Pearl Harbor’s original radar plot of station Opana

Smithsonian has a story called “How (Almost) Everyone Failed to Prepare for Pearl Harbor”

Rousted by an alarm clock, Pvts. George E. Elliott Jr. and Joseph L. Lockard had awakened in their tent at 3:45 in the caressing warmth of an Oahu night and gotten their radar fired up and scanning 30 minutes later. Radar was still in its infancy, far from what it would become, but the privates could still spot things farther out than anyone ever had with mere binoculars or telescope.

Half a dozen mobile units—generator truck, monitoring truck, antenna and trailer—had been scattered around the island in recent weeks. George and Joe’s, the most reliable of the bunch, was emplaced farthest north. It sat at Opana, 532 feet above a coast…

Here’s a photo I took in Hawaii of the original radar plot of station Opana, showing the Japanese attack planes approach (click to enlarge).

The Smithsonian describes the exact moment radar was able to generate this plot:

Their duty done, George, who was new to the unit, took over the oscilloscope for a few minutes of time-killing practice. The truck that would shuttle them to breakfast would be along soon. As George checked the scope, Joe passed along wisdom about operating it. “He was looking over my shoulder and could see it also,” George said.

On their machine, a contact did not show up as a glowing blip in the wake of a sweeping arm on a screen, but as a spike rising from a baseline on the five-inch oscilloscope, like a heartbeat on a monitor. If George had not wanted to practice, the set might have been turned off. If it had been turned off, the screen could not have spiked.

Now it did.

Their device could not tell its operators precisely how many planes the antenna was sensing, or if they were American or military or civilian. But the height of a spike gave a rough indication of the number of aircraft. And this spike did not suggest two or three, but an astonishing number—50 maybe, or even more. “It was the largest group I had ever seen on the oscilloscope,” said Joe.

He took back the seat at the screen and ran checks to make sure the image was not some electronic mirage. He found nothing wrong. The privates did not know what to do in those first minutes, or even if they should do anything. They were off the clock, technically.

Whoever they were, the planes were 137 miles out, just east of due north. The unknown swarm was inbound, closing at two miles a minute over the shimmering blue of the vacant sea, coming directly at Joe and George.

It was just past 7 in the morning on December 7, 1941.

DoD CECOM’s historical archive has more details on the Signal Corp Radar (SCR) sets and antenna (SCR-270B). Fun fact, while SCR-270 was not a radio it still was designated as one to keep the technology a secret.

See also the Naval Postgraduate School presentation on Radar Fundamentals

This long-range search radar technology had started as early as 1937 at the Signal Corps laboratories at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey (PDF).

All Army detection development was officially assigned to the Signal Corps by 1936. Active development on radio detection began that year. The radio interference or “beat” method gave strong indications from passing planes but lacked directivity. Effort s shifted to the radio pulse-echo method. Planes were successfully detected on an oscilloscope by these means before the end of 1936. A combined system of heat and radio pulse-echo detection against aircraft was successfully demonstrated before the Secretary of War in May 1937. Shortly thereafter, substantial funds became available for the first time.

The Westinghouse Electronics Division in Baltimore, Maryland in 1940 thus was already working on a development contract.

In sum, this is why on December 7, 1941 radar (as coined in 1941 by the Navy) was in place and detected an incoming attack at Pearl Harbor, although the information and signature wasn’t conveyed in time let alone necessarily understood.

Kiwicon X: Pwning ML for Fun and Profit

I presented “Pwning ML for Fun and Profit” at Kiwicon X

When: Friday, Nov 18th, 2016 at 14:15
Where: Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington

Everyone is talking ML this and AI that as if they expect some kind of Utopian beast to be waiting just behind the next door and whisk us all away to a technological-paradise. It would seem dire warnings of every Sci-Fi book and movie ever haven’t been enough to dissuade people from cooking statistics and math into an techno-optimist soup of dubious origin and expecting us to swallow. Obviously security can’t just sit here and watch the catastrophes unfold. I aim to lay out some of the most awful yet still amusing examples of how and why we can and will break things. This presentation attempts to offer the audience a refreshingly realistic look at the terrible flaws in ML, the ease of altering outcomes and the dangers ahead.

Copy of Presentation: kiwiconX.daviottenheimer.pdf (5 MB)

“Using Behavioral Economics to Inform Policy” – Dr. Adam Oliver

Here is a copy for convenience of the 2014 presentation by Dr. Adam Oliver, a London School of Economics (LSE) Reader in Health Economics and Policy:

nudge.oliver
(PDF 2.1 MB)

Dr. Oliver is published in the areas of health equity, economic evaluation, risk and uncertainty, and the economics and policy of health care reform. The interface between economics and political science in health care policy analysis motivates his current research.

Since 2001 he has worked at the LSE, where currently he is Lecturer in Health Economics and Policy in the Department of Social Policy, and Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Director of LSE Health and Social Care, one of the largest research institutes in the health-related social sciences in Europe. 2005-06 Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy, Dr. Oliver holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Newcastle and an MSc in health economics from the University of York. He is a 1995-97 Japanese Ministry of Education (Monbusho) Research Scholar, Founding Chair of the Health Equity Network, Founding Coordinator of the Preference Elicitation Group, and a former Coordinator of the European Health Policy Group. He also is Founding Co-Editor of the journal, Health Economics, Policy and Law.

See also the forthcoming “Behavioural Public Policy“, an interdisciplinary and international peer-reviewed journal devoted to behavioural research and its relevance to public policy.

I should blog more again, I know

Thanks to everyone recently telling me they miss my blog posts. To be honest I have a queue of written posts unreleased because I went through one of those writing phases where erratic Tweets seemed like an easier public legacy than slogging through full paragraphs and illustrations. For six years I wrote a post every day, come rain or shine. Now it’s down to a post every harvest moon if that.

Of course in private I write for a living, typing up analysis and trying to expose fun facts of history for the many corporations building security teams and products. As the private load increased, my public writing necessarily changed to keep some distance. Balance wasn’t really expected.

Recent posts in particular I have been asked to release include defense of backdoors, surveillance camera economics and models for patching IoT…with a little elbow grease and a hammer applied to this rusty site they may soon be appearing.