David Daniel Lowman (1921-1999) was a

National Security Agency The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collecti ...

employee, an expert witness in the case that overturned

Hirabayashi v. United States ''Hirabayashi v. United States'', 320 U.S. 81 (1943), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States, United States Supreme Court held that the application of curfews against members of a minority group were constitutional when the nati ...

, and the author of the posthumously published book ''MAGIC: The Untold Story of U.S. Intelligence and the Evacuation of Japanese Residents from the West Coast during World War II''.

Biography

Lowman was a career officer in the National Security Agency. In the 1970s Lowman worked on the declassification of

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

Japanese cable traffic decrypted by the Magic program. Based on his reading of those cables, he criticized the

Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC) was a group of nine people appointed by the U.S. Congress in 1980 to conduct an official governmental study into the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Pr ...

for its conclusion that there had been "no military necessity" in relocating Japanese-Americans into internment camps. In 1985, in a court case brought by

Gordon Hirabayashi was an American sociologist, best known for his principled resistance to the Japanese American internment during World War II, and the court case which bears his name, ''Hirabayashi v. United States''. Early life Hirabayashi was born in Seattl ...

to clear his wartime conviction for refusing to report for relocation, Lowman testified that the United States government had intercepted and decrypted signal traffic from Japan directing officials in the United States to organize spy networks using Japanese-Americans as agents. The court decided in favor of Hirabayashi. Lowman died in April 1999.

Posthumous book

Lowman's book ''MAGIC: The Untold Story of U.S. Intelligence and the Evacuation of Japanese Residents from the West Coast during World War II'' was published posthumously in 2001. ''Magic'' argued that the

internment of Japanese Americans Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simply ...

was justified based on intercepted communications that indicated a spy network operating on the American West Coast. The book was published by Lee Allen, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and activist who convinced the

Smithsonian Institution The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Founded ...

to revise downward its estimates of medals and honors awarded to Japanese-American soldiers in World War II. Allen also wrote the book's foreword, in which he claimed that for Japanese-Americans during World War II, "evacuation and life under government care provided much needed relief from trials and threats they faced on the West Coast". ''Magic'' particularly criticized the

Civil Liberties Act of 1988 The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 (, title I, August 10, 1988, , et seq.) is a United States federal law that granted reparations to Japanese Americans who had been wrongly interned by the United States government during World War II. The act was ...

, which offered reparations to surviving Japanese-American internees. Writing for ''Military Review'', Richard Milligan concluded that ''Magic'' "refutes the accepted history that the evacuation was solely the result of national leaders' 'racism, war hysteria and the lack of political will'". ''Publishers Weekly'' agreed that the book's discussion of decrypted Japanese communications "makes a solid case that the intelligence community's faith in its credibility contributed significantly to the government's decision" but also noted that book did not actually refute the claims of racism, digressing instead into technical details and "bitter critique of the 1988 decision to compensate the former prisoners". Jonathan Kirsch of the ''

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the Un ...

'' praised the book for being "intellectually honest enough to allow us to come to our own conclusions", particularly in its inclusion of a rebuttal from the general counsel for the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, but also suggested that "it is possible to read the MAGIC intercepts and come away with an entirely different impression of the evidence".

Bibliography

* ''Magic: The Untold Story of U.S. Intelligence and the Evacuation of Japanese Residents from the West Coast during World War II'', Athena Press, 2001,

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Lowman, David 1921 births 1999 deaths Internment of Japanese Americans National Security Agency people