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LT: You graduated in 1976 from UCLA in economics, and eventually you became a cybersecurity specialist.

GI: Yeah, after college, I didn't know what to do for work, so I got a job at California First Bank, which was the renamed Bank of Tokyo, into their manager training program. But it was so constrained because I would have all these ideas on how they can improve procedures, but then I would find out that you had to be a vice president there for ten years before they would even entertain any kind of ideas for change. So being kind of an innovative type of person, that wasn't working out, and my boss could see that, so he fired me. And I thought, I've gone to school, I spent all this time, I can't even pay my loan up. And that was part of the honor, duty thing, you had to pay your student loan off, right, without question. So I thought, well, what is it that I don't, skill that I haven't learned? And I thought, well, computers were a big, coming to be a big thing, computer programming. But I was traumatized back in junior college where I was a math department assistant, and one of my tasks was to write a program, demonstrate the benefits of the computer using this very obscure computer programming language, which I did, but it was so hard that I promised myself I would never get near a computer again. But here I was, faced with this dilemma, and I decided to go to Control Data Corporation, and I was the first to finish their brand new curriculum. And so they had a placement service, and one day they said, "Oh, well, this guy is coming down from Computer Sciences Corporation, and he wants to look at your work and he wants to fly you back to where they are located to interview you with the rest of his team there." So I said, "Okay," and then I flew back in this little tiny airplane that was just buffeted the whole way. And we ended up in Ridgecrest, and people might know the name Ridgecrest because that's near Searles Corner, where the recent earthquakes were, it's right next door. And Computer Sciences had the contract with the Naval Weapons Center to do their administrative programming and that sort of thing. So I guess they were impressed by abilities, and they nicknamed me Crunch, that was my, kind of, military-ish handle, because they would just give me the hardest problems and I would just crunch them to death. And, of course, I didn't know it, but that was because of this whole thing since I was thirteen, that was my thing, that was my way of doing things that I learned. So then they sent me over to work on this top secret project, and that was pretty wild. And if any of the people watching this know the Terminator movies, there was something called Skynet where all the weapons of the world are automated and have achieved self-awareness. And the project that I was working on could be thought of as the genesis of what ultimately became the mythical Skynet, because that was my job. I mean, I could talk about it now even though it was top secret because you knew something like that had to exist. I can't tell you about the details, but that was my job, was to develop that program. So I was right in the ground floor of all this cyber stuff and security stuff because it was top secret. But interestingly enough, because of my activist background, and I imagine my father's FBI background, I was never cleared as top secret. I was there for eighteen months, I took a master's degree course in computer sciences from Bill Lane, the dean of the school of engineering from Cal State Chico. He would winter down in the desert and teach this class on the side. And... I kind of lost my train of thought there.

LT: But from 1983 to 2013, for thirty years, you were a data security specialist.

GI: Oh, okay, I'm trying to make this as short as possible. Okay, so let me just kind of transition to... so I saw a little ad in the paper, U.C. Irvine Library needs a senior programmer at, like almost twice the pay that I was making out in the desert, so I had to go. So I left my friends back... and it was about the top secret thing. So while I was on vacation in Hawaii, I asked Jan, the HR lady, "Hey, if my top secret clearance ever comes through, give me a call or page me." Because I had to carry a pager around for another couple of months after I left in case they needed me to do something. So while I was in Hawaii she paged me and said, "Hey, your top secret clearance finally came through." And the reason being either, or both, my father's record and my anti-war civil rights records was kind of delaying my top secret clearance, but I got cleared. So I went to UC Irvine and I automated the library systems there. And for various reasons, I went to work at National Education Corporation and did some pioneering computer work there and then I went to City National Bank because I was tired of managers telling me, "Where's the code, where's the code?" No, you need systems design and testing and planning and implementation, you need a project. This is not just the code. So I became, I hired as a quality assurance analyst. But at the same time, this movie, War Games, which is one of the most famous cyber movies that was ever made of these kids hacking into NORAD and almost causing World War III, that movie was funded by City National Bank, which is known around the world as the banker to the stars. Anybody in the media banks and City National Bank because they tailor their services toward the entertainment industry. So Graham Goldsmith said, "Hey, I just made this film, and we need a data security review." And then they go, "Hey, what about that new guy, Gary? He was at the Naval Weapons Center and UC Irvine." So they assigned me the task of doing a data security review. I had no idea what it was, so I researched it, came back a month later and met with the leaders of the information technology infrastructure. And I said, "You need a data security," well, "You have pretty good security, but because technology is changing so fast, you really need to assign somebody to track down what needs to be done next and you need to meet, like, on a periodic basis with the same management team." And then one of the managers goes, "Well, I guess that's you, Gary." And they all laughed kind of under their breath, and, "Don't worry about it, that's how things work here, we just write our own tickets." And I've basically been writing my own ticket ever since.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.