Re: [irtf-discuss] [Internet Policy] Why the World Must Resist Calls to Undermine the Internet

[David Lloyd-Jones <[e-mail]>]

Steve,

A fine piece, though you take the Official Truths a little too seriously.

"Structured as an agile operation," may be said to be a sweet and nice way
of saying "slush fund."  "Overseen by both DoD management and the relevant
Congressional committees and subcommittees" is a fine joke for the morning.
In those days Federal budgets tended to be published about half way through
the fiscal year, but I believe Junior Bush achieved the astonishing trick
of publishing a budget after the entire year was over. Even today, with
Congressional staffs quadruple what they were back then, DARPA is so small
that I doubt it gets more than a couple of staffers' mornings of serious
consideration in a year.

The addition of the D was entirely cosmetic, purely for the purpose of
paying lip-service to the Mansfield Amendment. The name had nothing to do
with the evolution of the agency itself. In 1962 it was just loose money
contributed by whichever Pentagon office could be made to cough it up
toward the end of the year. By ten years later, when then-Senator Mansfied
was concerned about the possible corrupting influence of military money, it
had a relatively fixed name, offices, and staff. The solidification has
continued, as you detail.

FWIW, at the time when "the Net" had seven nodes two of them were in the
UK, the Defence Establishment, in London, and the fine artificial
intelligence group up in Edinborough. Both ARPAnet and DARPAnet were rare.





On Tue, 15 Mar 2022 at 09:00, Steve Crocker <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Adding to Vint's comments:
>
> I was at (D)ARPA from mid 1971 to mid 1974.  Bob Kahn arrived in late
> 1972.  Vint came a few years after I left.
>
> The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was created in 1958 in
> response to the launch of Sputnik.  It was placed within the Defense
> Department's Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD).  I believe OSD was
> about 2,000 people.  ARPA was approximately 150 people.  It was
> purposefully structured as an agile operation, authorized to define its own
> projects and get them moving quickly.  Its authority and operation were
> overseen by both DoD management and the relevant Congressional committees
> and subcommittees.  "Slush fund" is a pejorative term that mischaracterizes
> the organization.
>
> In 1972, following a decision to reduce the size of OSD, ARPA was moved
> out of OSD and became a Defense agency.  This put it in the same status as
> the other Defense agencies, e.g., Defense Mapping Agency (DMA), Defense
> Intelligence Agency (DIA), Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA), et al.  In the
> process, "ARPA" acquired the "D" and became DARPA.  There was no
> appreciable change in the mission, structure or operation of the agency.
> On paper, the director of DARPA now reported directly to the Secretary of
> Defense instead of the Defense Director for Research and Engineering
> (DDR&E).  In practice, the reporting lines remained the same.  I don't
> believe the transition had anything to do with the Mansfield amendment.
> (D)ARPA was unabashedly doing work on a wide range of military technologies
> both before and after the transition.  Each internal funding  memo included
> a section describing the relevance of the effort being funded to the
> overall DoD mission.  I wrote my share of these, as did every program
> manager.  See the next paragraphs for a key point related to this.
>
> Internally, (D)ARPA is divided into a handful of Offices.  Each Office
> focuses on specific technologies.  Offices are created, folded down, and
> renamed at various times.  In the beginning, ARPA focused on the space
> program.  In 1962, the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) was
> formed to focus on advanced computer science technology.  JCR Licklider was
> the first director.  The Office funded research across a broad spectrum of
> computer science topics ranging from time-sharing systems, graphics,
> multiprocessor architectures, and artificial intelligence.  Many of these
> ideas had already been articulated and pursued in a few labs around the
> country.  IPTO was able to put considerably more money into these areas.
>
> The Offices were how the agency was structured from a personnel point of
> view.  From a budget point of view, the agency was structured in terms of
> "programs."  Each program had a budget and an objective.  These were
> documented and reported to DoD management and Congress each year.
>
> Most of the Offices had programs that were intended to yield results
> within a few years.  However, IPTO, the Materials Science Office, and the
> Behavioral Sciences Office funded research with a *much* longer time
> horizon.  These were considered "basic research" offices, in contrast to
> the other "development" Offices.  The aggregate funding for basic research
> was just a small fraction of the overall (D)ARPA budget, which meant that
> most of (D)ARPA's funding was producing visible results fairly regularly.
> The budgets and progress of the basic research Offices were still reviewed
> annually, but the expectations were adjusted.
>
> The terms "basic research" and "development" correspond to the budget
> designations "6.1" and "6.2."  Line 6 in McNamara's famous reorganization
> of the Defense budget was Research, Development, Test and Engineering
> (RDT&E), with designations of 6.1 through 6.4.  The funding levels were
> significantly different, i.e. 6.1 << 6.2 << 6.3 << 6.4.  (D)ARPA's funding
> was limited to just 6.1 and 6.2 programs.
>
> In terms of its budget, IPTO evolved and became a hybrid Office with two
> programs, one with 6.1 funding and one with 6.2 funding.  The artificial
> intelligence work was part of the 6.1 budget.  The big system developments,
> e.g., Illiac IV and Multics, were part of the 6.2 budget.
>
> As noted, the idea of a network had been written about and was definitely
> part of the vision.  There were a handful of small efforts to connect two
> or three computers.  The Arpanet was conceived and initiated in 1965-66.
> After a couple of years of planning, the Request for Quotation for the IMPs
> was released in 1968.  Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) in Cambridge, MA was
> selected, and work began in 1969.  The first IMP was delivered to UCLA at
> the beginning of September that year.
>
> When the Arpanet was up and running, IPTO began to look at packet radio
> and packet satellite networking.  With strong support from the director of
> the agency, Steve Lukasik, a third budget line item was created, also
> within the overall 6.2 budget, that focused on communications.
>
> ============================
>
> I believe the use of the exclamation point (!), informally called "bang,"
> was part of the UUNET routing scheme, not the Arpanet routing or email
> addressing.
>
> Steve
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 15, 2022 at 7:59 AM vinton cerf via InternetPolicy <
> [e-mail]> wrote:
>
>> 1. Arpanet was never called "Darpanet"
>> 2. I don't think we ever "numbered" users since getting on the Arpanet
>> was mostly by having an account on a time-sharing computer at a university
>> (or research lab) that had an ARPA contract.
>> 3. "bangs" were at email level, not Arpanet (or Internet) level of
>> routing. The "bang" email addresses aided routing through application level
>> gateways.
>> 4. Bob Kahn, Dave Walden, Frank Heart and many others at BBN did the
>> Arpanet IMP design. The Arpanet Host-Host NCP effort was led by Steve
>> Crocker (Jon Postel and I and others helped) and stabilized enough to
>> support email in 1971 and a public demonstration in October 1972. The
>> Internet work started the next year in 1973. Since Internet was conceived
>> as a network of networks, you needed more than one network to make an
>> Internet. There were three to begin with: Arpanet, Packet Radio Net and
>> Packet Satellite Net, all funded by ARPA.
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 15, 2022 at 4:50 AM David Lloyd-Jones via InternetPolicy <
>> [e-mail]> wrote:
>>
>>> Willi,
>>>
>>> You have shown us that you are full of good sentiments. Quite a lot of
>>> them. Very good ones. I assume that you know something about the start and
>>> development of the Internet but no such knowledge has found its way into
>>> your long post.
>>> .
>>> First proposed by Bacon in the fifteenth century or so, the 'Net was a
>>> solid policy proposal made by Vannevar Bush in 1945. It was made possible
>>> by the invention of packet-switching in the mid-1960 to 70s. Johnny Foster,
>>> JFK's science advisor in 1961, was the first person I know of to have done
>>> solid financing of the effort.  Bush was working on wide-scale computer
>>> networking, along with many other things, when I met him in his
>>> utterly false "retirement" in Lexington, Mass. in 1976. This was well
>>> before your Reagan Administration.
>>>
>>> The original present "internet" was ARPAnet  (on which I was user #300
>>> in 1971). This was financed before it really existed by ARPA when that
>>> "Agency" was more-or-less a slush fund passed around at random in the
>>> Pentagon. It continued as DARPAnet after they added that "D," for defence,
>>> to pretend compliance with the Mansfield Amendment. I worked on this on
>>> Congressional staff in 1969-71 and at MIT in '72. The D was tacked on in
>>> December '71 or January '72, I forget, but had been in the works ever since
>>> Mansfied, as Senator, had tried to prevent military money from corrupting
>>> civilian research. Unfortunately, civilian researchers cried piteously that
>>> they wanted to be corrupted. By then, Mansfied was ambassador to Japan....
>>>
>>> When the scalability of the internetted nets, DARPAnet, began to seem
>>> limited, -- all those !!! "bangs," -- its growth was smoothed by the
>>> development of the present TCP/IP, credited to Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf. When
>>> Cerf later went to work for MCI, a hapless little phone company, their PR
>>> department tub-thumped that he was "the" founder of "the" Internet. Many
>>> people seem to have believed this inanity. More recently this has been
>>> toned down to "a" founder of the Internet. In fact packet-switching, the
>>> key invention, was largely the work of Lenny Kleinrock, under whom Cerf
>>> studied as a university student. Their much later contribution to TCP/IP
>>> has certainly been useful.
>>>
>>> On Fri, 11 Mar 2022 at 13:07, willi uebelherr via InternetPolicy <
>>> [e-mail]> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Why the World Must Resist Calls to Undermine the Internet
>>>> Andrew Sullivan, 02.03.2022
>>>>
>>>> https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2022/03/why-the-world-must-resist-calls-to-undermine-the-internet/
>>>>
>>>> Dear friends,
>>>>
>>>> Andrew Sullivan rightly pointed out in his text that "the Internet is
>>>> for everyone". Absolutely right in the idea.
>>>>
>>>> But the reality is different. The technical players acting today are
>>>> not
>>>> interested in a free global communication of people, but in a
>>>> commercialization and capitalization of their needs for communication.
>>>>
>>>> This result did not come about by chance, but was already the essential
>>>> guiding principle at the beginning by the government of the USA under
>>>> Ronald Reagan. The original concept of "the inter-connection of local
>>>> Net-works", which is necessarily based on local networks, became a
>>>> privately and state organized system of interconnected star-systems,
>>>> "the inter-connection of private Star-Systems".
>>>>
>>>> This interconnection of star-systems creates the possibility to
>>>> organize
>>>> access and exclusion according to arbitrary criteria. And we see today
>>>> that the system of a free global communication has turned into a field
>>>> of censorship and private control mania, organized by countries calling
>>>> themselves "the West". Already the naming points to organized bullshit,
>>>> because the planet is a sphere and not a disk and thus any directions
>>>> can lead to the same goal.
>>>>
>>>> The actors of this fragmentation and breaking of a free human
>>>> communication "without borders" are those who call themselves
>>>> representatives of a "free world", but in fact trample every diversity
>>>> with military boots. Every form of racial mania a'la Cecil Rhodes is
>>>> put
>>>> back on the table. Lying and hypocrisy is the form of communication
>>>> that
>>>> is now elevated to the absolute.
>>>>
>>>> The idea of telecommunication in the form of an Internet that does not
>>>> adhere to private or governmental or geographical boundaries, as we saw
>>>> with Jonathan Postel, was destroyed at the very beginning of the life
>>>> of
>>>> an Internet. Today we see what a monster of small-minded power madness
>>>> it has developed into, where only private profit interests and state
>>>> delusions of control apply.
>>>>
>>>> The alternative always remains. A telecommunication in the form of an
>>>> internet, which rests on local networks and thus enables free access to
>>>> all people of our planet, independent of their social situation and
>>>> geographical position.
>>>>
>>>> That and only that is a "net of nets".
>>>>
>>>> with kind regards, willi
>>>> Asuncion, Paraguay
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> in german -----------------------------------------------------------
>>>>
>>>> Liebe freunde,
>>>>
>>>> Andrew Sullivan hat zu Recht in seinem Text darauf hingewiesen, "the
>>>> Internet is for everyone". Absolut richtig in der Idee.
>>>>
>>>> Aber die Wirklichkeit sieht anders aus. Die heute agierenden
>>>> technischen
>>>> Akteure sind nicht an einer freien globalen Kommunikation der Menschen
>>>> interessiert, sondern an einer Kommerzialisierung und Kapitalisierung
>>>> ihrer Beduerfnisse nach Kommunikation.
>>>>
>>>> Dieses Resultat ist nicht zufaellig entstanden, sondern war bereits zu
>>>> Anfang das wesentliche Leitmotiv durch die Regierung der USA unter
>>>> Ronald Reagan. Das urspruengliche Konzept "the Inter-connection of
>>>> local
>>>> Net-works", das ja notwendig auf lokalen Netzwerken ruht, wurde zu
>>>> einem
>>>> privat und staatlich organisierten System von verbundenen
>>>> Sternsystemen,
>>>> "the inter-connection of private Star-Systems".
>>>>
>>>> Diese Verbindung von Stern-Systemen schafft die Moeglichkeit, nach
>>>> beliebigsten Kriterien den Zugang und Ausschluss zu organisieren. Und
>>>> wir sehen heute, dass sich das System einer freien globalen
>>>> Kommunikation zu einem Feld der Zensur und privatem Kontrollwahn
>>>> entwickelt hat, das von Laendern organisiert wird, die sich "der
>>>> Westen"
>>>> nennen. Schon die Namensgebung deutet auf organisierten Schwachsinn,
>>>> weil der Planet eine Kugel und keine Scheibe ist und damit beliebige
>>>> Richtungen zum gleichen Ziel fuehren koennen.
>>>>
>>>> Die Akteure dieser Zersplitterung und Zerbrechung einer freien
>>>> menschlichen Kommunikation "ohne Grenzen" sind jene, die sich als
>>>> Vertreter einer "freien Welt" bezeichnen, tatsaechlich aber jede
>>>> Diversitaet mit militaerischen Stiefeln zertrampeln. Jede Form des
>>>> Rassenwahns a'la Cecil Rhodes wird wieder auf den Tisch gestellt. Die
>>>> Luege und Heuchelei ist diejenige Form der Kommunikation, die nun zum
>>>> absoluten Mass erhoben wird.
>>>>
>>>> Die Idee einer Telekommunikation in Form eines Internet, das sich nicht
>>>> an private oder staatliche oder geografische Grenzen haelt, wie wir es
>>>> bei Jonathan Postel sahen, wurde schon zu Beginn der Lebensphase eines
>>>> Internet zerstoert. Heute sehen wir, zu welchem Monster kleingeistigem
>>>> Machtwahns es sich entwickelt hat, wo nur noch private Profitinteressen
>>>> und staatlicher Kontrollwahn gelten.
>>>>
>>>> Die Alternative bleibt immer existent. Eine Telekommunikation in Form
>>>> eines internet, das auf lokalen Netzwerken ruht und so allen Menschen
>>>> unseres Planeten den freien Zugang ermoeglicht, unabhaengig von ihrer
>>>> sozialen Lage und geografischen Position.
>>>>
>>>> Das und nur das ist ein "Netz der Netze".
>>>>
>>>> mit lieben gruessen, willi
>>>> Asuncion, Paraguay
>>>>
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>