ARDA said it obeys all privacy laws and has not given its researchers any government or private data. But it declined to say whether it was sponsoring any research on privacy protection.
Lunt, who used to be a DARPA program manager, was developing privacy protection software for Poindexter's Genisys program.
Her software-shielded identities in the records the government reviewed restricted each intelligence analyst to only the data he or she was authorized to see and created a permanent record to track cheaters.
In reviewing the rise and fall of Poindexter's project, the Pentagon's inspector general concluded the failure to address privacy problems from the outset of future data-mining research risks developing "systems that may not be either deployable or used to their fullest potential without costly revision."
Professor LaTanya Sweeney of Carnegie Mellon University was the principal researcher developing privacy protections for the Bio-ALIRT project. An early version of Bio-ALIRT was used to help protect President George W. Bush's 2001 inauguration.
She also presented her work last fall to officials of various agencies she was told "might want to continue the work. But they came through with zero dollars."
"The tool just sits there unused," she said. "People think they have to sacrifice privacy to get safety. And it doesn't have to be that way."
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