Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency <- click the link
It's the brainstorming, development, whiz bang end of military hardware.
Not all of it. Some really cool tech and high end military equipment comes from DARPA programs.
They are not just a group of people hanging out thinking up bad stuff although there are DARPA programs all over the place that don’t even know others exist.
Like anything else there are White Hat programs and Black Hat stuff going on.
DARPA isn't restricted to hardware. Since at least the 1960s and perhaps back into the 1950s, DARPA was the original funder of (software) research in artificial intelligence, notably at MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, and Stanford.
Aha, thanks.