The projects to be launched at a top-secret University of Maryland research center would make "Q" - James Bond's owlish gadget-meister - blink with tears of envy.
In the coming months, teams of the nation's top theoretical mathematicians, behavioral scientists, software engineers and futurists will assemble to figure out how to make U.S. intelligence better, faster and more efficient.
Aston Martins with twin machine guns and ejector seats? Flamethrower bagpipes? Jet packs? The missile-firing leg cast?
Beyond that. Way beyond that.
The idea of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, under construction at the university's M-Square research park near the main campus, is to investigate new ideas for intelligence agencies that are too preposterous for government bureaucrats or private contractors to consider.
Can a machine learn a new language quickly - say, a dialect of Somali being spoken by pirates - so it could instantaneously translate intercepted communications?
How could hackers attack a U.S. national health database and how can it be protected?
Could a software program use cultural and linguistic clues from interrogations to predict a terrorist attack?
"The whole idea is to go beyond the threats of today, to anticipate the national security needs of tomorrow," said Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, who fought to have IARPA's new headquarters in Maryland.
"We're not going to be inventing gadgets here," Mikulski, a Democrat, sniffed in an interview after the dedication Monday of the incomplete, $40 million building that will house IARPA.
"We're talking technology breakthroughs," she said. "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are stampeding across the planet as we speak, and there are those who have a predatory intent against the United States of America.
"We have to stand sentry to make sure that never, ever again is there an attack on the United States and its interests abroad."
IARPA, a collaboration among intelligence officials and experts from academia and business, was formed in 2007 and patterned after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
DARPA investigates futuristic military projects such as armed unmanned aerial vehicles, common in the skies over Afghanistan and Pakistan, which its engineers dreamed of in the 1980s.
