
IBM Stretch, the NSA, and MLK - schmudde
https://schmud.de/posts/2020-06-02-mlk.html
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dmix
> 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.

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schmudde
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.

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

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perfmode
> 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.

~~~
01100011
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.

~~~
perfmode
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.

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

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29athrowaway
Title should be "IBM Stretch..."

~~~
tlb
Fixed, thanks.

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

~~~
opnitro
and?

