David Lowman

Who was David Lowman?

David Daniel Lowman was the National Security Agency executive responsible for the declassification of the Magic intercepts 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.

Lowman disagreed with the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. He asserted that the U.S. government Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, established to look into the wartime relocation program authorized by Executive Order 9066, published its findings without even examining Magic intelligence. While the internment programs of the Department of Justice's Immigration and Naturalization Service affected Germans, Italians, Hungarians, and Japanese citizens who became "enemy aliens" under U.S. and international law, only those of Japanese ancestry were rounded up based solely on their racial background. The U.S. government apologized to those who had been interned, and provided $20,000 checks to the survivors, citing "wartime hysteria" as the reason for their internment.

His book, two-thirds of which Lowman claims to be citation and reproductions of declassified documents from Magic intercepts to FBI reports, argues that the intelligence available to President Roosevelt revealed that disloyalty was widespread among resident alien Japanese and even Japanese Americans during World War II. These FBI and Office of Naval Intelligence records have been declassified and appear in several other published books, such as Intelligence, Internment and Relocation, and are now freely available in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.