The year was 1978. A young engineer, just out of school with a still-warm BSEE degree, is working at his new job where programming was performed using punch cards or over the phone line with a acoustically coupled modem. After 3 or so months, the company has purchased these 3270 displays with keyboards and installed them in offices. Our junior engineer is assigned one of these. After just a few moments of use, it becomes exceedingly apparent that these are of a new class of technology, indeed, making life at work ever so much more pleasant and productive. Now retired, our engineer still remembers these quite fondly. Even more so, he remembers the keyboard. How solid it felt and the wonderful tactile feedback when pressing the keys. He might even say that it was the best keyboard that he ever used.
I was wondering the same thing. I would have thought every possible combination of parameters would have been tried by now. I guess it just goes to show you that your code is never really complete.
> I guess it just goes to show you that your code is never really complete.
Yes and no, feature bloat usually justify themselves innocently and once you go down that slope there is no return.
The hardest thing to do in software is commit yourself to a set of feature and protect it from any "helpful additions", naming might be the second hardest.
This blows me away. I worked on systems that processed the signals from these satellites at the ground sites. At the time, these were highly classified, requiring background investigations and a polygraph to be granted access to know about these things. All our work had to be performed in a SCIF and we were forbidden to discuss our work with anyone not cleared to know. The form that we had to sign when being briefed stated that this was a lifetime commitment. I never would have believed that the NRO would declassify this system.
I'm sure I don't need to say it, but what got declassified and the work you did are very, very different things. Pretty much everything in the notice is included in this article, so anything you're not reading.... Best to keep to yourself.
Not to worry. Unlike trump, I didn't remove classified info from the SCIF and store it in my bathroom or share it with Russian dinner guests. I hold my oaths seriously.
Was this really that secret? I've known about JUMPSEAT for at least 20 years and I'm not a US citizen, nor do I have any kind of security clearance. Not sure where the information was published, maybe one of James Bamford's books, but there's nothing terribly new there apart from the USG finally acknowledging what we already knew.
Knowing that some classified program exists is one thing. Knowing technical details, capabilities, missions, targeting, is a whole nother. One can read about such black programs from a number of sources, Bamford's Puzzle Palace is one. Sontag's Blind Man's Bluff is another. You can also learn about such things from books and newspaper articles about people who revealed secret information to the Soviet Union, Chris Boyce, Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen, and the Walker Family. In other words, nothing is truly secret if you know where to look and have a ability to piece together disparate facts to build up a more complete picture.
"Blind Man's Bluff" was a really impressive piece of work, I once talked about it with someone who was involved with the program and he was astounded at how much Sontag had managed to find out. There were things in the book that he didn't even know about, because they were compartmentalised and Sontag wasn't.
Interesting point! I think a lot of the secrecy around programs like JUMPSEAT is more about official acknowledgment than actual hidden knowledge so what’s been publicly available for years suddenly becomes ‘news’ once the government confirms it. James Bamford’s work definitely made a lot of this info accessible to the public, so it makes sense that someone could know about it without clearance.
I've had a quick look and it's mentioned in a number of places, Matthew Aid's "The Secret Sentry" mentions it briefly, Bamford has a page or two in "Body of Secrets", and for honorable mention Jeffrey Richelson's "Wizards of Langley" doesn't have it but does cover the entire KH series across a span of around 250 pages. It may be in a few more books but it'd be a pile to go through.
2.4 Collection Techniques...
These procedures shall not authorize:
...
(c) Physical surveillance of a United States
person in the United States by agencies
other than the FBI, except for:
(1) Physical surveillance of present or former
employees, present or former intelligence
agency contractors or their present or former
employees, or applicants for any such
employment or contracting; and
(2) Physical surveillance of a military person
employed by a nonintelligence element of a
military service.
This is written to look like it's constitutional but it's granting power through the wide-ranging exceptions. The upshot is it grants all agencies other than the FBI approval to surveil individuals covered by 2.4(c)1 & 2. The FBI gets a complete blank check on everyone. Covering "former employees" means this remains in effect until death for those affected.
I started running SETI back in 1999 when it first came out. I ran it on both my personal machines and even had it running on several servers I controlled at work. I probably ran it for several years before losing interest, pulling it off of everything. I guess I am a bit surprised to learn it was still running. It was quite unique back in the day. I wonder how many years of CPU time were burned running this thing.
In 1978, I was at my first engineering job after getting my BSEE. The company had set up a small lab that had variety of small computers, including a KIM-1. It also had an Apple II, a CROMEMCO computer, and a Pet, plus one or two others. At that time, I was only familiar with big iron, like an IBM 370, that I could only submit jobs to. As a result, I was in heaven. Here were computers that I could interact with directly, write programs (in Basic) for, and play games. I was in there every day at lunch or after work, sometimes staying until 2 or 3 in the morning. I messed around with the KIM a bit but found it unrefined and clunky to use as compared to the Apple or even the Pet.
Around 1980, while taking a "Saturday Morning Class" in Toronto - I discovered that there was a lab of ~24 Commodore PET 2001 (8K - blue phosphor, chiclet keyboards) at George Brown College. Spent as much time as I could there engaging with the early hacker community who all brought their shoeboxes of 5-1/4" floppies to trade programs. It was there that I had my first OMG moment when a much older kid showed me his floppy disk catalog program that could sort so much faster than mine did (he used quicksort).
I remember jones-ing for that computer. It was too expensive though. Then I got a series of books about how to build an Elektor Junior, which was a cheaper alternative. I did that, I loved it; and then in short order the BBC Micro stole my heart. The through-line was the 6502, which retains a place in my heart even today. It's fascinating to me that there still remains interest in that CPU even today, with papers and publications and repos. That CPU has had a great innings. Both simple enough and complex enough. It went on to power the Apple, the Pet, various Acorns. It's interesting to look at the family tree, even the ARM chips have a family association (say, cousins through the Acorn line).
I still hack assembly on my Oric Atmos system, just to keep my 6502 chops fine. The day job has me doing Linux development - somehow its soothing to spend an hour at home winding down on page zero ..
Jimmi Hendrix, Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Kobain, and Bon Scott would all fit the profile. All died young of substance abuse. But then we have Keith Richards which no one can explain.
He lives in the same home in Omaha that he had in the 60's. BH does not own any corporate jets but they do own NetJets that sells/leases fractional shares of their jet fleet of which Buffet uses for his travel.
