Esther Dyson’s Flight School

There aren’t two more institutions more different than the Walt Disney Company and the US Directorate of National Intelligence…perhaps.   Eric Haseltine, who has worked at both of them, says, “You’d be astonished how similar intelligence and the media /entertainment businesses actually are. Both collect information, add value to it and then deliver it to consumers. The biggest problems confronting both businesses are similar: how to manage overwhelming amounts of data, how to keep information private and secure, and above all how to make consumer experience simple.”

He worked at Disney for 10 years, and more recently as chief technology officer of the DNI from June 2005 to June 2007.  Now he’s taken on another challenge – health care -s well asnd secure, and above all how to make consumer experiences simple.overwhelming amounts of data; how to keep information as well as media, sports and themed entertainment.  And he’ll be speaking at Flight School in June as well as the New Yorker’s conference in May.

By training, he is a neuroscientist; he wrote his PhD thesis at Indiana University about the sensory neurophysiology of the brains of snakes (boas and pythons) that “see” in the dark via heat sensors around their lips.

After a year as a post-doc in neuroanatomy at Vanderbilt Medical School, Haseltine  went to work for Hughes Aircraft Company as an industrial psychologist and designed advanced fighter cockpit displays and flight simulation systems.

Haseltine’s research in military flight simulation introduced him to the emerging field of virtual reality, and in 1992 he joined Walt Disney Imagineering to help found the Virtual Reality Studio, which he ended up running until his departure from Disney in 2002. By the time he left Disney, Haseltine was head of R&D for the entire corporation, including film, television, theme parks, internet and consumer products.

In the aftermath of 9/11, he joined the National Security Agency as Associate Director, in charge of  NSA Research and Development, where he directed a broad range of projects, specializing in counter-terrorism technology.

When Congress created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in 2005, he was promoted to  become its first chief technology officer  (formally, Associate Director National Intelligence, reporting to the Director).  In his two years there, he oversaw all science and technology efforts within the United States technology community as well as fostering development innovative new technologies for counter-terrorism.

 Securing the elephant

“When the US was attacked on 9/11,” he says, “it was as if an elephant had been bitten by a virus-bearing mosquito.  But instead of developing a better immune system, we tried to grow bigger tusks and sharper ears.”    

Last year, he created the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity – an incubator for projects that couldn’t find a home elsewhere, especially within the establishment. Its name is no accident:  Using the word “activity” as opposed agency, says Haseltine, “made it faster and simpler to create the organization, inasmuch as specific words carry enormous weight in such situations. If we’d called it an ‘agency,’ for example, the finance people asserted  - rightly or wrongly -  that it would have had to have its own separate funding ‘program’ from Congress (also a term of art)…and its own Director, HR system, Finance officers and so on. It didn’t matter if all of this was actually true; all that mattered was that important staffers in ODNI thought it might be true…”   IARPA’s mission is to develop revolutionary technologies that are (perceived as) too  high-risk for any regular agency to pursue. IARPA also focuses on emerging opportunities in the “white spaces” of the intelligence community that do not fit the mission of any agency  and technologies that benefit multiple agencies.

Indeed, Haseltine believes the current situation provides a lot of opportunity for start-ups.  Crises have led to the birth of many new markets, he says.  They include UAVs, GPS, even the Internet itself, which was created in response to the Soviet threat.  He describes the recent success of UAVs, which were pretty much ignored by the armed services.  After all, they competed with existing methods and technology.  “If you’re a parent, you shouldn’t ask the permission of your first-born to have another child.”

 So DARPA  funded UAV’s as an experiment with an operational partner.  They were used in the field in Iraq; when the experiment was over, the operational partner in Iraq would not give them up.  Now the DOD is paying for them – and using them extensively. 

So, Haseltine asks, will the end of the Space Shuttle and the rise of China be the crises that enable private space travel?