[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Weaponizing the Pentagon's Cyborg Insects

[Bill Totten]

A Futuristic Nightmare That Just Might Come True

by Nick Turse

TomDispatch.com (March 31 2008)


Biological weapons delivered by cyborg insects. It sounds like a
nightmare scenario straight out of the wilder realms of science fiction,
but it could be a reality, if a current Pentagon project comes to fruition.

Right now, researchers are already growing insects with electronics
inside them. They're creating cyborg moths and flying beetles that can
be remotely controlled. One day, the US military may field squadrons of
winged insect/machine hybrids with on-board audio, video or chemical
sensors. These cyborg insects could conduct surveillance and
reconnaissance missions on distant battlefields, in far-off caves, or
maybe even in cities closer to home, and transmit detailed data back to
their handlers at US military bases.

Today, many people fear US government surveillance of email and cell
phone communications. With this program, the Pentagon aims to
exponentially increase the paranoia. Imagine a world in which any insect
fluttering past your window may be a remote-controlled spy, packed with
surveillance equipment. Even more frightening is the prospect that such
creatures could be weaponized, and the possibility, according to one
scientist intimately familiar with the project, that these cyborg
insects might be armed with "bio weapons".

For the past fifty years, work by the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA) - the Pentagon's blue skies research outfit - has led to
some of the most lethal weaponry in the US arsenal: from
Hellfire-missile-equipped Predator drones and stealth fighters and
bombers to Tomahawk cruise missiles and Javelin portable "fire and
forget" guided missiles. For the last several years, DARPA has funneled
significant sums of money into a very different kind of guided missile
project, its Hybrid Insect MEMS (HI-MEMS) program. This project is,
according to DARPA, "aimed at developing tightly coupled machine-insect
interfaces by placing micro-mechanical systems [MEMS] inside the insects
during the early stages of metamorphosis". Put simply, the creation of
cyborg insects: part bug, part bot.

Bugs, Bots, Borgs and Bio-Weapons

This past August, at DARPA's annual symposium - DARPATech - HI-MEMS
program manager Amit Lal, an associate professor on leave from Cornell
University, explained that his project aims to transform "insects into
unmanned air-vehicles". He described the research this way: "[T]he
HI-MEMS program seeks to grow MEMS and electronics inside the insect
pupae. The new tissue forms around the insertions, making the
bio-electronic interface long-lasting and reliable". In other words,
micro-electronics are inserted at the pupal stage of metamorphosis so
that they can be integrated into the insects' bodies as they develop,
creating living robots that can be remotely controlled after the insect
emerges from its cocoon.

According to the latest reports, work on this project is progressing at
a rapid pace. In a recent phone interview, DARPA spokesperson Jan Walker
said, "We're focused on determining what the best kinds of MEMS systems
are; what the best MEMS system would be for embedding; what the best
time is for embedding".

This month, Rob Coppinger, writing for the aerospace trade publication
Flight International, reported on new advances announced at the "1st
US-Asian Assessment and Demonstration of Micro-Aerial and Unmanned
Ground Vehicle Technology" - a Pentagon-sponsored conference. "In the
latest work", he noted, "a Manduca moth had its thorax truncated to
reduce its mass and had a MEMS component added where abdominal segments
would have been, during the larval stage". But, as he pointed out,
Robert Michelson, a principal research engineer, emeritus at the Georgia
Tech Research Institute, laid out "on behalf of DARPA" some of the
obstacles that remain. Among them were short insect life-spans and the
current inability to create these cyborgs outside specialized labs.

DARPA's professed long-term goal for the HI-MEMS program is the creation
of "insect cyborgs" capable of carrying "one or more sensors, such as a
microphone or a gas sensor, to relay back information gathered from the
target destination" - in other words, the creation of military
micro-surveillance systems.

In a recent email interview, Michelson - who has previously worked on
numerous military projects, including DARPA's "effort to develop an
'Entomopter' (mechanical insect-like multimode aerial robot)" -
described the types of sensor packages envisioned, but only in a
minimalist fashion, as a "[w]ide array of active and passive devices".
However in "Insect Cyborgs: A New Frontier in Flight Control Systems", a
2007 article in the academic journal Proceedings of SPIE, Cornell
researchers noted that cyborg insects could be used as "autonomous
surveillance and reconnaissance vehicles" with on-board "[s]ensory
systems such as video and chemical".

Surveillance applications, however, may only be the beginning. Last
year, Jonathan Richards, reporting for The Times, raised the specter of
the weaponization of cyborg insects in the not-too-distant future. As he
pointed out, Rodney Brooks, the director of the computer science and
artificial intelligence lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
indicated that the Pentagon is striving toward a major expansion in the
use of non-traditional air power - like unmanned aerial vehicles and
cyborg insects - in the years ahead. "There's no doubt their things will
become weaponized", he explained, "so the question [is]: should they
[be] given targeting authority?". Brooks went on to assert, according to
The Times, that it might be time to consider rewriting international law
to take the future weaponization of such "devices" into account.

But how would one weaponize a cyborg insect? On this subject, Robert
Michelson was blunt: "Bio weapons".

Cyborg Ethics

Michelson wouldn't elaborate further, but any program using bio-weapons
would immediately raise major legal and ethical questions. The 1972
Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention outlawed the manufacture and
possession of bio-weapons, of "[m]icrobial or other biological agents,
or toxins whatever their origin ...  that have no justification for
prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes" and of "[w]eapons,
equipment or means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for
hostile purposes or in armed conflict". In fact, not only did President
George W Bush claim that Iraq's supposed production and possession of
biological weapons was a justification for an invasion of that nation,
but he had previously stated, "All civilized nations reject as
intolerable the use of disease and biological weapons as instruments of
war and terror".

Reached for comment, however, DARPA's Jan Walker insisted that her
agency's focus was only on "fundamental research" when it came to cyborg
insects. Although the focus of her agency is, in fact, distinctly on the
future - the technology of tomorrow - she refused to look down the road
when it came to weaponizing insect cyborgs or arming them with
bio-weapons. "I can't speculate on the future", was all she would say.

Michelson is perfectly willing to look into future, especially on
matters of cyborg insect surveillance, but on the horizon for him are
technical issues when it comes to the military use of bug bots.
"Surveillance goes on anyway by other means", he explained, "so a new
method is not the issue. If there are ethical or legal issues, they are
ones of 'surveillance', not of the 'surveillance platform'."

Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, a digital rights and civil liberties group, sees that same
future in a different light. Cyborg insects, he says, are an order of
magnitude away from today's more standard surveillance technologies like
closed circuit television. "CCTV is mostly deployed in public and in
privately owned public spaces. An insect could easily fly into your
garden or sit outside your bedroom window", he explained. "To make
matters worse, you'd have no idea these devices were there. A CCTV
camera is usually an easily recognizable device. Robotic surveillance
insects might be harder to spot. And having to spot them wouldn't
necessarily be good for our mental health."

Does Michelson see any ethical or legal dilemmas resulting from the
future use of weaponized cyborg insects? "No, not unless they could
breed new cyborg insects, which is not possible", he explained. "Genetic
engineering will be the ethical and legal battleground, not cybernetics".

Battle Beetles and Hawkish Hawkmoths

Weaponized or not, moths are hardly the only cyborg insects that may
fly, creep, or crawl into the military's future arsenal. Scientists from
Arizona State University and elsewhere, working under a grant from the
Office of Naval Research and DARPA, "are rearing beetle species at
various oxygen levels to attempt to produce beetles with
greater-than-normal size and payload capacity". Earlier this year, some
of the same scientists published an article on their DARPA-funded
research titled "A Cyborg Beetle: Insect Flight Control Through an
Implantable, Tetherless Microsystem". They explained that, by implanting
"multiple inserted neural and muscular stimulators, a visual stimulator,
a polyimide assembly and a microcontroller" in a two centimeter long,
one to two gram green June beetle, they were "capable of modulating [the
insect's] flight starts, stops, throttle/lift, and turning". They could,
that is, drive an actual beetle. However, unlike the June bug you might
find on a porch screen or in a garden, these sported on-board
electronics powered by cochlear implant batteries.

DARPA-funded HI-MEMS research has also been undertaken at other
institutions across the country and around the world. For example, in
2006, researchers at Cornell, in conjunction with scientists at
Pennsylvania State University and the Universidad de Valparaiso, Chile,
received an $8.4 million DARPA grant for work on "Insect Cyborg
Sentinels". According to a recent article in New Scientist, a team led
by one of the primary investigators on that grant, David Stern, screened
a series of video clips at a recent conference in Tucson, Arizona
demonstrating their ability to control tethered tobacco hawkmoths
through "flexible plastic probes" implanted during the pupal stage.
Simply stated, the researchers were able to remotely control the
moths-on-a-leash, manipulating the cyborg creatures' wing speed and
direction.

Robo-Bugs

Cyborg insects are only the latest additions to the US military's
menagerie. As defense tech-expert Noah Shachtman of Wired magazine's
Danger Room blog has reported, DARPA projects have equipped rats with
electronic equipment and remotely controlled sharks, while the military
has utilized all sorts of animals, from bomb-detecting honeybees and
"chickens used as early-warning sensors for chemical attacks" to guard
dogs and dolphins trained to hunt mines. Additionally, he notes, the
DoD's emphasis on the natural world has led to robots that resemble
dogs, monkeys that control robotic limbs with their minds, and numerous
other projects inspired by nature.

But whatever other creatures they favor, insects never seem far from the
Pentagon's dreams of the future. In fact, Shachtman reported earlier
this year that "Air Force scientists are looking for robotic bombs that
look - and act - like swarms of bugs and birds". He went on to quote
Colonel Kirk Kloeppel, head of the Air Force Research Laboratory's
munitions directorate, who announced the Lab's interest in "bio-inspired
munitions", in "small, autonomous" machines that would "provide close-in
[surveillance] information, in addition to killing intended targets".

This month, researcher Robert Wood wrote in IEEE Spectrum about what he
believes was "the first flight of an insect-size robot". After almost a
decade of research, Wood and his colleagues at the Harvard Microrobotics
Laboratory are now creating small insect-like robots that will
eventually be outfitted "with onboard sensors, flight controls, and
batteries ...  to nimbly flit around obstacles and into places beyond
human reach". Like cyborg insect researchers, Wood is DARPA-funded. Last
year, in fact, the agency selected him as one of 24 "rising stars" for a
"young faculty awards" grant.

Asked about the relative advantages of cyborg insects compared to
mechanical bugs, Robert Michelson noted that "robotic insects obey
without innate or external influences" and "they can be mass produced
rapidly". He cautioned, however, that they are extremely limited
power-wise. Insect cyborgs, on the other hand, "can harvest energy and
continue missions of longer duration". However, they "may be diverted
from their task by stronger influences"; must be grown to maturity and
so may not be available when needed; and, of course, are mortal and run
the risk of dying before they can be employed as needed.

The Future is Now

There is plenty of technical information about the HI-MEMS program
available in the scientific literature. And if you make inquiries, DARPA
will even direct you to some of the relevant citations. But while it's
relatively easy to learn about the optimal spots to insert a neural
stimulator in a green June beetle ("behind the eye, in the flight
control area of the insect brain") or an electronic implant in a tobacco
hawkmoth ("the main flight powering muscles ...  in the dorsal-thorax"),
it's much harder to discover the likely future implications of this
sci-fi sounding research.

The "final demonstration goal" - the immediate aim - of DARPA's HI-MEMS
program "is the delivery of an insect within five meters of a specific
target located a hundred meters away, using electronic remote control,
and/or global positioning system (GPS)". Right now, DARPA doesn't know
when that might happen. "We basically operate phase to phase", says
Walker. "So, it kind of depends on how they do in the current phase and
we'll make decisions on future phases".

DARPA refuses to examine anything but research-oriented issues. As a
result, its Pentagon-funded scientists churn out inventions with
potentially dangerous, if not deadly, implications without ever fully
considering - let alone seeking public or expert comment on - the future
ramifications of new technologies under production.

"The people who build this equipment are always going to say that
they're just building tools, that there are legitimate uses for them,
and that it isn't their fault if the tools are abused", says the
Electronic Frontier Foundation's Eckersley. "Unfortunately, we've seen
that governments are more than willing to play fast-and-loose with the
legal bounds on surveillance. Unless and until that changes, we'd urge
researchers to find other projects to work on."
_____

Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of
Tomdispatch.com. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San
Francisco Chronicle, Adbusters, the Nation, the Village Voice, and
regularly for Tomdispatch. His first book, The Complex: How the Military
Invades Our Everyday Lives, has just been published in Metropolitan
Books' American Empire Project series. His website is NickTurse.com

Copyright 2008 Nick Turse

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/31/7986/


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/