Academics Should Not Remain Silent On Government Hacking

ananyo writes "The Guardian's technology editor, Charles Arthur, asks why researchers have remained largely silent in the wake of the revelation that the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology's standard for random numbers used for cryptography had been weakened by the NSA: 'The nature of the subversions sounds abstruse: the random-number generator, the 'Dual EC DRBG' standard, had been hacked by the NSA and the UK's GCHQ so that its output would not be as random as it should have been. That might not sound like much, but if you are trying to break an encrypted message, the knowledge that it is hundreds or thousands of times weaker than advertised is a great encouragement.' Arthur attributes the silence of UK academics, at least, to pressure from GCHQ. He goes on to say: 'For those who do care, White and Matthew Green, who teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, have embarked on an ambitious effort to clean up the mess — one that needs help. They have created a non-profit organization called OpenAudit.org, which aims to recruit experts to provide technical assistance for security projects in the public interest, especially open-source security software.'"

Comments

They're living on the government teat.

[jcr]

American academia is lousy with left-wing sycophants, who know full well that their inflated salaries are supported by government interference in the student loan market, and taxpayer-supported direct funding. If more than a handful of them spoke up, they'd find out just how easily their overlords can snatch that titty away.

-jcr

Re:They're living on the government teat.

[jcr]

your hatred of academia

Guess again. I want nothing more than to see academia liberated from government control. Today, US higher-ed institutions are fully in government thrall, just like all the universities in the Soviet Union.

-jcr