
Who smeared Richard Feynman? - beefman
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/07/11/smeared-richard-feynman/
======
cperciva
My first thought when I saw this letter was that it was Richard Feynman
himself, perhaps appropriating the name of someone he knew had been
interviewed. It would be entirely consistent with his character to smear
himself in order to convince the government that they didn't want him -- just
like the letter he wrote to the draft board proclaiming that he was not truly
crazy, but was instead precisely crazy enough to not want them to think he was
crazy.

~~~
Renaud
Accusing someone of communism in those witch-hunting days was a dangerous
thing to do. It seems a bit improbable that Feynman would have done that to
himself, knowing that it could jeopardise his participation in other
committees/projects/areas that were of interest to him. He wasn't 'forced' to
be on the PSAC, it's not like he was trying to get away from jury-duty. He
could just as well have said he wasn't interested/able do participate when
asked to join.

To me, it would also have seemed a bit out of character, Feynman has
demonstrated that he had no big problem speaking his mind, so stealing
someone's identity, with the legal risks that represents, especially if it was
his estranged wife's, doesn't sound very probable.

But hey, I don't know, I guess I see it as improbable but it's always
possible.

~~~
cperciva
I did say that was my _first_ thought -- the article makes a good case and I'm
mostly convinced by it.

------
sengstrom
A little gem from the article: "It was an extremely ugly, long (2 years!)
divorce hearing: it made the newspapers because of Bell’s allegations of
“extreme cruelty” by Feynman, including the notion that he spent all of his
waking hours either doing calculus and playing the bongos."

~~~
alexjeffrey
if only we could all live in a world where the highest form of domestic abuse
was calculus and playing drums.

~~~
jimhefferon
At that time, in those jurisdictions, you could only get divorced under very
precise circumstances. One of the few ways was for one spouse, typically the
woman, to assert "extreme cruelty."

I don't know any more about _this_ divorce than anyone else here but I do know
that at the time people did whatever it took to fit in the required "extreme"
criteria.

~~~
CamperBob2
It was also a matter of mutual agreement; sometimes the husband and wife would
agree to accuse each other of crap like that. You know you have terrible
public policy when couples are incentivized to slander each other in order to
separate amicably.

------
thegeomaster
It seems like there needs to be another approach to redacting text like this.
This one doesn't really cut it, apparently. And slips such as 'her' and 'she'
was what primarily gave her away here. So the people who published the file
should have been way more careful with this.

~~~
pling
They just draw a black box over the text in the PDFs now...

(No joke)

~~~
rbanffy
Yes, but now they remove the underlying text too. It was fun while it lasted.

~~~
eli
Current best practice is actually to draw the black boxes, print it, then scan
it back in. The result is crummy quality pdfs with no metadata or hidden text.

~~~
pling
Well you'd think but I worked for an org back in 2005 that decided to
completely optimise that step away.

They were an aerospace/defense company building IFF units no less...

~~~
mpyne
I think that was still a year or so before news stories started coming out
about government "redacted" documents that were not actually redacted.

A lot of the NSA-related documents released after redaction were certainly run
through the "redact,print,scan" routine, and I know the Navy does the same as
a best practice now.

Maybe that hasn't made it out to the defense industrial base by now, but I'd
be surprised if 9 years worth of being beat about the head regarding redaction
mistakes wouldn't have fixed things even there.

~~~
ams6110
Wouldn't "redact, print-preview, save" be good enough?

Or redact, screen-shot.

Does that preserve anything that an actual paper print and rescan would
remove?

~~~
mpyne
Oh, there's tons of much better methods that would be more than good enough.
Adobe even provides specific redaction features that drill down within the PDF
data itself to make sure that _nothing_ gets drawn under a redaction block, it
works quite well.

But the government is about making procedures that are both easily understood
by low-paid civil servants and unlikely to be screwed up in major fashion
(e.g. our GS-7 scanning documents back in might use the wrong file name or
reverse the pages or something, but they probably won't leak classified data
if they do that).

------
keithpeter
Enjoyed the article liked the 'lofi' images with typewriter text, am using the
smear image as wallpaper.

Would it not be entirely in character if Feynman had picked up echos of the
profiling process and smeared himself? Obviously can't be this letter.

------
prestadige
Feynman was in fact critical of the Soviet Union:

>I think that Russia represents danger in saying that the solution to human
problems is known, that all effort should be for the state, for that means
there is no novelty.

(from 'The Meaning Of It All', Ch. II)

------
gus_massa
Interesting comment in the blog (by Raphael)
[http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/07/11/smeared-richard-
fe...](http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/07/11/smeared-richard-
feynman/#comment-99765)

> _With regard to the censored words, I would argue that they are probably “my
> former husband,” instead of “my ex-husband, the”._

Author reply:

> _Yeah, it’s possible. I don’t put a lot of faith in character length
> analysis,_ [...]

------
th3iedkid
Is there any type-set technology on proving possibilities for redacted texts?

~~~
keithpeter
Typewriter text is fixed width, so I imagine they get an average width for one
character then calculate the number of characters in each redacted bit.

What had you in mind?

~~~
codeflo
Interestingly, although it seems harder, this sort of analysis is much more
reliable with proportional fonts, because the specific width of the gap
narrows the number of possibilities down considerably.

~~~
baddox
That would would depend heavily both on the proportional-width font that was
used and the accuracy with which we could measure the width of the gap.

------
firstOrder
> Through the years that he has been at the California Institute of Technology
> (REDACTED) he has in my opinion made a definite point of knowing well and
> cultivating such persons as the president of California Institute of
> Technology, the dean of the school of physics, department heads (including
> REDACTED and Linus Pauling), regents of California Institute of Technology,
> as well as REDACTED.

Well it shouldn't be too much detective work to figure out what Caltech
department head Feynman was buddy buddy with other than Pauling. They seemed
to feel need to redact the name for some reason.

From all of the references to Caltech implying a personal knowledge of the
school, to the continual references to Feynman being a religious skeptic and
critical of Republicans, I'd guess this letter was written by a conservative
working at Caltech. It would make sense in terms of the initial FBI contact,
the acquaintanceship but not friendship with Feynman etc.

~~~
wavefunction
Why would someone working at Caltech be interviewed in Idaho? The ex-wife
theory seems a whole lot more credible.

~~~
c_c_c
I have no idea but as long as we're speculating there is this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_National_Laboratory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_National_Laboratory)
and this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I)

------
dimitar
The FBI surely must have known about the nasty divorce (the TA mentioned it
was very public at the time). So, did that fact get into consideration while
evaluating Feynmann?

I might be a bit naive, but I don't want to assume it was a simple witch-hunt.

------
Agathos
Without looking, I would have guessed Edward Teller, but the gender thing
shoots that down.

~~~
stox
The letter was not anyway near Teller's style of writing.

------
robocat
Maybe not a smear...

If it were his wife, it seems just as likely she knew something of his
character...

