From time to time when working at the
RAND Corporation, I would occassionally pick up information that I
was not supposed to hear. It was very rare, and no harm was done.
In all cases, the specific information had been printed in the NY
Times or similar venue anyway.
I do have one story that I think is
amusing and which I plan to tell you here.
I hope that by telling you this, I
don't accidentally become internationally famous, have my picture in
every newspaper, have beautiful women throwing themselves at my feet, get offered huge fees as a freedom-loving journalist, and be
acclaimed a hero. I doubt however that any of these things will
happen because by telling you this story I am not intentionally or
actually damaging America and violating trust based on narcissistic self-delusion, unlike some self-righteous assholes people I
could name.
The RAND Corporation was an early site
on the ARPAnet, which was the prototype of what we now call the
Internet. Much, but not all, of the fundamental technology of the Internet was invented for the ARPAnet and then scaled up. (Actually, this becomes less and less true every year as the Internet evolves, but it was true at the beginning).
Among other things, the ARPAnet allowed
heterogenous computers to communicate in a way that was reliable even
if parts of the network went down. This is the famous "packet
switching" concept, in which a message is disassembled into
packets, the packets are sent by the best available route, and
reassembled at the destination.
The computers that handled all this
disassembly, re-transmission, reassembly, etc was all in the
background and were called IMPs and TIPs and they were highly
reliable, special purpose computers built by Bolt Beranak and Newman
(BBN) under contract to ARPA. Although very reliable, BBN had
maintenance people in various places to fix anything that broke.
One of those maintenance people, the one who handled the west coast,
was a good friend of ours, for some reason. He had long hair and a
beard, was a surfer, was very straight and had a Top Secret / CRYPTO
clearance.
CRYPTO is the clearance you need to
handle cryptographic material. All cryptographic material is managed
by the NSA.
Why he had that clearance was not
entirely clear to me, but I think it was because there were places he
had to go to fix various computers that were inside places where
people did highly secret work. The ARPAnet was completely open and
not secret at all, but we were aware that there was a secure version
of it inside the basement of NSA, there was a version used between
some military commands called MILNET, and so forth.
One day my friend got a call from his
boss who told him to grab his kit of spare boards and his passport
because they were sending him to London and he was leaving that
afternoon. All he was told was to keep his kit of spare boards with
him, fly to London, go to his hotel and wait. He would be contacted.
I am not exactly sure when this was, but it was probably 1978 plus
or minus a year.
So he did that. He got on a plane to
London and checked into the hotel they told him to go to, and when he
had been there for a few hours, trying to get some sleep, some people
came to his hotel and asked him to take his parts kit and whatever
tools he needed and come with them. They took him to the basement
parking garage of the hotel, put him in a car, put his head down so
that he could not see where they were going, and proceeded to drive
over an hour somewhere.
At some point, the car stopped and they
let him sit up. They were in another underground parking garage for
a different hotel somewhere, but of course he had no idea where he
was.
They took him upstairs to a hotel room
and there, in that hotel room, was an IMP, sitting there looking
completely alien and out of place. It had obviously just been moved
from somewhere else. They told him it was broken and could he fix
it please. Indeed it was broken, he ran diagnostics, swapped some
boards and fixed it.
The people who were escorting him, and
who stayed with him the entire time he was fixing the computer, then
reversed the process: they took him down to the basement, put him in
the car, put his head down, proceeded to drive somewhere for an hour
or so, and delivered him back to the basement of the hotel he was
staying at. They thanked him and told him he could go home now.
So he did.
What does it all mean ? It probably
means that there was a special project somewhere that was using a
very secure version of the ARPAnet for communication. It was so
secret that when one of their IMPs broke, they took the trouble to
move it someplace else to have it fixed, and then presumably took it
back to where it was being used.
So far as I know, we never heard what
project it was.
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