DARPA'S LITTLE COUSIN GETS ITS PROPS

"The Technical Support Working Group has been toiling against terror for years, but its technologically advanced work has been overshadowed by DARPA," Wired News says. "Now TSWG is stepping into the limelight."

TSWG has historically focused on short-term projects that create usable prototypes to solve real-world problems. The group's 2002 annual report points to the group's success in creating a better flat-panel X-ray machine to help bomb squads and a counterterrorism kit to help educate law enforcement and emergency workers how to recognize, by sight and smell, chemical, biological and radiological materials.
Chemical- and biological-weapon escape masks developed by TSWG have been ordered in the thousands by the Pentagon and Capitol Hill, according to Jeff David, deputy director of the Combating Terrorism Technology Support Office, which oversees TSWG.
Other current projects include a luggage irradiation machine that would destroy undetected biological and chemical weapons, better bomb disposal robots, bullet-detecting radar to prevent assassinations, a project to extract DNA from fingerprints, a cooling system for body armor and a mass transit surveillance camera system.