The United States is gradually advancing its efforts in the field of expanding awareness about codebreakers and the origins of modern computing, akin to the remarkable work undertaken by historians at Bletchley Park in England. An article featured in DCist sheds light on significant revelations associated with “Building E on the Foreign Service Institute’s leafy Arlington campus”.

“The codebreakers who worked here saved countless American lives and shortened the war by what many historians estimate to be at least two years,” [institute director] Polaschik said.

A group of Black women who worked at Arlington Hall — they were segregated from their white counterparts — kept tabs on messages from the private sector, ensuring that American companies were not doing business with Nazi Germany or Japanese companies.

Overall, women made up 70% of the American domestic codebreaking force, noted Adam Howard, the director of the Office of the Historian at the State Department.

[…]

At the end of the war, the women were mostly pushed out of their jobs to make way for men…

Listening to companies doing business with Nazi Germany? Like *cough, cough* Ford, IBM and Coke?

How awkward to enlist Black women to surveil the most powerful American brands for evidence of treason. I am sure it wasn’t hard for them to find America’s worst offenders, given evidence was so often out in the open while being ignored.

Furthermore, the conclusion of the Arlington story features a memorable quote that underscores potential injustices within America. However, it may not fully capture the nuanced and intricate web of challenges faced by women. A perfect example can be found in the case of Agnes Driscoll who expanded and thrived in intelligence work after her role in World War I ended, as documented in the NSA Hall of Honor.

In her thirty-year career, Mrs. Driscoll broke Japanese Navy manual codes — the Red Book Code in the 1920s, the Blue Book Code in 1930, and, in 1940, she made critical inroads into JN-25, the Japanese fleet’s operational code, which the U.S. Navy exploited after the attack on Pearl Harbor for the rest of the Pacific War. In early 1935, Mrs. Driscoll led the attack on the Japanese M-1 cipher machine (also known to the U.S. as the ORANGE machine), used to encrypt the messages of Japanese naval attaches around the world. At the same time, Agnes sponsored the introduction of early machine support for cryptanalysis against Japanese naval code systems. Early in World War II, Mrs. Driscoll was engaged in the U.S. Navy’s effort against the German naval Enigma machine, although this work was superceded by the U.S.-U.K. cryptologic exchanges in 1942-43. Mrs. Driscoll was part of the navy contingent that joined the new national cryptologic agencies, first the Armed Forces Security Agency in 1949 and then the National Security Agency in 1952.

Driscoll’s postwar career experienced a remarkable ascent, rather than being obstructed by male colleagues. It’s intriguing to observe that the greater a woman’s success in the field of cryptology, the less recognition she tends to receive especially if Black. This phenomenon could be attributed to a paradox: the less they are forced out, the more they are drawn into the shadows, if that conceptually aligns.

One might ponder whether any Black woman listening to the overtly racist white men driving American private sector to support Hitler and genocide (let alone the racists around them at work) would truly desire corporations like Ford, IBM, and Coca-Cola (among others) to unveil the extent of knowledge she possessed.

Here’s a medal. Now you’re dead.

On that note, the NSA claiming “work was superceded by the U.S.- U.K. cryptologic exchanges in 1942-43” completely obscures the critical role of Polish codebreakers. I wonder how this keeps happening to extremely important yet humble men in history like Rejewski.

It’s necessary for individuals, regardless of gender, to practice self-limiting humility when discussing their role in intelligence. Seeking attention and recognition for such roles is generally considered inappropriate, and yet we see men far earlier and more often breaking the most basic rule about breaking rules (e.g. spying often is by definition illegal). It’s not about encouraging women to become boastful too, and rather about protecting the necessary culture where both men and women are expected to refrain from stealing the limelight and instead focus on collective morally justified achievements of the team.

For example, a man received a recognition for supervising Black women at Arlington, while all of them apparently remained unknown and unrecognized.

Whereas stories of their white counterparts have come to light as records have been declassified, the identities of most of Arlington’s Black code breakers remain unknown.

In researching her book, Mundy scoured National Security Agency records, among many other sources, and uncovered only two names of Arlington’s Black women code breakers: Annie Briggs, who headed up the production unit, which worked to identify and decipher codes; and Ethel Just, who led a team of translators.

William Coffee, a Black man, supervised the women and recruited many of them, later winning an award for his wartime leadership.

The percentage of women to men in that photo is typical of codebreakers, if you ask the NSA historians. So let me also make an important point about the book-writing and touring reference in the above article quote:

Mundy scoured National Security Agency records…and uncovered only two names of Arlington’s Black women code breakers

Twenty years before Mundy the NSA Center for Cryptologic History published a book in 2001 called “The Invisible Cryptologists: African-Americans, WWII to 1956″ by Jeannette Williams with Yolande Dickerson (researcher).

In early 1996, the History Center received as a donation a book of rather monotonous photographs of civilian employees at one of NSA’s predecessors receiving citations for important contributions. Out of several hundred photographs, only two included African-Americans – an employee receiving an award from Colonel Preston Corderman (reproduced on page 14) and the same employee posing with his family. […] the war came, and we needed to expand. They bought Arlington Hall, and built two buildings – A Building and B Building – and we moved on Thanksgiving Day of ‘42. I’m not sure when the first blacks came, but Geneva Arthur was one of the early ones [in 1947].

Geneva Arthur.

Just saying, Mundy allegedly “scoured” NSA records and then left out Geneva Arthur in the machine section, a Black woman who rose all the way to being section head before retiring in 1973 as documented in 2001 by the NSA. Annie Briggs and Ethel Just also were mentioned in the same book by the NSA.

I suppose the real question here is whether, like Driscoll, Black women in intelligence became so accomplished they were promoted quietly and intentionally restricted by race into being further buried in secrecy — deciphering Soviet communications on the Venona project based on Genevieve Grotjan’s celebrated work. Yet very unlike the celebrated Grotjan the very many other names have been completely written out of history.

We really have to put this in proper perspective, because it used to be a given that computers meant women and then essential career-motivating factors (e.g. taking care of others, doing the right things, optimism and hope that things were going to get better) were used against them.

In June 1942, when the US government took over Arlington Hall under the War Powers Act to become their center for military intelligence and cryptanalysis, it was an all-female Junior College and boarding school.

A year later something like 2,500 civilians and 800 military staff had been assigned to the station. To put it another way, women codebreakers initially were signed on as lesser civilians, as men directly entered above them into the benefits, recognition and status of being military.

[Eunice Russell Willson Rice] joined the Office of Naval Intelligence as a language analyst in 1935 and transferred to OP-20-G—the Office of Naval Communication’s Code and Cipher Section—as a civilian cryptanalyst in 1939. During WWII, Rice led the team working Italian ciphers and codes, then learned enough Japanese on her own to lead the team charged with recovery and analysis of the vital Japanese Water Transport code.

The monotony of repetitive precision work with letters and numbers (likened to crossword puzzles), let alone huge patterns of tiny thread-like wires, was treated as women’s work and famously called computing. In all aspects of software and hardware, therefore, computers in America initially were being quietly developed and operated predominantly by women as credit flowed into the hands of men around them.

Ms. Blum was one of the pioneers in writing computer software at NSA. She led the effort to recruit Agency employees to learn how to program cryptanalytic techniques. She was aware of and taking advantage of the computer language FORTRAN at least three years before it became publicly available in 1957.

Official American history tells us that IBM released the first commercially available computer language “Formula Translation” (FORTRAN), giving credit to John Backus. Is that right? Probably not.

The NSA tells us instead half-a-century later that Dottie Blum was given a special role at IBM and was developing FORTRAN by 1954. Dottie had for years worked on U.S. Army BOMBE hardware for decoding Enigma, before she worked on the 1950 Standards Easter Automatic Computer (SEAC). Therefore her seasoned influence into FORTRAN is likely much larger than ever stated, just like her mostly unknown colleague Henriette Avram (who also wrote programs for the IBM 701) much later was credited only with developing MARC.

These are the giants of history we know a little about, leaving the large question of what the ghosted Black women of Arlington Hall accomplished that made their secrecy so important. Were they just trying to stay alive by never revealing what they knew about notoriously racist American private sector corporations who had backed Hitler, or trying to fit into a work environment that did little to prohibit or end racism?

According to [chief of the Russian plaintext exploitation branch in 1948] Jack Gurin, the critical need for clerical support prompted him to approach the personnel officer with a request for additional typists. He was told that “Code 1’s” were not available, but “Code 2’s” could be obtained. The coding, it was explained, was used on personnel records to designate race. “Code 1” was white; “Code 2” was “colored.” On the advice of the personnel officer, Gurin discussed with the existing branch personnel the possibility of bringing “Negroes” into the unit. One person, “a very dignified, good-looking Alabama lady, objected, stating that she could not ‘sit next to a colored person and work’.” Gurin relocated her desk…

Jack Gurin, anti-racist agent of change, stands as a good example of white men we should also hear more about.

But what were the names of all the Black women and what credit are they missing? The NSA notoriously built a reputation of hiring single young white women from the American south. I mean Black women apparently were instrumental in monitoring private sector companies during WWII yet afterwards we hear only about white women tasked and trusted with big IBM research roles…

I came to be interviewed at Arlington Hall in 1951, and there was a woman. I don’t know her name, but she was white… she vowed that I would not be ‘going down in the hole’… Most of the blacks at that time were assigned to the basement.

From the outset, it was evident to anyone with basic knowledge of urban dynamics that Uber would have negative effects on cities. It’s not a matter of complex calculations; it’s a fundamental principle of urban transportation. Increasing the number of cars on the road leads to more problems.

The same common sense reasoning suggests that RoboTaxis will likely exacerbate these issues.

Even MIT has acknowledged its mistake in endorsing Uber, as they were so juiced on Utopia they failed to recognize the glaring warning signs.

This utopian vision was not only compelling but within reach. After publishing our results, we started the first collaboration between MIT and Uber to research a then-new product: Uber Pool (now rebranded UberX Share), a service that allows riders to share cars when heading to similar destinations for a lower cost.

One thing that really bothers me is when people discuss Utopia like this as if they are working on a tangible reality. The term itself, derived from Latin, essentially means to go nowhere. The term was coined by Sir Thomas More in 1516 in his book of the same name. It is a combination of two Greek words, “ou” (meaning “not”) and “topos” (meaning “place”), which roughly translates to “no place” or “nowhere.” MIT’s “utopian vision” of cars was going nowhere, by definition!

Considering this, MIT might want to consider reimbursing students’ tuition fees if they’re teaching that achieving utopian vision is feasible, and the end is neigh. Honestly, one might as well attend church for free instead of paying stupid money to MIT, if it’s just study of compelling unattainable beliefs.

MIT’s fixation on the dogma of revolution through detached-STEM thinking (pun intended) totally neglected the intricate, real-world dynamics of human behavior within complex systems. This classic mistake is exactly what prompted formation of a Fabian Society in London in 1884, an anti-upheaval (gradualism of social reform) organization that successfully has handled such issues for a significant stretch of time.

In an article brimming with STEM remorse about falling for the false profits of Uber (pun intended), MIT emphatically cautions now against getting involved with RoboTaxis.

Our research was technically right, but we had not taken into account changes in human behavior. Cars are more convenient and comfortable than walking, buses and subways — and that is why they are so popular. Make them even cheaper through ride-sharing and people are coaxed away from those other forms of transit. This dynamic became clear in the data a few years later: On average, ride-hailing trips generated far more traffic and 69% more carbon dioxide than the trips they displaced. We were proud of our contribution to ride-sharing but dismayed to see the results of a 2018 study that found that Uber Pool was so cheap it increased overall city travel: For every mile of personal driving it removed, it added 2.6 miles of people who otherwise would have taken another mode of transportation. As robotaxis are on the cusp of proliferating across the world, we are about to repeat the same mistake, but at a far greater scale.

Ah, the sweet taste of pride. Often followed by a not-so-graceful tumble, right? But seriously, why was MIT “proud of our contribution to ride-sharing”?

The correlation between an increase in subsidized cars and heightened traffic congestion seems like an obvious observation. Individuals from places as distant as Davis (a three-hour journey) were opting to “commute” to San Francisco, not for conventional employment but to essentially circle the city, nap in their vehicles, and contribute to the issue of public defecation while serving as “drivers” for those unwilling to walk. The city’s functionality came to a standstill because Uber failed to consider the overall capacity of people on the streets, which was significantly dwindling.

The issue at hand? Once more, it’s the age-old equation: more cars equals more headaches.

This is wisdom older than your grandma’s secret apple pie recipe. It’s not brain surgery; it’s not even “hey, we’re on the brink of utopia” snake-oil salesmanship as ancient as steam engines.

Taxis, or cars in general, really shine when it comes to serving folks who can’t sprint or comfortably hop onto a bus. But when you attempt to cram everyone into a car, you’re basically signing up for a masterclass in waste and inefficiency.

Hold onto your cabriolet hats, folks! The Uber saga was a spectacular display of wastefulness and inefficiency, a saga foreshadowed by centuries of shared transportation history.

• Hacker? England 1625 from Hackney (although some claim French haquenee)
• Cab (Cabriolet)? England 1820 from French cabrioler
• Taxi? Germany 1895 from French taxe

This is not new stuff. Yet in the 2010s instead of taking a leisurely stroll for a few blocks, people decided to gather on bustling street corners, waiting to congest the roads in colossal, empty, self-centered metal boxes, leaving behind a trail of pollution and traffic snarls that could rival a spaghetti monster convention.

I think it’s pretty amazing that these people without scientific backgrounds — or really any education at all — think they have the right to decide the [transit systems]. And it blows my mind that they are getting away with it.

Picture this: an entire city street, maybe even a whole neighborhood, held hostage by the one guy who’s treating his latte frappuccino like it’s a cauldron of magic potion. Meanwhile, his Uber, just a stone’s throw away, has decided to throw a temper tantrum in the middle of the road, blocking all traffic while screaming at the top of its metallic lungs, “CHAD! Anyone, anywhere, please tell me if you’ve seen a CHAD! I’m here, waiting for CHAD!”

It’s like a scene from a sitcom where the latte-sipping wizard and the rogue Uber car team up to create a traffic jam worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy. “To honk or not to honk, that is the question!” No five-star ratings allowed by the thousands of people inconvenienced by the stupid “ride-hailing app” performances they have to witness.

Ah, the history lesson of the ages! People were grappling with this conundrum for centuries, especially when those old-timey hackney cabs were turning city streets into chaos. Then, like a dazzling revelation from the 1800s, we discovered that buses, streetcars, and subways were the real MVPs. We all have places to be, so you hop on board, take a seat, and zip your lip. It works wonders because we’re all in this together, not stuck in that backward world of cutthroat competition like Uber.

For god’s sake they even named the stupid company Uber. How could the disaster of callous capitalist nihilism be any less obvious?

The whole ride-share “explosion” felt like a group of overconfident, privileged guys who missed the memo on history, thinking they could throw billions at reinventing the wheel and somehow make it less, well, wheel-like. I was there, both inside and outside those companies, shaking my head in disbelief.

Around 2012, it seemed like I was a lone tech warrior resisting the awful siren call of Uber, amidst meetings with dozens of big-shot executives running billion-dollar empires. They were all in, betting our fortunes on Uber, while I stood my engineering ground armed with the simple wisdom of human behavior studies. I’d show up with train tickets and bus receipts, each sporting single-digit price tags, and they laughed at my “lesser” status while they casually tossed around hundreds and more for an Uber ride.

At one point I found myself in an exclusive invitation to Uber’s HQ, where they rolled out the red carpet and asked me to help lead their security team. I decided to go out of courtesy and a dash of curiosity. But as soon as they started pitching their grand plan — “We want to be as indispensable as water, so people can’t survive without paying us…” — I felt like I was in a bad sci-fi Dystopia (lesser Utopia) and made a hasty exit, practically diving for the door.

“Let them ride in cake,” did you say?!

Approximately ten years later, while strolling through the streets of San Francisco, one of the original developers of Uber made a startling confession to me. They admitted that their early product design was shockingly naive. In their detached-STEM enthusiasm, they believed that constantly harvesting sensitive personal data through various sensors (such as geolocation, motion, video, and microphones) during every car ride, essentially engaging in covert surveillance of customers without their knowledge, would somehow benefit society. However, they acknowledged that they eventually had to leave the project when they came to the stark realization that this approach was a grave ethical error: creating an app pretending to be essential for survival while relentlessly spying on users for profit.

So here we are, MIT advising us to study human behavior to predict, well… known human behavior. Makes perfect sense to me. What took them so long? I guess they had to stop believing.

Now, if you’re dealing with a disability, a robotaxi might make as much sense as a luxurious, oversized wheelchair or, heck, even an elevator (vertical subway car) instead of stairs. But for the rest of us, it’s time to put on those walking shoes, head to the train, and stop being the roadblock to progress!

A train to a remote office in Connecticut was no joke, for example, a logistical maze in America’s shameless suburban planning system. I arrived early using a $18 train from NYC and finding a local bus that cost me $3 for the last mile, walking a sidewalk from the stop to the door. The other executive pulled up behind, sweaty, late and barking “no problem, it was only $200 for my Uber but we got some bad traffic”. He should have been fired on the spot.

Despite decades of working in Silicon Valley, working inside the largest and most successful tech companies, to this day I’ve taken only one Uber ride. As soon I as I stepped in it, I knew it was wrong. The Fabians probably would have just said: “no shit Sherlock”.