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

[Miles Fidelman]

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


On 4/13/18 8:05 PM, Bill Ricker wrote:
> 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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