Dr.Raj Reddy, now an American citizen enjoying the highest security clearance of the Pentagon, graduated in engineering from the Guindy Engineering College (now called the Anna University) of the Madras University in 1958 and then went to Australia where he obtained the Mtech from the University of New South Wales in 1960.
After having worked in Australia for three years as an Applied Science Representative of the IBM Corporation of the US, he went to the US in 1963 to study Computer Science in the Stanford University, obtaining his doctorate in 1966. He worked there as an Assistant Professor for three years.
In 1969, he joined the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) of Pittsburgh as an Associate Professor of Computer Science and was promoted as a full Professor in 1973 and as a University Professor in 1984. He was named as the Simon University Professor in 1992.
In 1979, the Westinghouse Electric Corporation gave a grant of US $ 5 million to start a Robotics Institute at CMU. The CMU made him the founding Director of the Institute in which post he continued till 1991.
Dr. Reddy's hopes of making Pittsburgh the Robotsburgh of the US were partly belied despite close collaboration with the US Energy Department in respect of robots for nuclear power stations and the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA). The highly (in retrospect) optimistic expectations of demand for robots from industries were not fulfilled. Despite the inadequate commercial results, it continues to work on many US Government projects.
In 1991, he became the Dean of the School of Computer Science of the CMU, of which the Robotics Institute is a part, and continued in that post till last year.
In the late 1980s, Dr. Reddy was reported to have helped
Dr.V.S.Arunachalam, Scientific Adviser in the Ministry of Defence of the Government of India who was associated with research and development of a sensitive nature and who was the predecessor of Dr.Abdul Kalam, secure a job in the CMU.
Dr. Arunachalam left Government service and joined the CMU to become a Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Engineering & Public Policy, Materials Science and Engineering of the Robotics Institute.
In February 1997, the US President, Mr.Bill Clinton, appointed Dr. Reddy as a member of the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), which has a one-billion dollar budget to promote multi-agency research and development under the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. The Act requires the President to appoint an Advisory Committee to provide advice and information on high-performance computing and communication to the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Mr.Bill Joy, founder and chief scientist of the Sun Microsystems, and Mr.Ken Kennedy, Director of the Centre for Research on Parallel Computation of the Rice University, were appointed by Mr.Clinton as the first co-chairs for two years and they were replaced in August last by Dr.Reddy and Mr.Irving Wladawsky-Berger, General Manager, Internet Division of the IBM Corporation.
Before his appointment, Mr.Kennedy had taken the initiative in the formation of the Houston Area Computational Science Consortium (HACSC) to incorporate high performance computing and virtual reality into the next Internet and to increase the bandwidth capabilities so that full-motion video and new applications can be transferred in real time.
After his appointment, Mr.Kennedy said that one of the aims of the PITAC would be the development of the Next Generation Internet (NGI). In a press interview, he explained the difference between Internet II and NGI as follows: "Internet II is a consortium of US universities that have joined together to establish high-speed connections to one another. It has no formal relationship to the NGI, which is a federal research initiative to establish the technology infrastructure that will be needed to bring the current Internet to bandwidths (amount of information that can be transferred in a second) to 100 or even 1000 times what it is today."
He added: "The Internet II consortium may benefit from the NGI's proposed support for a testbed that would interconnect 100 or more research labs, especially those at universities. However, the NGI support would pay only part of the cost of establishing connections that are needed for the testbed; significant costs would fall on the universities themselves. "
Another important task of the PITAC is to advise the President on the defensive as well as offensive aspects of the information infrastructure security. The defensive aspect is about preventing the penetration of the US' information infrastructure by foreign intelligence agencies and hackers. The offensive aspect is about developing a capability for penetrating the information infrastructure of foreign countries.
It is believed that Dr.Reddy's inclusion in the PITAC is partly because of his expertise in this subject, which has received special attention in the research faculties of the CMU's School of Computer Science under his stewardship. In fact, the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) of the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) of the Pentagon functions in the CMU's School of Computer Science, which is the recipient of regular grants from the Pentagon for research and development in this field.
Published reports of October, 1995, had identified Mr.Dain Gary as the head of the DIA's CERT in the CMU. It is not known who presently heads it. Dr.Bruce Berkowitz, Adjunct Professor of Strategic Studies at the CMU, served in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1978 to 1985 and then as an aide in the Senate Staff Committee on Intelligence from 1985 to 1987.
In a written testimony before the Senate Sub-committee on Communications on March 8,2000, Dr.Reddy explained the measures required for strengthening the information infrastructure security in the US. The testimony had thanked a number of members of the PITAC and others for their suggestions on this subject.
Dr.Arunachalam was one of them.
Apart from his two hats as an academic and as an advisor on information infrastructure security to the US intelligence community and the Pentagon, Dr. Reddy wears a third hat as a participant in business ventures. He used to be, and probably still is, the Chairman of the Board of the Carnegie Group Inc. and a member of Microsoft's Technical Advisory Board. In 1995, he became a member of the Board of Directors of Industry.Net, a company that was merged in 1996, with the AT&T's New Media Services Unit to form Nets Inc, with Dr.Reddy continuing as a member of its Board of Directors.
He is also the Chairman of SEEC.Inc of which Mr. Ravindra Koka is the CEO and has reportedly a link-up with the Satyam Infoway.
On August 10, 1998, Dr.Reddy and
Dr.Arunachalam prepared the first draft of their proposal for a National High Speed Inter-University Data Network for India to be called the Sankhya Vahini, or the River of Knowledge. They explained their objective as follows: "To establish a very high bandwidth all-India national data network and enrich it with educational, healthcare and other knowledge oriented multimedia applications for the technical and economic growth of the nation. Named Sankhya Vahini, this network will be primarily a data network forming the National Backbone, and will initially connect at least 10 metropolitan centres and over 100 universities, institutions of higher learning and research centres. As the speed of the network will be more than 1,000-10,000 times the speed currently available in the country, it will not only be able to meet the research, teaching and learning requirements of educational institutions, but also the high bandwidth data communication needs of other organisations in the commercial, manufacturing and financial sectors….. More than meeting the immediate and fast growing requirements of the country, Sankhya Vahini will also provide the testbed for developing and proving multi-giga bit technologies that will soon become the norm throughout the world in the next decade."
They also said that the network would be set up in phases with the first two phases consisting of the creation of a National Internet Backbone and then a series of Urban Data Networks to be linked to the National Backbone. Their draft also envisaged that this national network be linked to an inter-university high speed data network of the US through the CMU. To start with, they suggested that the Indian Institute of Information Technology of Hyderabad, the Indian Institute of Science of Bangalore and the Indian Institutes of Technology of Chennai and Mumbai become partners of this venture.
Their proposal was approved in principle by the Information Technology Task Force of the Government of India on September 5,1998, and a Memorandum of Understanding was signed in Washington on October 16,1998. The project has since run into controversy on procedural and national security grounds. This paper would restrict itself to some observations having a bearing on the national security aspects only.
The US intelligence community was totally taken by surprise by India's nuclear tests (Pokhran II) of May 1998. An enquiry ordered by the Clinton Administration attributed the failure of the intelligence community to detect the preparations for the tests
to misjudgement of the BJP's determination to have the tests carried out, over-reliance on satellites to detect the preparations, lack of penetration capability in India and successful concealment techniques of Indian scientists.
Intriguingly, within a few weeks of the submission of the enquiry report, this proposal for an US-aided data network in India to be connected with a data network of the CMU surfaced. Since the School of Computer Science of the CMU works in collaboration with the CERT of the DIA of the Pentagon, all its foreign collaboration projects are subject to prior clearance by the Pentagon. This project was apparently cleared without any delay seeing from the rapidity with which the MOU was signed.
After Pokhran I in 1974, Washington has imposed severe restrictions on sensitive technology transfers to India. In the fit of anger after Pokhran II, Washington added to these restrictions, vastly expanded the black list of Indian entities with which co-operation without prior permission was prohibited, refused or cancelled visas to many Indian scientists invited to seminars in the US and issued informal advisories to American scientific institutions freezing interactions with their Indian counterparts,
Since 1974, all projects for sensitive technological collaboration with Indian institutions are subject to security vetting by the US intelligence community followed by a careful examination by an inter-departmental committee, resulting in long and painful delays even in the clearance of legitimate projects of a non-sensitive nature, as one saw from the experience of the Indian Meteorological Department in the 1980s.
When inordinate delays have thus been the norm in all such projects since Pokhran I, the Clinton Administration and its intelligence community do not appear to have created any hurdles or delays in respect of Sankhya Vahini. On the contrary, despite the then prevailing fit of anger over Pokhran II, all clearances in respect of this project seem to have been given in a jiffy between August and October, 1998..
It would be reasonable to infer from this that the US agencies are interested in a quick implementation of this project for their own national security reasons and the only possible reason for this could be their calculation that the US involvement in this network could facilitate their penetration of India's information infrastructure.
The US intelligence community always looks for opportunities for the penetration of the information infrastructure of not only potential adversaries like China, but also allies like the member-countries of the European Union, Australia etc. In 1995, the Australian Navy ordered a temporary suspension of the use of Microsoft software in its establishments following suspicion that the Microsoft was collaborating with the DIA for the penetration of the information infrastructure of the Australian Navy.
The same year, an enquiry ordered by President Jacques Chirac of France into the penetration of the information infrastructure of the French Navy reportedly concluded that the penetration had been done by the Americans. The French authorities alleged that the US intelligence community tried to mislead their investigators by planting false information on them that the penetration was by the Russians.
And, one had seen the recent allegations by the EU countries about the joint Echelon project of the US and British intelligence, not only for telephone tapping, but also for penetrating the information infrastructures of the EU countries.
Against the background of this, the national security implications of the Sankhya Vahini project do not seem to have received the thorough attention they deserved. We may have to pay a heavy price for this one day in the form interference with and distortion of the information infrastructures of our nuclear, missile and other sensitive defence projects by the American experts associated with this project.
For causing such distortions, they don't even have to come to India. They can do so from Pittsburgh by taking advantage of the inter-connectivity between the Indian network and that of the CMU.
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai, E-mail:
[email protected]
Do you also want to guess why he referred to 150 kt while he could have talked abt any number like 60 or 80 or 200 kt ?
