IBM Stretch, the NSA, and MLK | Hacker News Reader

IBM Stretch, the NSA, and MLK

schmud.de

103 pointsschmudde17 comments

> It ran totally without judicial oversight or legislative charter.

Funny how they later added 'judicial oversight' and things didn't change much. Secret courts are not proper oversight. The FBI should be handling all domestic cases, period (NSLs are another matter).

That said, automated keyword search at that volume in the 1960s is extremely impressive.

This is probably the 1990s-2000s equivalent of doing keyword search for every single 'foreign' phone call coming into the US or across pipes the US controls (one side or both having some international signal). Considering one of the first NSA technology releases was around voice parsing this is likely old hat by now.

OP here. Stretch is an interesting machine that can claim many firsts. The 8-bit byte, CPU look ahead, an interrupt system, and error checking amongst other modern features.

It had 3/4 of a megabyte of random access memory. A colossal amount at the time.

I want to make sure I don't overplay Harvest's keyword search ability. The NSA would physically walk down the street and grab reels of magnetic tape every day from ITT, RCA, and Western Union. So they're working with relatively structured data from international telegram cables.

Still impressive, but much more limited.

Your analogy seems appropriate and the activity is fundamentally very similar. The repeated violations of the constitution demonstrates the natural inertia of such an entity.

Translation Lookaside Buffer, TLB, started with Stretch, too. Nowadays we would call it a page msp cache, but the name has stuck.

> Funny how they later added 'judicial oversight' and things didn't change much. Secret courts are not proper oversight. The FBI should be handling all domestic cases, period (NSLs are another matter).

There should be no FBI. In fact, there didn't used to be. States were previously in charge of enforcing federal laws.

Local law enforcement is the only group you can ever hope to hold accountable, and look how much they get away with.

The FBI's predecessor was formed specifically because of fraud involving local goverments in the Oregon Land Fraud Scandal. But even before that the justice department oversaw investigating federal crimes so this was never fully delegated to the states.

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

Also, there just weren't many Federal criminal laws until the late 19th century and especially early 20th century. What preceded and ushered in the so-called administrative state and expansive Commerce Clause powers was the emergence of Federal morality laws, such as the 1895 Federal Lottery Act[1] and the 1910 Mann Act.[2] Excepting brief periods during the Civil War and Reconstruction, Federal crimes only pertained to very specific areas under Federal jurisdiction, such as acts on federal property, violations of Federal tax laws (e.g. import/export), etc, none of which required an extensive, general purpose investigatory and enforcement apparatus. There were Federal agencies that performed investigations, of course, most famously the Federal Marshal Service and Secret Service. The power to investigate and enforce was always concomitant with the power to legislate, and naturally followed the enactment of such legislation.

[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champion_v._Ames

[2] Supreme Court precedents applying these two acts is what opened the door to predominantly intra-state activity being captured by Federal inter-state powers.

Then the FBI should be like 'Internal Affairs' for state-run investigations, and for coordinating cross-state investigations.

Surely if a body of legislators thought it prudent to specifically establish the postal service, they would have established a federal law enforcement investigative body.

They had it under the umbrella of the Justice Department. The BOI was created because the Justice Department didn’t have the will or manpower to perform its investigative duties.

> Before the assassination of King ignited days of civil unrest, signals intelligence used computers to help in the government effort to defame King and undermine his cause. Large organizations have always invested in machines like Stretch because information is often the most effective weapon in a conflict.

This is a reminder for me to be mindful of how my beliefs and behaviors as an engineer are inextricably connected to questions of justice, civil rights, and human dignity.

i am grateful that this article has been written and shared here, so that i might be illumined.

Sure, but you often don't know the connections. Working on deep learning, for instance, can seem pretty innocuous, but it most definitely has applications in propaganda, warfare, surveillance, etc. I know where I work, there is no mention of our military customers, only other branches of the government, despite the military buying a lot of our tech. I think it's intentional so we don't discourage younger engineers from contributing.

It is true. One can never know.

This is a reminder not to place ego-value in software work, to keep a small footprint, to shed identifications, and surrender into that deeper Truth of our being.

Acknowledging the inevitability of fallibility, it becomes important to adopt a posture such that once we become aware of a deeper truth, we stop living out what becomes apparent as delusion.

Amazing specs for a computer made in the 1960s! Of course, the desktop machine I am using right now is much more powerful.

Title should be "IBM Stretch..."

Fixed, thanks.

A glaring ommision in the article is how it fails to mention that King was himself of socialist and anti-war persuasion.

and?

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