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

[Jack Haverty]

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


On 04/15/2018 03:06 AM, John Klensin 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.
> 
> 
> 
> On Sat, Apr 14, 2018 at 11:26 AM, Eric Gade <eric.gade at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> On Sat, Apr 14, 2018 at 7:15 AM, Dave Walden <dave.walden.family at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> 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
>>>
>>> On 4/14/2018 3:36 AM, Jack Haverty wrote:
>>>> 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.
>>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Eric
>>
>> _______
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>>
> 
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