I was devastated yesterday to hear of
the passing of one of the most interesting people I have ever met or
worked with, Dr. Willis Ware formerly of the RAND Corporation.
Dr. Ware passed away at the far too
young age of 93 years old.
Most people at RAND had no idea what he
did, just that he was very senior.
I met Dr. Ware at the RAND Corporation
when I was just 21 or so years old, and Willis was already some sort
of Scientist Emeritus at RAND and while no one seemed to know exactly
what he did he, suspiciously, had a three window office and a
full-time secretary/assistant. With this information we knew he was
powerful beyond measure. They said that he testified before
Congress on the issues of privacy, and that of course was important
but seemed to only add to the mystery.
Several clues revealed themselves as
time went by.
Clue #1 He knew my interest in graphics
and he wanted to show me a film he had with a user interface that he
thought was interesting. It turned out to be none other than one of
the famous films of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad thesis work at MITRE
when he was a graduate student at MIT. To this day I consider that
user interface to be one of the top five or so I have ever seen.
Clue #2 We were chatting about nothing
in particular and he told me the story of how he had worked to bring
Dr. von Neumann to RAND after the war and when he was bored at the
Institute at Princeton. von Neumann, whose computer architecture
you are using while you read my blog, most likely, was going to come
to RAND and UCLA and split his time between them. But unfortunately
he died suddenly of brain cancer.
Clue #3 Somehow it came to my attention
that Willis had received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from
Princeton in 1939. Look up 1939 in history, recall that the new
Intelligence agencies (really the proto-agencies, the ones we know
were formed after WWII from these proto-agencies) recruited heavily
from the Ivy League and imagine what someone with a PhD in EE might
do in the upcoming conflict.
Clue #4 Although Willis did not seem to
work on any run of the mill projects at RAND, he did travel every six
months and spent a week somewhere in Maryland. Fort Meade, Maryland,
as it turned out. In fact, I saw above his secretaries desk an
agenda and it said he attended the "SAB" at Ft. Meade,
Maryland. Now, what is at Ft. Meade? Well, the National Security
Agency is. And what might the SAB be ? Well, it is something
called the "Scientific Advisory Board" which meets every
six months.
The Scientific Advisory Board of the
NSA is the body responsible at a very high level for advising the NSA
on technologies of interest and issues that they should be
addressing. In short, Willis had some sort of very serious position
advising the NSA. A senior spook, at least in part.
Clue #5 Willis and I were discussing
WWII and Enigma one day and I told him that I was guessing that there
were still secrets from WWII that had not been revealed. And he said
to me that he knew for a fact that there were secrets and events from
WWII that had not been released and that, in his opinion, they should
be.
Clue #6 At random intervals, maybe once
or twice a year, Willis would travel on a short trip to Washington,
DC. No one knew what he did there, but it was suggested to me, by
someone who knew Willis well, that he was used by various elements of
the Intelligence Community when it was necessary to liason with
another part. In other words, he was some sort of prestigious
messenger when some sort of issue or discussion needed to take place.
Now, I may have that wrong, or incomplete, and of course it is
vague, but I think it still has valid information.
Clue #7 In 1967, DARPA commissioned a report on "Security Controls in Computer Systems". The report was reissued in 1979. Written by Dr. Ware, you may find this report on the Cryptome site at
http://cryptome.org/sccs.htm
And so, who was Dr. Willis Ware ?
I think he was a pioneer of computing
and information technology, and a recognized authority on the impact
on policy, particularly the policy of privacy, at very high levels of
government. I think he was in some sense a spook during WW II and
that he maintained his relationship with the primary user of
computers in intelligence, the NSA, and was on their advisory board.
He maintained an office at RAND and did his own work because it was
a useful platform that kept him in touch with Washington, yet outside
the beltway madness that so many succumb to. RAND gave him a
certain long term cachet, and RAND management of course loved him
because their very raison d'etre is to influence policy in
Washington, and clearly Willis did just that.
I also suspect that there is more
public history here than I know and will no doubt discover over the
next few weeks. Willis was probably involved in the Mathematics
Division of the RAND Corporation back when RAND had two mathematics-related departments: abstract and applied. Computer science, such as it became, came from the applied math department. When I was with
RAND, we had a small computer science department that was in some way
derived from these much larger efforts of the past. Today, RAND has
no computer science department although there are individual computer scientists and programmers lurking in the hallways. (1)
Finally, Willis is one of the reasons
that I am so screwed up today. You see, back then, at RAND, I was
treated as a real human being, with intelligence and something to
contribute. Today I am treated like garbage by nearly everyone but
especially in my own field and it was those expectations that got set
at RAND that led inevitably to my downfall.
__________________________________________________
1. Part of the reason that RAND had a
computer science department(s), was because RAND believed it
was of strategic importance to the US Government. As time went by,
computer science spread to the more traditional venues of University
and Industry and so RAND no longer needed to do that. There were
other things that were more important and more in line with their
specific missions in the context of Congressional limitations on the maximum size of the annual budgets of places like RAND.
