9 ms·

Little known fact, but all you have to do is ask not to be contacted, watched, etc. - and the FBI will respect your request and note it in your file. (Okay, en

Little known fact, but all you have to do is ask not to be contacted, watched, etc. - and the FBI will respect your request and note it in your file. (Okay, ending sarcasm.) Find it hard to believe they stopped, reads more like a note saying to stop keeping "official" records.

colechristensen 10y ago
Seems more like Feynman got the attention of upper management to some overzealous low-level agents.
- saycheese 10y ago
  Back then, the FBI had a nasty habit of keeping files at field offices in such an insecure ways that it would have been very easy for some with Feynman's skills to get access to if they wanted; clearly there would have been a risk of getting caught, but likely small for someone like Feynman.
  - UnoriginalGuy 10y ago
    > been very easy for some with Feynman's skills to get access to if they wanted I thought Feynman was a physicist. What skills are you speaking of? Was he a spy in a former life or something?
    - theandrewbailey 10y ago
      He had safe-cracking skills, apparently. Also, he was a well respected person that could have pulled off social engineering.
    - lb1lf 10y ago
      In (I think, it has been a while since I read it) "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman ", a collection of anecdotes from his life, he states he - to prove how inadequate (not to say pointless) security measures at Los Alamos were, he made a habit of opening safes he shouldn't have access to only to leave cryptic notes or objects in it for the safe owner to find and puzzle over.
    - fossuser 10y ago
      You should read "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" which is referenced in another comment. There's an entire section about him messing around with the safes at Los Alamos (he explains his simple methods for cracking them and the fun he had doing it/tricking people into thinking he was a safe cracking master).
    - squeaky-clean 10y ago
      He had a hobby of safe-cracking. There's a funny chapter in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" where he recounts the lousy security during the Manhattan project. He would gather top secret documents or reports (usually ones he had permission to see, he just didn't bother to request it, IIRC) and leave notes like "Feynman the Safecracker borrowed Document ABC123", and as they upped the security, he would just keep managing to get access to the files. It was usually silly things, like locking one cabinet drawer, but not an adjacent one, so someone with long enough arms could just reach into the cabinetry and get their hand inside the other drawer. Or just knowing the birthday of the person whose safe he wanted to crack, and 90% of the time that was the combination. I think in one incident, the safe was just simply left unlocked. But of course, Feynman doesn't disclose those little details to the people around him, and quickly became known as a lockpicking legend. Edit: He also was an artist who sold several works, and an avid percussionist who played with groups in Brazil, and many other things I'm forgetting. I'd really recommend reading "Surely You're Joking" or any other book about him, his life is incredible and hilarious.
      - macintux 10y ago
        "Surely You're Joking" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think" are astonishingly funny and poignant memoirs. Can't recommend them highly enough.
      - baddox 10y ago
        In one instance I believe he just tried every combination in order over the course of several days. From what I remember, he reflects humorously on his reputation as a brilliant safe cracker when he really just had a little patience.
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - pinkythepig 10y ago
      He was prone to 'rattling the bars' so to speak and out of boredom, learned how to break the 'secure' file cabinets/safes that all the top secret stuff was kept in. Basically, all of the combination locks had 2 digits of leeway. So if your first code was 20, you could set the lock to anything from 18 - 22 and it would still open. This meant that instead of the locks having 100 x 100 x 100 = 1,000,000 combinations, they instead had something closer to 20 x 20 x 20 = 8000 combinations. He would then brute force the 8000 combinations through a combination of trying the more likely ones first and if that failed, just brute forcing it over a few hours. The locks were made easier to brute force in that unlike modern locks, the 3 combinations would be input on 3 separate dials so you can set the first two to the 'right' value, then just spin the third while attempting the handle at the same time. This meant you could try literally every possible combination in ~10 hours of work. As for an example of easy ones would be a birthday or anniversary. - code 1 = day 1-30(6 combos) - code 2 = month 1-12(3 combos) - code 3 = year 1-99 (20 combos) (This would likely be 9-10 combos if he accounted for the distribution of likely dates) So to try every date combo, you would only need to try 360 attempts in the worst case.
      - digler999 10y ago
        I would imagine if you kept notice of what number series was left on the locked safe, it would leak a little bit of info. for instance, if the last number of the combo is 42, but when its locked you consistently see the number 10, its likely the person spins the dial a predictable number of times each time he locks it. all you'd need is to observe him -from a distance- locking it and count the number of spins and you'd have a good guess what the last number is. then there's the paddle technique, not sure what its called, but after the first number is set, the 2nd number has to be at least past the point where you feel the "paddle" contact the 2nd wheel in the series. Higher-end safes counter this somehow.
      - VLM 10y ago
        Over the last 20-30 years there have been innumerable microcontroller projects involving a stepper motor and a servo and very recently some 3d printed parts to open combo locks. Its an interesting real world project. At my high school some decades ago we had the 3-turn 0-39 master locks but mfgr sloppiness meant there were really only ten or so possibilities and if you knew the last digit you only had perhaps 100 or so combos to try which doesn't take long. A frenemy of mine got into a practical joke war and my friends collected tens of thousands of magazine subscription cards from the school library over the course of weeks and filled his locker with them when I finally brute forced the lock. He responded by filling my locker with many thousands of 4-40 sided machine tool nuts and some washers fed in thru the top ventilation slots. Well, it all seemed like a good idea at the time. Small time barely noteworthy events happened all the time like remove the lock and attach it to the locker upside down, or replace it with a different lock, or swap it with a neighbors lock, or remove and/or change the numbers on the locker door. Oh another move was breaking into a locker, and respectfully not touching any personal property but disassembling the interior of the locker such that the victim no longer had a coat hanging hook.
okreallywtf 10y ago
The sad thing being how much harassment essentially went on and how pointless it was given that the soviets detonated a bomb just a few years after it was invented. I don't know what else you can do, there must I assume be some security measures but it only seems to make things marginally harder for proper Russian intelligence agents and informants to get information out. I guess it does increase the barrier-to-entry so that not just any 3rd world intelligence agency can steal nuclear secrets. By cyber-security standards the physical and information security measures taken during the Manhattan project were pretty amazingly pointless. They did a good job of keeping the process of enriching uranium secret from the regular folks that worked on it, but that just kept them from going home and talking to their friends. The scientists working at Los Alamos knew an incredible amount about what was going on and therefore represented single points of failure. If a spy had been able to infiltrate Oak Ridge, granted they wouldn't have gotten to see many steps of the process but the fact that lay-people didn't know what they were working on didn't mean much. The main security for the project probably lay in the fact that economically no other nations involved in WW2 could have attempted such a program, even with day-by-day updates of exactly what we were doing. By the time the kinks were worked out it would have been way too late for any other entities to attempt to copy it.
- lostlogin 10y ago
  > The sad thing being how much harassment essentially went on The past tense implies the intelligence community is better behaved now. The old threat was communism, now it's terrorism.
  - Pica_soO 10y ago
    Somebody has to employ all those high-school bully's. Else they would be standing at crossroads, doing stick-ups.
- kirrent 10y ago
  Counterintelligence projects were the reason Klaus Fuchs was caught so I don't know if you can say any specific program is pointless because it was unsuccessful. Maybe you need to cast a lot of rods to catch these fish. Obviously he wasn't caught by the FBI but it certainly made it more than marginally harder for the Soviets when an extremely well placed and high value asset is caught.
VLM 10y ago
The article wasn't what I expected because having read my share of Feynman I would totally expect him to have typed up that J Edgar Hoover memo by himself, signed it himself, and mailed it to the manager of the local FBI office just to see what happens. I would be surprised if he's the first guy to try that. The trick with social engineering people back in those days was getting the typewritten formats identical. Being Feynman all he would have needed was one actual memo to copy from and away he goes.
gozur88 10y ago
>Little known fact, but all you have to do is ask not to be contacted You can absolutely refuse to talk to the FBI. Security services are in a bind when it comes to people like Feynman. On the one hand, experienced agents would have known this guy was no Soviet spy. On the other, every time someone makes an accusation they're sort of duty bound to at least ask him about it, because if it later turns out he is up to something nefarious people will accuse them of ignoring the evidence. That's just how bureaucracies work, and you don't move up in that sort of environment by ignoring the ground rules. I suspect whoever was charged with running down poison whispers was perfectly happy to be ordered to stop. They got to stop wasting time and concentrate on stuff that might matter, while at the same time on the outside chance it came back to bite them they had documentation of being ordered to ignore him, effectively shuffling the blame up the ladder.

colechristensen 10y ago

Seems more like Feynman got the attention of upper management to some overzealous low-level agents.

saycheese 10y ago
Back then, the FBI had a nasty habit of keeping files at field offices in such an insecure ways that it would have been very easy for some with Feynman's skills to get access to if they wanted; clearly there would have been a risk of getting caught, but likely small for someone like Feynman.
- UnoriginalGuy 10y ago
  > been very easy for some with Feynman's skills to get access to if they wanted I thought Feynman was a physicist. What skills are you speaking of? Was he a spy in a former life or something?
  - theandrewbailey 10y ago
    He had safe-cracking skills, apparently. Also, he was a well respected person that could have pulled off social engineering.
  - lb1lf 10y ago
    In (I think, it has been a while since I read it) "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman ", a collection of anecdotes from his life, he states he - to prove how inadequate (not to say pointless) security measures at Los Alamos were, he made a habit of opening safes he shouldn't have access to only to leave cryptic notes or objects in it for the safe owner to find and puzzle over.
  - fossuser 10y ago
    You should read "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman" which is referenced in another comment. There's an entire section about him messing around with the safes at Los Alamos (he explains his simple methods for cracking them and the fun he had doing it/tricking people into thinking he was a safe cracking master).
  - squeaky-clean 10y ago
    He had a hobby of safe-cracking. There's a funny chapter in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" where he recounts the lousy security during the Manhattan project. He would gather top secret documents or reports (usually ones he had permission to see, he just didn't bother to request it, IIRC) and leave notes like "Feynman the Safecracker borrowed Document ABC123", and as they upped the security, he would just keep managing to get access to the files. It was usually silly things, like locking one cabinet drawer, but not an adjacent one, so someone with long enough arms could just reach into the cabinetry and get their hand inside the other drawer. Or just knowing the birthday of the person whose safe he wanted to crack, and 90% of the time that was the combination. I think in one incident, the safe was just simply left unlocked. But of course, Feynman doesn't disclose those little details to the people around him, and quickly became known as a lockpicking legend. Edit: He also was an artist who sold several works, and an avid percussionist who played with groups in Brazil, and many other things I'm forgetting. I'd really recommend reading "Surely You're Joking" or any other book about him, his life is incredible and hilarious.
    - macintux 10y ago
      "Surely You're Joking" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think" are astonishingly funny and poignant memoirs. Can't recommend them highly enough.
    - baddox 10y ago
      In one instance I believe he just tried every combination in order over the course of several days. From what I remember, he reflects humorously on his reputation as a brilliant safe cracker when he really just had a little patience.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - pinkythepig 10y ago
    He was prone to 'rattling the bars' so to speak and out of boredom, learned how to break the 'secure' file cabinets/safes that all the top secret stuff was kept in. Basically, all of the combination locks had 2 digits of leeway. So if your first code was 20, you could set the lock to anything from 18 - 22 and it would still open. This meant that instead of the locks having 100 x 100 x 100 = 1,000,000 combinations, they instead had something closer to 20 x 20 x 20 = 8000 combinations. He would then brute force the 8000 combinations through a combination of trying the more likely ones first and if that failed, just brute forcing it over a few hours. The locks were made easier to brute force in that unlike modern locks, the 3 combinations would be input on 3 separate dials so you can set the first two to the 'right' value, then just spin the third while attempting the handle at the same time. This meant you could try literally every possible combination in ~10 hours of work. As for an example of easy ones would be a birthday or anniversary. - code 1 = day 1-30(6 combos) - code 2 = month 1-12(3 combos) - code 3 = year 1-99 (20 combos) (This would likely be 9-10 combos if he accounted for the distribution of likely dates) So to try every date combo, you would only need to try 360 attempts in the worst case.
    - digler999 10y ago
      I would imagine if you kept notice of what number series was left on the locked safe, it would leak a little bit of info. for instance, if the last number of the combo is 42, but when its locked you consistently see the number 10, its likely the person spins the dial a predictable number of times each time he locks it. all you'd need is to observe him -from a distance- locking it and count the number of spins and you'd have a good guess what the last number is. then there's the paddle technique, not sure what its called, but after the first number is set, the 2nd number has to be at least past the point where you feel the "paddle" contact the 2nd wheel in the series. Higher-end safes counter this somehow.
    - VLM 10y ago
      Over the last 20-30 years there have been innumerable microcontroller projects involving a stepper motor and a servo and very recently some 3d printed parts to open combo locks. Its an interesting real world project. At my high school some decades ago we had the 3-turn 0-39 master locks but mfgr sloppiness meant there were really only ten or so possibilities and if you knew the last digit you only had perhaps 100 or so combos to try which doesn't take long. A frenemy of mine got into a practical joke war and my friends collected tens of thousands of magazine subscription cards from the school library over the course of weeks and filled his locker with them when I finally brute forced the lock. He responded by filling my locker with many thousands of 4-40 sided machine tool nuts and some washers fed in thru the top ventilation slots. Well, it all seemed like a good idea at the time. Small time barely noteworthy events happened all the time like remove the lock and attach it to the locker upside down, or replace it with a different lock, or swap it with a neighbors lock, or remove and/or change the numbers on the locker door. Oh another move was breaking into a locker, and respectfully not touching any personal property but disassembling the interior of the locker such that the victim no longer had a coat hanging hook.

okreallywtf 10y ago

The sad thing being how much harassment essentially went on and how pointless it was given that the soviets detonated a bomb just a few years after it was invented. I don't know what else you can do, there must I assume be some security measures but it only seems to make things marginally harder for proper Russian intelligence agents and informants to get information out. I guess it does increase the barrier-to-entry so that not just any 3rd world intelligence agency can steal nuclear secrets. By cyber-security standards the physical and information security measures taken during the Manhattan project were pretty amazingly pointless. They did a good job of keeping the process of enriching uranium secret from the regular folks that worked on it, but that just kept them from going home and talking to their friends. The scientists working at Los Alamos knew an incredible amount about what was going on and therefore represented single points of failure. If a spy had been able to infiltrate Oak Ridge, granted they wouldn't have gotten to see many steps of the process but the fact that lay-people didn't know what they were working on didn't mean much. The main security for the project probably lay in the fact that economically no other nations involved in WW2 could have attempted such a program, even with day-by-day updates of exactly what we were doing. By the time the kinks were worked out it would have been way too late for any other entities to attempt to copy it.

lostlogin 10y ago
> The sad thing being how much harassment essentially went on The past tense implies the intelligence community is better behaved now. The old threat was communism, now it's terrorism.
- Pica_soO 10y ago
  Somebody has to employ all those high-school bully's. Else they would be standing at crossroads, doing stick-ups.
kirrent 10y ago
Counterintelligence projects were the reason Klaus Fuchs was caught so I don't know if you can say any specific program is pointless because it was unsuccessful. Maybe you need to cast a lot of rods to catch these fish. Obviously he wasn't caught by the FBI but it certainly made it more than marginally harder for the Soviets when an extremely well placed and high value asset is caught.

VLM 10y ago

The article wasn't what I expected because having read my share of Feynman I would totally expect him to have typed up that J Edgar Hoover memo by himself, signed it himself, and mailed it to the manager of the local FBI office just to see what happens. I would be surprised if he's the first guy to try that. The trick with social engineering people back in those days was getting the typewritten formats identical. Being Feynman all he would have needed was one actual memo to copy from and away he goes.

gozur88 10y ago

>Little known fact, but all you have to do is ask not to be contacted You can absolutely refuse to talk to the FBI. Security services are in a bind when it comes to people like Feynman. On the one hand, experienced agents would have known this guy was no Soviet spy. On the other, every time someone makes an accusation they're sort of duty bound to at least ask him about it, because if it later turns out he is up to something nefarious people will accuse them of ignoring the evidence. That's just how bureaucracies work, and you don't move up in that sort of environment by ignoring the ground rules. I suspect whoever was charged with running down poison whispers was perfectly happy to be ordered to stop. They got to stop wasting time and concentrate on stuff that might matter, while at the same time on the outside chance it came back to bite them they had documentation of being ordered to ignore him, effectively shuffling the blame up the ladder.