Bastards. Via BoingBoing.net:
Darpa hired a consulting firm, SRI, to investigate the feasibility of re-designing the Internet to eliminate online anonymity to catch terrorists and evil underpants gnomes. The consultants gathered a whack of experts from various disciplines who told them it was stupid all around: bad for privacy, bad for the Constitution, technologically unsound, and unlikely to provide any assistance to the nation’s intelligence agencies whose problem isn’t an absence of information, but rather an absence of analysis — you don’t get faster analysis by throwing more chaff into the radar-field.
Anyway, the snake-oil consultants decided that the group was far too negative and basically made up its own conclusions, submitting them to Darpa as the “consensus” of the august experts they met with — a positive outlook would mean more consulting dollars.
And then someone leaked the whole story to the NYT.