DARPA will fund that too, but almost always only as part of a larger applied research project. DARPA project deliver working systems.
DARPA projects are also always limited term, without renewals. That gives a deadline, which is different to most research agencies.
(ex-PM for a research agency that worked with *ARPA here. Most of the non-DARPA US *ARPA agencies aren't as effective as DARPA itself though).
The projects I worked on were all on tight budgets and deadlines with the goal of finding a way to commercialize the research.
That being said, I'm not a researcher and my job was finding/developing a commercialization path for existing research.
In 1998 I was setting up a shared internet connection in the apartment block I lived in. I remember wondering if I should go for a bundle of ethernet cables in the stairway or this newfangled WiFi thing. Neither I nor anyone else in the block had ever tried WiFi, and I believe it was still a few years before I did.
Went for the cables - and it ran without a hickup for all the time I lived there. Nobody else used the connection much so student-me ended up with an insanely fast 512kbps at 1/10 the price.
SEL is a modern miracle. The decision by the government to de-fund the work is a tragedy.
Last I heard, this seeing people with Wifi was very poor resolution and filled with noise but worst of all, the system had to be trained on the specific rooms it was being used on so you couldn't apply it secretly.
Second seems to be that the tech is uncommon and has poor resolution.
^ this is true with the first digital cameras as well.
As the MIT researchers first publishing their work on this know, the minimumly viable tech needed to use wifi to passively see observe each breath someone takes is 5% hardware and 95% software. We aren’t talking about cutting edge tech. We are taking about commonly available tech that is just used to observe distortions in the 3d radio propagation geometries.
The actual hardware required to see exactly where someone is behind walls and what their hands are doing costs less than $300. Most of it is software needed to reconstruct the geometry from the signals. Software like this is notorious for being randomly and abruptly open sourced.
You can also see if someone's breathing by noticing condensation on their windows in winter or seeing them enter their house one day and come out another day. They must have spent the intervening time inside breathing. If that's the level of invasion, it hardly matters.
Until we don't.
RIP Jon Lang. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wsFBeetiYMs
Cellphone jammers are probably a clearer example of cheap tech that can be used covertly but it's illegal and people usually don't.
Another important factor is that they aren't scalable because it takes a human a lot of work to hack only extremely local targets, not a program that can scan computers all over the world automatically.
[1] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R45088.pdf
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: Overview and Issues for CongressAs you said some fantastic projects, but a lot of political budget decisions.
From being on the inside for a short period of time, I've had a glimpse at just how hard this is. Projects come and go, getting killed for budgets, politics, etc etc
The commitment and early vision, are very difficult to re-create.
I'm most familiar with WiFi as I worked with one of the inventors. It was patented in 1992 based on research in radio-telescopes for detecting black holes, which had been done years earlier.
If you think about what most computers were like, and what we were doing with them in 1992, WiFi would have made no sense. It would have made less sense when they started work on it.
Most computers were desktops, you didn't take a laptop to get a latte (which was also just barely a common beverage). Most people didn't have the internet, so there wasn't much to connect to. Your computer didn't move, so why have it wireless. Mostly you'd connect to a printer, which was also huge, so may as well be wired.
There was nothing you would do on the network which would use the speed that WiFi was capable of.
It would be almost a decade before it would be somewhat useful, and not until 2008, with the arrival of smartphones that it was a necessity.
So yes, I believe most countries should try to support a DARPA like environment. I don't believe most countries will be successful in their attempt.