Ex-DARPA Chief: Technology Advancing Too Fast For Governments

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The former head of the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Kaigham (Ken) Gabriel, has warned that technology is advancing too fast for governments to keep up.

Gabriel was the agency’s acting director and was “the man behind drone technology and global positioning satellites, as well as the military’s top secret, high-tech operation responsible for inventing the forerunner to the internet, Arpanet,” Computer Weekly reports.

According to Gabriel, governments have little chance to stymie the development and spread of technologies like encryption.

“One of the things people and governments need to understand is that the private sector is moving [with a lot of] speed, energy and economic power. The days when government could leapfrog encryption with federally funded or defence-funded technologies are gone,” said Gabriel, who has served as an executive at Google and now heads the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory

This doesn’t mean, however, that they should throw in the towel when it comes to keeping advanced tech from falling into the wrong hands, he told the magazine in an interview.

“Export control of dual-use technology is a very important area. It is a serious issue that we have to be careful very about. Yes, the field is level from the point of view of commercial tech, but that doesn’t mean all bets are off and we should just dump all technologies on the marketplace,” he said.

“I think we are far from that utopia. There are certain elements that should be thoughtfully and carefully controlled and restricted by export,” he added.