by Yasha Levine
9. Comm. on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics: A Report, S. Rep. 93-S7-312 (1973), https://archive.org/stream/Military-Surveillance-Civilian-Politics-1973/MilitarySurveillance CivilianPolitics#page/n0/mode/2up.
10. This quote comes from Christopher Pyle’s Senate testimony. Senate Comm. on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, “Federal Data Banks, Computers, and the Bill of Rights: Hearings,” 92nd Cong., 1st sess., 163 (1971) (statement of Christopher H. Pyle, graduate student at Columbia University).
11. Information on the army’s CONUS Intel operation comes mostly from two Senate reports—Army Surveillance of Civilian Politics: A Documentary Analysis and Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics—released in 1972 and 1973 by a special Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights that was convened by Senator Sam Ervin to investigate Christopher Pyle’s revelations.
12. “Persons of Interest,” Life, March 26, 1971.
13. “Federal Data Banks, Computers, and the Bill of Rights: Hearings,” 174 (statement of Christopher Pyle).
14. Ibid.
15. Christopher Pyle, “CONUS Revisited: The Army Covers Up,” Washington Monthly, July 1970.
16. “Persons of Interest,” 22.
17. “Federal Data Banks, Computers, and the Bill of Rights: Hearings,” 164 (statement of Christopher Pyle).
18. Ibid.
19. Christopher Pyle, interview with author, April 28, 2016.
20. Frank Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
21. John Connolly, “Inside the Shadow CIA,” Spy, September 1992.
22. Pyle, “Vast Army Intelligence Operation Monitors Political Scene.”
23. “Unraveling Data Networks,” ComputerWorld, November 26, 1975.
24. Joan M. Jensen, Army Surveillance in America, 1775–1980 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).
25. Daniel R. Kashey, “A Look Inside NCIC,” ComputerWorld, December 12, 1977.
26. William D. McDowell, “73 Law Enforcement Agencies All Under One Roof,” ComputerWorld, August 2, 1972.
27. Richard E. Rotman, “GSA Denies ‘Secrecy’ of Data Bank,” Washington Post, June 21, 1974.
28. “Surveillance Technology,” Joint Hearings before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Comm. on the Judiciary and the Special Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Commerce of the Comm. on Commerce, 94th Cong., 1st sess. (June 23, September 9 and 10, 1975).
29. Arthur R. Miller, “The National Data Center and Personal Privacy,” The Atlantic, November 1967; “Unraveling Data Networks”; Mark Radwin, “Nets Make Reference Data Available in 50 Cities,” ComputerWorld, November 26, 1975.
30. Leslie Goff, “1960: Sabre Takes Off,” CNN, June 29, 1999.
31. Waldrop, Dream Machine, 120.
32. Thomas Petzinger Jr., Hard Landing: The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged the Airlines into Chaos (New York: Times Business, 1995).
33. SABRE could process seventy-five hundred reservations per hour. Not blazing by modern standards, but at the time it was the most sophisticated commercial system of its kind and it quickly became the common platform on which all air booking was done. “By the mid-1960s, Sabre became the largest private, real-time data processing system, second in size only to the US government’s system,” according to IBM’s official history. “Sabre: The First Online Reservation System,” IBM, http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/sabre/.
34. “SABRE Press Kit,” SABRE, April 29, 2014, http://web.archive.org/web/20170524143915/https://www.sabre.com/files/PressKitUPDATED.4.29.14.pdf.
35. Steven Lubar, “‘Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate’: A Cultural History of the Punch Card,” Journal of American Culture, June 2004.
36. Arthur R. Miller, “The National Data Center and Personal Privacy,” The Atlantic, November 1967.
37. Lawrence M. Baskir, “Reflections on the Senate Investigation of Army Surveillance,” Indiana Law Journal, Summer 1974.
38. Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2008); Karl E. Campbel, Senator Sam Ervin: Last of the Founding Fathers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
39. “Federal Data Banks, Computers and the Bill of Rights. Part I,” Senate Comm. on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, 92nd Cong, 1st sess. (1971).
40. In his opening statement (ibid.), Senator Ervin mentioned that the number of federal government computer systems had increased more than tenfold in a decade. “In 1959, there were 403 computers in use by the Federal Government. There are now over 5,000. From a total of $464,000 in 1959, we have leaped to a national budget of over $2 million.”
41. Richard Halloran, “Senators Hear of Threat of a ‘Dossier Dictatorship,’” New York Times, February 24, 1971.
42. Baskir, “Reflections on the Senate Investigation of Army Surveillance.”
43. Senator Ervin’s committee destroyed US Army surveillance files they obtained to protect people’s privacy, but the final report on the investigation contained a few anonymized details. An entry on “nationally known civil rights leader” noted that he “has subversive Communist background, and is a sex pervert.” An intelligence report on a youth group in Colorado noted that its members engaged in “sex activities of both heterosexual and homosexual varieties.”
44. “Army Surveillance of Civilians: A Documentary Analysis,” Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, Comm. on the Judiciary, US Senate, 92nd Cong., 2nd sess. (1972), 93.
45. Ibid., v.
46. Senator Ervin’s Army Surveillance of Civilians: A Documentary Analysis report at multiple points discusses lack of evidence that the army destroyed its surveillance files as well as evidence showing that the data had been deliberately preserved: “Many of the records undoubtedly have been destroyed; many others undoubtedly have been hidden away.… On two subsequent occasions it was learned that the Intelligence Command had failed to carry out orders to destroy its computerized files on civilians unaffiliated with the armed forces.… The order to destroy the mug books was issued on February 18, 1970, but as of August 26, 1970, less than half had been reported destroyed.… At the Counterintelligence Analysis Division this directive was interpreted to permit microfilming of the Compendium before destruction of the office copy was carried out” (v-8). Three years later, Senator Ervin introduced a bill that outlawed domestic military surveillance. The proposed law was supposed to put this issue to rest once and for all, but it was fiercely opposed by the Pentagon. Despite having wide bipartisan support, it never made it past its first reading. By then, public attention had moved on. The army surveillance scandal was old news, eclipsed by the Watergate investigation. Paul J. Scheips, The Role of Federal Military Forces in Domestic Disorders, 1945–1992 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History of the United States Army, 2012), 398.
47. Christopher Pyle told me that army computers back then were still very rudimentary and could do only the most basic analysis on the surveillance data they contained. “I never came across any information that the computers were able to talk to each other. That was a little too sophisticated for them” (Christopher Pyle, interview with author, April 2016). But that was already changing. ARPA was hard at work building exactly the kind of networked computer database technology that Pyle said the domestic army intelligence program lacked.
48. Transcripts of Ford Rowan’s June 1975 NBC broadcasts were read into the Congressional Record. “Surveillance Technology,” Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, 4–9.
49. Ford Rowan, interview with author, November 10, 2015.
50. Ford Rowan told me that at the time he aired the story, he was afraid the Pentagon would sue him and NBC and attempt to get him to disclose his anonymous sources. To protect his sources and to protect himself, he wrote their n
ames down on a piece of paper and stuck it in a bank vault. “I ended up footnoting all of those and have the names of all the people I talked with and there was only one copy made. This was back in the days before you had computers to write everything on. So you had a typewriter. I put it in a safe deposit box and gave the key to my editor and in the end six months later he gave me the key back. He said, ‘throw it away, as far as I’m concerned.’ So I burned the list. Or actually tore it up.” Ford Rowan, interview with author, November 10, 2015.
51. Nancy French, a correspondent for ComputerWorld, hit up her contacts at MIT, and they confirmed that files on antiwar activists and protesters had indeed been transferred over ARPANET to MIT. French’s sources explained that the reason those files were transferred was because MIT, in partnership with Harvard, was developing a special database system for the Pentagon that would handle these surveillance files. One source told French that an army lieutenant colonel had explained that the surveillance data was being sent from the National Security Agency at Fort Mead. “Files were transmitted over the ARPANET to certain parties on a joint MIT-Harvard project who were writing data bank maintenance programs for use on Army surveillance files on civilian antiwar protestors,” writes Nancy French. A “data bank maintenance program” in 1970s techie lingo was simply a program that allowed a user to interact with a database, to enter and retrieve data, to search for information, that kind of thing (Nancy French, “Army Files on Citizens Still Not Destroyed,” ComputerWorld, June 11, 1975). Reporters from MIT’s The Tech pursued the story, too, looking at allegations that the surveillance files were transferred to ARPA’s Project CAM and the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. “Although Defense Department officials testified in 1971 that the program had been terminated and its records destroyed, informed sources—including former military intelligence officers—have told The Tech that many of the files were retained. The information, according to intelligence sources, was transferred and stored at the headquarters of the National Security Agency (NSA), at Fort Meade, Maryland. The Army files were transmitted on the ARPANET in about January 1972, sources say, more than two years after the material—and the data banks maintained at the Fort Holabird facility—were ordered destroyed” (Norman D. Sandler and Mike McNamee, “Computers Carried Army Files; MIT Investigation Underway,” The Tech, April 11, 1975, http://web.archive.org/web/20170530223241/http://tech.mit.edu/V95/PDF/V95-N17.pdf).
52. Ford Rowan, Technospies (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978), 55.
53. In Senator Tunney’s investigation, Pentagon officials made multiple references to the “Cambridge Project.” They denied that it was used for surveillance, but this was the MIT center that Rowan identified in his reporting. “Surveillance Technology,” Joint Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, 21, 52.
54. Ibid., 42.
55. “Department of Defense Appropriations for Fiscal Year 73, Part 1,” Subcommittee on DOD Appropriations, Comm. on Appropriations, Senate Comm. on Appropriations (February 25, 28, March 14, 16, 22–24, May 4, 1972) (testimony of Stephen Lukasik, APRA director, March 14, 1972).
56. In his testimony to the Senate in 1972, Lukasik explains that the ARPANET was already on its way to being integrated into operational military communications systems including the Worldwide Military Command and Control System (WWMCCS), a global command and control network operated by the Department of Defense. “Now that ARPA has demonstrated the feasibility of distributed network operation, the Defense Communications Agency has ordered three of ARPA’s Interface Message Processors so that a prototype ARPANET operation can be established between three of the WWMCCS computers. When this is completed and the network operation has been proven as operationally effective, the WWMCCS network will be expanded to worldwide operation,” he said. Ibid.
57. ARPA began developing end-to-end encryption over the ARPANET in 1976. As a report to the Senate explains, this was superior because it did not require physically securing the lines and allowed a general-purpose defense network to be used for both classified and nonclassified tasks. “Department of Defense Appropriations for FY78 Part 5: Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation,” Hearings, Subcommittee of the Comm. on Appropriations, 95th Cong., 1st sess. (February–March 1977).
58. “The operational defense agencies first became interested in the ARPANET as a model for replacing their existing networks with more advanced technology. The National Security Agency commissioned Bolt, Beranek and Newman to create two smaller versions of the ARPANET for the intelligence community. These were the Community Online Intelligence System (‘COINS’), begun around 1972, and the Platform Network, built in the late 1970s. According to Eric Elsam, who managed network projects at BBN’s Washington office, both systems provided regular data communications service for intelligence agencies for many years” (Abbate, Inventing the Internet). “The most obvious and striking thing that pops out at you while looking at old maps of the ARPANET is that the NSA became a node in the mid-1970s. What does being a node mean? It meant that there was a computer at the NSA that was responsible for routing traffic on the ARPANET. The NSA could connect any computer it wanted to their IMP (the refrigerator-sized modems of the 1960s and 70s) and access the ARPANET and any networks to which it connected” (Matt Novak, “A History of Internet Spying, Part 2,” Gizmodo, February 20, 2015, http://gizmodo.com/a-history-of-internet-spying-part-2-1686760364).
59. Recently declassified CIA documents show that in 1974 the CIA planned to install ARPANET terminals for its analysts to use. Other declassified CIA files talk about installing terminals as well. Memorandum: CASCON Report to DCI (draft), Central Intelligence Agency, January 31, 1974, https://www.cia.gov/library /readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP79M00096A000500010002-6.pdf; an official map of the ARPANET released in June 1975 lists an NSA node as well as multiple nodes at air force and army bases and military contractors’ sites.
60. Stephen J. Lukasik, “Why the Arpanet Was Built,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 33, no. 3 (July–September 2011).
61. Waldrop, Dream Machine, 380.
62. Robert Kahn, interviewed by Vinton Cerf, September 30, 2006, http://web.archive.org/web/20170530211316/http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access /text/2013/05/102657973-05-01-acc.pdf.
63. ARPA’s command and control division was later renamed the Information Processing Technology Office, a more generic name that, whether intentionally or not, masked its military origins.
64. The agency had first-hand experience with the need for this kind of technology. In Vietnam, many battlefield projects relied on data transmission over long distances. There was Igloo White, the ambitious attempt to “bug the battlefield” and detect enemy movement by creating a computer network tied to wireless seismic sensors and microphones along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Also, multiple ARPA projects worked via remote-controlled helicopters—what we’d now call drones. Several models were being tested in battle by 1968. One model was a submarine hunter-killer launched from navy vessels and equipped with sonar and torpedoes. Another was outfitted for jungle duty with night vision and multiple weapon configurations: Vulcan cannons, missiles, grenade launchers, and cluster bomb dispensers. The drone’s real-time video signal was relayed to a mobile control station mounted on an army jeep, and it provided recon information used to call in bomber strikes (F. A. Tietzel, M. R. VanderLind, and J. H. Brown Jr., Summary of ARPA-ASO, TTO Aerial Platform Programs. Volume 2. Remotely Piloted Helicopters [Columbia, OH: Battelle, July 1975], http://www.dtic.mil/docs/citations /ADB007793). Early models hunted for submarines; others attacked ground forces, did recon, or worked as hovering antennas for long-distance radio links (Adverse Effects of Producing Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopters Before Completion of Development and Tests [Washington, DC: Comptroller of the United States, December 31, 1970]). These drones more or less worked, but they were crude. Their main limitations were short flight times and lack of long-distance control. And, of course, none of them used the ARPANET or any other network because it
did not yet exist.
65. Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 127–128.
66. Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn, “A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection,” IEEE Transactions on Communications 22, no. 5 (May 1974).
67. Vinton Cerf, interviewed by Judy O’Neill, April 24, 1990, Charles Babbage Institute.
68. Ibid.
69. “Department of Defense Appropriations for Fiscal Year 1978, Part 5—Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation,” 95th Cong., 1st sess. (February 4, 1977–March 18, 1977).
70. For example: in 1973, even as Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf sketched out the ARPANET 2.0, ARPA director Stephen Lukasik was asking Congress for $6.5 million to fund an “intelligent systems” program to fulfill the “objective of developing the capability to have computers consider large quantities of complex, real world information and form generalizations and plans based on the totality of information. Progress in these areas is important for the intelligence agencies, especially in intelligence analysis and question-answering systems.” Lukasik pointed out: “the tools and techniques to be developed will be available on systems of the ARPA network and therefore will be immediately accessible by the services.” “Department of Defense Appropriations for Fiscal Year 1973, Part 1,” Subcommittee on DOD Appropriations, Comm. on Appropriations, Senate Comm. on Appropriations (February 25, 28, March 14, 16, 22–24, May 4, 1972).
71. Ford Rowan, phone interview with author, November 10, 2015.
Chapter 4
1. Rossetto expanded this quote into a full-blown manifesto in Wired’s UK edition: “The most fascinating and powerful people today are not politicians or priests, or generals or pundits, but the vanguard who are integrating digital technologies into their business and personal lives, and causing social changes so profound that their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire.”