The Computermen
The Last Archive
Pushkin Industries
4.6 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 25 June 2020
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1966, just as the foundations of the Internet were being imagined, the federal government considered building a National Data Center. It would be a centralized federal facility to hold computer records from each federal agency, in the same way that the Library of Congress holds books and the National Archives holds manuscripts. Proponents argued that it would help regulate and compile the vast quantities of data the government was collecting. Quickly, though, fears about privacy, government conspiracies, and government ineptitude buried the idea. But now, that National Data Center looks like a missed opportunity to create rules about data and privacy before the Internet took off. And in the absence of government action, corporations have made those rules themselves.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pushkin. |
| 0:07.0 | Imagine there's a place in our world where the known things go. |
| 0:19.0 | Like old modems, or at the end of this brightly lit hallway, towers of computer servers, a little |
| 0:27.8 | city of miniature skyscrapers. This vault, this data center, stores the facts that matter and matters of fact. |
| 0:37.7 | It's all that stands between a reasonable doubt and the chaos of uncertainty. |
| 0:43.0 | The sign on the door reads, |
| 0:45.0 | The Last Archive. |
| 0:47.0 | Step through the door to Washington, D.C. |
| 0:52.0 | Capitol Hill, July 26, 1966, a Tuesday. The United States was |
| 1:00.0 | mired in a terrible war in Vietnam. Americans were engaged in a struggle for civil rights at home. |
| 1:06.2 | There'd been riots on the streets of American cities, |
| 1:09.3 | protests of all kinds, anti-war marches, student demonstrations. To a lot of people, I felt as if the |
| 1:16.6 | country was coming apart. Inside the office building of the House of Representatives, |
| 1:22.6 | Room 2247, hearings were about to begin. |
| 1:26.7 | Hearings that weren't about any of those protests. |
| 1:30.1 | Hearings that were about computer data. |
| 1:34.0 | The subcommittee will come to order. |
| 1:37.0 | Just after 10 a.m. |
| 1:38.0 | Cornelius E. Gallagher, a Democratic congressman from New Jersey took his seat. |
| 1:44.0 | The Special Subcommittee on Invasion of Privacy today begins its investigation into proposals to establish |
| 1:49.5 | a national data center. |
| 1:51.2 | A centralized facility within the structure of the national government, |
... |
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