[ACSAC History]

1989: With Five You Get Tucson

Planning for the fifth conference actually began while we were in the middle of the fourth. Scheduling of hotels for conferences often must be done twelve to fifteen months in advance. The Applications conference, as we were becoming known (at least among committee members) had been two years in the Washington D.C. area, and two years in Florida. The committee immediately detected this pronounced pattern and declared it to be a defining characteristic of the conference: A new venue every two years would become the norm. For the 1989 conference the committee selected the Westward Look Hotel in Tucson, Arizona. This selection was the result of an extensive search effort by Dr. Joel Levy, who's role on the conference committee was to identify site entertainment and future conference sites.

The committee also agreed that the declining interest in aerospace oriented issues and the lack of support from the aerospace community warranted a conference name change. In order to minimize confusion among potential attendees and to ensure conservation of acronymy, we replaced the term Aerospace with the term Annual, thus becoming the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference but retained the acronym ACSAC. It was also at this time that ACSA along with ASIS became the sole sponsors of the conference; the IEEE Computer Society became an in co-operation with (non-financial) partner.

Committee for ACSAC 5
Conference Chairman: Marshall Abrams
Program Chairman: Ron Gove
Treasurer: Joel Levy
Tutorials: Dr. Dixie Baker
Publicity: Diana Akers
Exhibits: Robert Kovach
Program Co-Chairs: Carlin Covey, Ann Marmor-Squires
ASIS Liaison: Lewis Schneider
Local Arraignments; Steve Reynolds
Publications: Victoria Ashby
Civil Systems Liaison: William Bisignani
Member-at-Large: Santosh Chokani

The conference committee for 1989 included Dr. Marshall Abrams as the General Chairman, Dr. Ron Gove as the Technical Program Chair. The membership for the full committee is shown in the table.

Early in 1989, the primary sponsor of ACSAC, The Aerospace Computer Security Associates (ACSA), decided to institute a Distinguished Lecturer award. Each year the ACSA nominating committee would select an outstanding computer security professional to present a lecture of current topical interest to the security community. The Distinguished Lecturer would receive an honorarium, would have his expense to the conference paid by ACSA, and would be presented with a plaque during the opening plenary session. As the first Distinguished Lecturer, the nominating committee selected Steven T. Walker, President of Trusted Information Systems. The title of Mr. Walker's lecture was: INFOSEC: How Far We Have Come! How Far Can We Go? M. Walker is nationally recognized for his pioneering work on the DOD Computer Security Initiative, establishment of the National Computer Security Center, and extensive experience with the design and implementation of large scale computer networks and information systems.

ACSA also decided at this time to have each Distinguished Lecture recorded on video taped and to provide copies of these tapes for sale at a nominal cost. ACSA would subsidize the actual cost of these tapes in the interest of the security community.

This conference was also honored to have Senator Dennis DeConcini, the Democratic Senator from Arizona, as its keynote speaker. Our opening day luncheon speaker was Charles T. Force of NASA. As an added attraction, Joel Levy arranged for Dave Fitzsimmons, a political cartoonist for the Arizona Daily Sun, to entertain the attendees during Thursday's lunch by discussing various political issues with editorial cartoons. Due to the intense interest in computer crime at that time the conference also solicited the support of Gail Thackery, Assistant Attorney General, Arizona, who was very active in prosecuting computer crime. Ms Thackery presented a tutorial on Computer Crime as well as a technical paper on Computer Crime Investigation. View a complete listing of the sessions at the fifth conference.