Not meaning to pick on this particular article or AUV, but doesn't it generally seem that everyone has their hand out for money to the Homeland Security Department lately? It's like they try to promote their drones or auvs or nanotechnology or robots as can help with Anti- Terrorism efforts! It's like they can't get any attention just being a science project that they are, or keep funding for their project going, so they put a tag of "CAN HELP FIGHT TERRORISM" on the project, and then everyone is all of a sudden interested! Then they seemingly hope to get some more funding for their project. They have all of these vaporware grand ideas of how it could possibly help fight terrorism. Why don't their name their project "Terror Buster" or something like that. Naw, nevermind, it's probably just me and not getting enough coffee this morning.

Terror dollars are having a huge impact and are going to shape and bend our educational systems for the next ?? years. Hopefully there will be a technology halo effect where some of these developments leak into other commercial/health/educational/ areas. I'm probably drinking the same coffee...

Yes it does seem these days that any new whizbang technology has an "also fights terror" label slapped on it. I definately noticed a heightened interest in face recognition in recent years.

Actually although technology is useful I think there's a limit to which you can use it to fight terrorism. There's still no substitute for good human intelligence in what are basically social/political matters.

Has anyone seen anything about the AUV down in Antartica on whether it was successful or not at mapping the area under the iceshelf?

Looks like the Antarctic deployment of Autosub was a success: Autosub expedition journal archive

Homeland security is indeed a new research gravy train - but there's a good reason everyone's hopping on the bandwagon. The government has a lot of money dedicated to homeland security now, and there's quite a bit going to AUV work.