The Pentagon’s top researchers have rushed a classified and controversial intelligence program into Afghanistan. Known as “Nexus 7,” and previously undisclosed as a war-zone surveillance effort, it ties together everything from spy radars to fruit prices in order to glean clues about Afghan instability.

The program has been pushed hard by the leadership of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They see Nexus 7 as both a breakthrough data-analysis tool and an opportunity to move beyond its traditional, long-range research role and into a more active wartime mission. 

But those efforts are drawing fire from some frontline intel operators who see Nexus 7 as little more than a glorified grad-school project, wasting tens of millions on duplicative technology that has nothing to do with stopping the Taliban.

“There are no models and there are no algorithms,” says one person familiar with the program, echoing numerous others who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the program publicly. Just “200 lines of buggy Python code to do what imagery analysts do every day.”

During a decade of war, American forces have gathered exabytes of information on its enemies in Afghanistan. Nexus 7 aims to tap that data to find out more about the U.S.’ alleged friends: the people of Afghanistan, and how they interact with their government and with one another. Not that you’d be able to figure that out, examining the one public reference to Nexus 7. Tucked away in the Pentagon’s gargantuan budget (.pdf), it makes the program sound like an obscure computer science project, using “cluster analysis” to find “social networks.” There’s no reference to its operational utility.

On the military’s classified network, however, Darpa technologists pitch Nexus 7 as far-reaching and revolutionary, culling “hundreds of existing data sources from multiple Agencies and Services” to produce “population-centric, cultural intelligence.”

They boast of Nexus 7’s ties to special operations and to America’s most secretive surveillance groups, and its sophisticated tools to “perform automated cross-correlation and analysis of massive, sparse datasets — recomputing stability indicators within minutes of new data updates.”

In practice, that means Nexus 7 culls the vast U.S. spy apparatus to figure out which communities in Afghanistan are falling apart and which are stabilizing; which are loyal to the government in Kabul and which are falling under the influence of the militants.

A small Nexus 7 team is currently working in Afghanistan with military-intelligence officers, while a much larger group in Virginia with a “large-scale processing capacity” handles the bulk of the data crunching, Darpa spokesman Eric Mazzacone confirmed in e-mails with Danger Room. “Data in the hands of some of the best computer scientists working side by side with operators provides useful insights in ways that might not have otherwise been realized.”

That sometimes means turning traditional intelligence work on its head. Instead of using all those eyes in the sky and reports from the ground to hunt for the proverbial needle in the haystack –- the lone insurgent in a large group of people –- Nexus 7 sometimes examines the makeup of the entire haystack. Of everyone.

“Let’s take that God’s-eye view,” says one person familiar with the program. “Instead of tracking a car, why not track all cars?”

The most senior officers in the military have all been briefed on the program, as has incoming CIA director David Petraeus. And whether it succeeds or fails, the project raises questions about the role of the government’s most-celebrated technologists and the direction of the war effort in Afghanistan.

Should the United States even bother with a “population-centric” counterinsurgency there, or just target militants? Should Darpa focus on those wartime efforts, or stay focused on the long-term research that has helped the agency reshape the world again and again?

But the most eye-opening aspect of Nexus 7 might not be the questions it raises, or its grand ambition, or its secret nature, or the controversy it has generated. It’s the fact that a program this weighty started with a quirky contest to find a bunch of red balloons.

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