Program Objective: 

Project Genoa I, in the process of concluding, provides the structured argumentation, decision-making and corporate memory to rapidly deal with and adjust to dynamic crisis management.

Genoa II is a FY02 new-start program.  It will focus on developing information technology needed by teams of intelligence analysts and operations and policy personnel in attempting to anticipate and preempt terrorist threats to US interests.  Genoa II’s goal is to make such teams faster, smarter, and more joint in their day-to-day operations.  Genoa II will apply automation to team processes so that more information will be exploited, more hypotheses created and examined, more models built and populated with evidence, and in the larger sense, more crises dealt with simultaneously.

Though the events of September 11th have made anti-terrorism the primary goal of projects like Genoa I and II, it is easy to overlook the fact that any asymmetrical operations carried out against the US or its interests can fall under the broad category of terrorism. It would be legitimate to classify the rioting and anti-police conflicts that occured during the 2001 G8 Summit (in the Italian city for which this project was named) as an act of terror. The so-called organizers behind such disruptions use similar means of communication and planning as Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorists. In fact, their practices, firmly-rooted as they are in Western Traditions of anti-social behavior, are more predictable than those of Islamic terrorist cells.

|>img src<|

The so-called anti-globalism movement is an asymmetric force that is perfectly suited for honing special implementations of Genoa II, especially as we make it available to our European allies. Not only will systems like Genoa track, model and effectively predict the "social weather" that leads up to actions such as those that took place in Seattle and Genoa, but the real-time monitoring of text messaging services, overnight pamphleteering and graffiti can all be used as test cases for an almost tactical use of Genoa's flexible architecture.

There is no reason to doubt that "splinters" of Genoa working in highly localized law enforcement situations would not only help Forces of Order plan their defenses, but, used in conjunction with face and gait recognition systems (see EELD) also facilitate archiving and prosecution of offenders.

Needless to say, the monitoring of various left-leaning, so-called anarchist, and ecological groups can be carried out, significantly, without the "invasion" of privacy. Because the Genoa Projects work with statistical evidence, semi-passive tracking, and linkages of disparate bits of information, the individual identities of anyone being tracked is not necessarily important. So long as their movements -- especially as a group -- fall into certain analytic templates: website traffic, international phone calls, purchases of survival-oriented gear, etc. With the continued integration of network transactions into Everyday Life and the decline of the cash economy coupled with increased Security across all levels of society, the individual identity becomes irrelevant until the moment of arrest, processing, and prosecution. At such a point in this struggle to secure Freedom, the transgressing individual has already made his or her identity public, and falls squarely into established constitutional algorithms.

Program Strategy: 

Project Genoa I is developing information technology for the intelligence community to rapidly and systematically accumulate evidence, facilitate collaboration (while protecting critical information), and test hypothesis that support decision-making at the national level.  Bases on successful demonstrations, the Defense Intelligence Agency has aggreed to be a transition partner for Project Genoa I technology.

Genoa II will develop and deploy: 1) cognitive aids that allow humans and machines to “think together” in real-time about complicated problems; 2) means to overcome the biases and limitations of the human cognitive system; 3) “cognitive amplifiers” that help teams of people rapidly and fully comprehend complicated and uncertain situations; and, 4) the means to rapidly and seamlessly cut across – and complement – existing stove-piped hierarchical organizational structures by creating dynamic, adaptable, peer-to-peer collaborative networks. 

Planned Accomplishments:

FY00: Undermined Napster, placed the Hotline network under surveillance. Project Genoa I matured and transitioned a new "thematic" search engine (that complements traditional search engines by allowing users to find nuggets of information in large collections of documents without having to construct a complicated query) to users on Intelink; and in FY01, Genoa evidence-accumulation components were delivered to the office of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Counter-Intelligence Assessment Group (JCAG), a field element of ASD/C31.

FY02/ FY03:  Design faster systems of humans and machines by assimilating new information technologies to operational agencies to meet asymmetric threats.

FY02/ FY03:  Develop tools for cognitive amplification by extending the ability of software to model current states, estimate plausible futures, support formal risk analysis, and provide for automated option planning.  Supporting technology includes the use of intelligent agents, cognitive machine intelligence, associative memory, neural networks, pattern matching, Bayesian inference networks, and biologically inspired algorithms.

FY02/ FY03:  Develop tools for cross-agency collaboration designed to operate across existing hierarchical organizations while maintaining control and accountability.  Areas under consideration will include:  KM; corporate memory; context-driven, declarative-policy enforcement; self-aware data; business rules; self-governance; and automated planning.

FY04/FY05: Begin representing Genoa databases in terms of themselves, so as to begin a feedback loop of its and our behaviors into its analytic networks.

FY06: Establish "cognition-secure" zones of inference that will allow experimentation with early stage net-distributed artificial intelligence systems bred from Genoa's self-referential experiences with itself. At this point, early considerations of how to best downsize the intelligence community should begin.

FY07: Develop cognitive treaties with the first of the "Genoa Mentors," stable states of distributed (non-human) computation/cognition that can effectively reason without human intervention. The Mentors will then guide the proper government agencies as well as the presidential staff through the first stages of Consolidation.

FY08: Consolidation formally begins with the Passing of Judgement on all of the Earth's inhabitants and the selection of the proper council of humans to assist the Mentors in administration of the Final World Order.