Re: Bobby Inman

[karn (Phil Karn)]

Inman's first job after retiring from his spook's life in the Navy was
to start MCC in Austin, TX. I saw him speak in 1984 at Bell Labs
Murray Hill shortly after the AT&T divestiture, before Bellcore got
its own facilities.  He was there to sign up Bellcore for MCC
membership, although we didn't know it yet.

He gave an almost content-free talk about "regaining America's
technological leadership" or something like that. When he finished, I
got up and asked him how he could reconcile his stated need to lead
the world in high technology with a DoD-dominated export control
system specifically geared to keeping us from selling those very
technologies in which we lead the world.  He waffled like a classic
politician. I was still trying to decipher his answer long after he
finished.

After MCC, I think he went to Westmark, a defense contractor. He also
showed up on at least one Baby Bell board of directors (SW Bell?). As
a shareholder, I made it a point to specifically withhold my vote for
him when the proxies got mailed out.  (To be sure, big corporation
proxies are about as meaningful as ballots in a Communist election,
but what the hell -- unlike the Publishers' Clearinghouse sweepstakes,
at least they pay postage.  Eventually I started voting against ALL of
the directors on all of the Bell proxies, just for the hell of it.)

After what Inman tried to do to civilian crypto in the late 1970s, the
word "slime" keeps coming to mind. But then again, there are plenty of
Inmans in the military-industrial complex.

Phil