An Evolution of Views

My work in the multilevel database security area began in 1982, when Marv Schaefer invited me to be on the steering committee for the Air Force Summer Study on Multilevel Data Management Security, to be held at Woods Hole. At the time, I was on the faculty at Purdue University, where I had spent the past several years working on the statistical database problem (protecting sensitive data released in the form of aggregate statistics). I had just finished my book and was glad to have the opportunity to see whether my earlier work would apply to the multilevel database problem. We had several committee meetings prior to the workshop, during which time we discussed the problem, determined whom to invite and how to structure the workshop, and listened to briefings from various government agencies. At first I found the meetings hard to follow; acronyms (RADC, CECOM, WWMCCS, Blacker, …) were flying by at a rate faster than I could catch them, but gradually I began to make some sense out of them.