iPad to your chest and back for instant body armor.

Or a suicide vest, if it's a Dell.