David Lowman

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David Lowman (d. 1999) 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 WWII.. Lowman disagreed with the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, in which the U.S. government apologized for the forced internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans and provided financial reparations to the surviving ethnic Japanese American internees.

His book, two-thirds of which Lowman claimed to have been declassified documents, provides a compelling argument that disloyalty was widespread among ethnic Japanese and Japanese Americans during WWII. However, few if any historians agree with this conclusion. One of the bases for this disagreement is the lack of any substantiating evidence, which would include records of actions taken as a result of the intelligence which Lowman's book claims to have been developed. None of the records which would be associated with arrest, detention, trial, verdict, penalty or the logistics which would have surrounded these events has come to light. While Lowman's supporters may claim that these records are still classified, this argument requires the belief that Quartermaster Corps and Army personnel records are more sensitive than MAGIC transcripts.

According to his official biography, Lowman himself was in the South Pacific during the war, not associated with MAGIC. At the time that the book was published, no person directly involved with MAGIC was known to be still living.