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Les Earnest's original 1986 "bboard" posting of this story, and other related ones, are to be found in the dump of the Sail backup tapes archived at https://www

Les Earnest's original 1986 "bboard" posting of this story, and other related ones, are to be found in the dump of the Sail backup tapes archived at https://www.saildart.org/BB.MSG[MSG,LES] https://www.saildart.org/BB.MSG[MSG,LES] Search for "Finger flex" / "e-t-a-o-i-n Spy", "Kick the Mongrel" / "White Faces in New Places", and "The Missed Punch" / "Mongrel in a Star-chamber" for the the F.B.I. and security clearance entries. As one might imagine from these stories, he's quite a character, and still alive at 92 (according to Stanford and Wikipedia).

ceautery 4y ago
Yep, still alive. He plans on being shot in the back while fleeing from a jealous husband in 2043, according to his Stanford bio[1] 1 - https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/ https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/
- neilv 4y ago
  This is great. From one of those pages: > Now with 55 years hindsight I realize that both our study group and the government nuclear safety committee overlooked other possibilities such as that a malevolent programmer might have been able to launch a missile all by himself. There was no certainty that such a scheme would have worked inasmuch as the SAGE software was reviewed by multiple people who might have questioned any odd-looking code. Nevertheless, we should have considered that possibility and taken steps to ensure that it didn’t happen. The reason we didn’t was that there was no such thing as a malevolent programmer in that era (1950s and ‘60s) – we were all honest, upright, and altruistic, so the idea that a programmer might sneak in evil code was inconceivable. Later experiences on the Internet have revealed other possibilities. IIRC, Bertrand Russell had an observation about Western philosophers on a related question: they had a blind spot, in that they extrapolated too much from themselves, who weren't representative of everyone.

ceautery 4y ago

Yep, still alive. He plans on being shot in the back while fleeing from a jealous husband in 2043, according to his Stanford bio[1] 1 - https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/ https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/

neilv 4y ago
This is great. From one of those pages: > Now with 55 years hindsight I realize that both our study group and the government nuclear safety committee overlooked other possibilities such as that a malevolent programmer might have been able to launch a missile all by himself. There was no certainty that such a scheme would have worked inasmuch as the SAGE software was reviewed by multiple people who might have questioned any odd-looking code. Nevertheless, we should have considered that possibility and taken steps to ensure that it didn’t happen. The reason we didn’t was that there was no such thing as a malevolent programmer in that era (1950s and ‘60s) – we were all honest, upright, and altruistic, so the idea that a programmer might sneak in evil code was inconceivable. Later experiences on the Internet have revealed other possibilities. IIRC, Bertrand Russell had an observation about Western philosophers on a related question: they had a blind spot, in that they extrapolated too much from themselves, who weren't representative of everyone.