[ih] Yasha Levine's Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet -- Some Questions

this looks like conflates of a lot of stuff.

The ARPANET was motivated by resource sharing (see Larry Roberts and Barry
Wessler paper "On Resource Sharing"

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1477020

Licklider wrote extensively on the use of computers for non-numerical
purposes and was a strong supporter of Douglas Engelbart's work on
collaborative knowledge sharing.

The director of IPTO, Robert Taylor, was involved at one point, I think, in
the Vietnamese situation regarding casualty counts. see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_(computer_scientist) but this
had nothing to do with ARPANET as far as I know.

I know nothing about the Cambridge Project but ARPANET was available for
anyone with permission from DoD to use it so if CAM was a DoD project it
might well have been authorized to use the ARPANET but the developers of
the ARPANET and its host protocols did not make any reference to a
"Cambridge Project" or "CAM" to me during my association with the ARPANET
project (1968-1982).

ARPANET was a general purpose computer communication network. It is a
distortion to conflate this communication system's development with the
various projects that made use of its facilities. A secured capability was
developed for use on the ARPANET by BBN (the developer of the ARPANET IMPs)
and presumably was used to communicate classified information over the
network.

Post by Eric Gade
Hello list members,
Please excuse the length of this email.
I am in the process of writing a review of Yasha Levine's new history of
the Internet, "Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the
Internet." His overall thesis is that the development of the Internet has,
from the beginning, grown from "counterinsurgency" and surveillance
operations, and that these aspects have not been adequately chronicled in
other histories. Many of his claims about the early ARPA work I have not
encountered before, and I imagine that some would find them provocative.
I'm hoping there are members of this list with knowledge about these
1. Levine asserts that there was some overlap or relationship between
William Godel's Project Agile and work conducted by the ARPA Command and
Control division under Licklider. He pulls a lot from Sharon Weinberger's
recent book ("The Imagineers of War") in discussing both Godel and the
potential connection. He writes, "[Licklider's] work at ARPA was part of
the military's larger counterinsurgency efforts and directly overlapped
with William Godel's Project Agile." (52). In making this statement he
actually cites Weinberger's prologue, in which she says "Godel personally
signed off on the first computer-networking study, giving it money from his
Vietnam budget." It appears Weinberger is herself citing this document: (
https://archivesdeclassification.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/
arpa-order-internet.pdf
<https://archivesdeclassification.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/arpa-order-internet.pdf>).
It is a part of a series that may still be classified (I have the NDC
looking into it). My question about this is: was there really any kind of
working relationship? What does this transfer of funds represent? And
perhaps more broadly: to what extent was ARPA C&C/IPTO involved in
counterinsurgency data collection and processing?
2. A large section of the early history in this book deals with the
Cambridge Project (aka Project CAM) at MIT and controversy surrounding it
at the time. I am awaiting a copy of the original proposal from MIT (it
might not come in before deadline; should anyone on this list have a copy
I'd really appreciate it). Levine asserts that the project "would directly
aid the agency's counterinsurgency mission." He claims that the work of the
project "could be accessed from any computer with an ARPANET connection"
(68) and that "It was a kind of stripped down 1960s version of Palantir,
the powerful data mining, surveillance, and prediction software the
military and intelligence planners use today." He goes on: "the project was
customized to the military's needs, with particular focus on fighting
insurgencies and rolling back communism [...] It was clear that the
Cambridge Project wasn't just a tool for research, it was a
counterinsurgency technology." (68-69)
Is that not an accurate description of the proposal? Were any members
on this list involved in this research? If so, are these characterizations
accurate to your mind?
3. There is yet another section where Levine finds some reporting from
the early 70s, where NBC News' Rowan Ford conducted a 4 month investigation
and found evidence that intelligence files about American anti-war
protestors and others had been transferred, perhaps stored, and perhaps
processed somehow, over the ARPANET and linked host machines. His report
was entered into the Congressional Record as a part of Tunney's hearings in
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015078638619;
view=1up;seq=7
The claim is that these files might have been a part of previous CONUS
intel that, in 1972, the Army was ordered to delete. One of the claims in
the report is that such files were transferred via the ARPANET to MIT for
some reason. Ford had 4 sources for this story who had knowledge of the
incident; only one, Richard Ferguson (who apparently was fired from MIT for
this disclosure), gave information publicly.
Does anyone on this list have knowledge of this incident, and/or
whether or not the ARPANET/ARPA IPTO was used to move around, eventually
store, or otherwise process these kinds of dossiers?
These are all the questions I have for now. Thanks for taking the time to
read.
--
Eric
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http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history

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Bill Ricker

2018-04-14 00:05:42 UTC

I wasn't there but ... maybe I can connect some dots.

This smells like coincidence ... that Licklider's CAM and MAC projects
(and many other defense projects) were\ at MIT makes a connection
"obvious" even if there wasn't one.

A budget-balancing transfer of funds from AGILE to Licklider seems
perfectly reasonable from a bureaucratic point of view. It doesn't
mean the money was for ARPAnet even though that is the last project
that put Licklider over budget; they could be listed together on one
memo because they're the two amendments to a previously approved
budget. It does means AGILE had uncommitted funds when Lick was
overcommitted. The Psych portion of Lick's portfolio was certainly of
common interest, but a transfer might have occurred from any
undercommitted team, as failure to spend funds may lead to a reduction
in budget!

I would be very impressed if either of the captains of research
expected the ARPAnet to be actually useful to AGILE researchers in the
near term. Although the possible benefits of a future MILNET for
collaboration between applied social science researchers in in-country
anti-insurgency INTEL centers and their peers back home (in academe or
CIA HQ) could perhaps be foreseen, the undersea cables and high
bandwidth satellites needed to connect a SAIGON operating center to
back home were decades in the future. (There was eventually a low
bandwidth link to UK and from there to NATO and a treaty verification
seismology lab in Scandinavia but even that was far future at the time
in question.)

Active INTEL databases have been classified since forever. As Vint
notes, there was a classified adapter for MILNET nodes of the
(d)ARPAnet, for passing data from from one MILNET node to another.
That would technically be "over the ARPANET" since until TCP/IP
cutover, it was only one network, but with an encrypted tunnel of some
sort. I'd be shocked if active INTEL data was sent that way, I doubt
the adapters were certified for higher classifications; but ...
anything's possible, especially as exceptions. Sending to MIT? That's
distinctly odder.

I am unaware of the Natick Army Labs being involved in anything like
this ... they developed the tropical chocolate bar and new uniforms.
Could they have had an AGILE branch? I guess plausible. Might a
researcher working with NSA or CIA have collocated with Natick to have
secure facilities instead of at Draper, Lincoln Labs, MITRE, BBN, etc,
for whatever reason ? IDK, possible, but seems very odd. But if they'd
had a compartmentalized sideline, no one would know. That's the beauty
of black programs and conspiracy theories, lack of evidence is
inconclusive. Were they home to contract managers for some ASA
research project with MIT? Perhaps. Before NSA could use its name
publicly, they'd have let contracts as ASA (or successor names) and
the Navy equivalent.

The mystery files at MIT make me think of CCA's Model 204 work for
"The Community", which may well be an MIT Intelligence-research
spinoff. (While possibly connected to CAM or more likely AGILE, it
might have been more applied and directly funded CIA/NSA R&D contract
funneled through ASA?) The inventor of Model 204's key internals, Pat
O'Neil, was a professor at MIT immediately before CCA, and had been
working on the special index structure for nearly a decade. Just
guessing but looks like development may have been at MIT as contract
research and fielding, support, and future maintenance/support was
spun off to CCA, formed conveniently down the block?
(For decades Model 204 was the only DBMS capable of big-data and
text-retrieval. The opening sequence in "3 Days of the Condor" movie
(likely 7 days book too?) showed you an AGILE/CAM type team using CCA
software to digitize printed source documents into a document
retrieval system ahead of the unclassified state of the art, if I'm
connecting the dots right. I worked with tape extracts from a Model
204 Text DBMS in an unclassified setting in the late 1990s -- the
National Library of Medicine MEDLINE bibliography&abstract system was
then, likely still is, based on Model 204. Lucious metadata, it had
ontological search before the phrase was coined. You can access it as
PUBMED, thanks to Al Gore -- which undercut our startup's business
model, oops. )
The tapes being seen at MIT does not mean they were sent over the
ARPAnet. In those days, was it not the case that a courier with
several tapes in a locked bag taking the train from DC to Boston had
better bandwidth, latency, and error recovery? I was still getting
tapes sent from NLM's Model 204 via USPS/UPS in 1990s. (And a weirder
EBCDIC variant I've never seen.)
I'm guessing the mystery tapes at MIT were test data sent to
O'Neil to test his pre-production DBMS ? Back in those dark ages,
they might not have thought to make the test data anonymized/mangled.
( People still forget that today in a post HIPAA/PCI world!) Or,
realizing that a real intel DB being released to an academic
environment would have been a security problem for NSA/CIA, maybe they
made a test file with data they swiped from Commerce's Census dept?
Just brainstorming here.
Pat O'Neil is Professor Emeritus at UMass/Boston, where he
co-founded the CS department on his return from industry.
[ https://www.cs.umb.edu/~poneil/ ] He might be able to shed light
on the NBC reports of MIT having had tapes that belonged at Langley or
Ft. Meade, and which of Licklider or AGILE or CIA/NSA/ASA was his
original funding source.

You could also check with Don E Eastlake iii (on some IETF/W3C groups)
on CCA DBMS history.
https://www.informit.com/authors/bio/5f1734d3-42df-49f0-b2e2-61007b188cd1

// Bill Ricker
// Friend of Padlipsky

Vint Cerf

2018-04-14 00:33:41 UTC

a few corrections in CAPS for distinguishability - not shouting.

ARRAY TO DETECT NUCLEAR UNDERGROUND TESTING. IT WAS A
SATELLITE LINK AND WAS DOUBLED TO 9600 BPS TO ACCOMMODATE
THE ARPANET TIP (TERMINAL IMP) AT NDRE IN ADDITION TO CARRYING
DATA FROM NORSAR TO THE US. THAT LINK WENT IN ABOUT 1973 I
BELIEVE.

Post by Bill Ricker
Active INTEL databases have been classified since forever. As Vint
notes, there was a classified adapter for MILNET nodes of the
(d)ARPAnet, for passing data from from one MILNET node to another.

NO, IT WAS END-TO-END, SO THE MILNET LINKS WERE NOT
ENCRYPTED IF MEMORY SERVES. THE HOSTS ON EITHER
END OF THE PRIVATE LINE INTERFACE HAD ALL THEIR TRAFFIC
ENCRYPTED. OF COURSE IT STAYED ENCRYPTED AS IT TRAVERSED
THE INTERVENING IMPS OF THE MILNET AND/OR ARPANET.
MILNET DID NOT COME INTO EXISTENCE UNTIL THE TCP/IP
FLAG DAY, JANUARY 1983 BY THE WAY.

Post by Bill Ricker
That would technically be "over the ARPANET" since until TCP/IP
cutover, it was only one network, but with an encrypted tunnel of some
sort. I'd be shocked if active INTEL data was sent that way, I doubt
the adapters were certified for higher classifications; but ...
anything's possible, especially as exceptions. Sending to MIT? That's
distinctly odder. DEPENDING ON THE KEYS USES, THE PLI WAS

ABLE TO CARRY AT LEAST TS AND POSSIBLY SCI.

Post by Bill Ricker
I am unaware of the Natick Army Labs being involved in anything like
this ... they developed the tropical chocolate bar and new uniforms.
Could they have had an AGILE branch? I guess plausible. Might a
researcher working with NSA or CIA have collocated with Natick to have
secure facilities instead of at Draper, Lincoln Labs, MITRE, BBN, etc,
for whatever reason ? IDK, possible, but seems very odd. But if they'd
had a compartmentalized sideline, no one would know. That's the beauty
of black programs and conspiracy theories, lack of evidence is
inconclusive. Were they home to contract managers for some ASA
research project with MIT? Perhaps. Before NSA could use its name
publicly, they'd have let contracts as ASA (or successor names) and
the Navy equivalent.
The mystery files at MIT make me think of CCA's Model 204 work for
"The Community", which may well be an MIT Intelligence-research
spinoff. (While possibly connected to CAM or more likely AGILE, it
might have been more applied and directly funded CIA/NSA R&D contract
funneled through ASA?) The inventor of Model 204's key internals, Pat
O'Neil, was a professor at MIT immediately before CCA, and had been
working on the special index structure for nearly a decade. Just
guessing but looks like development may have been at MIT as contract
research and fielding, support, and future maintenance/support was
spun off to CCA, formed conveniently down the block?
(For decades Model 204 was the only DBMS capable of big-data and
text-retrieval. The opening sequence in "3 Days of the Condor" movie
(likely 7 days book too?) showed you an AGILE/CAM type team using CCA
software to digitize printed source documents into a document
retrieval system ahead of the unclassified state of the art, if I'm
connecting the dots right. I worked with tape extracts from a Model
204 Text DBMS in an unclassified setting in the late 1990s -- the
National Library of Medicine MEDLINE bibliography&abstract system was
then, likely still is, based on Model 204. Lucious metadata, it had
ontological search before the phrase was coined. You can access it as
PUBMED, thanks to Al Gore -- which undercut our startup's business
model, oops. )
The tapes being seen at MIT does not mean they were sent over the
ARPAnet. In those days, was it not the case that a courier with
several tapes in a locked bag taking the train from DC to Boston had
better bandwidth, latency, and error recovery? I was still getting
tapes sent from NLM's Model 204 via USPS/UPS in 1990s. (And a weirder
EBCDIC variant I've never seen.)
I'm guessing the mystery tapes at MIT were test data sent to
O'Neil to test his pre-production DBMS ? Back in those dark ages,
they might not have thought to make the test data anonymized/mangled.
( People still forget that today in a post HIPAA/PCI world!) Or,
realizing that a real intel DB being released to an academic
environment would have been a security problem for NSA/CIA, maybe they
made a test file with data they swiped from Commerce's Census dept?
Just brainstorming here.
Pat O'Neil is Professor Emeritus at UMass/Boston, where he
co-founded the CS department on his return from industry.
[ https://www.cs.umb.edu/~poneil/ ] He might be able to shed light
on the NBC reports of MIT having had tapes that belonged at Langley or
Ft. Meade, and which of Licklider or AGILE or CIA/NSA/ASA was his
original funding source.
You could also check with Don E Eastlake iii (on some IETF/W3C groups)
on CCA DBMS history.
https://www.informit.com/authors/bio/5f1734d3-42df-49f0-b2e2-61007b188cd1
// Bill Ricker
// Friend of Padlipsky
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history

--
New postal address:
Google
1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
Reston, VA 20190

Bill Ricker

2018-04-14 01:29:43 UTC

Vint replied (not shouting) --

Post by Vint Cerf
NO, IT WAS END-TO-END, SO THE MILNET LINKS WERE NOT
ENCRYPTED IF MEMORY SERVES. THE HOSTS ON EITHER
END OF THE PRIVATE LINE INTERFACE HAD ALL THEIR TRAFFIC
ENCRYPTED. OF COURSE IT STAYED ENCRYPTED AS IT TRAVERSED
THE INTERVENING IMPS OF THE MILNET AND/OR ARPANET.
MILNET DID NOT COME INTO EXISTENCE UNTIL THE TCP/IP
FLAG DAY, JANUARY 1983 BY THE WAY.

I stand corrected that i shouldn't have referred to the PLI-eligible
Military hosts attached to on NCP (D)ARPAnet as MILNET.
:-)

Ok, for this thread OP request :
Were the PLI in use pre-TCP ?
Did the PLI have a bypass or null-key option to allow a host
(rebooted to sanitzed state with classified files off-line) to connect
to the normal, PLI-less ARPAnet hosts ?

(-: We could say the PLI were the original VPN or rather Virtual Sub Nets :-)

So sending an INTEL file from a PLI host to an MIT host just wouldn't
work, unless the MIT host temporarily was connected via a PLI with
matching key, which would involve shenanigans strange even by MIT or
Community standards.

Maybe NATICK LABS is involved, per article referenced in OP, because
file was sent via PLI to them (when did they get a host?) and moved
tapes from there to MIT?
(As long as the orginating branch had provided waivers it might even
have been vaguely legal to read the tape at MIT?)
(Courier with 6 tapes in a bag on the night train still better bandwidth?)

One could have sent an UNCLASS file to MIT from an UNCLASS host at Ft
Meade (mentioned in the article), but file would have to be downgraded
from NSA system of origin to //UNCLASS//FOUO// in order to put it onto
the rare, air-gapped UNCLASS system that was connected to the net
normally (no PLI).
Doing that with actual INTEL DB would still be have been wrong, in
addition to whether it was (im)properly gathered or not.

( Alas the Ft Meade Unclass system that I remember on the net,
DOCKMASTER MULTICS, is documented as being a 1984 install. Also one of
the last MULTICs to be turned off, 1998. So it was never on NCP
ARPAnet.)

What was DOCKMASTER's precursor in the NET-facing role at Ft Meade,
and how early?
That is relevant to (in)validating the clippings referenced in OP.

Post by Vint Cerf
DEPENDING ON THE KEYS USES, THE PLI WAS
ABLE TO CARRY AT LEAST TS AND POSSIBLY SCI.

Oh, interesting, I'd forgotten that.

If there were Spooks doing _remote_ collaboration with social
scientists early enough to be relevant to OP query re AGILE+CAM,
they'd have to have been PLI customers, except for very general
UNCLASS support/research work.

(Presumably the several communities still had need for PLI's for their
system-high subnet, once the //UNCLASS//FOUO// TCP/IP MILNET was
separated from ARPAnet.)

//bill

Vint Cerf

2018-04-14 02:56:37 UTC

I think the PLI supported an interface that made it transparently like the
IMP (BBN 1822 interface) so a host would not know it was connected to
something other than an IMP but I am not absolutely sure.

v

Post by Bill Ricker
Vint replied (not shouting) --

I stand corrected that i shouldn't have referred to the PLI-eligible
Military hosts attached to on NCP (D)ARPAnet as MILNET.
:-)
Were the PLI in use pre-TCP ?
Did the PLI have a bypass or null-key option to allow a host
(rebooted to sanitzed state with classified files off-line) to connect
to the normal, PLI-less ARPAnet hosts ?
(-: We could say the PLI were the original VPN or rather Virtual Sub Nets :-)
So sending an INTEL file from a PLI host to an MIT host just wouldn't
work, unless the MIT host temporarily was connected via a PLI with
matching key, which would involve shenanigans strange even by MIT or
Community standards.
Maybe NATICK LABS is involved, per article referenced in OP, because
file was sent via PLI to them (when did they get a host?) and moved
tapes from there to MIT?
(As long as the orginating branch had provided waivers it might even
have been vaguely legal to read the tape at MIT?)
(Courier with 6 tapes in a bag on the night train still better bandwidth?)
One could have sent an UNCLASS file to MIT from an UNCLASS host at Ft
Meade (mentioned in the article), but file would have to be downgraded
from NSA system of origin to //UNCLASS//FOUO// in order to put it onto
the rare, air-gapped UNCLASS system that was connected to the net
normally (no PLI).
Doing that with actual INTEL DB would still be have been wrong, in
addition to whether it was (im)properly gathered or not.
( Alas the Ft Meade Unclass system that I remember on the net,
DOCKMASTER MULTICS, is documented as being a 1984 install. Also one of
the last MULTICs to be turned off, 1998. So it was never on NCP
ARPAnet.)
What was DOCKMASTER's precursor in the NET-facing role at Ft Meade,
and how early?
That is relevant to (in)validating the clippings referenced in OP.

Post by Vint Cerf
DEPENDING ON THE KEYS USES, THE PLI WAS
ABLE TO CARRY AT LEAST TS AND POSSIBLY SCI.

Oh, interesting, I'd forgotten that.
If there were Spooks doing _remote_ collaboration with social
scientists early enough to be relevant to OP query re AGILE+CAM,
they'd have to have been PLI customers, except for very general
UNCLASS support/research work.
(Presumably the several communities still had need for PLI's for their
system-high subnet, once the //UNCLASS//FOUO// TCP/IP MILNET was
separated from ARPAnet.)
//bill

--
New postal address:
Google
1875 Explorer Street, 10th Floor
Reston, VA 20190

Miles Fidelman

2018-04-14 01:00:28 UTC

Sounds like bullshit to me.

I was at BBN at the time that the Defense Data Network (DDN) was split
from the ARPANET (my contribution was the architecture for network
management of the DDN). Let me assure you that the powers that be were
largely against using the ARPANET for, you know, military applications.

As Vint already pointed out, the ARPANET was built to support resource
sharing in the research community (universities & military labs doing
ARPA-supported work). It turns out that various military users (at the
military research sites on the ARPANET) kept using ARPANET email because
it just worked a lot better than the message-switching C2 networks then
in use (notably AUTODIN).

A little background & history:

- AUTODIN: Message switching network supporting C2 traffic. (Think Telex.)

- ARPANET: First turned on in late 1969, transitioned from ARPA to DCA
(Defense Communications Agency) around 1975, because it was now
considered an operational network, not a research project (in a sense,
it never was a research project - it was built to support research
projects).

- Early 1980s, AUTODIN was not doing to well, plans started for AUTODIN
II replacement. Ultimately, the program was cancelled.

- Somewhere along the way, the name "Defense Data Network" was coined,
and there was a competitive "shootout" between the older AUTODIN
technology, and the newer ARPANET technology. ARPANET won.

- The ARPANET was split into two networks - ARPANET (for research) and
MILNET for unclassified military use. Ultimately they were separated
into to sets of nodes, connected by routers (then called gateways).
Three more classified networks were built in parallel to MILNET.

- A lot of work spun off into tactical packet networks of various sorts.

- Meanwhile, the Internet started growing around the ARPANET (campus
networks, CSnet, the supercomputer center networks, and then the
NSFnet). Ultimately, the ARPANET backbone was shut down (and nobody
noticed, because the packets just kept flowing). The MILNET remained a
while longer, and ultimately was supplanted by a router based backbone.

It's been a while - the names and dates are a bit fuzzy (but relatively
easy to find with some googling - and a lot of the key players are still
around, and on this list).

But the basic message is that, other than some early talk about the
potential survivability of packet networks, it was all about building
infrastructure for research. This "secret history" stuff is bullshit.

Miles Fidelman

Post by Bill Ricker
I wasn't there but ... maybe I can connect some dots.
This smells like coincidence ... that Licklider's CAM and MAC projects
(and many other defense projects) were\ at MIT makes a connection
"obvious" even if there wasn't one.
A budget-balancing transfer of funds from AGILE to Licklider seems
perfectly reasonable from a bureaucratic point of view. It doesn't
mean the money was for ARPAnet even though that is the last project
that put Licklider over budget; they could be listed together on one
memo because they're the two amendments to a previously approved
budget. It does means AGILE had uncommitted funds when Lick was
overcommitted. The Psych portion of Lick's portfolio was certainly of
common interest, but a transfer might have occurred from any
undercommitted team, as failure to spend funds may lead to a reduction
in budget!
I would be very impressed if either of the captains of research
expected the ARPAnet to be actually useful to AGILE researchers in the
near term. Although the possible benefits of a future MILNET for
collaboration between applied social science researchers in in-country
anti-insurgency INTEL centers and their peers back home (in academe or
CIA HQ) could perhaps be foreseen, the undersea cables and high
bandwidth satellites needed to connect a SAIGON operating center to
back home were decades in the future. (There was eventually a low
bandwidth link to UK and from there to NATO and a treaty verification
seismology lab in Scandinavia but even that was far future at the time
in question.)
Active INTEL databases have been classified since forever. As Vint
notes, there was a classified adapter for MILNET nodes of the
(d)ARPAnet, for passing data from from one MILNET node to another.
That would technically be "over the ARPANET" since until TCP/IP
cutover, it was only one network, but with an encrypted tunnel of some
sort. I'd be shocked if active INTEL data was sent that way, I doubt
the adapters were certified for higher classifications; but ...
anything's possible, especially as exceptions. Sending to MIT? That's
distinctly odder.
I am unaware of the Natick Army Labs being involved in anything like
this ... they developed the tropical chocolate bar and new uniforms.
Could they have had an AGILE branch? I guess plausible. Might a
researcher working with NSA or CIA have collocated with Natick to have
secure facilities instead of at Draper, Lincoln Labs, MITRE, BBN, etc,
for whatever reason ? IDK, possible, but seems very odd. But if they'd
had a compartmentalized sideline, no one would know. That's the beauty
of black programs and conspiracy theories, lack of evidence is
inconclusive. Were they home to contract managers for some ASA
research project with MIT? Perhaps. Before NSA could use its name
publicly, they'd have let contracts as ASA (or successor names) and
the Navy equivalent.
The mystery files at MIT make me think of CCA's Model 204 work for
"The Community", which may well be an MIT Intelligence-research
spinoff. (While possibly connected to CAM or more likely AGILE, it
might have been more applied and directly funded CIA/NSA R&D contract
funneled through ASA?) The inventor of Model 204's key internals, Pat
O'Neil, was a professor at MIT immediately before CCA, and had been
working on the special index structure for nearly a decade. Just
guessing but looks like development may have been at MIT as contract
research and fielding, support, and future maintenance/support was
spun off to CCA, formed conveniently down the block?
(For decades Model 204 was the only DBMS capable of big-data and
text-retrieval. The opening sequence in "3 Days of the Condor" movie
(likely 7 days book too?) showed you an AGILE/CAM type team using CCA
software to digitize printed source documents into a document
retrieval system ahead of the unclassified state of the art, if I'm
connecting the dots right. I worked with tape extracts from a Model
204 Text DBMS in an unclassified setting in the late 1990s -- the
National Library of Medicine MEDLINE bibliography&abstract system was
then, likely still is, based on Model 204. Lucious metadata, it had
ontological search before the phrase was coined. You can access it as
PUBMED, thanks to Al Gore -- which undercut our startup's business
model, oops. )
The tapes being seen at MIT does not mean they were sent over the
ARPAnet. In those days, was it not the case that a courier with
several tapes in a locked bag taking the train from DC to Boston had
better bandwidth, latency, and error recovery? I was still getting
tapes sent from NLM's Model 204 via USPS/UPS in 1990s. (And a weirder
EBCDIC variant I've never seen.)
I'm guessing the mystery tapes at MIT were test data sent to
O'Neil to test his pre-production DBMS ? Back in those dark ages,
they might not have thought to make the test data anonymized/mangled.
( People still forget that today in a post HIPAA/PCI world!) Or,
realizing that a real intel DB being released to an academic
environment would have been a security problem for NSA/CIA, maybe they
made a test file with data they swiped from Commerce's Census dept?
Just brainstorming here.
Pat O'Neil is Professor Emeritus at UMass/Boston, where he
co-founded the CS department on his return from industry.
[ https://www.cs.umb.edu/~poneil/ ] He might be able to shed light
on the NBC reports of MIT having had tapes that belonged at Langley or
Ft. Meade, and which of Licklider or AGILE or CIA/NSA/ASA was his
original funding source.
You could also check with Don E Eastlake iii (on some IETF/W3C groups)
on CCA DBMS history.
https://www.informit.com/authors/bio/5f1734d3-42df-49f0-b2e2-61007b188cd1
// Bill Ricker
// Friend of Padlipsky
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In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra

Brian E Carpenter

2018-04-14 02:20:09 UTC

I know nothing of this whatever. However, I do know that the SIGINT community
has a history of using data links in support of their work since at least
as early as 1944, and certainly since they acquired their first Turing-equivalent
computers in the late 1940s. So why they would have wasted their time 20 years
later using an insecure researchy network stuffed with inquisitive academics is
beyond me.

In other words this doesn't pass the laugh test IMNSHO.

Brian

Jack Haverty

2018-04-14 07:36:09 UTC

Hello Eric,

First, let me thank you for pointing us to the "Dream Machine" book. I
tend to ignore "history of the network" books, since I've found that
they tend to describe a history sometimes quite different from what I
remember as one of the people who was actually there.

"Dream Machine" is an exception. Lick was my thesis adviser, and
subsequently my boss when I was a member of the MIT research staff in
his group. So there is a lot of overlap between my personal experiences
in 1969-1977 at MIT and the events and interactions chronicled in "Dream
Machine".

My reaction to Dream Machine was that it was right on target, consistent
with everything I remember (except maybe a few minor details). I also
learned a lot, with the "back story" of the political history now
explaining some of the things that happened in those days at MIT.

Of course, I haven't read "Surveillance Valley", but I can offer some
insights into how it was back then, to maybe help you decide whether SV
is fantasy or reality.

First, I think it's important to understand that "MIT" was not a
monolith. It had many pieces, and, like most institutions, they were
sometimes cooperative, usually competitive, and often unaware of what
the other pieces were doing. That's especially true if you think of
"MIT" as not only the school per se, but also related pieces - Lincoln
Labs and Draper Labs being two major ones.

Lick's group was part of Project MAC, aka LCS (Laboratory for Computer
Science), It occupied part of 545 Technology Square, along with the MIT
AI Lab. LCS had many subgroups. In addition, the building complex
housed an IBM research group (that did the DataComputer, which was
attached to the ARPANET), and even a stealth office of the CIA (really -
but that's another story), which I accidentally "outed" one day while
trying to run computer cables up to the roof through the elevator shaft.
Oops.

Second, the ARPANET was not the first, or only, way to communicate
between computers at different organizations. As an undergrad in 1968,
I had a part time job which involved running an APL facility for use in
some course (Metallurgy IIRC). That was accessed by a dial-up line from
one of our computers to one at the IBM research center in upstate New
York. Lots of that kind of informal ad-hoc "networking" was common.

IIRC, the machines "on the ARPANET" at MIT in the early years included
Multics, Dynamic Modelling (Lick's group where I hung out), AI, and ML
(MathLab). Those all supported multiple projects (who could use the
ARPANET, with ARPA permission of course). Those projects could have
been anywhere in MIT (or even elsewhere over dialups), using one of the
ARPANET-attached machines to do --- well, whatever they were doing.

I doubt anyone knows, or knew, what all of those pieces were and what
exactly they were doing back in the 60s/70s, who they were working for
(being funded by), or what kind of data they moved around. LCS itself,
AFAIK, did not do any classified work. Draper Labs did (I had a
parttime job there for a year or so, programming a PDP-8). Probably
Lincoln too but I never worked there.

Also remember that this was the time of protests in the streets. It
wasn't politically correct (or even safe) to be doing certain kinds of
work. So anybody doing such stuff kept it quiet.

So, it's certainly possible that something interesting and controversial
got "transferred to MIT", but that's too vague a claim. Without
details, it's too hard to tell if it might have happened.

I do remember, at the ICCC '72 debut of the ARPANET in DC, that one of
the most popular datasets being transferred around and sent to the
printer in the exhibit hall was ... a file containing a collection of
bawdy limericks. Possibly the debut of "Internet Porn"? I still have a
yellowed listing as a souvenir.

So, the lesson is that nobody could really tell what was going across
the ARPANET.....

Third, there was a behavioral pattern which I'll call "Elephant
Syndrome" -- after that old story about a group of blind people
describing an elephant based on which piece of the elephant's anatomy
each of them can touch.

Here's an example of Elephant Syndrome (ES) from Lick's group.

At one point in the mid-70s Lick reluctantly disappeared for a while to
go back to ARPA for a year. This is described in "Dream Machine" - and
after reading that I now know what was really going on!

Subsequently, we worker bees were cajoled into being excited about a new
project - how to get our poor overworked PDP-10 to not only decode, but
to understand hand sent Morse code, and even hopefully be able to
participate in conversations with other human-manned stations. Today,
we would call this an "expert system", but I don't think that term had
been invented yet. I was a ham operator in high school, and got pretty
good with Morse. So I was "the expert", and our group tried to make the
computer do things the way I did them as a Morse operator. I would
explain how I did things as a Morse operator, and then we'd figure out a
way to get the computer to do the same.

Having now read "Dream Machine", I realize that this was driven by
Heilmeyer's (and no doubt others) desire to make the funded research
more immediately relevant to military needs. Foreign forces were still
communicating using hand-sent Morse. Inquiring minds wanted to know
what they were talking about. Soon.

I remember one day when "the government" came to visit. Half-a-dozen
men in dark suits, very serious. I never knew who they were. We showed
them what the system we had built could do and they seemed very
impressed. We also advised them that we couldn't quite get "realtime"
understanding of hand-sent Morse. The PDP-10 (IIRC - 512MB of memory,
.001 GHz CPU)! simply didn't have the horsepower. So having the
computer interact with a live human in a Morse conversation was not
possible with our equipment. They didn't seem concerned about that.
I think we missed an opportunity then - to ask for a few more PDP-10
systems (only a few million each..) to continue the work. I bet we
would have gotten them with no fuss at all. Where to put them though
-- that would have been a real problem.

That was of course the "military/surveillance" view of the Elephant and
why it was being built.

From the MIT researchers' perspective, the Morse project was interesting

because Morse is a very very simple language. There are only two
syllables - "dot" and "dash". Much simpler than spoken English or any
other voiced language, but still rich in details to be handled -
dialects, accents, noisy and "cocktail-party" environments, etc. But
building a system which could truly understand that simple spoken
language seemed like a good first step in research toward eventually
getting a computer to understand spoken conversational human voice -
something which seems now pretty close to solved, 43 years later. Maybe.

So the "research/academia" view of that Elephant was quite different
from the military. Same Elephant, two ideas of what it was all about.

I never saw whatever was the written proposal from MIT to somewhere in
the government to start that More "Natural Language Research/Morse
Surveillance" project. It would be interesting to see what perspective
of that Elephant was portrayed in the proposal. The Morse system could
certainly have been accessed over the ARPANET although I don't recall
anyone ever actually doing that. One could certainly have promoted the
project as "aiding the surveillance mission".

Another project at MIT in Lick's group in the 70s focused on "Electronic
Messaging", which fit right in with Lick's "Dream" and we built a system
that mimicked a typical office environment. Then we adapted the system
as part of the "Military Messaging Experiment", which was a testbed
deployed (at CINCPAC IIRC), to show how Electronic Messaging could be
used to improve the machinery of military communications - everything
from logistics to command and control in a multi-level secure environment.

Again, an Elephant which looks quite different to different audiences.

Throughout those years at MIT, I never heard of "The Cambridge Project"
or "Project CAM". But perhaps I was looking at a different part of the
Elephant.

Is it possible that the "Cambridge Project" was something involving the
DataComputer? It was across the hall from Lick's world at MIT, and was
on the ARPANET in the early/mid 70s. I did several projects trying to
use the DataComputer, e.g., as an archival trusted repository for
important email (a sort of escrow agent). I imagine there may have been
some kind of joint project between IBM and some part of MIT to use the
DataComputer in some way. After all, IBM probably put it in a building
on the MIT Campus for some reason....

In 1977, I left MIT and joined BBN in the same group that built and was
running the ARPANET. My first assignment was to implement TCP for Unix.
For the next 13 years, with titles ranging from Computer Scientist to
Chief Network Architect, most of the work I did at BBN involved the
Internet in one way or another.

If you've read the "Dream Machine", you'll understand the synergy
between Lick's MIT activity, BBN, and ARPA. The same culture and
behavior could be found in all.

In particular, we got pretty good at creating Elephants.

One example I can remember clearly. The Internet was getting a bit
unwieldy, and the basic technology really didn't have any mechanisms for
management - things like fault detection, isolation, configuration
control, and the like.

So, a project was put together, drawing funding from several very
different sources. To ARPA, we were working on forward-thinking ideas
for "Automated Network Management", which fit in with their mission of
advanced, risky research. To DCA, we were working on new operations
tools and procedures which were critical to getting the users onto the
DDN, and making the Internet reliable in military environments.

We even had funding from some of the "user" communities, who had begun
building their own private clones of "The Internet" and were frantically
searching for the management tools.

Each of those groups had a different perspective on the Elephant they
were funding. Same Elephant.

Those "user communities" even extended into the non-government arena.
By the late 80s, corporations with an early-adopter gene had gotten
tired of waiting for the PTTs and Big Iron vendors to deliver on their
promises, and were tentatively pushing forward with the TCP route,
simply by building their own personal private corporate Internet.

I consulted for one firm - a major Wall Street investment house - with a
private Internet (IIRC we called them Intranets then), with multiple T-1
lines interconnecting New York, London, and Tokyo as their own neonatal
private Internet.

They were so serious about reliability and zero-downtime that they even
had two massive datacenters, fully redundant and linked so that one
could take over if the other failed. When I asked what situation they
were worried about, the CIO pointed out that one datacenter was on the
flight path for Newark airport. The risk of an unfortunate encounter
with an airliner was just too high. Each minute of downtime meant
millions of dollars lost. A clone datacenter was cheap insurance.

When you think about it, the government and especially military focus on
C3I - Communications, Command, Control, and Intelligence. Looking at
corporations like that Wall Street world, they do exactly the same
things - gather data, turn it into information, get it to decision
makers, and issue commands, and control their agents activities around
the world.

When the military C3I system fails, people can die. When the corporate
system fails, billions can be lost.

The Internet is an Elephant that serves all those needs. What it is
depends on your perspective....

So, was the Internet "from the beginning, grown from "counterinsurgency"
and surveillance operations"?

Probably there are people who think so. They may be right. You decide...

I think we were building The Ultimate Elephant. It is what it looks
like ... to you.

/Jack Haverty

Hello list members,
Please excuse the length of this email.
I am in the process of writing a review of Yasha Levine's new history of
the Internet, "Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the
Internet." His overall thesis is that the development of the Internet
has, from the beginning, grown from "counterinsurgency" and surveillance
operations, and that these aspects have not been adequately chronicled
in other histories. Many of his claims about the early ARPA work I have
not encountered before, and I imagine that some would find them provocative.
I'm hoping there are members of this list with knowledge about these
1. Levine asserts that there was some overlap or relationship between
William Godel's Project Agile and work conducted by the ARPA Command
and Control division under Licklider. He pulls a lot from Sharon
Weinberger's recent book ("The Imagineers of War") in discussing
both Godel and the potential connection. He writes, "[Licklider's]
work at ARPA was part of the military's larger counterinsurgency
efforts and directly overlapped with William Godel's Project Agile."
(52). In making this statement he actually cites Weinberger's
prologue, in which she says "Godel personally signed off on the
first computer-networking study, giving it money from his Vietnam
(https://archivesdeclassification.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/arpa-order-internet.pdf).
It is a part of a series that may still be classified (I have the
NDC looking into it). My question about this is: was there really
any kind of working relationship? What does this transfer of funds
represent? And perhaps more broadly: to what extent was ARPA
C&C/IPTO involved in counterinsurgency data collection and processing?
2. A large section of the early history in this book deals with the
Cambridge Project (aka Project CAM) at MIT and controversy
surrounding it at the time. I am awaiting a copy of the original
proposal from MIT (it might not come in before deadline; should
anyone on this list have a copy I'd really appreciate it). Levine
asserts that the project "would directly aid the agency's
counterinsurgency mission." He claims that the work of the project
"could be accessed from any computer with an ARPANET connection"
(68) and that "It was a kind of stripped down 1960s version of
Palantir, the powerful data mining, surveillance, and prediction
software the military and intelligence planners use today." He goes
on: "the project was customized to the military's needs, with
particular focus on fighting insurgencies and rolling back communism
[...] It was clear that the Cambridge Project wasn't just a tool for
research, it was a counterinsurgency technology." (68-69)
Is that not an accurate description of the proposal? Were any
members on this list involved in this research? If so, are these
characterizations accurate to your mind?
3. There is yet another section where Levine finds some reporting from
the early 70s, where NBC News' Rowan Ford conducted a 4 month
investigation and found evidence that intelligence files about
American anti-war protestors and others had been transferred,
perhaps stored, and perhaps processed somehow, over the ARPANET and
linked host machines. His report was entered into the Congressional
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015078638619;view=1up;seq=7
The claim is that these files might have been a part of previous
CONUS intel that, in 1972, the Army was ordered to delete. One of
the claims in the report is that such files were transferred via the
ARPANET to MIT for some reason. Ford had 4 sources for this story
who had knowledge of the incident; only one, Richard Ferguson (who
apparently was fired from MIT for this disclosure), gave information
publicly.
Does anyone on this list have knowledge of this incident, and/or
whether or not the ARPANET/ARPA IPTO was used to move around,
eventually store, or otherwise process these kinds of dossiers?
These are all the questions I have for now. Thanks for taking the time
to read.
--
Eric
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Dave Walden

2018-04-14 11:15:18 UTC

Jack,

My memory is that CCA (Computer Corporation of America -- Tom Merrill's
company) did the DataComputer. They might also have been at 545 Tech
Square at the time but I am unsure of that. IBM (the "Cambridge
Scientific" lab?) was also there (as you note) and did other important
things (my memory is vague, so I am uncertain of the following things
... the beginning of CP/CMS operating system, Script text processing
system, creation of GML, I think they may also have had the other CTSS
system, etc.) but I don't remember this group being connected to the
ARPANET (IBM was pushing SNA -- proprietary networking).

Dave

Post by Jack Haverty
Lick's group was part of Project MAC, aka LCS (Laboratory for Computer
Science), It occupied part of 545 Technology Square, along with the MIT
AI Lab. LCS had many subgroups. In addition, the building complex
housed an IBM research group (that did the DataComputer, which was
attached to the ARPANET), and even a stealth office of the CIA (really -
but that's another story), which I accidentally "outed" one day while
trying to run computer cables up to the roof through the elevator shaft.
Oops.

Eric Gade

2018-04-14 15:26:25 UTC

Post by Jack Haverty
Lick was my thesis adviser, and
subsequently my boss when I was a member of the MIT research staff in
his group. So there is a lot of overlap between my personal experiences
in 1969-1977 at MIT and the events and interactions chronicled in "Dream
Machine".

Hi Jack, thanks for writing back. It's great to have a person who worked
with Licklider be a part of this email record.

Also thank you to all the others for responding. I want to clarify a couple
of things, mostly because I don't want to be unfair to the book's author
despite my evaluation of his research. Levine seems to suggest that there
is some connection between counterinsurgency psychological/sociological
research in Vietnam and the origins of Licklider's research group(s) and
work in building the ARPA C&C/IPTO community. That is to say, he believes
there are common intellectual origins if not necessarily applications. What
has been covered by Waldrop and others -- and what is even apparent in the
oral histories recorded by Licklider and others -- is that to the extent
this is true, there was apprehension on the part of the interactive
computing researchers. Either way, this is a bold claim and my own feeling
is that it requires much more evidence to support it.

The NBC reporting is -- to his telling -- evidence of similar tactics being
used on the ARPANET, although the Congressional Record testimony seems
pretty clear that the report confused a bunch of things. Again, it doesn't
seem to me that enough convincing evidence is presented, but these reports
are interesting nonetheless and I'd never heard of them before in my own
research.

One final note about the Cambridge Project. Waldrop also discusses the
Cambridge Project in "Dream Machine" -- he even recounts a story where
Licklider, surrounded by protestors who were attempting to burn copies of
his proposal, showed the youngsters that they needed to fan out the pages
if they wanted to get it to burn properly (and even lit his own report on
fire). At the time, this was a known project. The Harvard Crimson even
reported on it:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1969/9/26/brass-tacks-
the-cambridge-project-pi/

As I mentioned, I have not been able to get a copy of this proposal. The
MIT archives will almost certainly take their time getting back to me. The
citation Levine uses for the report is:
J.C.R. Licklider, "Establishment and Operation of a Program in Computer
Analysis and Modeling in the Behavioral Sciences" December 5, 1968. MIT
Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Cambridge Project records.

Levine does not seem to quote from this proposal and only cites it once
when he lists the "data banks" that the Cambridge Project would create (and
"make available through ARPANET"):

- Public opinion polls from all countries
- Cultural patterns of all the tribes and peoples of the world
- Archives on comparative communism [...] files on the contemporary
world communist movements
- Political participation of various countries [...] This includes such
variables as voting, membership in associations, activity of political
parties, etc.
- Youth movements
- Mass unrest and political movements under conditions of rapid social
change
- Data on national integration, particularly in "plural" societies; the
integration of ethnic, racial and religious minorities; the merging or
splitting of present political units
- International propaganda output
- Peasant attitudes and behavior
- International armament expenditures and trends

(It is unclear is Levine is listing these himself or quoting from the
proposal; without seeing a copy we cannot verify)

My understanding is that the project ran for ~5 years. The only documentary
evidence for it that I've been able to find online is the following report,
presumably written near the end of the project:

http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?AD=AD0783626

Without some revelation from people on this list, I don't see enough
evidence to overturn the narrative clearly expounded by Waldrop,
Weinberger, and others that the ARPA computing community as established by
Licklider was a kind of lucky moment where lots of funds could be spent on
risky/open projects and that most of the rest of ARPA had little idea what
these guys were even doing, let alone others within the Pentagon.

Post by Jack Haverty
Jack,
My memory is that CCA (Computer Corporation of America -- Tom Merrill's
company) did the DataComputer. They might also have been at 545 Tech
Square at the time but I am unsure of that. IBM (the "Cambridge
Scientific" lab?) was also there (as you note) and did other important
things (my memory is vague, so I am uncertain of the following things
... the beginning of CP/CMS operating system, Script text processing
system, creation of GML, I think they may also have had the other CTSS
system, etc.) but I don't remember this group being connected to the
ARPANET (IBM was pushing SNA -- proprietary networking).
Dave

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Eric

John Klensin

2018-04-15 10:06:47 UTC

Hi, while I'm on this list, I don't routinely follow it, so it took a
while for me to be pointed to this thread and longer to find the
energy to respond.

For context, I was involved with the Cambridge Project from the time
an early draft of the proposal started to be circulated to relevant
researchers within MIT, through the summer study, and then ended up
with lead responsibility for among other things, the software that was
intended to hold everything together, was a member of the small
steering committee (I don't remember what it was called, but that
wasn't it) that had practical oversight of the Project. I worked
closely with Lick and more closely with those who were running the
project on a day-to-day basis. Lick was actively involved (more than
I think Waldrop realized) but was leading the Dynamic Modeling work at
the same time and almost certainly more involved there on a daily
basis. When I decided to do work leading to a Ph.D a few years after
the Cambridge Project wound down, Lick ended up on my somewhat-strange
committee. If I recall, he was one of those who helped convince me I
should do the degree. I'm happy to answer specific questions to the
extent that I have time and remember --the Project did zero classified
research-- but it has been a long time and MIT has, at least IMO, a
bad institutional memory problem for activities that are not linked to
active departments and/or sources of funds.. I have no idea whether
the original idea for what became the Cambridge Project originated
with Lick or de Sola Pool -- I worked closely with both, the latter
even earlier than I first met Lick, but, by the time I heard about the
idea, it was described very much in "joint effort" terms. I also knew
(and know) enough about the interests of each to guess where some
ideas came from but find it difficult or impossible to try to
attribute most of the ideas to either independently.

I'll try to describe what it was all about, but it is probably
important that those trying to understand the effort (and almost
anything else related at MIT or Harvard at the time, especially if
there was DoD money involved, was that the late 1960s and first half
of the 1970s were times of great tumult in the academic and research
communities, with large differences in style among institutions about
how those things played out. I don't believe we had anyone killed in
Cambridge, but there were a lot of loud demonstrations, marches, etc.,
There were some unpleasant confrontations between demonstrators and
the Cambridge Police and I can remember the smell of tear gas
Because it involved social and behavioral science research and
researchers, including some whom some of the most active of the
antiwar community were suspicious of for other reasons and because it
involved DoD (whether specifically ARPA or not, and it was ARPA)
funding) which meant to them that something nefarious was going on,
Some of those stories were on a par with some things we hear today
about the "real" reason the ARPANET work was funded; some were, at
least in my opinion, far worse. The times were troubled enough that I
had some people who were working for me by day (because they were
comfortable with what they were doing and what they could see) and
picketing us by night (some because of the principle of DoD funding
and others because of what "must" be going on elsewhere in teh project
although they could never find any sign of it). The noise was loud
enough that, if one looks through contemporary articles, one can
probably find a lot of things that were the result of those kinds of
thinking (i.e., without strong connections to reality) and find then
with great ease. We are a lot more interested in getting work done
than in trying to hold debates with those who were not willing to
listen and who, in many case, felt that anyone who disagreed with
them, their positions, or their truth should not be allowed to speak
at all.

Organizationally, the project was originally intended to be a joint
MIT-Harvard effort. It was also intended, from the beginning, to be
organized the way Project MAC was originally organized (in retrospect,
probably unsurprising given Lick's involvement in shaping both), i.e.,
some centrally-funded and managed core activities, support from the
Project for complementary activities of various faculty and
departments, and some more independent activities with their own
independent (e.g., non-DoD) support that were nonetheless
collaborating (the latter group of activities was important with
Project MAC but was never significant with the Cambridge Project and,
as far as I can remember, never came together), There were many
protests and some debate about that at Harvard. The _Crimson_ article
cited was part of that fabric; perhaps something about its balance and
dedication to reasoned debate can be inferred from such balanced and
objective comments as " M.I.T. is the Defense Department's house
whore,...". Others may remember actual details of the Harvard
discussions better than I do, but Harvard eventually decided that
there would be no formal Harvard-as-University participation, but that
interested departments and researchers at Harvard were free to
participate and accept funding. Many did -- there were at least
three Harvard senior faculty, from at least Schools on the internal
advisory committee and far more on a large faculty (and probably some
students -- don't remember offhand) advisory group. So, we ended up
with a central staff at MIT with work focusing on a general
architecture and software substrate for a wide range of applications,
integration of a variety of tools, data representation issues, design
and construction of a researcher-friendly and statistically-oriented
database management system, and a good deal of work what was necessary
to apply different kinds of tools and models to the same underlying
data. Wrt the latter, a common attitude, and arguably the state of
the art, at the time was that people would build highly integrated
"statistical packages" with a particular view of data and that
researchers should design their work and hypotheses around what could
be done with one of those packages. One of the key ideas behind the
Cambridge Project was that it was important to have an environment in
which data, models, and hypotheses should drive analysis not the
available tools (not at all z new idea, but one that was hard to
realize at the time).[1].[2]

It may also be relevant that the Cambridge Project was funded out of
ARPA Behavioral Sciences (sometimes Human Resources, IIR), not IPTO.
There were certainly some conversations at/with RADC about command,
control, and intelligence functions but they were more about the
applicability of our work to those functions than any focus of the
work on those topics. Mostly or entirely after the Cambridge Project
as such ended, a company that was more or less spun off from MIT
provided support for the systems that the Cambridge Project was
developed to several universities and commercial enterprises in the US
and Europe (and maybe elsewhere, but I don't remember) and to parts of
DoD, notably what was then OSD Program Analysis and Evaluation (main
application there was the DoD budget, not, e.g., warfare).. As with
many other things funded by ARPA, there was far more effort to explain
possible specific military applicability of the research work rather
than its justification as research after the Mansfield Amendment (and
the transition to "DARPA") than earlier. Like many other ARPA
activities at the time, the explanations changed more than the actual
work, It occurs to me that some of those explanations might be the
foundation for the NBC reporting referred to below.

A few other things to add a bit of data and help parse facts from
misunderstanding or fantasy (I'm running out of energy and this note
is already too long or there would be a much longer list):

(1) I have no idea where Levine got his list of "data banks" that the
Project was going to acquire, maintain, and distribute. I don't
remember such a list from any of the early proposal drafts, nor do I
remember any discussion of them during the summer study. In any
event, while individual researchers almost certainly had their own
data of interest and saw some of the work of the Project as providing
better tools for analysis and modeling of them, there was never any
central archive or effort to build one -- I'm quite confident about
that because it almost certainly would have been in my area of
responsibility.

(2) The document at http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?AD=AD0783626
was one of a collection of annual and them semi-annual reports. They
are all public; they were all available through NTIS and probably
still are, although some of the scans were, IIR, even worse than this
particular one. In any event, I have the MIT-produced paper versions
of all of them. If the NTIS copies are no longer avaialble and
someone has appropriate scanning resources, I'd be happy to make them
available.

(3) There was never any "Project CAM" or something referred to that
way, at least in conjunction with the Cambridge Project. The only
times I remember hearing that term during the Cambridge Project's
existence were in conjunction with a conspiracy theory (whose details
I don;t remember) involving "MAC" spelled backwards.

(4) During most of its existence, the Cambridge Project was on the 5th
floor or what was then 575 Technology Square, across the plaze from
545 (before that space came together, there was a group in MIT
Building 26 near the original MIT computer center facility, I
continued to sit in 545 Tech Square, etc. That is relevant to the
Datacomputer discussion because we had the south side of that floor
and they had the north side. But, if I remember (and my memory is
very vague about this), while Tom Merrill was PI on that project, I
think CCA continued to do business out of their other offices (up near
Fresh Pond and a few blocks from BBN). Could easily be wrong about
that, but IBM never had anything to do with the Datacompiuter -- it
ran on PDP-10s, Ampex videotape drives, and some specialized hardware.
What I do know is that, while the people involved knew each other
(common elevator lobby and shared history among the more senior
folks), no data ever moved between the two projects although Lick and
others had a lot of fantasies about that if and when the Datacomputer
work ever reached useful production status. Also, IBM's Cambridge
Scientific Lab was definitely in 545. The only two CTSS systems I
was ever aware of belonged to Project MAC and the MIT Computation
Center. They were networked via the high-bandwidth method of people
carrying magnetic tapes a block of two :-( I don't think IBM every
actually owned one, although I might not have known. CP/CMS didn't
speak SNA. It did acquire RSCS although I don't remember whether
before or after the transition to the VM/CMS product. RSCS of course
became the primary transport protocol for BITNET. Almost certainly no
ARPANET connections to the Cambridge Scientific Center, at least early
on -- the Host-IMP protocols didn't exist for the machine and there
weren't any spare ports on the obvious IMPs. And the CIA office in
545 was a fairly open secret if it was a secret at all, at least by
the time I had an office there around 1965-1966.

john

[1[ Klensin, John C., J. Markowitz, D. B. Yntema, and R. A. Wiesen,
“The Approach to Compatibility of the Cambridge Project Consistent
System”, ACM SIGSOC Bulletin, Fall 1973.
[2} Klensin, John C. and Douwe B. Yntema, “Beyond the Package: A new
approach to social science computing”, Social Science Information, 20,
4/5, (1981), pp. 787-815.

Hi Jack, thanks for writing back. It's great to have a person who worked
with Licklider be a part of this email record.
Also thank you to all the others for responding. I want to clarify a couple
of things, mostly because I don't want to be unfair to the book's author
despite my evaluation of his research. Levine seems to suggest that there is
some connection between counterinsurgency psychological/sociological
research in Vietnam and the origins of Licklider's research group(s) and
work in building the ARPA C&C/IPTO community. That is to say, he believes
there are common intellectual origins if not necessarily applications. What
has been covered by Waldrop and others -- and what is even apparent in the
oral histories recorded by Licklider and others -- is that to the extent
this is true, there was apprehension on the part of the interactive
computing researchers. Either way, this is a bold claim and my own feeling
is that it requires much more evidence to support it.
The NBC reporting is -- to his telling -- evidence of similar tactics being
used on the ARPANET, although the Congressional Record testimony seems
pretty clear that the report confused a bunch of things. Again, it doesn't
seem to me that enough convincing evidence is presented, but these reports
are interesting nonetheless and I'd never heard of them before in my own
research.
One final note about the Cambridge Project. Waldrop also discusses the
Cambridge Project in "Dream Machine" -- he even recounts a story where
Licklider, surrounded by protestors who were attempting to burn copies of
his proposal, showed the youngsters that they needed to fan out the pages if
they wanted to get it to burn properly (and even lit his own report on
fire). At the time, this was a known project. The Harvard Crimson even
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1969/9/26/brass-tacks-the-cambridge-project-pi/
As I mentioned, I have not been able to get a copy of this proposal. The MIT
archives will almost certainly take their time getting back to me. The
J.C.R. Licklider, "Establishment and Operation of a Program in Computer
Analysis and Modeling in the Behavioral Sciences" December 5, 1968. MIT
Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Cambridge Project records.
Levine does not seem to quote from this proposal and only cites it once when
he lists the "data banks" that the Cambridge Project would create (and "make
Public opinion polls from all countries
Cultural patterns of all the tribes and peoples of the world
Archives on comparative communism [...] files on the contemporary world
communist movements
Political participation of various countries [...] This includes such
variables as voting, membership in associations, activity of political
parties, etc.
Youth movements
Mass unrest and political movements under conditions of rapid social change
Data on national integration, particularly in "plural" societies; the
integration of ethnic, racial and religious minorities; the merging or
splitting of present political units
International propaganda output
Peasant attitudes and behavior
International armament expenditures and trends
(It is unclear is Levine is listing these himself or quoting from the
proposal; without seeing a copy we cannot verify)
My understanding is that the project ran for ~5 years. The only documentary
evidence for it that I've been able to find online is the following report,
http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?AD=AD0783626
Without some revelation from people on this list, I don't see enough
evidence to overturn the narrative clearly expounded by Waldrop, Weinberger,
and others that the ARPA computing community as established by Licklider was
a kind of lucky moment where lots of funds could be spent on risky/open
projects and that most of the rest of ARPA had little idea what these guys
were even doing, let alone others within the Pentagon.

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Jack Haverty

2018-04-15 23:43:39 UTC

Thanks for the story of the Cambridge Project.

It's fascinating to know now that Lick was PI on another big project at
the same time he was running our Dynamic Modeling group in 545 Tech
Square. I don't recall ever hearing anything about it at all.

There was a project within Dynamic Modeling in the same timeframe which
Lick called "Calico" (which must have expanded to something but I can't
remember). Calico sounded a lot like the "Consistent System" of Project
Cambridge. Lick had the notion that many programs could be constructed
by somehow plugging together a bunch of individual modules, which
consisted of selections from maybe a few thousand "nouns" (data types
and structures) and "verbs" (subroutines). Calico explored that notion,
and we created a few thousand nouns/verbs (I did Strings and their
actions). All in PDP-10 assembler, which was all our poor machine could
really support at the time.

I guess Lick carried his ideas wherever he went.

I can confirm that the late 60s/70s were pretty interesting years. Lots
of protests. Less so at MIT than other schools, but I do remember not
being able to go work on the PDP-8 at Draper because of the picketing
outside. Students as well as professors often had a reluctance to work
on anything associated with the Military Industrial Complex. That's of
course where all the funding was. Lick was a master at reconciling
those 2 world-views (e.g., the presentation of the Morse "surveillance"
project as a stepping-stone toward AI and understanding spoken human
language.0

Getting back to "surveillance", I can also confirm that surveillance was
in people's thoughts too. One concrete example is in that paper I
referenced about the Morse project.

In the paper, there's a short comment that we had intended to
incorporate real-world atmospheric effects into the radio environment,
but it was prevented for unspecified "contractual reasons".

I remember when this all happened quite well. The "contractual reasons"
were actually related to surveillance.

In our testbed, we created an in-house radio environment, with a dozen
or so transmitters and receivers all attached to a coaxial cable strung
between offices in 545 Tech Square. With that in-house radio net, a
bunch of the project workers had learned Morse, and we performed live
"message passing networks", recording the whole thing on audio tape. We
could play back that tape repeatedly to recreate the same event, which
made it possible to try different techniques and algorithms to get the
software developed by successive experiments.

The coax network was of course not quite real-world. So the next phase
was to attach the system to an outside antenna, where atmospheric noise,
auroras, and other such phenomena would be present.

So, we arranged for permission to put an antenna on the roof, and after
much hassle and a bit of frightening high-altitude work, we had a
top-of-the-line beam antenna, on top of of 30-foot tower, on top of a
ten-story building. All paid for by the project.

Since the ultimate goal of COMDEC (Computer Morse DECoder) was to be
able to actually participate in on-air networks, we of course had to
also get a high-end ham transmitter as well, attached to that antenna.

As a ham operator, it doesn't get any better than this....

Not long after getting this all set up, Al Vezza (Lick's "chief of
staff") told us that we couldn't hook up the antenna to COMDEC after
all. When the client learned what we were doing, they forbade any such
connection. They didn't want the project to even appear to be capable
of doing surveillance.

So as it turned out, there was a lot of concern about government
surveillance. But in this case, the government didn't want us to do
anything that might be misinterpreted as government surveillance.
Having an antenna capable of vacuuming god-knows-what out of the
airwaves was simply too risky.

In retrospect, I think there was an inordinate amount of "visionware" in
those days. Depending on your expectations, you could look at a lot of
boxes that "could" be hooked together in some way for nefarious
purposes, and conclude that they "were" being used that way. Everyone's
vision of what was *really going on* could be quite different.

Whether it's databases traversing the ARPANET, or government projects
sucking private information out of the air, if you could imagine a way
to possibly hook things together so something "could" happen, there were
probably people convinced it that it had been done and did happen.

/Jack Haverty

Post by John Klensin
Hi, while I'm on this list, I don't routinely follow it, so it took a
while for me to be pointed to this thread and longer to find the
energy to respond.
For context, I was involved with the Cambridge Project from the time
an early draft of the proposal started to be circulated to relevant
researchers within MIT, through the summer study, and then ended up
with lead responsibility for among other things, the software that was
intended to hold everything together, was a member of the small
steering committee (I don't remember what it was called, but that
wasn't it) that had practical oversight of the Project. I worked
closely with Lick and more closely with those who were running the
project on a day-to-day basis. Lick was actively involved (more than
I think Waldrop realized) but was leading the Dynamic Modeling work at
the same time and almost certainly more involved there on a daily
basis. When I decided to do work leading to a Ph.D a few years after
the Cambridge Project wound down, Lick ended up on my somewhat-strange
committee. If I recall, he was one of those who helped convince me I
should do the degree. I'm happy to answer specific questions to the
extent that I have time and remember --the Project did zero classified
research-- but it has been a long time and MIT has, at least IMO, a
bad institutional memory problem for activities that are not linked to
active departments and/or sources of funds.. I have no idea whether
the original idea for what became the Cambridge Project originated
with Lick or de Sola Pool -- I worked closely with both, the latter
even earlier than I first met Lick, but, by the time I heard about the
idea, it was described very much in "joint effort" terms. I also knew
(and know) enough about the interests of each to guess where some
ideas came from but find it difficult or impossible to try to
attribute most of the ideas to either independently.
I'll try to describe what it was all about, but it is probably
important that those trying to understand the effort (and almost
anything else related at MIT or Harvard at the time, especially if
there was DoD money involved, was that the late 1960s and first half
of the 1970s were times of great tumult in the academic and research
communities, with large differences in style among institutions about
how those things played out. I don't believe we had anyone killed in
Cambridge, but there were a lot of loud demonstrations, marches, etc.,
There were some unpleasant confrontations between demonstrators and
the Cambridge Police and I can remember the smell of tear gas
Because it involved social and behavioral science research and
researchers, including some whom some of the most active of the
antiwar community were suspicious of for other reasons and because it
involved DoD (whether specifically ARPA or not, and it was ARPA)
funding) which meant to them that something nefarious was going on,
Some of those stories were on a par with some things we hear today
about the "real" reason the ARPANET work was funded; some were, at
least in my opinion, far worse. The times were troubled enough that I
had some people who were working for me by day (because they were
comfortable with what they were doing and what they could see) and
picketing us by night (some because of the principle of DoD funding
and others because of what "must" be going on elsewhere in teh project
although they could never find any sign of it). The noise was loud
enough that, if one looks through contemporary articles, one can
probably find a lot of things that were the result of those kinds of
thinking (i.e., without strong connections to reality) and find then
with great ease. We are a lot more interested in getting work done
than in trying to hold debates with those who were not willing to
listen and who, in many case, felt that anyone who disagreed with
them, their positions, or their truth should not be allowed to speak
at all.
Organizationally, the project was originally intended to be a joint
MIT-Harvard effort. It was also intended, from the beginning, to be
organized the way Project MAC was originally organized (in retrospect,
probably unsurprising given Lick's involvement in shaping both), i.e.,
some centrally-funded and managed core activities, support from the
Project for complementary activities of various faculty and
departments, and some more independent activities with their own
independent (e.g., non-DoD) support that were nonetheless
collaborating (the latter group of activities was important with
Project MAC but was never significant with the Cambridge Project and,
as far as I can remember, never came together), There were many
protests and some debate about that at Harvard. The _Crimson_ article
cited was part of that fabric; perhaps something about its balance and
dedication to reasoned debate can be inferred from such balanced and
objective comments as " M.I.T. is the Defense Department's house
whore,...". Others may remember actual details of the Harvard
discussions better than I do, but Harvard eventually decided that
there would be no formal Harvard-as-University participation, but that
interested departments and researchers at Harvard were free to
participate and accept funding. Many did -- there were at least
three Harvard senior faculty, from at least Schools on the internal
advisory committee and far more on a large faculty (and probably some
students -- don't remember offhand) advisory group. So, we ended up
with a central staff at MIT with work focusing on a general
architecture and software substrate for a wide range of applications,
integration of a variety of tools, data representation issues, design
and construction of a researcher-friendly and statistically-oriented
database management system, and a good deal of work what was necessary
to apply different kinds of tools and models to the same underlying
data. Wrt the latter, a common attitude, and arguably the state of
the art, at the time was that people would build highly integrated
"statistical packages" with a particular view of data and that
researchers should design their work and hypotheses around what could
be done with one of those packages. One of the key ideas behind the
Cambridge Project was that it was important to have an environment in
which data, models, and hypotheses should drive analysis not the
available tools (not at all z new idea, but one that was hard to
realize at the time).[1].[2]
It may also be relevant that the Cambridge Project was funded out of
ARPA Behavioral Sciences (sometimes Human Resources, IIR), not IPTO.
There were certainly some conversations at/with RADC about command,
control, and intelligence functions but they were more about the
applicability of our work to those functions than any focus of the
work on those topics. Mostly or entirely after the Cambridge Project
as such ended, a company that was more or less spun off from MIT
provided support for the systems that the Cambridge Project was
developed to several universities and commercial enterprises in the US
and Europe (and maybe elsewhere, but I don't remember) and to parts of
DoD, notably what was then OSD Program Analysis and Evaluation (main
application there was the DoD budget, not, e.g., warfare).. As with
many other things funded by ARPA, there was far more effort to explain
possible specific military applicability of the research work rather
than its justification as research after the Mansfield Amendment (and
the transition to "DARPA") than earlier. Like many other ARPA
activities at the time, the explanations changed more than the actual
work, It occurs to me that some of those explanations might be the
foundation for the NBC reporting referred to below.
A few other things to add a bit of data and help parse facts from
misunderstanding or fantasy (I'm running out of energy and this note
(1) I have no idea where Levine got his list of "data banks" that the
Project was going to acquire, maintain, and distribute. I don't
remember such a list from any of the early proposal drafts, nor do I
remember any discussion of them during the summer study. In any
event, while individual researchers almost certainly had their own
data of interest and saw some of the work of the Project as providing
better tools for analysis and modeling of them, there was never any
central archive or effort to build one -- I'm quite confident about
that because it almost certainly would have been in my area of
responsibility.
(2) The document at http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?AD=AD0783626
was one of a collection of annual and them semi-annual reports. They
are all public; they were all available through NTIS and probably
still are, although some of the scans were, IIR, even worse than this
particular one. In any event, I have the MIT-produced paper versions
of all of them. If the NTIS copies are no longer avaialble and
someone has appropriate scanning resources, I'd be happy to make them
available.
(3) There was never any "Project CAM" or something referred to that
way, at least in conjunction with the Cambridge Project. The only
times I remember hearing that term during the Cambridge Project's
existence were in conjunction with a conspiracy theory (whose details
I don;t remember) involving "MAC" spelled backwards.
(4) During most of its existence, the Cambridge Project was on the 5th
floor or what was then 575 Technology Square, across the plaze from
545 (before that space came together, there was a group in MIT
Building 26 near the original MIT computer center facility, I
continued to sit in 545 Tech Square, etc. That is relevant to the
Datacomputer discussion because we had the south side of that floor
and they had the north side. But, if I remember (and my memory is
very vague about this), while Tom Merrill was PI on that project, I
think CCA continued to do business out of their other offices (up near
Fresh Pond and a few blocks from BBN). Could easily be wrong about
that, but IBM never had anything to do with the Datacompiuter -- it
ran on PDP-10s, Ampex videotape drives, and some specialized hardware.
What I do know is that, while the people involved knew each other
(common elevator lobby and shared history among the more senior
folks), no data ever moved between the two projects although Lick and
others had a lot of fantasies about that if and when the Datacomputer
work ever reached useful production status. Also, IBM's Cambridge
Scientific Lab was definitely in 545. The only two CTSS systems I
was ever aware of belonged to Project MAC and the MIT Computation
Center. They were networked via the high-bandwidth method of people
carrying magnetic tapes a block of two :-( I don't think IBM every
actually owned one, although I might not have known. CP/CMS didn't
speak SNA. It did acquire RSCS although I don't remember whether
before or after the transition to the VM/CMS product. RSCS of course
became the primary transport protocol for BITNET. Almost certainly no
ARPANET connections to the Cambridge Scientific Center, at least early
on -- the Host-IMP protocols didn't exist for the machine and there
weren't any spare ports on the obvious IMPs. And the CIA office in
545 was a fairly open secret if it was a secret at all, at least by
the time I had an office there around 1965-1966.
john
[1[ Klensin, John C., J. Markowitz, D. B. Yntema, and R. A. Wiesen,
“The Approach to Compatibility of the Cambridge Project Consistent
System”, ACM SIGSOC Bulletin, Fall 1973.
[2} Klensin, John C. and Douwe B. Yntema, “Beyond the Package: A new
approach to social science computing”, Social Science Information, 20,
4/5, (1981), pp. 787-815.

Hi Jack, thanks for writing back. It's great to have a person who worked
with Licklider be a part of this email record.
Also thank you to all the others for responding. I want to clarify a couple
of things, mostly because I don't want to be unfair to the book's author
despite my evaluation of his research. Levine seems to suggest that there is
some connection between counterinsurgency psychological/sociological
research in Vietnam and the origins of Licklider's research group(s) and
work in building the ARPA C&C/IPTO community. That is to say, he believes
there are common intellectual origins if not necessarily applications. What
has been covered by Waldrop and others -- and what is even apparent in the
oral histories recorded by Licklider and others -- is that to the extent
this is true, there was apprehension on the part of the interactive
computing researchers. Either way, this is a bold claim and my own feeling
is that it requires much more evidence to support it.
The NBC reporting is -- to his telling -- evidence of similar tactics being
used on the ARPANET, although the Congressional Record testimony seems
pretty clear that the report confused a bunch of things. Again, it doesn't
seem to me that enough convincing evidence is presented, but these reports
are interesting nonetheless and I'd never heard of them before in my own
research.
One final note about the Cambridge Project. Waldrop also discusses the
Cambridge Project in "Dream Machine" -- he even recounts a story where
Licklider, surrounded by protestors who were attempting to burn copies of
his proposal, showed the youngsters that they needed to fan out the pages if
they wanted to get it to burn properly (and even lit his own report on
fire). At the time, this was a known project. The Harvard Crimson even
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1969/9/26/brass-tacks-the-cambridge-project-pi/
As I mentioned, I have not been able to get a copy of this proposal. The MIT
archives will almost certainly take their time getting back to me. The
J.C.R. Licklider, "Establishment and Operation of a Program in Computer
Analysis and Modeling in the Behavioral Sciences" December 5, 1968. MIT
Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Cambridge Project records.
Levine does not seem to quote from this proposal and only cites it once when
he lists the "data banks" that the Cambridge Project would create (and "make
Public opinion polls from all countries
Cultural patterns of all the tribes and peoples of the world
Archives on comparative communism [...] files on the contemporary world
communist movements
Political participation of various countries [...] This includes such
variables as voting, membership in associations, activity of political
parties, etc.
Youth movements
Mass unrest and political movements under conditions of rapid social change
Data on national integration, particularly in "plural" societies; the
integration of ethnic, racial and religious minorities; the merging or
splitting of present political units
International propaganda output
Peasant attitudes and behavior
International armament expenditures and trends
(It is unclear is Levine is listing these himself or quoting from the
proposal; without seeing a copy we cannot verify)
My understanding is that the project ran for ~5 years. The only documentary
evidence for it that I've been able to find online is the following report,
http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?AD=AD0783626
Without some revelation from people on this list, I don't see enough
evidence to overturn the narrative clearly expounded by Waldrop, Weinberger,
and others that the ARPA computing community as established by Licklider was
a kind of lucky moment where lots of funds could be spent on risky/open
projects and that most of the rest of ARPA had little idea what these guys
were even doing, let alone others within the Pentagon.

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Bill Ricker

2018-04-14 18:18:55 UTC

On Sat, Apr 14, 2018 at 7:15 AM, Dave Walden

Post by Dave Walden
Jack,
My memory is that CCA (Computer Corporation of America -- Tom Merrill's
company) did the DataComputer.

Data Computer is a CCA trade name at least much later, so Jack's
suggestion of Data Computer and my thought of Prof O'Neil's work on
CCA Model 204 DB which was known to be used by the spooks are heading
in the same direction.

Post by Dave Walden
They mighxt also have been at 545 Tech
Square at the time but I am unsure of that. IBM (the "Cambridge
Scientific" lab?) was also there (as you note) and did other important
things (my memory is vague, so I am uncertain of the following things
... the beginning of CP/CMS operating system, Script text processing
system, creation of GML,

All true ... I spent a very happy supper at IBM Cambridge Science Center in '79.

Post by Dave Walden
I think they may also have had the other CTSS
system, etc.) but I don't remember this group being connected to the
ARPANET (IBM was pushing SNA -- proprietary networking).

AFAIK, yes, they had their own SNA backbone. I don't recall hearing of
BITNET there.

Jack -

Very interesting about the Morse Code program.
An aside: Dad graduated from Morse Code Intercept School at Ft
Devens during the Korean excitement -- it beat going to Infantry
school and then Korea, he figured, even if he wound up in Incirlik. He
had to recycle the class, so wound up at Vint Hill Farm Station near
Manassas VA, much better. His diploma was unclassified, send to Mom,
but his 05H MOS of Morse Intercept Operator was classified. Colonel
giving diplomas couldn't explain how that made sense. Given how poor
morale was -- they recruited honors graduates to do this rote work
transcribing quintuples of nonsense, a living modem between headphones
and a typewriter -- apparently because of their aptitude test
confounding pattern-matching and raw intelligence -- replacing Morse
Intercept operators with a computer would have been merciful. They had
guys on Morse Intercept who should have been assigned to the
Cryptanalytic team or Traffic Analysis/Correlation, memorialized as
"Army's biggest waste of brain power" in an expose white-paper. Dad
wasn't cleared to know that his Vint Hill unit of ASA had already been
reorganized into a new Joint entity called NSA. (NSA was Joint before
Joint was cool.) To this day Dad hates Morse Code and has no interest
in ASA veterans being eligible for the Retired Spooks society. But his
"weekends" researching in the Library of Congress (possibly the first
public Air Conditioned building in Virginia/DC) cemented long-distance
courtship with my Mom, so he has that one positive memory from his
Army days. 73 DE N1VUX

Post by Jack Haverty
attached to the ARPANET), and even a stealth office of the CIA (really -
but that's another story), which I accidentally "outed" one day while
trying to run computer cables up to the roof through the elevator shaft.
Oops.

Interesting.
That might be connected to the CAM/AGILE, or project officers for the
database, or something else entirely, maybe monitoring Soviets or
domestic threats in Peoples Republic of Cambridge :-).

Post by Jack Haverty
Again, an Elephant which looks quite different to different audiences.

Quite so.

Post by Jack Haverty
LCS itself,
AFAIK, did not do any classified work. Draper Labs did ... Probably
Lincoln too but I never worked there.

Lincoln Labs and their spin-off MITRE* most certainly had classified
work. In the 1980s, the MITRE department Mike Padlipsky (ex of MIT
Project MAC, e.g. MULTICS ARPAnet implementation) and I were in was
working with "The Community". I wasn't cleared to know what some of
the others were doing.

* (MITRE officially does NOT stand for MIT Radar Engineering, it is
officially NOT an Acronym. Because trademarks. MITRE was originally
spun-off from Lincoln to take the MIT-LL design for SAGE to RFP and
fielding, as contracted contract management, which MIT felt was
outside MIT-LL's remit and mission. I knew people who were called to a
LL conference room one day in 1958 and told they were now MITRE
employees, please pick up your new badge at security.)

Land-lord to the stealth CIA office would be one. :-)
If Prof O'Neil was involved with CIA/NSA and DataComputer / Model
204 work in LCS prior to the CCA spinoff/spinup, that would likely
have been at least mildly classified as to who / why. (Live data would
have been highly classified.) Unclear if National Library of Medicine
usage of Model 204 was an intentional dual-use* cover-story or just
"hey if you're funding that, can we use it too?"; I'm unsure
if/how-long they managed to keep CCA's CIA/NSA sponsorship secret.

* (The Community had used venture capital to create dual-use cover
elsewhere: ITEK Photo typesetting was intentionally set up as a
dual-use cover for ITEK manufacturing lenses for CORONA satellites.
The super sharp super high power high-tech lenses needed to record
land 100 miles below onto film crisply were exactly what would make
phototypesetting from a collection of photo-negative masters work.
Once CORONA was officially declassified, The Museum of Printing's
master calligrapher boardmember (RIP, Louis), who had been a font
designer at ITEK, gave the annual lecture on CORONA's relevance to
typographic progress. )

--
Bill Ricker
***@gmail.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux

Jack Haverty

2018-04-14 19:07:09 UTC

In Lick's group, publication was never a priority; writing code and
building systems was the focus. Maybe that was to avoid issues if
different audiences discovered the others' view of the "Elephant"....

So there aren't many historical papers about the work done there. It's
unfortunate because there was a lot of interesting stuff going on,
especially with 4 decades of hindsight.

There was one paper about the Morse project published rather obscurely
in a conference proceedings. A poor but mostly legible copy survives in
DTIC. The paper about the Morse Project starts on page 128:

http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a143691.pdf

AFAIK, nothing we did in Lick's group was classified - at least not from
our perspective.

Some of you might find that paper interesting or at least nostalgic.

/Jack

Post by Bill Ricker
On Sat, Apr 14, 2018 at 7:15 AM, Dave Walden

Post by Dave Walden
Jack,
My memory is that CCA (Computer Corporation of America -- Tom Merrill's
company) did the DataComputer.

All true ... I spent a very happy supper at IBM Cambridge Science Center in '79.

Post by Dave Walden
I think they may also have had the other CTSS
system, etc.) but I don't remember this group being connected to the
ARPANET (IBM was pushing SNA -- proprietary networking).

AFAIK, yes, they had their own SNA backbone. I don't recall hearing of
BITNET there.
Jack -
Very interesting about the Morse Code program.
An aside: Dad graduated from Morse Code Intercept School at Ft
Devens during the Korean excitement -- it beat going to Infantry
school and then Korea, he figured, even if he wound up in Incirlik. He
had to recycle the class, so wound up at Vint Hill Farm Station near
Manassas VA, much better. His diploma was unclassified, send to Mom,
but his 05H MOS of Morse Intercept Operator was classified. Colonel
giving diplomas couldn't explain how that made sense. Given how poor
morale was -- they recruited honors graduates to do this rote work
transcribing quintuples of nonsense, a living modem between headphones
and a typewriter -- apparently because of their aptitude test
confounding pattern-matching and raw intelligence -- replacing Morse
Intercept operators with a computer would have been merciful. They had
guys on Morse Intercept who should have been assigned to the
Cryptanalytic team or Traffic Analysis/Correlation, memorialized as
"Army's biggest waste of brain power" in an expose white-paper. Dad
wasn't cleared to know that his Vint Hill unit of ASA had already been
reorganized into a new Joint entity called NSA. (NSA was Joint before
Joint was cool.) To this day Dad hates Morse Code and has no interest
in ASA veterans being eligible for the Retired Spooks society. But his
"weekends" researching in the Library of Congress (possibly the first
public Air Conditioned building in Virginia/DC) cemented long-distance
courtship with my Mom, so he has that one positive memory from his
Army days. 73 DE N1VUX

Post by Jack Haverty
Again, an Elephant which looks quite different to different audiences.

Quite so.

Post by Jack Haverty
LCS itself,
AFAIK, did not do any classified work. Draper Labs did ... Probably
Lincoln too but I never worked there.

Lincoln Labs and their spin-off MITRE* most certainly had classified
work. In the 1980s, the MITRE department Mike Padlipsky (ex of MIT
Project MAC, e.g. MULTICS ARPAnet implementation) and I were in was
working with "The Community". I wasn't cleared to know what some of
the others were doing.
* (MITRE officially does NOT stand for MIT Radar Engineering, it is
officially NOT an Acronym. Because trademarks. MITRE was originally
spun-off from Lincoln to take the MIT-LL design for SAGE to RFP and
fielding, as contracted contract management, which MIT felt was
outside MIT-LL's remit and mission. I knew people who were called to a
LL conference room one day in 1958 and told they were now MITRE
employees, please pick up your new badge at security.)
Land-lord to the stealth CIA office would be one. :-)
If Prof O'Neil was involved with CIA/NSA and DataComputer / Model
204 work in LCS prior to the CCA spinoff/spinup, that would likely
have been at least mildly classified as to who / why. (Live data would
have been highly classified.) Unclear if National Library of Medicine
usage of Model 204 was an intentional dual-use* cover-story or just
"hey if you're funding that, can we use it too?"; I'm unsure
if/how-long they managed to keep CCA's CIA/NSA sponsorship secret.
* (The Community had used venture capital to create dual-use cover
elsewhere: ITEK Photo typesetting was intentionally set up as a
dual-use cover for ITEK manufacturing lenses for CORONA satellites.
The super sharp super high power high-tech lenses needed to record
land 100 miles below onto film crisply were exactly what would make
phototypesetting from a collection of photo-negative masters work.
Once CORONA was officially declassified, The Museum of Printing's
master calligrapher boardmember (RIP, Louis), who had been a font
designer at ITEK, gave the annual lecture on CORONA's relevance to
typographic progress. )

James B DiGriz

2018-04-15 20:47:23 UTC

On Sat, 14 Apr 2018 12:07:09 -0700
Jack Haverty <***@3kitty.org> wrote:

<cut>

Post by Jack Haverty
There was one paper about the Morse project published rather obscurely
in a conference proceedings. A poor but mostly legible copy survives
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a143691.pdf
AFAIK, nothing we did in Lick's group was classified - at least not
from our perspective.
Some of you might find that paper interesting or at least nostalgic.
/Jack

I'm pretty sure I would be interested, but unfortunately DTIC
access requires you to be a Federal employee, contractor, sponsored
foreign person, etc., as I found out after wading through the
registration process as a mere taxpayer ;-). Any chance that paper's
available anywhere else?

Thanks,
jbdigriz

Miles Fidelman

2018-04-15 21:09:21 UTC

Post by James B DiGriz
On Sat, 14 Apr 2018 12:07:09 -0700
<cut>

An awful lot of the documents on DTIC are available, to the public,
without logging in. INCLUDING the link listed above (I just checked).
Did you try clicking on it? :-)

Miles Fidelman

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra

James B DiGriz

2018-04-15 23:19:39 UTC

On Sun, 15 Apr 2018 17:09:21 -0400

Post by Miles Fidelman

Post by James B DiGriz
On Sat, 14 Apr 2018 12:07:09 -0700
<cut>

Post by Jack Haverty
There was one paper about the Morse project published rather
obscurely in a conference proceedings. A poor but mostly legible
copy survives in DTIC. The paper about the Morse Project starts
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a143691.pdf
AFAIK, nothing we did in Lick's group was classified - at least not
from our perspective.
Some of you might find that paper interesting or at least
nostalgic.
/Jack

An awful lot of the documents on DTIC are available, to the public,
without logging in. INCLUDING the link listed above (I just
checked). Did you try clicking on it? :-)
Miles Fidelman

Tried with my phone and it finally downloaded. Firefox on this machine
kept firing up PDF.js no matter what, and the connection reset every
time. FWIW I got to the main login and registration stuff earlier by
trying an https link to the same file.

Thanks, though, and thanks to Jack for the link,
jbdigriz

Jack Haverty

2018-04-14 18:40:27 UTC

Dave - you're right. The DataComputer was at CCA, not IBM. We did have
some interaction with IBM, IIRC as part of Lick's focus on Office
Automation. No software, since PDP-10s and IBM had radically different
technical views of the world, but documents and reports were easier to
share. Lick knew everybody.

I don't recall any specific events, but it wouldn't surprise me if there
was some terminal over at some IBM site which had access to the ARPANET
somehow, or if IBM people came by some MIT lab to visit and 'kick the
tires'. Especially around the ICCC '72 exhibition, there was a lot of
interest in promoting the ARPANET by demonstrating what you could do
with it. MACSYMA was especially popular when it got online (MACSYMA was
a symbolic manipulation "desk calculator" which could be used to solve
algebraic equations).

Being "connected to the ARPANET" didn't necessarily mean having a
machine which was wired to an IMP port. It sometimes just meant that
you had some means of accessing (or making available) interesting stuff
by somehow using the ARPANET.

Another of Lick's projects that I did was to create a server on the
ARPANET on our PDP-10 which enabled a user to submit "card decks" and
receive "printouts" from an IBM 360. We never would have come up with
such an idea on our own, but it was important to Lick so I got
volunteered to do it. I had used the 360s with punch cards at the MIT
Data Center and Draper Labs so I sort of knew what to do. Tedious and
painful to get there but it worked.

The idea was that you could submit a card deck by emailing it to my
server. The server would submit ithe card deck as a "job" to the 360 at
UCLA by the RJE (Remote Job Entry) facility via the ARPANET, and then
poll the RJE machine to eventually retrieve the printout that resulted
from the job run for emailing back to whoever submitted the card deck.
Presumably that card deck could have somehow invoked IBM networking to
access remote datasets or services in the IBM world as it ran on the
360. Imagine a gateway handling punched card images instead of packets!

I built the RJE server but I don't know if anybody ever used it
afterwards or took the software away to run somewhere else. I had had
enough experience with card decks by then so I never felt the desire to
play around in the bowels of the IBM world. It sure would have been
handy to have a few years earlier when I was working at Draper and
occasionally had to carry decks of cards and listings across the MIT Campus.

By using that RJE interface, one might make any "interesting dataset" on
some IBM machine, not wired to an IMP, "accessible from the ARPANET". I
can imagine my "RJE server" being promoted as a solution to that problem.

That email system was the same one I built that also interfaced with the
DataComputer at CCA. So card decks and printouts might have been stored
in the DataComputer as part of Lick's larger vision of shared networked
resources cooperating in an Office Automation (or C3I?) context. Might
explain why I associated IBM with the DataComputer - all just details of
the "Military Industrial Complex" in the 60s/70s which we student-types
had strong feelings about.

An interesting dataset might be processed by submitting a card deck of
Fortran, with the resulting printout placed in the DataComputer for
archival and access by interested parties via the ARPANET. One could
easily view this as a part of some "surveillance" facility. Did it
happen? Don't know. Did people think that was what the ARPANET was
all about? Maybe some did...

The Elephant looks different depending on your perspective.

/Jack

Post by Dave Walden
Jack,
My memory is that CCA (Computer Corporation of America -- Tom Merrill's
company) did the DataComputer. They might also have been at 545 Tech
Square at the time but I am unsure of that. IBM (the "Cambridge
Scientific" lab?) was also there (as you note) and did other important
things (my memory is vague, so I am uncertain of the following things
... the beginning of CP/CMS operating system, Script text processing
system, creation of GML, I think they may also have had the other CTSS
system, etc.) but I don't remember this group being connected to the
ARPANET (IBM was pushing SNA -- proprietary networking).
Dave

_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history

John Day

2018-04-15 21:28:31 UTC

Just for the record, we (Illinois) were heavy users of CCN RJE. It was at least the physics guys but I don’t remember who all else there was, possibly the economists.

Post by Jack Haverty
Dave - you're right. The DataComputer was at CCA, not IBM. We did have
some interaction with IBM, IIRC as part of Lick's focus on Office
Automation. No software, since PDP-10s and IBM had radically different
technical views of the world, but documents and reports were easier to
share. Lick knew everybody.
I don't recall any specific events, but it wouldn't surprise me if there
was some terminal over at some IBM site which had access to the ARPANET
somehow, or if IBM people came by some MIT lab to visit and 'kick the
tires'. Especially around the ICCC '72 exhibition, there was a lot of
interest in promoting the ARPANET by demonstrating what you could do
with it. MACSYMA was especially popular when it got online (MACSYMA was
a symbolic manipulation "desk calculator" which could be used to solve
algebraic equations).
Being "connected to the ARPANET" didn't necessarily mean having a
machine which was wired to an IMP port. It sometimes just meant that
you had some means of accessing (or making available) interesting stuff
by somehow using the ARPANET.
Another of Lick's projects that I did was to create a server on the
ARPANET on our PDP-10 which enabled a user to submit "card decks" and
receive "printouts" from an IBM 360. We never would have come up with
such an idea on our own, but it was important to Lick so I got
volunteered to do it. I had used the 360s with punch cards at the MIT
Data Center and Draper Labs so I sort of knew what to do. Tedious and
painful to get there but it worked.
The idea was that you could submit a card deck by emailing it to my
server. The server would submit ithe card deck as a "job" to the 360 at
UCLA by the RJE (Remote Job Entry) facility via the ARPANET, and then
poll the RJE machine to eventually retrieve the printout that resulted
from the job run for emailing back to whoever submitted the card deck.
Presumably that card deck could have somehow invoked IBM networking to
access remote datasets or services in the IBM world as it ran on the
360. Imagine a gateway handling punched card images instead of packets!
I built the RJE server but I don't know if anybody ever used it
afterwards or took the software away to run somewhere else. I had had
enough experience with card decks by then so I never felt the desire to
play around in the bowels of the IBM world. It sure would have been
handy to have a few years earlier when I was working at Draper and
occasionally had to carry decks of cards and listings across the MIT Campus.
By using that RJE interface, one might make any "interesting dataset" on
some IBM machine, not wired to an IMP, "accessible from the ARPANET". I
can imagine my "RJE server" being promoted as a solution to that problem.
That email system was the same one I built that also interfaced with the
DataComputer at CCA. So card decks and printouts might have been stored
in the DataComputer as part of Lick's larger vision of shared networked
resources cooperating in an Office Automation (or C3I?) context. Might
explain why I associated IBM with the DataComputer - all just details of
the "Military Industrial Complex" in the 60s/70s which we student-types
had strong feelings about.
An interesting dataset might be processed by submitting a card deck of
Fortran, with the resulting printout placed in the DataComputer for
archival and access by interested parties via the ARPANET. One could
easily view this as a part of some "surveillance" facility. Did it
happen? Don't know. Did people think that was what the ARPANET was
all about? Maybe some did...
The Elephant looks different depending on your perspective.
/Jack

_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history

Miles Fidelman

2018-04-14 16:58:50 UTC

Hi Jack,

I could have sworn that the DataComputer was CCA. (Whatever happened to
CCA, anyway?)

Miles

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra

David Walden

2018-04-14 19:53:59 UTC

The sale of CCA that I am remembering was *much* earlier than when the wikipedia says Rocket bought CCA. I remember a founding CCA employee getting money when the company was sold. CCA could have been acquired and then acquired again; maybe a Canadian parent company sold it to Rocket.

On April 14, 2018, at 2:19 PM, Bill Ricker <***@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sat, Apr 14, 2018 at 7:15 AM, Dave Walden

Post by Dave Walden
Jack,
My memory is that CCA (Computer Corporation of America -- Tom Merrill's
company) did the DataComputer.

All true ... I spent a very happy supper at IBM Cambridge Science Center in '79.

Post by Dave Walden
I think they may also have had the other CTSS
system, etc.) but I don't remember this group being connected to the
ARPANET (IBM was pushing SNA -- proprietary networking).

Post by Jack Haverty
Again, an Elephant which looks quite different to different audiences.

Quite so.

Post by Jack Haverty
LCS itself,
AFAIK, did not do any classified work. Draper Labs did ... Probably
Lincoln too but I never worked there.

--
Bill Ricker
***@gmail.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux

David Walden

2018-04-15 11:04:29 UTC

Yes, my memory as I wrote an earlier message was wrong. The second CTSS system was at Project MAC, not IBM Cambridge Scientific.

(Regarding reference 1 below, Joe Markowitz was at BBN in 1968 while the proposal to do the IMP development was being written; he was an active reviewer of what was being written.)

On April 15, 2018, at 6:06 AM, John Klensin <***@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi, while I'm on this list, I don't routinely follow it, so it took a
while for me to be pointed to this thread and longer to find the
energy to respond.

For context, I was involved with the Cambridge Project from the time
an early draft of the proposal started to be circulated to relevant
researchers within MIT, through the summer study, and then ended up
with lead responsibility for among other things, the software that was
intended to hold everything together, was a member of the small
steering committee (I don't remember what it was called, but that
wasn't it) that had practical oversight of the Project. I worked
closely with Lick and more closely with those who were running the
project on a day-to-day basis. Lick was actively involved (more than
I think Waldrop realized) but was leading the Dynamic Modeling work at
the same time and almost certainly more involved there on a daily
basis. When I decided to do work leading to a Ph.D a few years after
the Cambridge Project wound down, Lick ended up on my somewhat-strange
committee. If I recall, he was one of those who helped convince me I
should do the degree. I'm happy to answer specific questions to the
extent that I have time and remember --the Project did zero classified
research-- but it has been a long time and MIT has, at least IMO, a
bad institutional memory problem for activities that are not linked to
active departments and/or sources of funds.. I have no idea whether
the original idea for what became the Cambridge Project originated
with Lick or de Sola Pool -- I worked closely with both, the latter
even earlier than I first met Lick, but, by the time I heard about the
idea, it was described very much in "joint effort" terms. I also knew
(and know) enough about the interests of each to guess where some
ideas came from but find it difficult or impossible to try to
attribute most of the ideas to either independently.

I'll try to describe what it was all about, but it is probably
important that those trying to understand the effort (and almost
anything else related at MIT or Harvard at the time, especially if
there was DoD money involved, was that the late 1960s and first half
of the 1970s were times of great tumult in the academic and research
communities, with large differences in style among institutions about
how those things played out. I don't believe we had anyone killed in
Cambridge, but there were a lot of loud demonstrations, marches, etc.,
There were some unpleasant confrontations between demonstrators and
the Cambridge Police and I can remember the smell of tear gas
Because it involved social and behavioral science research and
researchers, including some whom some of the most active of the
antiwar community were suspicious of for other reasons and because it
involved DoD (whether specifically ARPA or not, and it was ARPA)
funding) which meant to them that something nefarious was going on,
Some of those stories were on a par with some things we hear today
about the "real" reason the ARPANET work was funded; some were, at
least in my opinion, far worse. The times were troubled enough that I
had some people who were working for me by day (because they were
comfortable with what they were doing and what they could see) and
picketing us by night (some because of the principle of DoD funding
and others because of what "must" be going on elsewhere in teh project
although they could never find any sign of it). The noise was loud
enough that, if one looks through contemporary articles, one can
probably find a lot of things that were the result of those kinds of
thinking (i.e., without strong connections to reality) and find then
with great ease. We are a lot more interested in getting work done
than in trying to hold debates with those who were not willing to
listen and who, in many case, felt that anyone who disagreed with
them, their positions, or their truth should not be allowed to speak
at all.

Organizationally, the project was originally intended to be a joint
MIT-Harvard effort. It was also intended, from the beginning, to be
organized the way Project MAC was originally organized (in retrospect,
probably unsurprising given Lick's involvement in shaping both), i.e.,
some centrally-funded and managed core activities, support from the
Project for complementary activities of various faculty and
departments, and some more independent activities with their own
independent (e.g., non-DoD) support that were nonetheless
collaborating (the latter group of activities was important with
Project MAC but was never significant with the Cambridge Project and,
as far as I can remember, never came together), There were many
protests and some debate about that at Harvard. The _Crimson_ article
cited was part of that fabric; perhaps something about its balance and
dedication to reasoned debate can be inferred from such balanced and
objective comments as " M.I.T. is the Defense Department's house
whore,...". Others may remember actual details of the Harvard
discussions better than I do, but Harvard eventually decided that
there would be no formal Harvard-as-University participation, but that
interested departments and researchers at Harvard were free to
participate and accept funding. Many did -- there were at least
three Harvard senior faculty, from at least Schools on the internal
advisory committee and far more on a large faculty (and probably some
students -- don't remember offhand) advisory group. So, we ended up
with a central staff at MIT with work focusing on a general
architecture and software substrate for a wide range of applications,
integration of a variety of tools, data representation issues, design
and construction of a researcher-friendly and statistically-oriented
database management system, and a good deal of work what was necessary
to apply different kinds of tools and models to the same underlying
data. Wrt the latter, a common attitude, and arguably the state of
the art, at the time was that people would build highly integrated
"statistical packages" with a particular view of data and that
researchers should design their work and hypotheses around what could
be done with one of those packages. One of the key ideas behind the
Cambridge Project was that it was important to have an environment in
which data, models, and hypotheses should drive analysis not the
available tools (not at all z new idea, but one that was hard to
realize at the time).[1].[2]

It may also be relevant that the Cambridge Project was funded out of
ARPA Behavioral Sciences (sometimes Human Resources, IIR), not IPTO.
There were certainly some conversations at/with RADC about command,
control, and intelligence functions but they were more about the
applicability of our work to those functions than any focus of the
work on those topics. Mostly or entirely after the Cambridge Project
as such ended, a company that was more or less spun off from MIT
provided support for the systems that the Cambridge Project was
developed to several universities and commercial enterprises in the US
and Europe (and maybe elsewhere, but I don't remember) and to parts of
DoD, notably what was then OSD Program Analysis and Evaluation (main
application there was the DoD budget, not, e.g., warfare).. As with
many other things funded by ARPA, there was far more effort to explain
possible specific military applicability of the research work rather
than its justification as research after the Mansfield Amendment (and
the transition to "DARPA") than earlier. Like many other ARPA
activities at the time, the explanations changed more than the actual
work, It occurs to me that some of those explanations might be the
foundation for the NBC reporting referred to below.

A few other things to add a bit of data and help parse facts from
misunderstanding or fantasy (I'm running out of energy and this note
is already too long or there would be a much longer list):

(1) I have no idea where Levine got his list of "data banks" that the
Project was going to acquire, maintain, and distribute. I don't
remember such a list from any of the early proposal drafts, nor do I
remember any discussion of them during the summer study. In any
event, while individual researchers almost certainly had their own
data of interest and saw some of the work of the Project as providing
better tools for analysis and modeling of them, there was never any
central archive or effort to build one -- I'm quite confident about
that because it almost certainly would have been in my area of
responsibility.

(2) The document at http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?AD=AD0783626
was one of a collection of annual and them semi-annual reports. They
are all public; they were all available through NTIS and probably
still are, although some of the scans were, IIR, even worse than this
particular one. In any event, I have the MIT-produced paper versions
of all of them. If the NTIS copies are no longer avaialble and
someone has appropriate scanning resources, I'd be happy to make them
available.

(3) There was never any "Project CAM" or something referred to that
way, at least in conjunction with the Cambridge Project. The only
times I remember hearing that term during the Cambridge Project's
existence were in conjunction with a conspiracy theory (whose details
I don;t remember) involving "MAC" spelled backwards.

(4) During most of its existence, the Cambridge Project was on the 5th
floor or what was then 575 Technology Square, across the plaze from
545 (before that space came together, there was a group in MIT
Building 26 near the original MIT computer center facility, I
continued to sit in 545 Tech Square, etc. That is relevant to the
Datacomputer discussion because we had the south side of that floor
and they had the north side. But, if I remember (and my memory is
very vague about this), while Tom Merrill was PI on that project, I
think CCA continued to do business out of their other offices (up near
Fresh Pond and a few blocks from BBN). Could easily be wrong about
that, but IBM never had anything to do with the Datacompiuter -- it
ran on PDP-10s, Ampex videotape drives, and some specialized hardware.
What I do know is that, while the people involved knew each other
(common elevator lobby and shared history among the more senior
folks), no data ever moved between the two projects although Lick and
others had a lot of fantasies about that if and when the Datacomputer
work ever reached useful production status. Also, IBM's Cambridge
Scientific Lab was definitely in 545. The only two CTSS systems I
was ever aware of belonged to Project MAC and the MIT Computation
Center. They were networked via the high-bandwidth method of people
carrying magnetic tapes a block of two :-( I don't think IBM every
actually owned one, although I might not have known. CP/CMS didn't
speak SNA. It did acquire RSCS although I don't remember whether
before or after the transition to the VM/CMS product. RSCS of course
became the primary transport protocol for BITNET. Almost certainly no
ARPANET connections to the Cambridge Scientific Center, at least early
on -- the Host-IMP protocols didn't exist for the machine and there
weren't any spare ports on the obvious IMPs. And the CIA office in
545 was a fairly open secret if it was a secret at all, at least by
the time I had an office there around 1965-1966.

john

[1[ Klensin, John C., J. Markowitz, D. B. Yntema, and R. A. Wiesen,
“The Approach to Compatibility of the Cambridge Project Consistent
System”, ACM SIGSOC Bulletin, Fall 1973.
[2} Klensin, John C. and Douwe B. Yntema, “Beyond the Package: A new
approach to social science computing”, Social Science Information, 20,
4/5, (1981), pp. 787-815.

Hi Jack, thanks for writing back. It's great to have a person who worked
with Licklider be a part of this email record.
Also thank you to all the others for responding. I want to clarify a couple
of things, mostly because I don't want to be unfair to the book's author
despite my evaluation of his research. Levine seems to suggest that there is
some connection between counterinsurgency psychological/sociological
research in Vietnam and the origins of Licklider's research group(s) and
work in building the ARPA C&C/IPTO community. That is to say, he believes
there are common intellectual origins if not necessarily applications. What
has been covered by Waldrop and others -- and what is even apparent in the
oral histories recorded by Licklider and others -- is that to the extent
this is true, there was apprehension on the part of the interactive
computing researchers. Either way, this is a bold claim and my own feeling
is that it requires much more evidence to support it.
The NBC reporting is -- to his telling -- evidence of similar tactics being
used on the ARPANET, although the Congressional Record testimony seems
pretty clear that the report confused a bunch of things. Again, it doesn't
seem to me that enough convincing evidence is presented, but these reports
are interesting nonetheless and I'd never heard of them before in my own
research.
One final note about the Cambridge Project. Waldrop also discusses the
Cambridge Project in "Dream Machine" -- he even recounts a story where
Licklider, surrounded by protestors who were attempting to burn copies of
his proposal, showed the youngsters that they needed to fan out the pages if
they wanted to get it to burn properly (and even lit his own report on
fire). At the time, this was a known project. The Harvard Crimson even
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1969/9/26/brass-tacks-the-cambridge-project-pi/
As I mentioned, I have not been able to get a copy of this proposal. The MIT
archives will almost certainly take their time getting back to me. The
J.C.R. Licklider, "Establishment and Operation of a Program in Computer
Analysis and Modeling in the Behavioral Sciences" December 5, 1968. MIT
Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Cambridge Project records.
Levine does not seem to quote from this proposal and only cites it once when
he lists the "data banks" that the Cambridge Project would create (and "make
Public opinion polls from all countries
Cultural patterns of all the tribes and peoples of the world
Archives on comparative communism [...] files on the contemporary world
communist movements
Political participation of various countries [...] This includes such
variables as voting, membership in associations, activity of political
parties, etc.
Youth movements
Mass unrest and political movements under conditions of rapid social change
Data on national integration, particularly in "plural" societies; the
integration of ethnic, racial and religious minorities; the merging or
splitting of present political units
International propaganda output
Peasant attitudes and behavior
International armament expenditures and trends
(It is unclear is Levine is listing these himself or quoting from the
proposal; without seeing a copy we cannot verify)
My understanding is that the project ran for ~5 years. The only documentary
evidence for it that I've been able to find online is the following report,
http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?AD=AD0783626
Without some revelation from people on this list, I don't see enough
evidence to overturn the narrative clearly expounded by Waldrop, Weinberger,
and others that the ARPA computing community as established by Licklider was
a kind of lucky moment where lots of funds could be spent on risky/open
projects and that most of the rest of ARPA had little idea what these guys
were even doing, let alone others within the Pentagon.

_______
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http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history

--
Eric
_______
internet-history mailing list
http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history

Vint Cerf

2018-04-15 20:14:25 UTC

joe did end up at CIA in the office of Research for some time as I recall.

v

Post by David Walden
Yes, my memory as I wrote an earlier message was wrong. The second CTSS
system was at Project MAC, not IBM Cambridge Scientific.
(Regarding reference 1 below, Joe Markowitz was at BBN in 1968 while the
proposal to do the IMP development was being written; he was an active
reviewer of what was being written.)
Hi, while I'm on this list, I don't routinely follow it, so it took a
while for me to be pointed to this thread and longer to find the
energy to respond.
For context, I was involved with the Cambridge Project from the time
an early draft of the proposal started to be circulated to relevant
researchers within MIT, through the summer study, and then ended up
with lead responsibility for among other things, the software that was
intended to hold everything together, was a member of the small
steering committee (I don't remember what it was called, but that
wasn't it) that had practical oversight of the Project. I worked
closely with Lick and more closely with those who were running the
project on a day-to-day basis. Lick was actively involved (more than
I think Waldrop realized) but was leading the Dynamic Modeling work at
the same time and almost certainly more involved there on a daily
basis. When I decided to do work leading to a Ph.D a few years after
the Cambridge Project wound down, Lick ended up on my somewhat-strange
committee. If I recall, he was one of those who helped convince me I
should do the degree. I'm happy to answer specific questions to the
extent that I have time and remember --the Project did zero classified
research-- but it has been a long time and MIT has, at least IMO, a
bad institutional memory problem for activities that are not linked to
active departments and/or sources of funds.. I have no idea whether
the original idea for what became the Cambridge Project originated
with Lick or de Sola Pool -- I worked closely with both, the latter
even earlier than I first met Lick, but, by the time I heard about the
idea, it was described very much in "joint effort" terms. I also knew
(and know) enough about the interests of each to guess where some
ideas came from but find it difficult or impossible to try to
attribute most of the ideas to either independently.
I'll try to describe what it was all about, but it is probably
important that those trying to understand the effort (and almost
anything else related at MIT or Harvard at the time, especially if
there was DoD money involved, was that the late 1960s and first half
of the 1970s were times of great tumult in the academic and research
communities, with large differences in style among institutions about
how those things played out. I don't believe we had anyone killed in
Cambridge, but there were a lot of loud demonstrations, marches, etc.,
There were some unpleasant confrontations between demonstrators and
the Cambridge Police and I can remember the smell of tear gas
Because it involved social and behavioral science research and
researchers, including some whom some of the most active of the
antiwar community were suspicious of for other reasons and because it
involved DoD (whether specifically ARPA or not, and it was ARPA)
funding) which meant to them that something nefarious was going on,
Some of those stories were on a par with some things we hear today
about the "real" reason the ARPANET work was funded; some were, at
least in my opinion, far worse. The times were troubled enough that I
had some people who were working for me by day (because they were
comfortable with what they were doing and what they could see) and
picketing us by night (some because of the principle of DoD funding
and others because of what "must" be going on elsewhere in teh project
although they could never find any sign of it). The noise was loud
enough that, if one looks through contemporary articles, one can
probably find a lot of things that were the result of those kinds of
thinking (i.e., without strong connections to reality) and find then
with great ease. We are a lot more interested in getting work done
than in trying to hold debates with those who were not willing to
listen and who, in many case, felt that anyone who disagreed with
them, their positions, or their truth should not be allowed to speak
at all.
Organizationally, the project was originally intended to be a joint
MIT-Harvard effort. It was also intended, from the beginning, to be
organized the way Project MAC was originally organized (in retrospect,
probably unsurprising given Lick's involvement in shaping both), i.e.,
some centrally-funded and managed core activities, support from the
Project for complementary activities of various faculty and
departments, and some more independent activities with their own
independent (e.g., non-DoD) support that were nonetheless
collaborating (the latter group of activities was important with
Project MAC but was never significant with the Cambridge Project and,
as far as I can remember, never came together), There were many
protests and some debate about that at Harvard. The _Crimson_ article
cited was part of that fabric; perhaps something about its balance and
dedication to reasoned debate can be inferred from such balanced and
objective comments as " M.I.T. is the Defense Department's house
whore,...". Others may remember actual details of the Harvard
discussions better than I do, but Harvard eventually decided that
there would be no formal Harvard-as-University participation, but that
interested departments and researchers at Harvard were free to
participate and accept funding. Many did -- there were at least
three Harvard senior faculty, from at least Schools on the internal
advisory committee and far more on a large faculty (and probably some
students -- don't remember offhand) advisory group. So, we ended up
with a central staff at MIT with work focusing on a general
architecture and software substrate for a wide range of applications,
integration of a variety of tools, data representation issues, design
and construction of a researcher-friendly and statistically-oriented
database management system, and a good deal of work what was necessary
to apply different kinds of tools and models to the same underlying
data. Wrt the latter, a common attitude, and arguably the state of
the art, at the time was that people would build highly integrated
"statistical packages" with a particular view of data and that
researchers should design their work and hypotheses around what could
be done with one of those packages. One of the key ideas behind the
Cambridge Project was that it was important to have an environment in
which data, models, and hypotheses should drive analysis not the
available tools (not at all z new idea, but one that was hard to
realize at the time).[1].[2]
It may also be relevant that the Cambridge Project was funded out of
ARPA Behavioral Sciences (sometimes Human Resources, IIR), not IPTO.
There were certainly some conversations at/with RADC about command,
control, and intelligence functions but they were more about the
applicability of our work to those functions than any focus of the
work on those topics. Mostly or entirely after the Cambridge Project
as such ended, a company that was more or less spun off from MIT
provided support for the systems that the Cambridge Project was
developed to several universities and commercial enterprises in the US
and Europe (and maybe elsewhere, but I don't remember) and to parts of
DoD, notably what was then OSD Program Analysis and Evaluation (main
application there was the DoD budget, not, e.g., warfare).. As with
many other things funded by ARPA, there was far more effort to explain
possible specific military applicability of the research work rather
than its justification as research after the Mansfield Amendment (and
the transition to "DARPA") than earlier. Like many other ARPA
activities at the time, the explanations changed more than the actual
work, It occurs to me that some of those explanations might be the
foundation for the NBC reporting referred to below.
A few other things to add a bit of data and help parse facts from
misunderstanding or fantasy (I'm running out of energy and this note
(1) I have no idea where Levine got his list of "data banks" that the
Project was going to acquire, maintain, and distribute. I don't
remember such a list from any of the early proposal drafts, nor do I
remember any discussion of them during the summer study. In any
event, while individual researchers almost certainly had their own
data of interest and saw some of the work of the Project as providing
better tools for analysis and modeling of them, there was never any
central archive or effort to build one -- I'm quite confident about
that because it almost certainly would have been in my area of
responsibility.
(2) The document at http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?AD=AD0783626
was one of a collection of annual and them semi-annual reports. They
are all public; they were all available through NTIS and probably
still are, although some of the scans were, IIR, even worse than this
particular one. In any event, I have the MIT-produced paper versions
of all of them. If the NTIS copies are no longer avaialble and
someone has appropriate scanning resources, I'd be happy to make them
available.
(3) There was never any "Project CAM" or something referred to that
way, at least in conjunction with the Cambridge Project. The only
times I remember hearing that term during the Cambridge Project's
existence were in conjunction with a conspiracy theory (whose details
I don;t remember) involving "MAC" spelled backwards.
(4) During most of its existence, the Cambridge Project was on the 5th
floor or what was then 575 Technology Square, across the plaze from
545 (before that space came together, there was a group in MIT
Building 26 near the original MIT computer center facility, I
continued to sit in 545 Tech Square, etc. That is relevant to the
Datacomputer discussion because we had the south side of that floor
and they had the north side. But, if I remember (and my memory is
very vague about this), while Tom Merrill was PI on that project, I
think CCA continued to do business out of their other offices (up near
Fresh Pond and a few blocks from BBN). Could easily be wrong about
that, but IBM never had anything to do with the Datacompiuter -- it
ran on PDP-10s, Ampex videotape drives, and some specialized hardware.
What I do know is that, while the people involved knew each other
(common elevator lobby and shared history among the more senior
folks), no data ever moved between the two projects although Lick and
others had a lot of fantasies about that if and when the Datacomputer
work ever reached useful production status. Also, IBM's Cambridge
Scientific Lab was definitely in 545. The only two CTSS systems I
was ever aware of belonged to Project MAC and the MIT Computation
Center. They were networked via the high-bandwidth method of people
carrying magnetic tapes a block of two :-( I don't think IBM every
actually owned one, although I might not have known. CP/CMS didn't
speak SNA. It did acquire RSCS although I don't remember whether
before or after the transition to the VM/CMS product. RSCS of course
became the primary transport protocol for BITNET. Almost certainly no
ARPANET connections to the Cambridge Scientific Center, at least early
on -- the Host-IMP protocols didn't exist for the machine and there
weren't any spare ports on the obvious IMPs. And the CIA office in
545 was a fairly open secret if it was a secret at all, at least by
the time I had an office there around 1965-1966.
john
[1[ Klensin, John C., J. Markowitz, D. B. Yntema, and R. A. Wiesen,
âThe Approach to Compatibility of the Cambridge Project Consistent
Systemâ, ACM SIGSOC Bulletin, Fall 1973.
[2} Klensin, John C. and Douwe B. Yntema, âBeyond the Package: A new
approach to social science computingâ, Social Science Information, 20,
4/5, (1981), pp. 787-815.

Hi Jack, thanks for writing back. It's great to have a person who worked
with Licklider be a part of this email record.
Also thank you to all the others for responding. I want to clarify a

couple

Post by Eric Gade
of things, mostly because I don't want to be unfair to the book's author
despite my evaluation of his research. Levine seems to suggest that

there is

Post by Eric Gade
some connection between counterinsurgency psychological/sociological
research in Vietnam and the origins of Licklider's research group(s) and
work in building the ARPA C&C/IPTO community. That is to say, he believes
there are common intellectual origins if not necessarily applications.

What

Post by Eric Gade
has been covered by Waldrop and others -- and what is even apparent in

the

Post by Eric Gade
oral histories recorded by Licklider and others -- is that to the extent
this is true, there was apprehension on the part of the interactive
computing researchers. Either way, this is a bold claim and my own

feeling

Post by Eric Gade
is that it requires much more evidence to support it.
The NBC reporting is -- to his telling -- evidence of similar tactics

being

Post by Eric Gade
used on the ARPANET, although the Congressional Record testimony seems
pretty clear that the report confused a bunch of things. Again, it

doesn't

Post by Eric Gade
seem to me that enough convincing evidence is presented, but these

reports

Post by Eric Gade
are interesting nonetheless and I'd never heard of them before in my own
research.
One final note about the Cambridge Project. Waldrop also discusses the
Cambridge Project in "Dream Machine" -- he even recounts a story where
Licklider, surrounded by protestors who were attempting to burn copies of
his proposal, showed the youngsters that they needed to fan out the

pages if

Post by Eric Gade
they wanted to get it to burn properly (and even lit his own report on
fire). At the time, this was a known project. The Harvard Crimson even
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1969/9/26/brass-tacks-

the-cambridge-project-pi/

Post by Eric Gade
As I mentioned, I have not been able to get a copy of this proposal. The

MIT

Post by Eric Gade
archives will almost certainly take their time getting back to me. The
J.C.R. Licklider, "Establishment and Operation of a Program in Computer
Analysis and Modeling in the Behavioral Sciences" December 5, 1968. MIT
Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT Cambridge Project

records.

Post by Eric Gade
Levine does not seem to quote from this proposal and only cites it once

when

Post by Eric Gade
he lists the "data banks" that the Cambridge Project would create (and

"make

Post by Eric Gade
Public opinion polls from all countries
Cultural patterns of all the tribes and peoples of the world
Archives on comparative communism [...] files on the contemporary world
communist movements
Political participation of various countries [...] This includes such
variables as voting, membership in associations, activity of political
parties, etc.
Youth movements
Mass unrest and political movements under conditions of rapid social

change

Post by Eric Gade
Data on national integration, particularly in "plural" societies; the
integration of ethnic, racial and religious minorities; the merging or
splitting of present political units
International propaganda output
Peasant attitudes and behavior
International armament expenditures and trends
(It is unclear is Levine is listing these himself or quoting from the
proposal; without seeing a copy we cannot verify)
My understanding is that the project ran for ~5 years. The only

documentary

Post by Eric Gade
evidence for it that I've been able to find online is the following

report,

Post by Eric Gade
http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?AD=AD0783626
Without some revelation from people on this list, I don't see enough
evidence to overturn the narrative clearly expounded by Waldrop,

Weinberger,

Post by Eric Gade
and others that the ARPA computing community as established by Licklider

was

Post by Eric Gade
a kind of lucky moment where lots of funds could be spent on risky/open
projects and that most of the rest of ARPA had little idea what these

guys

Post by Eric Gade
were even doing, let alone others within the Pentagon.
On Sat, Apr 14, 2018 at 7:15 AM, Dave Walden <

Post by Jack Haverty
Lick's group was part of Project MAC, aka LCS (Laboratory for Computer
Science), It occupied part of 545 Technology Square, along with the

MIT

Post by Jack Haverty

Post by Jack Haverty
AI Lab. LCS had many subgroups. In addition, the building complex
housed an IBM research group (that did the DataComputer, which was
attached to the ARPANET), and even a stealth office of the CIA

(really -

Post by Jack Haverty

Post by Jack Haverty
but that's another story), which I accidentally "outed" one day while
trying to run computer cables up to the roof through the elevator

shaft.