Speaker 1: Pushkin. Imagine there's a place in our world where the
Speaker 1: known things go, like old modems, or at the end
Speaker 1: of this brightly lit hallway, towers of computer servers, a
Speaker 1: little city of miniature skyscrapers. This vault, this data center,
Speaker 1: stores the facts that matter, and matters a fact. It's
Speaker 1: all that stands between a reasonable doubt and the chaos
Speaker 1: of uncertainty. The sign on the door reads the last Archive.
Speaker 1: Step through the door to Washington, d C. Capitol Hill.
Speaker 1: July twenty six, nineteen sixty six, a Tuesday, the United
Speaker 1: States was admired in a terrible war in Vietnam. Americans
Speaker 1: were engaged in a struggle for civil rights. At home.
Speaker 1: There'd been riots on the streets of American cities, protests
Speaker 1: of all kinds, anti War March's student demonstrations. To a
Speaker 1: lot of people felt as if the country was coming apart.
Speaker 1: Inside the office building of the House of Representatives, Room
Speaker 1: twenty two forty seven, hearings were about to begin. Hearings
Speaker 1: that weren't about any of those protests, Hearings that were
Speaker 1: about computer data. The subcommittee will come to order just
Speaker 1: after ten am. Cornelius E. Gallagher, a Democratic Congressman from
Speaker 1: New Jersey took his seat. The Special Subcommittee on Invasion
Speaker 1: of Privacy today begins its investigation into proposals to establish
Speaker 1: a National Data Center, a centralized facility within the structure
Speaker 1: of the national government into which would be poured information
Speaker 1: collected from various government agencies and from which computers could
Speaker 1: draw selected facts. At the time, more than three billion
Speaker 1: government records were stored on punch cards in magnetic tape,
Speaker 1: housed in over twenty different federal agencies. So many facts
Speaker 1: scattered all over the place. It was a mess. So
Speaker 1: the Johnson administration said, how about building a national data Center.
Speaker 1: It did, gather all the computer records of every federal
Speaker 1: agency all in one place, the same way the Library
Speaker 1: of Congress holds books, where the National Archives holds manuscripts.
Speaker 1: Seems straightforward enough. Congressman Gallagher, though, he thought this was
Speaker 1: a terrifying idea. If safeguards are not built into such
Speaker 1: a facility, it could lead to the creation of what
Speaker 1: I call the computerized man. The computerized man, as I
Speaker 1: see him, would be stripped of his individuality and his privacy.
Speaker 1: Congress is one of those lagging indicators of American fears
Speaker 1: By the time I fear gets articulated on Capital Hill,
Speaker 1: it's already been infecting the population for a while. Think
Speaker 1: about the times Congress has brought in baby faced Facebook
Speaker 1: CEO Mark Zuckerberg to ask him about computers and the
Speaker 1: invasion of privacy. Mister Zuckerberg, would you be comfortable sharing
Speaker 1: with us the name of the hotel you stayed in
Speaker 1: last night? No? I think that maybe what this is
Speaker 1: all about. You're right to privacy. It was too late.
Speaker 1: Congress is very often too late. Remember last episode about
Speaker 1: the defeat of National Health Insurance? Congress too little, too late?
Speaker 1: The National Data Center. It's a forgotten sequel to that
Speaker 1: story about National Health Insurance. Welcome to the Last Archive,
Speaker 1: the show about how we know what we know, and
Speaker 1: about how it seems lately as if we don't know
Speaker 1: anything anymore. I'm Jill Lapoor. But of course you can
Speaker 1: know things. For instance, you can know a lot of
Speaker 1: things by listening old congressional hearings and asking questions like,
Speaker 1: what the hell ever happened to the National Data Center?
Speaker 1: And did anyone listen to Congress in the nineteen sixties
Speaker 1: when it issued ominous warnings about a future in which
Speaker 1: we'd all be stalked and haunted and tortured by that freak,
Speaker 1: that monster computerized man. Everyone in the whole world seems
Speaker 1: to have forgotten about those hearings in nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 1: But forgetting about the means we keep having them all
Speaker 1: over again. It's like the horror movie where you think
Speaker 1: you've killed the monster, and then he digs himself out
Speaker 1: of his own grave and comes after you with the
Speaker 1: same rusty, bloody axe. Cornelius Gallagher, the Democrat who chaired
Speaker 1: the committee, wasn't the only member of Congress who was
Speaker 1: really worried about data and privacy. After Gallagher called the
Speaker 1: meaning to order, he was followed by Frank Horton, a
Speaker 1: Republican who felt more or less the same way about
Speaker 1: the whole thing as Gallagher did. I have become conver
Speaker 1: that the magnitude of the problem we now from front
Speaker 1: is akin to the changes wrought in our national life
Speaker 1: with the dawning of the nuclear age. Assuming the best
Speaker 1: for a moment, let us regard our computer systems as
Speaker 1: good and fair, and the computer men behind the console
Speaker 1: as honest and capable. That was the best case scenario.
Speaker 1: God forbid the machines were bad and unfair, and the
Speaker 1: computer men dishonest and incompetent. By the way, the term
Speaker 1: computer scientists didn't really exist then. They were called computermen,
Speaker 1: which I like better anyway, because it makes it sound
Speaker 1: as if they're half computer, half man. Anyway, there were
Speaker 1: all kinds of reasons the federal government wanted a national
Speaker 1: data center. For one, the government had taken on problems
Speaker 1: of bigger and bigger scale, a social security program, the
Speaker 1: building of atomic weapons. The government needed to collect and
Speaker 1: to conduct statistical analysis of data had to do with
Speaker 1: things like healthcare and economic development and racial justice. Lyndon
Speaker 1: Johnson's administration needed that information to fight the War on poverty.
Speaker 1: It also needed that information to implement the oversight requirements
Speaker 1: of the nineteen sixty four Civil Rights Act and the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty five Voting Rights Act. To do those things,
Speaker 1: it needed what we would call big data. Modern life
Speaker 1: required taller and taller piles of facts, numbers, and data.
Speaker 1: Piles of data so tall that they had to be
Speaker 1: handled by computers. And remember this was decades before the
Speaker 1: personal computer, before people had their own computers and knew
Speaker 1: how to use them, which meant that people had to
Speaker 1: be willing to put a whole lot of trust in
Speaker 1: the very small number of people, mainly men who knew
Speaker 1: how to run those machines, those computer men. Because of that,
Speaker 1: it seemed as if computer men had all kinds of
Speaker 1: information about you, and they seemed to have limitless powers.
Speaker 1: Assuming a computer man who was dishonest, unscrupulous, or bent
Speaker 1: on injury, there would be nothing sacred. We could be destroyed.
Speaker 1: Whoa so crazy start to those hearings? We could all
Speaker 1: be destroyed. Then Gallagher called his first witness, the subcommittee
Speaker 1: is very fortunate this morning and having as its first
Speaker 1: witness in this series of hearings, mister Vance Packard. Mister
Speaker 1: Packard is more responsible than any man in our country
Speaker 1: for alerting us to the dangers that lurk in the
Speaker 1: twilight of our sophisticated society. The then famous, if now
Speaker 1: sadly much forgotten, mister Vance Packard. I guess we'd now
Speaker 1: call this guy an influencer. He wasn't an academic, but
Speaker 1: he was often mistaken for one. And I'm sorry, but
Speaker 1: I love this guy. In nineteen sixty six, he was
Speaker 1: a fifty two year old social critic, and he was
Speaker 1: most famous for a book called The Naked Society, in
Speaker 1: which he'd issued a warning about the loss of privacy.
Speaker 1: The book spent twenty three weeks on the New York
Speaker 1: Times bestseller list. Packard had written a whole series of bestsellers,
Speaker 1: a lot of them about things I've been talking about here,
Speaker 1: and the last archive lie detectors targeted advertising data surveillance.
Speaker 1: The Times, in a profile, described him as a man
Speaker 1: who acts on the whole like a professor at a
Speaker 1: small college, a little unsure of tenure. This was actually
Speaker 1: a gentle way of saying that Packard was incredibly boring
Speaker 1: to listen to. But the Times reporter added, at the typewriter,
Speaker 1: he is something else again. In other words, in person,
Speaker 1: Vance Packard was a dud. But on the page, Vance
Speaker 1: Packard was a stud. Sometimes newspapers referred to Packard as
Speaker 1: a sociologist. This really tugged at the well trimmed beards
Speaker 1: of the nation's actual sociologists. One social science journal published
Speaker 1: an entire issue trying to answer the question, is Vance
Speaker 1: Packard necessary? You'd feel bad for the guy, except that
Speaker 1: he was a famously happy man and troubled by his critics.
Speaker 1: Packard liked to work in bed. He'd spend hours a
Speaker 1: day lying there. He clipped stories from newspapers and magazines
Speaker 1: and read through them. He played the banjo, He swam
Speaker 1: in the ocean, fare asked every morning. He was famously thrifty.
Speaker 1: In the winter, he wore two pairs of pants, one
Speaker 1: on top of the other to stay warm. Famously thrifty,
Speaker 1: famously kukie, but either way, very very famous. We are
Speaker 1: indeed honored and privilege to have you opened these hearings today.
Speaker 1: Mister Packard, please proceed. Cornelius Gallagher welcomed him to the
Speaker 1: hearings with enthusiasm. Mister Chairman and members of the committee,
Speaker 1: thank you for inviting me. Records on individual Americans now
Speaker 1: number in the billions. We leave a trail of records
Speaker 1: behind us from the moment of birth. The individual rule
Speaker 1: citizen who is concerned about the erosion of his privacy
Speaker 1: has up until now had some consolation in the knowledge
Speaker 1: that all these files about his life have been widely
Speaker 1: dispersed and often difficult to get at. Are we getting
Speaker 1: prematurely overheated and are concerned? I do not think you
Speaker 1: are getting prematurely overheated at all. I think we should
Speaker 1: all be scared stiff about the possibility that these giant
Speaker 1: machines would be fed data about individual Americans, and that
Speaker 1: this information would be retrievable by a number of different
Speaker 1: organizations or groups. I think this would clearly create the
Speaker 1: preconditions for a totalitarian system. He went on like that.
Speaker 1: On the first day of the hearings, nearly everyone agreed
Speaker 1: with Packard, down to the last witness agenda. I got
Speaker 1: to wondering whether people outside of Congress were worried about
Speaker 1: the National Data Center, and once I started looking, men
Speaker 1: they were everywhere. The New York Times, so the Data
Speaker 1: Center would bring the United States closer to an Orwellian nightmare.
Speaker 1: Big Brother Never Rests, ran the headline in the Indianapolis
Speaker 1: Star from Pulpits priests and ministers and rabbis denounced the idea.
Speaker 1: Another newspaper called it a giant peeping tom and I'm
Speaker 1: not kidding. Even the Daughters of the American Revolution the
Speaker 1: dr passed a resolution against the Data Center. But what
Speaker 1: about just regular people? Almost everyone who wrote to Gallagher
Speaker 1: about the National Data Center was opposed to it. Dear sir,
Speaker 1: it is good to know that your committee is alert
Speaker 1: to the dangers of this gestapo scheme of the president.
Speaker 1: I'magene Armstrong, El Paso, Texas. A lot of the letter
Speaker 1: writers feared a vast government conspiracy, a socialist conspiracy, or
Speaker 1: a communist conspiracy. Let me just add here that in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties this sort of cockamami thing got sent
Speaker 1: by the postal surface and read by one person or
Speaker 1: maybe two, and then they got filed in a drawer.
Speaker 1: Today this stuff is on Fortune or Twitter, read possibly
Speaker 1: by thousands, clicked on and linked to. I always think
Speaker 1: about that when I read these old letters, that no
Speaker 1: one has heard these voices since nineteen sixty six, and
Speaker 1: that really hardly anyone heard them. Then, dear sir, what
Speaker 1: better way to inaugurate a police state? Already we have
Speaker 1: creeping socialism in our government. God help us yours truly.
Speaker 1: Donald F. Hammond, Flagstaff, Arizona. Gallagher was a Democrat, a liberal,
Speaker 1: a supporter of Johnson's Great Society, but the citizens who
Speaker 1: wrote to him on this topic were chiefly conservatives. Also,
Speaker 1: there was a lot of talk about Dossier's Dear mister Gallagher,
Speaker 1: a word of thanks for bringing to a lot of
Speaker 1: day the nations of the White House task force employed
Speaker 1: in the Soviet life procedure of turning every US citizen
Speaker 1: into a little white rabbit for governmental dissection, brainwashing, and
Speaker 1: intimidation via the dossier process. Sincerely, Elizabeth Nash, Front Royal Virginia.
Speaker 1: A lot of these letter writers were from what was
Speaker 1: then the very far fringe of the American right, anti
Speaker 1: government coups, white supremacists, John Bircher's conspiracy theorists. Dear mister Gallagher,
Speaker 1: please kill the idea of a central data bank. This
Speaker 1: looks like communist infiltration. Also kill the Civil Rights Bill,
Speaker 1: especially fair housing jail Martin Luther King for inciting rebellion.
Speaker 1: Most sincerely, Frank P. Sterling, Open California, veteran World War One.
Speaker 1: Dear Congressman, the federal government is already operating too much
Speaker 1: of our business, controlling our manufacturing, interfering in our medical establishments,
Speaker 1: taking over our educational facilities and procedures. The Great Society
Speaker 1: now demands to have prior control and jurisdiction over even
Speaker 1: our personal thoughts. Guess we might just as well move
Speaker 1: to Moscow. Please do everything in your power to defeat
Speaker 1: and rout these enemies of freedom and liberty. James s. Christie,
Speaker 1: Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. The congressman started to get a little worried.
Speaker 1: He'd right back trying to calm these people down. Dear
Speaker 1: mister Christie, what I appreciate you supported my inquiry. I
Speaker 1: can either agree with your views that the federal government
Speaker 1: is taking over our rights, nor that the great society
Speaker 1: is the instrument for such action. Sincerely, Cornelius Gallagher. Remember though,
Speaker 1: that at the time there was also just a lot
Speaker 1: of anxiety about computers, and especially men who were obsessed
Speaker 1: with them. In the nineteen sixties, Americans were terrified too
Speaker 1: of another machine, the war machine, that was calling up
Speaker 1: young men, number by number, for the draft to go
Speaker 1: to Vietnam. Before nineteen sixty six, the kids of the
Speaker 1: middle class, the college students, they got educational deferments or
Speaker 1: some other dispensation. But by nineteen sixty six, the number
Speaker 1: of young men called up to the draft every month
Speaker 1: was being raised from seventeen thousand to thirty five thousand.
Speaker 1: That meant that for the first time, middle class white
Speaker 1: men boys really were being sent to Vietnam. Meantime, the
Speaker 1: war began to seem as in fact, it was hopeless
Speaker 1: and immoral. The Vietnam War was the first war whose
Speaker 1: every move was plotted by computer. Johnson's Secretary of Defense,
Speaker 1: Robert McNamara, was a systems analyst, a computer man who
Speaker 1: appeared to be running this war with a giant computer
Speaker 1: that could calculate a victory index. Johnson said, there is
Speaker 1: no computer that can tell the hour and the day
Speaker 1: of peace. But apparently there was a story, has it.
Speaker 1: People at the Pentagon fed all kinds of data into
Speaker 1: that computer, population, gross national product, manufacturing capability, the number
Speaker 1: of tanks, ships and aircraft, the size of the armed forces.
Speaker 1: And then about nineteen sixty seven or so, men at
Speaker 1: the Pentagon went down to the basement and asked that
Speaker 1: giant computer, which had run all those numbers, when will
Speaker 1: we win the war? And the computer spat out these words,
Speaker 1: you won. In nineteen sixty four, conservatives hated Lyndon Johnson's
Speaker 1: Great Society and big government, and liberals were getting angrier
Speaker 1: and angrier about Vietnam, seeing it as a war being
Speaker 1: waged by the ruthless, relentless mindlessness of a giant electronic brain.
Speaker 1: That meant that things looked bad for the establishment of
Speaker 1: a national Data center. On the last day of Gallagher's
Speaker 1: hearings July twenty eighth, nineteen sixty six, a witness appeared,
Speaker 1: Paul Baron of Rand Corporation, a forty year old Polish
Speaker 1: born computerman. Baron had grown up in Philadelphia. He'd worked
Speaker 1: for the Remington Rand Company, the company that made the Univac,
Speaker 1: the machine that CBS had hired for election night in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty two. Baron was brilliant. Suppose we build our
Speaker 1: future systems without any safeguards at all, and all information,
Speaker 1: this whole list of records did we accumulate during our life,
Speaker 1: is available in various systems. Barren told the committee something
Speaker 1: it hadn't expected to hear and couldn't really understand. He
Speaker 1: admitted that a national data center could destroy privacy as
Speaker 1: we knew it. But then he told the committee they
Speaker 1: actually didn't matter whether or not the national data center
Speaker 1: was built. It didn't require a building. Data was about
Speaker 1: to get all linked up anyway. Whether the information is
Speaker 1: centralized in one central data bank or whether it is
Speaker 1: spread around the country doesn't make a darn pitted difference.
Speaker 1: The result is the same. Basically, we could sum up,
Speaker 1: mister Baron, that we certainly should not attempt to impede
Speaker 1: the growth of technology. But at the same time, we
Speaker 1: should start devoting more time to building in the safeguards
Speaker 1: so that this technology can serve man rather than subordinate
Speaker 1: him to its decision. That's right. I don't think we're
Speaker 1: going to be able to stop technology. I think that
Speaker 1: decision is not ours. But what we can do is
Speaker 1: provide all the safeguards we possibly can. Barren's position came
Speaker 1: down to this, you can't stop technology, and you can't
Speaker 1: stop people from collecting data, but you can make data
Speaker 1: safer if you act right now. He told the committee,
Speaker 1: please do something. Set up a national data center, or
Speaker 1: don't set up a national data center. Just do something,
Speaker 1: set up some rules, establish principles before it's too late,
Speaker 1: because unless the government comes up with a way to
Speaker 1: understand what data is and what can be done with it,
Speaker 1: will be left wandering around in a world where anyone
Speaker 1: can collect data about anything and do whatever they want
Speaker 1: with it. The Special Subcommittee of Invasion of Privacy is
Speaker 1: a journ God damn it. The House investigation ended and
Speaker 1: they didn't come up with any rules. But then the
Speaker 1: Senate decided to hold its own hearings I've got the
Speaker 1: tapes stored here in this data center, in the halls
Speaker 1: of the last archive. The Senate held its own hearings
Speaker 1: about the National Data Center a few months after the
Speaker 1: House in March of nineteen sixty seven. Its chief witness
Speaker 1: was a then unknown law school professor from the University
Speaker 1: of Michigan. He was thirty two at the time. He's
Speaker 1: in his eighties now. I called him up. I'm Arthur Miller.
Speaker 1: I'm a university professor at NYU with a long tour
Speaker 1: at Harvard Law School, and I wrote in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: one a book called The Assault on Privacy, which some
Speaker 1: say saw the future. Miller's retired now for a long time.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties, he had a
Speaker 1: TV show called Miller's Court. On an upcoming Miller's Court,
Speaker 1: we'll be talking about the draft, the subject. Everyone has
Speaker 1: an opinion. I watched it when I was a kid.
Speaker 1: I thought it was like free law school. Miller really
Speaker 1: is a maid for TV law professor. He's a nimble, witty, combative.
Speaker 1: He's a very distinctive style. He wears three piece suits
Speaker 1: with flashy ties. Isn't it time for your day in court.
Speaker 1: I wanted to know how Miller got roped into testifying
Speaker 1: before the Senate hearing. He said it all started when
Speaker 1: he got a phone call from the office of Senator
Speaker 1: Sam Irvin, a Democrat from North Carolina who's best known
Speaker 1: as the guy who chaired the Watergate hearings. My phone rings.
Speaker 1: It's the staffer from the Senate Committee, Irvin's committee, and
Speaker 1: he says, we'd like you to be the lead witness
Speaker 1: on this hearing that we're going to hold on the
Speaker 1: National Data Center. And I say to the staffer, I
Speaker 1: don't know a thing about privacy, and he says, well,
Speaker 1: we're told that you've written about it. And I said no,
Speaker 1: I've written about computers and privacy. And he says, hang on.
Speaker 1: And the senator gets on the phone. What do you
Speaker 1: mean you don't know anything about privacy? And he says,
Speaker 1: I still want you as the lead witness in these hearings. Senator,
Speaker 1: I know nothing about privacy, and he screams into the phone,
Speaker 1: Well learn damn it. Miller says, okay, okay, I'll do it.
Speaker 1: You don't say no to Sam Irvin, so he reads up.
Speaker 1: I asked him why so many people had gotten worked
Speaker 1: up about the National Data Center. It just seemed like
Speaker 1: a damn good political issue that crossed Republican and Democratic lines,
Speaker 1: because when you're dealing with privacy, you're into the world
Speaker 1: of humanism, and the Democrats can rally around that, and
Speaker 1: the Republicans can rally around not creating big government that
Speaker 1: knows everything about you. The problem was that some people
Speaker 1: saw the government as the devil. Personally. I was concerned
Speaker 1: that there were no constraints on the broad outlines of
Speaker 1: the system that was being proposed. So March nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 1: Arthur Miller gets dressed up, three piece suit, flashy tie,
Speaker 1: pocket handkerchief. He goes to the hearing in the Senate.
Speaker 1: Sadly it wasn't recorded, but Miller tells the senators with
Speaker 1: his usual flair, that it's stupid to oppose a technological
Speaker 1: development that will widen the sphere of knowledge just because
Speaker 1: it might be misused. I was not Carrie Nation with
Speaker 1: an axe out to smash the machine. Never have been
Speaker 1: looking for rational controls. And the problem back then was
Speaker 1: not only was no one looking at that, but the
Speaker 1: high technology people didn't know how to do it. Miller
Speaker 1: agreed with that rand guy Paul Baron, who testified before
Speaker 1: the House a few months earlier. Baron said data collection
Speaker 1: was going to happen, and it wouldn't require an actual
Speaker 1: building like the Library of Congress or the National Archives.
Speaker 1: It would just be there floating around like a cloud.
Speaker 1: The thousand A Senate we're supposed to keep on thinking
Speaker 1: about the National Data Center, but instead they tabled it everything,
Speaker 1: including the questions it had raised about data and privacy. Basically,
Speaker 1: they hoped everyone would forget about it. They'd killed the
Speaker 1: monster and buried him. One month after the Senate hearings
Speaker 1: were Miller testified. The first big, really big protest against
Speaker 1: the Vietnam War took place in New York. Martin Luther
Speaker 1: King spoke out against the war. We have the participants
Speaker 1: in today's unprecedented national peace demonstration are united in our
Speaker 1: conviction of the imperative need pond immediate peaceful solution to
Speaker 1: an illegal and unjustifiable law that fault. Robert McNamara, Lyndon,
Speaker 1: Johnson's Secretary of Defense, resigned a few months later. Johnson
Speaker 1: shocked the country when he announced that he would not
Speaker 1: run for reelection in nineteen sixty eight. The Great society
Speaker 1: was over and the proposal for a National Data Center
Speaker 1: was dead. What do you think was lost in the
Speaker 1: way that defeat happened? When one looks at the National
Speaker 1: Data Center, it's child's play. It's fun for the feeble mind.
Speaker 1: It was basically a statistical system. Its ability to harm
Speaker 1: was limited. Yeah, so, I mean that's exactly squarely. What
Speaker 1: fascinates me about this story is looking back, was there
Speaker 1: ever a moment, and if there was, was at that
Speaker 1: moment in sixty six or sixty seven when maybe we
Speaker 1: could have usher in a set of principles that might
Speaker 1: have spared us the course we're now seeming to be
Speaker 1: doomed too. If somebody had said, hey, this National Data
Speaker 1: cent a great idea, sleek, efficient, economical, but we better
Speaker 1: take two years out and figure out the delatarious side
Speaker 1: effects of it. If that occurred, the possibility that we
Speaker 1: shot ourselves in the foot because we defeated it may
Speaker 1: have been a reality, but I assure you back in
Speaker 1: sixty six, seven, eight, nine, seventy, there was no no
Speaker 1: ability to do that. In other words, a better version
Speaker 1: of the National Data Center never had a chance in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties because people just couldn't wrap their heads
Speaker 1: around it, or some people could. They could see what
Speaker 1: was coming, but not enough people to really do something
Speaker 1: about it, like make those rules and build those safeguards.
Speaker 1: You probably know what happened next. Killing the National Data
Speaker 1: Center didn't mean the end of data. It was then
Speaker 1: followed by years of expanded governmental and private systems, which
Speaker 1: in effect gives you a national data center maturing into
Speaker 1: today's world, which is in fact the womb to tomb
Speaker 1: dot cer. Womb to tomb, cradle to grave data chronicles
Speaker 1: every moment of your life, and that data is entirely unregulated.
Speaker 1: Even as the National Data Center was being buried, a
Speaker 1: new monster was rising. The Internet, or at least what
Speaker 1: would become the Internet, was first demonstrated in nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: two in the ballroom of a hotel in Washington, d c.
Speaker 1: The ball and floor looked like the bottom of the ocean.
Speaker 1: A huge octopus splayed across it its tentacles, so many
Speaker 1: cables tangled in a seaweed of telephone lines and electrical cords.
Speaker 1: Technicians had set up twenty nine different terminals, each at
Speaker 1: its own station. Bob Kahn, a computer man, had organized
Speaker 1: the demo of what was called arpanet, the Computerized Network
Speaker 1: of the Department of Defenses Advanced Research Projects Agency or ARPA.
Speaker 1: People have been trying to build it for a long time,
Speaker 1: but it had never gotten finished and configured. They needed
Speaker 1: a deadline to give them a kick in the pants.
Speaker 1: So can you tell me a little bit what the
Speaker 1: mood was like in the ballroom during that week? Well,
Speaker 1: it was I would say exuberant. I mean it was
Speaker 1: like you know what you'd find in Time Square at
Speaker 1: eleven thirty waiting for New Year's to happen. It was
Speaker 1: everybody was excited. They knew they were part of, you know,
Speaker 1: something important. Were you hoping to get reporters to come
Speaker 1: right about this or it was really just for internally
Speaker 1: for the community of people who were working on the system.
Speaker 1: We weren't looking to try and advertise. I mean, like,
Speaker 1: did the Right brothers have the press there when they
Speaker 1: have their first airflight? I don't know. Maybe they didn't
Speaker 1: know if they'd get off to them. The news that day,
Speaker 1: October nineteen seventy two all had to do with the
Speaker 1: upcoming presidential election, which was just two weeks away. Henry
Speaker 1: Kissinger had just gotten back to Washington after a trip
Speaker 1: to Vietnam, a young Joe Biden was turning heads in
Speaker 1: his upstart Senate campaign in Delaware. The Washington Post had
Speaker 1: just broken a story reported by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein,
Speaker 1: an update about a break in at the offices of
Speaker 1: the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel. Meanwhile, over
Speaker 1: at the Arpanet demo at the Washington Hilton, a lot
Speaker 1: of wonderful and thrilling goofiness. The idea was to demonstrate
Speaker 1: that computers could talk to other computers. What they'd actually
Speaker 1: talk about didn't seem to matter much. The big idea
Speaker 1: was computers were changing from being storage devices to being
Speaker 1: also communication devices. It was amazing. My name is Timmy
Speaker 1: the Terminal, whilecast yours Jill. Lookfore, so you could sit
Speaker 1: in DC, follow the instructions in a brochure and chat
Speaker 1: with a program running out of UCLA. Pleased to meet you,
Speaker 1: Jill Lapware. Have William met before? No? Sorry, but I
Speaker 1: have a terrible memory for names. Anyway, My job is
Speaker 1: to answer your questions, so I'll ask away when will
Speaker 1: this computer crash next? About five o'clock, Timmy the Terminal
Speaker 1: clip be the paper Clip's grandfather. Some of these programs
Speaker 1: were really interesting, promising. Some of them are just unbelievably exciting.
Speaker 1: The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab had established a connection to
Speaker 1: the Associated Press's news hot line. Any terminal on that
Speaker 1: network could be turned into an AP news line using
Speaker 1: a program called h O T hot With this program
Speaker 1: linked to the AP wire service, you could read through
Speaker 1: all the latest news updates. You could even search by keyword.
Speaker 1: It was the first, the very first version of what
Speaker 1: we would call a news feed. Associated Press News Nixon
Speaker 1: twelve news items found Read Which funds? Which Richard Nixon
Speaker 1: story you might want to follow? In October nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: hard to say there were too many to choose from.
Speaker 1: Two weeks after the urpan At demo, Nixon was re
Speaker 1: elected with an incredible sixty percent of the popular vote.
Speaker 1: When it became clear just how huge Nixon's victory was
Speaker 1: going to be, an anchor at ABC News called a
Speaker 1: correspondent over where the Nixon campaign was celebrating well in Washington.
Speaker 1: President Nixon's number one domestic affairs advisor is John Erlickman,
Speaker 1: and David Schumacher is with him now in the Shoreham
Speaker 1: hotel in Washington. David Howard, he feels too good. I'm
Speaker 1: going to ask him whatever happened to Watergate. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Apparently nothing. In spite of all those
Speaker 1: investigations by Woodward and bernstein Erlickman was confident that there
Speaker 1: was nothing going on, But of course there was a
Speaker 1: lot going on. It led to an investigation and in
Speaker 1: a House impeachment inquiry. After two long years of scandal
Speaker 1: and strife, on August ninth, nineteen seventy four, President Nixon
Speaker 1: went on live television and resigned. I have never been
Speaker 1: a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed
Speaker 1: as abhorrent to every instinct in my body. The story
Speaker 1: of Watergate is a story of illicit knowledge, the real monster,
Speaker 1: ill gotten evidence, bad governance. Nixon's administration had bugged DNC
Speaker 1: headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. It had also directed the
Speaker 1: FBI and even the Army to conduct unlawful surveillance on
Speaker 1: American citizens. The list of citizens the Nixon administration had
Speaker 1: spied on it was staggering, and of course, in a
Speaker 1: story of Shakespearean proportions, Nixon was brought down by the
Speaker 1: evidence he had gathered because the president had even bugged
Speaker 1: his own office. Secrecy and spying. That's not a climate
Speaker 1: conducive to a national data center, let alone to a
Speaker 1: network of government computers. But that's the climate the Internet
Speaker 1: was born into, paranoia about what the government knew and
Speaker 1: how it knew it. NBC News has learned that the
Speaker 1: government has built a secret electronic intelligence network that gives
Speaker 1: the White House, the CIA, and the Defense Department instant
Speaker 1: access to computer files on millions of Americans. Just months
Speaker 1: after Nixon resigned, a young NBC reporter named Ford Ruin
Speaker 1: began an investigation of his own into the last days
Speaker 1: of the Nixon White House. In a series of explosive
Speaker 1: reports on NBC Nightly News in June nineteen seventy five,
Speaker 1: Rowan claimed to have uncovered yet another conspiracy, yet another
Speaker 1: cover up. The secret computer network was made possible by
Speaker 1: dramatic breakthroughs and the technique of hooking different makes and
Speaker 1: models of computers together so they can talk to one
Speaker 1: another and share information. It's a whole new technology that
Speaker 1: not many people know about. He sounds a little advanced
Speaker 1: packard in the Naked society, going on about how the
Speaker 1: government strips you down down to your bare ass. If
Speaker 1: you pay taxes or use a credit card, if you
Speaker 1: drive a car or have served in the military, if
Speaker 1: you've had major medical expenses, or contributed to a national
Speaker 1: political party, then there is information on you somewhere in
Speaker 1: some computer. Then ruin without really explaining it invokes the
Speaker 1: failed National Data Center proposal. The NBC News has learned
Speaker 1: that while Congress was voting down plans for big computer
Speaker 1: link ups, the Defense Department was developing exactly that capability.
Speaker 1: The technology to connect virtually every computer. The network, and
Speaker 1: it is referred to as the network, is now in operation.
Speaker 1: NBC News has learned that the network computers are talking
Speaker 1: to one another. We don't know how or when it began.
Speaker 1: We do know this. One of the perpetrators is named
Speaker 1: Timmy the Terminal. The Department of Defense scratched its head
Speaker 1: at NBC's report. Everyone involved in building ARPANET must have
Speaker 1: scratched their heads. This supposedly secret network had debuted in
Speaker 1: a public demo in a hotel ballroom. Gerald Ford's White
Speaker 1: House issued an official denial. The White House was not
Speaker 1: connected to ARPANETT, which was also not a secret network,
Speaker 1: but the Senate still in a watergate mood opened hearings
Speaker 1: on surveillance technology. So once again we're back in a
Speaker 1: hearing room to talk about monsters and computer men on
Speaker 1: Capitol Hill. The Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense appeared before
Speaker 1: the committee and admitted that the Army had illegally conducted
Speaker 1: surveillance and kept files on American citizens involved in political protests.
Speaker 1: That story had already come out. But as for keeping
Speaker 1: those records on a secret computer network, let me emphasize
Speaker 1: that it is not a secret network, but it is
Speaker 1: used for scientific research purposes, that it contains no sociological
Speaker 1: or intelligence data on personalities, and that it is a
Speaker 1: marvel in many ways, but it does not fit the
Speaker 1: Orwellian mold attributed to it. Arpanet was and always had
Speaker 1: been unclassified. The public was invited to its unveiling in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two at the Washington Hilton. The public just
Speaker 1: hadn't been interested. And not only had the public not
Speaker 1: been paying much attention to arpanet, but the public had
Speaker 1: really not been paying much attention to private corporate ownership
Speaker 1: of data. In nineteen sixty four, Vance Packard, wearing two
Speaker 1: pairs of pants, published the naked society, warning that computers
Speaker 1: were collecting data about you and stripping you naked. In
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy five, the United States finally withdrew from Vietnam.
Speaker 1: In the decade between, the American public got alarmed about
Speaker 1: what the American government was doing with its data. Between
Speaker 1: Vietnam and Watergate, Americans lost faith in the federal government,
Speaker 1: fearing and having found out that the government knew things
Speaker 1: it shouldn't know and was hiding things it shouldn't hide.
Speaker 1: All this happened just when data was becoming easier to
Speaker 1: store and faster to process, and computers were beginning to
Speaker 1: be able to communicate with one another across fast distances.
Speaker 1: That part's just a coincidence. But there are patterns here too,
Speaker 1: patterns that you can only see from the vantage of history.
Speaker 1: Because meanwhile, the people who were really stealing and hoarding
Speaker 1: data corporations, and hardly anyone noticed. Maybe Congress is always
Speaker 1: too late when it comes to technology. I think Arthur
Speaker 1: Miller feels about this the same way I do. The
Speaker 1: National Data Center died, but then that monster came back,
Speaker 1: wielding that same rusty, bloody axe. It came back as
Speaker 1: the Internet, and for my entire life. We've been having
Speaker 1: the same argument over it. My God, I close my
Speaker 1: eyes and I say, I've seen this movie before, and
Speaker 1: it's just as bad as it was the first time.
Speaker 1: That bad movie. It's still playing on c SPAN. In
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, when a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee
Speaker 1: held hearings about Facebook data and privacy, Senator or In
Speaker 1: Hatch was eighty four years old, Mark Zuckerberg Facebook was
Speaker 1: thirty three, and from their exchange it was pretty clear
Speaker 1: that Hatch had no idea how Facebook works. So how
Speaker 1: do you sustain a business model in which users don't
Speaker 1: pay for your service? Here, Zuckerberg blinked, Senator, we run ads. Senator,
Speaker 1: we run ads. People give us their data for free,
Speaker 1: and we sell it to advertising agencies and to other companies.
Speaker 1: This problem was never a technical problem. This problem a
Speaker 1: half century old, was always a political problem. Where is
Speaker 1: your data? Yeah, in the cloud? Where's the cloud everywhere?
Speaker 1: In data centers all over the world. What are the rules?
Speaker 1: There are no rules. The last archive is produced by
Speaker 1: Sophie Crane, mccabbon and Bennette of Faffrey. Our editor is
Speaker 1: Julia Barton and our executive producer is. Mia Lobell, Jason
Speaker 1: Gambrell and Martine Gonzalez are our engineers. Fact checking by
Speaker 1: Amy Gaines, original music by Matthias Bosse and John Evans
Speaker 1: of Stellwagen Symfinette. Many of our sound effects are from
Speaker 1: Harry Janette Jr. And the Star Jenette Foundation. Our full
Speaker 1: proof players are Barlow, Adamson, Daniel Burger Jones, Jesse Hinson,
Speaker 1: John Kuntz, Becca A. Lewis, and Maurice Emmanuel Parrott. The
Speaker 1: Last Dark I was brought to you by Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Ryan McKittrick in the American Repertory Theater,
Speaker 1: to Alex Allenson and the Bridge Sounding Stage, and to
Speaker 1: Simon Leak at Pushkin. Thanks to Heather Fane, Maya Canink,
Speaker 1: Carly Migliori, Emily Rostack, Maggie Taylor, and Jacob Weisberg. Our
Speaker 1: research assistants are Michelle Gau, Olivia Oldham, Henrietta Riley, Oliver
Speaker 1: Riskin Kutz and Emily Spector. Thanks also to Rachel Henson
Speaker 1: at the Carl Albert Center at the University of Oklahoma
Speaker 1: and to Stephen Kohler at the Lamont Library at Harvard.
Speaker 1: I'm Jill lapoor