Willis Ware
| Willis H. Ware | |
|---|---|
| Born |
August 31, 1920 Atlantic City, New Jersey |
| Died | November 22, 2013 (aged 93) Santa Monica, California |
| Alma mater | B.S. in electrical engineering, University of Pennsylvania; M.S. in electrical engineering, MIT; Ph.D. in electrical engineering, Princeton University |
| Known for | Privacy Act of 1974 |
Willis Howard Ware (August 31, 1920 – November 22, 2013) was an American computer pioneer, privacy pioneer, social critic of technology policy, and a founder in the field of computer security.
Ware studied electrical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and MIT. During World War II, he worked for the Hazeltine Corporation (1942–1946) on classified military projects. After the war (1946–1951), he joined the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton to work with John von Neumann on building an early computer. After completing his PhD there, he moved to North American Aviation (1951–1952), helped to move the aviation industry from punch-card machines to early computers, and began teaching a class in computing at UCLA; it continued for 12 years. In 1952 he joined the RAND Corporation, where he stayed until 1992. He was an early design engineer on the RAND JOHNNIAC computer.
In 1961, he was the founding president of the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, an early technical computing society. Ware predicted that increased reliance on computers would create new privacy issues, and in 1972 he chaired the Department of Health, Education and Welfare's Special Advisory Committee on Automated Personal Data Systems, which developed policy recommendations including the Code of Fair Information Practice that significantly influenced the Privacy Act of 1974. He continued to study and write about privacy for many years.
Ware influenced many aspects of computing including the initiation and direction of one of the first computing courses, at UCLA and authored some of the first textbooks in the field of computer security. In addition, he chaired several influential studies, including one in 1967 that produced a groundbreaking and transformational report to the Defense Science Board for ARPA (now DARPA) that was known thereafter as "The Ware Report."
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