Public security

The Pentagon Wants to Buy That Bomb You’re Building in the Garage

On Friday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, announced that they would award money to people who can turn consumer electronics, household chemicals, 3-D printed parts, cheap drones or other “commercially available technology” into the next improvised weapon.

“For decades, U.S. national security was ensured in large part by a simple advantage: a near-monopoly on access to the most advanced technologies. Increasingly, however, off-the-shelf equipment developed for the transportation, construction, agricultural and other commercial sectors features highly sophisticated components, which resourceful adversaries can modify or combine to create novel and unanticipated security threats,” the agency wrote in a press release announcing the Improv program.