Slashdot Mirror
Googlestalking For Covert NSA Research Funding
James Hardine writes "Wikileaks is reporting that the CIA has funded covert research on torture techniques, and that the NSA has pushed tens or hundreds of millions into academia through research grants using one particular grant code. Some researchers try to conceal the source of funding, yet commonality in the NSA grant code prefix makes all these attempts transparent. The primary NSA grant-code prefix is 'MDA904'. Googling for this grant code yields 39,000 references although some refer to non-academic contracts (scolar.google.com 2,300). The grants issue from light NSA cover, the "Maryland Procurement Office" or other fronts. From this one can see the broad sweep of academic research interests being driven by the NSA."
Actually, the googled links are a plant to test software that helps the NSA determine who is interested in it's activities, and the grant code is a key to tracing the CPU runningthe browser that is doing the googling.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
A sampling of some of these terrible, horrendous projects:
Duality for modules over finite rings and applications to coding theory
Bounding the number of geometric permutations induced by k-transversals
A unified framework for enforcing multiple access control policies
Affine Lie algebras and multisum identities
I think these only qualify as torture if you're a math or computer science graduate student.
The NSA is not a "hands on" group... they are signal intelligence. The bulk of these grants appear to be for exactly that, signal intelligence. I'm sure a few of them may have some mysterious/questionable motives but the bulk of them are nerds working on computers trying to break ciphers or improve our own.
The actual story is that the traditional source for engineering funding, DARPA, has been ordered to change to short term projects, as in "a widget for a soldier in 18 months."
That is not what academics do, it is what private sector contractors do.
Hence the academics have been overwhelming the National Science Foundation since 2001 or so. Acceptance rates for NSF research proposals are at all time lows. If the NSA also gives money for mathematics and certain segments of computer science, apparently all publicly published, why not take it?
It has been usual since 1945 that source for non-biological scientific and mathematical research have come through multiple government agencies, many military-affiliated.
What happens if you don't accept this funding? Somebody else gets it, and they get papers and grants and they stay funded. You don't. You probably won't get promotions or tenure without signficant government funding. If you're on soft money, you're just plain unemployed.
What will your protest do to stop torture by CIA or whoever? Nothing. BTW those policies didn't come spontaneously from CIA---they were ordered and approved by political appointees.
BTW: "MDA" usually means "Missile Defense Agency".