Richard Feynman Put Himself on the FBI’s Do Not Call List | Hacker News Reader

Richard Feynman Put Himself on the FBI’s Do Not Call List

muckrock.com

381 pointsdanso73 comments

  an unnamed colleague citing his hobby of cracking safes 
  at Los Alamos as evidence he was a “master of deception 
  and enemy of America.”

There is speculation that it was his ex-wife, Louise Bell: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/07/11/smeared-richard-fe...

Feynman's willingness to think more objectively than most about the world and share his thoughts likely resulted in a long list of enemies, people that desired to control him, etc.

Most obvious person to report it was the head of security at Los Alamos; Feynman told them about his exploits and actively tested the security.

"Never pen test without permission."

Been there. Done that. Suffered the consequences.

Don't leave us hanging! What happened ?

... unless you have a Nobel and a diagram named after you.

I believe those came well after his Los Alamos days. When he was cracking safes, he was essentially going out on a limb. The leaders of the establishment knew of his oddities and usefulness, so he was tolerated.

Someone willing to change their mind, on any subject, should their own reasoning give them cause to, would clearly be a worry from a national security point of view. Such a person might, after all, at any time conclude that the government that demands their loyalty isn't actually who they should be serving!

Never have I been so sad to agree with someone.

It's only logical that it is this way, but it's also very sad that learning more and adapting your world view to your growth is orthogonally opposite requirements for intelligence work. It also shifts an incredible amount of weight on who leads all the blindly trusting agents of state.

>> There is speculation that it was his ex-wife, Louise Bell

She made him sound like a James Bond evil genius type:

In matters of intrigue Richard Feynman is, I believe immensely clever—indeed a genius—and he is, I further believe, completely ruthless, unhampered by morals, ethics, or religion—and will stop at absolutely nothing to achieve his ends.

Making the atomic bomb scores pretty high on the evil-genius scale.

Fun fact, Feynman didn't work directly on the bomb. His role was managing high school students who performed computations, fixing adding machines, and did some safety work at the uranium isotope plant in Tennessee.

[1] https://robertlovespi.net/2014/09/07/how-richard-feynman-sav...

More fun facts: almost nobody worked directly on the bomb. Thousands of people worked on manufacturing equipment and components and had no idea what they were supposed to be building. They split the project up into very granular pieces so that nobody really had full insight into what was going on except for the core group of scientists. (Source for this I believe is Feynman himself in Surely You're Joking)

They have several examples of this on the Wikipedia page, but this one struck me when I saw it some years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project#/media/File:...

Gladys Owens, the woman seated in the foreground, did not know what she had been involved with until seeing this photo in a public tour of the facility fifty years later.

Feynman is one of the coolest guys in my books, but do note that "didn't work directly on the holocaust...was just counting beans to facilitate" was not a defense that saved necks, they were hanged. No moral judgement implied here, just the fact that history is written by winners.

Remember kids, don't forget your wedding anniversary.

It isn't surprising at all the FBI interviewed him. For example, page 352 of his file talks about his association with <redacted> who I would suspect was Klaus Fuchs[1] who gave the soviets information that let them build their own atomic bomb[2]. Feynman was also in frequent communication with the Soviet Embassy and was planning a trip to the Soviet Union.

The FBI can be over the top, but I imagine that's probably worth having a conversation about.

Edit: the letter (from Bell?) starts on page 110 of the file... It's pretty extreme!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Fuchs

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Fuchs#Value_of_Fuchs.27s...

Little known fact, but all you have to do is ask not to be contacted, watched, etc. - and the FBI will respect your request and note it in your file.

(Okay, ending sarcasm.)

Find it hard to believe they stopped, reads more like a note saying to stop keeping "official" records.

Seems more like Feynman got the attention of upper management to some overzealous low-level agents.

Back then, the FBI had a nasty habit of keeping files at field offices in such an insecure ways that it would have been very easy for some with Feynman's skills to get access to if they wanted; clearly there would have been a risk of getting caught, but likely small for someone like Feynman.

> been very easy for some with Feynman's skills to get access to if they wanted

I thought Feynman was a physicist. What skills are you speaking of? Was he a spy in a former life or something?

He had safe-cracking skills, apparently. Also, he was a well respected person that could have pulled off social engineering.

In (I think, it has been a while since I read it) "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman ", a collection of anecdotes from his life, he states he - to prove how inadequate (not to say pointless) security measures at Los Alamos were, he made a habit of opening safes he shouldn't have access to only to leave cryptic notes or objects in it for the safe owner to find and puzzle over.

You should read "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" which is referenced in another comment. There's an entire section about him messing around with the safes at Los Alamos (he explains his simple methods for cracking them and the fun he had doing it/tricking people into thinking he was a safe cracking master).

He had a hobby of safe-cracking. There's a funny chapter in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" where he recounts the lousy security during the Manhattan project. He would gather top secret documents or reports (usually ones he had permission to see, he just didn't bother to request it, IIRC) and leave notes like "Feynman the Safecracker borrowed Document ABC123", and as they upped the security, he would just keep managing to get access to the files.

It was usually silly things, like locking one cabinet drawer, but not an adjacent one, so someone with long enough arms could just reach into the cabinetry and get their hand inside the other drawer. Or just knowing the birthday of the person whose safe he wanted to crack, and 90% of the time that was the combination. I think in one incident, the safe was just simply left unlocked. But of course, Feynman doesn't disclose those little details to the people around him, and quickly became known as a lockpicking legend.

Edit: He also was an artist who sold several works, and an avid percussionist who played with groups in Brazil, and many other things I'm forgetting. I'd really recommend reading "Surely You're Joking" or any other book about him, his life is incredible and hilarious.

"Surely You're Joking" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think" are astonishingly funny and poignant memoirs. Can't recommend them highly enough.

In one instance I believe he just tried every combination in order over the course of several days. From what I remember, he reflects humorously on his reputation as a brilliant safe cracker when he really just had a little patience.

He was prone to 'rattling the bars' so to speak and out of boredom, learned how to break the 'secure' file cabinets/safes that all the top secret stuff was kept in.

Basically, all of the combination locks had 2 digits of leeway. So if your first code was 20, you could set the lock to anything from 18 - 22 and it would still open.

This meant that instead of the locks having 100 x 100 x 100 = 1,000,000 combinations, they instead had something closer to 20 x 20 x 20 = 8000 combinations. He would then brute force the 8000 combinations through a combination of trying the more likely ones first and if that failed, just brute forcing it over a few hours.

The locks were made easier to brute force in that unlike modern locks, the 3 combinations would be input on 3 separate dials so you can set the first two to the 'right' value, then just spin the third while attempting the handle at the same time. This meant you could try literally every possible combination in ~10 hours of work.

As for an example of easy ones would be a birthday or anniversary.

- code 1 = day 1-30(6 combos)

- code 2 = month 1-12(3 combos)

- code 3 = year 1-99 (20 combos) (This would likely be 9-10 combos if he accounted for the distribution of likely dates)

So to try every date combo, you would only need to try 360 attempts in the worst case.

I would imagine if you kept notice of what number series was left on the locked safe, it would leak a little bit of info. for instance, if the last number of the combo is 42, but when its locked you consistently see the number 10, its likely the person spins the dial a predictable number of times each time he locks it. all you'd need is to observe him -from a distance- locking it and count the number of spins and you'd have a good guess what the last number is.

then there's the paddle technique, not sure what its called, but after the first number is set, the 2nd number has to be at least past the point where you feel the "paddle" contact the 2nd wheel in the series. Higher-end safes counter this somehow.

Over the last 20-30 years there have been innumerable microcontroller projects involving a stepper motor and a servo and very recently some 3d printed parts to open combo locks. Its an interesting real world project.

At my high school some decades ago we had the 3-turn 0-39 master locks but mfgr sloppiness meant there were really only ten or so possibilities and if you knew the last digit you only had perhaps 100 or so combos to try which doesn't take long.

A frenemy of mine got into a practical joke war and my friends collected tens of thousands of magazine subscription cards from the school library over the course of weeks and filled his locker with them when I finally brute forced the lock. He responded by filling my locker with many thousands of 4-40 sided machine tool nuts and some washers fed in thru the top ventilation slots. Well, it all seemed like a good idea at the time.

Small time barely noteworthy events happened all the time like remove the lock and attach it to the locker upside down, or replace it with a different lock, or swap it with a neighbors lock, or remove and/or change the numbers on the locker door. Oh another move was breaking into a locker, and respectfully not touching any personal property but disassembling the interior of the locker such that the victim no longer had a coat hanging hook.

If I remember correctly, when the lock was open it wasn't hard for him to spin the dial and look for a click. That told him the last number. So he just collected that idly for every lock he could and now his safe cracking was under an hour of work.

The sad thing being how much harassment essentially went on and how pointless it was given that the soviets detonated a bomb just a few years after it was invented. I don't know what else you can do, there must I assume be some security measures but it only seems to make things marginally harder for proper Russian intelligence agents and informants to get information out. I guess it does increase the barrier-to-entry so that not just any 3rd world intelligence agency can steal nuclear secrets.

By cyber-security standards the physical and information security measures taken during the Manhattan project were pretty amazingly pointless. They did a good job of keeping the process of enriching uranium secret from the regular folks that worked on it, but that just kept them from going home and talking to their friends.

The scientists working at Los Alamos knew an incredible amount about what was going on and therefore represented single points of failure.

If a spy had been able to infiltrate Oak Ridge, granted they wouldn't have gotten to see many steps of the process but the fact that lay-people didn't know what they were working on didn't mean much.

The main security for the project probably lay in the fact that economically no other nations involved in WW2 could have attempted such a program, even with day-by-day updates of exactly what we were doing. By the time the kinks were worked out it would have been way too late for any other entities to attempt to copy it.

> The sad thing being how much harassment essentially went on

The past tense implies the intelligence community is better behaved now. The old threat was communism, now it's terrorism.

Somebody has to employ all those high-school bully's. Else they would be standing at crossroads, doing stick-ups.

Counterintelligence projects were the reason Klaus Fuchs was caught so I don't know if you can say any specific program is pointless because it was unsuccessful. Maybe you need to cast a lot of rods to catch these fish. Obviously he wasn't caught by the FBI but it certainly made it more than marginally harder for the Soviets when an extremely well placed and high value asset is caught.

The article wasn't what I expected because having read my share of Feynman I would totally expect him to have typed up that J Edgar Hoover memo by himself, signed it himself, and mailed it to the manager of the local FBI office just to see what happens.

I would be surprised if he's the first guy to try that.

The trick with social engineering people back in those days was getting the typewritten formats identical. Being Feynman all he would have needed was one actual memo to copy from and away he goes.

>Little known fact, but all you have to do is ask not to be contacted

You can absolutely refuse to talk to the FBI.

Security services are in a bind when it comes to people like Feynman. On the one hand, experienced agents would have known this guy was no Soviet spy. On the other, every time someone makes an accusation they're sort of duty bound to at least ask him about it, because if it later turns out he is up to something nefarious people will accuse them of ignoring the evidence. That's just how bureaucracies work, and you don't move up in that sort of environment by ignoring the ground rules.

I suspect whoever was charged with running down poison whispers was perfectly happy to be ordered to stop. They got to stop wasting time and concentrate on stuff that might matter, while at the same time on the outside chance it came back to bite them they had documentation of being ordered to ignore him, effectively shuffling the blame up the ladder.

You would think being part of the Manhattan Project would have put him under more intense scrutiny from the FBI, during the Red Scare.

The FBI even mention him as an associate of Oppenheimer in the notes showing his 'do not bother' request.

The first soviet atomic bomb was detonated in 1949[1] so this was nearly 10 years after that fact.

His association to Klaus Fuchs[2] was probably more suspect than Oppenheimer (despite how suspicious they were of him) given he was allegedly an actual spy (I say allegedly because I know how suspicious of the FBI people are around here, and not without reason in some cases).

According to the Feynman Bio I'm reading right now [3], Fuchs was said to have joked (when Feynman wasn't around) that he would be the most likely person to be a spy because of how often he left the base alone to visit his sick wife (or so he said).

[1] http://www.atomicheritage.org/history/soviet-atomic-program-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Fuchs [3] https://www.amazon.com/Genius-Life-Science-Richard-Feynman/d...

"I say allegedly because I know how suspicious of the FBI people are around here"

Fuch's was caught by MI5, not the FBI. And he gave a detailed confession even before he was arrested. So there isn't really any reason to be suspicious of his conviction.

Feynman himself casually notes Fuchs as "the fellow who turned out the be the spy", and despite their friendship never offered an skepticism about the conviction.

Fuchs confessed before he was prosecuted.

I'm not familiar with this particular case, but innocent people confess more frequently than you might think. Investigators put tremendous pressure on suspects during interrogation, and they can often feed details of the case to the suspect, resulting in a 'detailed confession'. Many times, the investigator is not intentionally trying to get a false confession.

That's not the case here and you can simply google the guy, his case is famous. He confessed voluntarily, likely because he was tipped off and knew he was already exposed. After serving his time he continued his life in East Germany. There is no doubt whatsoever he was a spy and he never disputed it when no longer under duress.

Good catch, I almost looked it up but I got lazy. I don't know if the Feynman bio I'm reading specified exactly who caught him but it didn't seem like there was ever any particular question whether or not he had done it but I can't either say that I know he was, I've just read it and not looked into the details myself.

It doesn't matter if Fuchs is an actual spy for the purposes of figuring out if the FBI should be worried - all that matters is that the FBI believes that he's a spy.

I assume he was being bothered often for this reason.

Check out the FBI file:

https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/fbi...

The sheer amount of black ink, rubric, marginalia, stampage, redaction, etc, is a reminder of how deeply dysfunctional (and even hellish) bureaucracies can be. It may not have been possible for the FBI to stop investigating Feynman without orders from the top.

Fun Feynman fact: He was friends with an artist who, among other things, built a home in the hills of Altadena (an LA suburb) using discarded construction materials from the area, and that was predominantly not enclosed, as he had claustrophobia from being smuggled out of Armenia during the genocide - I think in a coffin?

Wikipedia has some of the information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jirayr_Zorthian#Friendship_wit... , but if you go to the ranch the people there will tell you more.

That sounds more like a Zorthian fact than a Feynman fact.

Eh. The people in your life are pretty significant, and I doubt most people here have heard of Zorthian. For example, it's both a Tesla and Twain fun fact that they were buds, but I don't have to explain who either of those people are.

Edit: Still, fair critique.

Some jokes are being made in the thread how you can extricate yourself from surveillance by the FBI by asking not to be watched, but seriously, what is this list?

The article mentions that he "has stated he does not desire to be interviewed at any time by FBI Agents relative to matters of any kind". Why would the FBI reach out to him in the first place? I don't know about mr. Feynman but I don't regularly get contacted by the Dutch FBI (which is what anyway, the KLPD? I don't even know) for interviews, unless I did something wrong or when they think I know something to help further an investigation. I can hardly imagine anyone (let alone mr. Feynman) witnessing crimes (especially ones that warrant FBI investigation rather than a local police office's) that it was becoming a real burden for him to keep giving interviews.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism

I read the title as Richard Stallman and I was super confused.

So did I - although it does sound like something Stallman would try to do.

I think that Stallman is so completely transparent and articulate about his views and so totally outer field that I think he is unlikely ever to be close to an investigation into (say) documents being leaked or anything.

Or Stallman has devised the perfect cover, only time shall tell

I'm glad I'm not the only one. I was so sure I sat there wondering why I had never heard he worked on the bomb or how he was that old.

Slightly off-topic, but the magnifying-hover feature on the scanned images is pretty useful and done wel without being overly intrusive to the design.

I wonder who else is on this list?

I don't understand how this list works - you can just go and ask FBI not to be interested in you, and they whitelist you from their investigations?

Doesn't make sense, if it was simple as that I think virtually everybody would do that, because 9 out of 10 when the feds (or any other police body) is interested in you, it's not a good thing (for you, might good for the society)...

Exactly; that's why I don't understand what's up with this list.

Becoming a well connected, famous physicist who worked on the atomic bomb appears to be a prereq. According to the article.

It's not an exemption from investigation, just not having FBI agents try and interview him without a go-ahead from the higher ups. Since they can't force him to respond to an interview request anyways, and he's said he won't do them, it's seems like basically just a time-saver.

From the file and the Nuclear Security blog post above, it looks like Feynman was considered for a position on a gov't science advisory panel in 1958, the background investigation became concerned because of his safe-cracking hobby, his one-time friendship with (Soviet spy) Klaus Fuchs and a poor character reference from an angry ex-wife. After several interviews, Feynman said he wasn't interested in being interviewed any further.

As he never served on the panel, he presumably withdrew himself from consideration or the gov't decided he was a security risk. As a result, there presumably wasn't any reason to investigate him further in any case.

On a related note, there seems to be a nearly infinite demand for stories related to Feynman in HN in particular[1] and internet in general. No wonder, his colleagues like Schwinger and Gell-Mann were pissed off as they didn't receive anywhere close to that kind of attention[2][3].

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=feynman&sort=byPopularity&pref...

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=gell-mann&sort=byPopularity&pr...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=schwinger&sort=byPopularity&pr...

Perhaps this isn't the place for this, but I've always loved this comic:

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2103

Feynmann is not a popular figure just because of his contributions to physics.

I'd say his popularity stems from how engaging a person he is: It's hard to watch Feynmann talk about something he's interested in (and he's interested in everything!), and to see that twinkle in his eye, and not be gripped by whatever the subject is. There's something special about his childlike wonder at the way things work.

All of that, and he's absolutely astoundingly intelligent, articulate, and friendly.

This video where he's asked how magnets "work" [youtu.be/ewcJR2nqDV4 - 7:30 long, from The Fantastic Mr. Feynmann] is amazing. He takes seven minutes to respond to a question. He doesn't even answer the question properly, and yet it's the perfect response. Even the most science-averse of my friends are able to enjoy watching that video.

And that's just the science bit! He's also done crazy and interesting things: Cracking safes in Los Alamos that had research documents on the atomic bomb and leaving taunting notes. He used to work off napkins in topless bars. He was just an all-round interesting guy.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that neither Schwinger nor Gell-Mann have these same qualities.

While different in personality from RPF, Gell-Mann's range of interests and abilities is even more inspiring. I can't locate it now, but I recall the anecdote of him learning Swahili on the plane ride over. Here's a profile of him:

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/08/magazine/the-man-who-knows...

Or check out his Santa Fe homepage to appreciate his incredible range of interests.

http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~mgm/Site/Front_Page.html

So the story goes:

A moderately famous physicist came to lecture at the university where Feynman was teaching. Feynman, a few minutes before the physicist had arrived at the lecture hall, read the notes at the lectern and spotted a mistake.

As the lecture was going on, Feynman apparently pointed out the mistake as if he had spontaneously identified it. The physicist, obviously astonished at that point, offered to stop the lecture if there was a mistake in his calculations. But Feynman asked him to continue, and apparently they became good friends later.

Schwinger and Gell-mann were pissed off because of two things - obviously they couldn't match Feynman's charisma, but they also felt he went around "generating anecdotes about himself" which contributed to that charisma somewhat.

Can someone confirm this story?

Gell-Mann on his annoyance with Feynman's thirst for anecdotes: https://youtu.be/rnMsgxIIQEE

I find that nostalgic personalities such as Feynman imply that the authorities of the past were not only evil, but conquered, and therefore, sublimated into the dominant mythos of progress.

In the post-9/11 world, this mythos is central to the authority of authority: "See? We no longer run overt, clumsy, and brutal humint! We learned our lesson, thanks hippies!"

Everyone nods in agreement and dismisses the people saying, "Covert sigint just got cheaper, that's all."

I don't dispute that they have done harm, but I think everyone is getting a little ahead of themselves. We have no idea what it is like (yet) to live in a true police state but judging by the average perception on HN right now about the FBI, CIA, NSA we're getting shaken down in the street daily and spied on in our homes.

The truth is much more nuanced and these are massive bureaucracies and if you average the effects of everyone in them and all that they do I honestly don't know whether its a net positive or negative. The problem is if they do something right, we'll likely never know and we can never really know what our lives would be like if they didn't exist.

We should fight injustices and be vigilant but I think people understate the good and overstate the bad. If I could wave a wand to do away with them here and now I wouldn't know what to do, but I know I wouldn't do it without question.

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