Previously on Computers Are Bad, we discussed the early history of air traffic control in the United States. The technical demands of air traffic control are well known in computer history circles because of the prominence of SAGE, but what's less well known is that SAGE itself was not an air traffic control system at all. SAGE was an air defense system, designed for the military with a specific task of ground-controlled interception (GCI). There is natural overlap between air defense and air traffic control: for example, both applications require correlating aircraft identities with radar targets. This commonality lead the Federal Aviation Agency (precursor to today's FAA) to launch a joint project with the Air Force to adapt SAGE for civilian ATC.

There are also significant differences. In general, SAGE did not provide any safety functions. It did not monitor altitude reservations for uniqueness, it did not detect loss of separation, and it did not integrate instrument procedure or terminal information. SAGE would need to gain these features to meet FAA requirements, particularly given the mid-century focus on mid-air collisions (a growing problem, with increasing air traffic, that SAGE did nothing to address).

The result was a 1959 initiative called SATIN, for SAGE Air Traffic Integration. Around the same time, the Air Force had been working on a broader enhancement program for SAGE known as the Super Combat Center (SCC). The SCC program was several different ideas grouped together: a newer transistorized computer to host SAGE, improved communications capabilities, and the relocation of Air Defense Direction Centers from conspicuous and vulnerable "SAGE Blockhouses" to hardened underground command centers, specified as an impressive 200 PSI blast overpressure resistance (for comparison, the hardened telecommunication facilities of the Cold War were mostly specified for 6 or 10 PSI).

Some years ago, I had a frustrating and largely fruitless encounter with the politics of policing. As a member of an oversight commission, I was particularly interested in the regulation of urban surveillance. The Albuquerque Police Department, for reasons good and bad, has often been an early adopter of surveillance technology. APD deployed automated license plate readers, mounted on patrol cars and portable trailers, in 2013. Initially, the department kept a six-month history of license plate data. For six months, police could retrospectively search the database to reconstruct a vehicle, or person's, movements—at least, those movements that happened near select patrol cars and "your speed is" trailers. Lobbying by the American Civil Liberties Union and public pressure on APD and city council lead to a policy change to retain data for only 14 days, a privacy-preserving measure that the ACLU lauded as one of the best ALPR policies in the nation.

Today, ALPR is far more common in Albuquerque. Lowering costs and a continuing appetite for solving social problems with surveillance technology means that some parts of the city have ALPR installed at every signalized intersection—every person's movements cataloged at a resolution of four blocks. The data is retained for a full year. Some of it is offered, as a service, to law enforcement agencies across the country.

One of the most frustrating parts of the mass surveillance debate is the ability of law enforcement agencies and municipal governments to advance wide-scale monitoring programs, weather the controversy, and then ratchet up retention and sharing after public attention fades. For years, expansive ALPR programs spread through most American cities with little objection. In my part of the country, it seemed that the controversy over ALPR had been completely forgotten until one particularly significant ALPR vendor—Flock Safety—started repeatedly stepping in long-festering controversies with such wild abandon that they are clearly either idiots or entirely unconcerned about public perception.

One of the difficult things about describing a grift, or at least what became a grift, is judging the sincerity with which the whole thing started. Scams often crystallize around a kernel of truth: genuinely good intentions that start rolling down the hill to profitability and end up crashing through every solid object along the way. I'm not totally sure about Evelyn Wood; she seems to have had all the best in mind but still turned so quickly to hotel conference room seminars that I have trouble lending her the benefit of the doubt.

Still, she was a teacher, and I am inclined to be sympathetic to teachers. Funny, then, that Wood's journey to fame started with another teacher. His curious reading behavior, whether interpreted as intense attention or half-assed inattention, set into motion one of the mid-century's greatest and, perhaps, most embarrassing executive self-help sensations.

In 1929, Evelyn Wood earned a bachelor's in English at the University of Utah. The following two decades are a bit obscure; she took various high-school jobs around Utah leading ultimately to Salt Lake City's Jordan High School. There, as a counselor to girl students, Wood found that many students struggled because of their reading. Assigned books were arduous, handouts discarded. These students struggled to read so severely that it hampered their performance in every area. She launched a remedial reading program of her own design, during which she made her first discovery: as her students learned to read faster, their comprehension improved. Then their grades—in every subject—followed suit. Reading, she learned, was a foundational skill. A person could learn more, do more, achieve more, if only they could read faster.

Wood became fascinated with reading, probably the reason for her return to the University of Utah for a master's degree in speech. Around 1946, she turned her thesis in to Dr. Lowell Lees. Lees was the chair of the Speech and Theater Department, and had a hand in much of the development of Utah theater from the Great Depression until his death in the 1950s. A period photo of Lees depicts him with a breastplate-microphone intercom headset and a look of concentration, hands on the levers of a mechanical variac dimmer rack. He is backstage of either "Show Boat" or "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the university's summer theater festival. A theater department chair on lights seems odd, yes, but theater was Lees passion.

I have at least a few readers for which the sound of a man's voice saying "government cell phone detected" will elicit a palpable reaction. In Department of Energy facilities across the country, incidences of employees accidentally carrying phones into secure areas are reduced through a sort of automated nagging. A device at the door monitors for the presence of a tag; when the tag is detected it plays an audio clip. Because this is the government, the device in question is highly specialized, fantastically expensive, and says "government cell phone" even though most of the phones in question are personal devices. Look, they already did the recording, they're not changing it now!

One of the things that I love is weird little wireless networks. Long ago I wrote about ANT+, for example, a failed personal area network standard designed mostly around fitness applications. There's tons of these, and they have a lot of similarities---so it's fun to think about the protocols that went down a completely different path. It's even better, of course, if the protocol is obscure outside of an important niche. And a terrible website, too? What more could I ask for.

The DoE's cell-phone nagging boxes, and an array of related but more critical applications, rely on an unusual personal area networking protocol called RuBee.

RuBee is a product of Visible Assets Inc., or VAI, founded in 2004 ¹ by John K. Stevens. Stevens seems a somewhat improbable founder, with a background in biophysics and eye health, but he's a repeat entrepreneur. He's particularly fond of companies called Visible: he founded Visible Assets after his successful tenure as CEO of Visible Genetics. Visible Genetics was an early innovator in DNA sequencing, and still provides a specialty laboratory service that sequences samples of HIV in order to detect vulnerabilities to antiretroviral medications.

How much do you remember from elementary school? I remember vinyl tile floors, the playground, the teacher sentencing me to standing in the hallway. I had a teacher who was a chess fanatic; he painted a huge chess board in the paved schoolyard and got someone to fabricate big wooden chess pieces. It was enough of an event to get us on the evening news. I remember Run for the Arts, where I tried to talk people into donating money on the theory that I could run, which I could not. I'm about six months into trying to change that and I'm good for a mediocre 5k now, but I don't think that's going to shift the balance on K-12 art funding.

I also remember a domain name: bridger.pps.k12.or.us

I have quipped before that computer science is a field mostly concerned with assigning numbers to things, which is true, but it only takes us so far. Computer scientists also like to organize those numbers into structures, and one of their favorites has always been the tree. The development of wide-area computer networking surfaced a whole set of problems around naming or addressing computer systems that belong to organizations. A wide-area network consists of a set of institutions that manage their own affairs. Each of those institutions may be made up of departments that manage their own affairs. A tree seemed a natural fit. Even the "low level" IP addresses, in the days of "classful" addressing, were a straightforward hierarchy: each dot separated a different level of the tree, a different step in an organizational hierarchy.

The first large computer networks, including those that would become the Internet, initially relied on manually building lists of machines by name. By the time the Domain Name System was developed, this had already become cumbersome. The rapid growth of the internet was hard to keep up with, and besides, why did any one central entity---Jon Postel or whoever---even care about the names of all of the computers at Georgia Tech? Like IP addressing, DNS was designed as a hierarchy with delegated control. A registrant obtains a name in the hierarchy, say gatech.edu, and everything "under" that name is within the control, and responsibility, of the registrant. This arrangement is convenient for both the DNS administrator, which was a single organization even after the days of Postel, and for registrants.