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Mathematicians Uncomfortable With Ties To NSA, But Not Pulling Back
An anonymous reader writes: When we talk about how the NSA operates, it's typically about the policymakers and what the agency should or should not do. It's worth remembering that the NSA is built upon the backs of world-class mathematicians, whom they aggressively recruit to make all their underlying surveillance technology work. A new piece in Science discusses how the relationship between mathematicians and the NSA has changed following the Snowden leaks (PDF). But as Peter Woit points out, these ethical conundrums are not actually spurring any change. This is perhaps due to the NSA's generous funding of mathematics-related research.
The article talks about the American Mathematical Society, which until recently was led by David Vogan: "...after all was said and done, no action was taken. Vogan describes a meeting about the matter last year with an AMS governing committee as 'terrible,' revealing little interest among the rest of the society's leadership in making a public statement about NSA's ethics, let alone cutting ties. Ordinary AMS members, by and large, feel the same way, adds Vogan, who this week is handing over the presidency to Robert Bryant, a mathematician at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. For now, U.S. mathematicians aren't willing to disown their shadowy but steadfast benefactor."
The article talks about the American Mathematical Society, which until recently was led by David Vogan: "...after all was said and done, no action was taken. Vogan describes a meeting about the matter last year with an AMS governing committee as 'terrible,' revealing little interest among the rest of the society's leadership in making a public statement about NSA's ethics, let alone cutting ties. Ordinary AMS members, by and large, feel the same way, adds Vogan, who this week is handing over the presidency to Robert Bryant, a mathematician at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. For now, U.S. mathematicians aren't willing to disown their shadowy but steadfast benefactor."
Shame on them
How many entities have significant funding that they are willing to dump into basic mathematical research?
Engineering and applied science programs can probably find any number of industry partners at home or abroad. I expect mathematicians have the most limited pool of well-financed donors.
TL;DR - Money talks (except when you ask the NSA how much they get/spend).
So what exactly distinguishes one of these mathematicians from a common whore?
"The NSA makes us uncomfortable, but their money makes us very comfortable indeed."
mathematicians find overwhelming moral and ethical conflict pertaining to employment by the NSA dwarfed considerably by their tacit concern that large, unsupervised spy agency isnt actually funding mathematics in the altruistic pursuit of knowledge and wisdom. When pressed for comment, Mercedes Benz, Lexus, and multi-story housing community with on-site suzuki violin tutor issued a collective shrug. all this and a story about the flu designed to sell medication and take your mind off the next financial collapse, at 11.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I'm pulling back. This article is now officially false!
Or Microsoft coming out with new versions of Windows as long as the licensing revenue keeps rolling in.
NSA spreads, and has been spreading, so much corruption for past 10 years that this news is literally a piss in the ocean.
Or grow a spine.
From the article most of the spending is on things that are beneficial to society as a whole, not just NSA. These include K-12 funding for science fairs, math clubs, and STEM summer camps. Unless the NSA is influencing these in harmful ways, such as pushing ideology beyond the normal "if you do well in school, you could do cool spy work for us" recruiting I don't see a problem with taking their money. Same for the research grants and conferences, which all result in publicly published fundamental research, that help the entire cryptographic and big data communities as a whole. The only program I would have a problem with are any classified research and the sabbaticals to do classified work at the NSA.
The Snowden revelations about constitutionally-questionable domestic spying have been with the full co-operation of telecom and internet companies, hence no super-smart mathematicians necessary, just a bunch of IT guys and CompSci specialists to deal with the large amount of data.
NSA's "traditional" activities, which involve espionage and codebreaking applied against foreign powers (requiring the aid of mathematicians for codebreaking) is an accepted and normal part of international relations, in a tradition going back millenia. Yes, when spies or espionage projects are caught there's usually a stern press release, but nothing ever comes of it.
Are you likening climate science to math, because climate science is so rigorously proven?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
We make no distinction between those that violat constitutional rights, and those that aid them.
Huhuhuh, I like money.
The correlate is dollars spent on anything beneficial to society are dollars that can't be spend on less altruistic pursuits.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
And in similar fashion, finance professors and students didn't disown Wall Street practices after the 2008 crisis.
You mean like the elliptic curve cryptography that they backdoored and then pressured the NIST in to backing so that millions of people's data was both available to them and also potentially at risk to any 3rd party to find out about it? The one that's specifically mentioned in the article?
"But the agency appears to have created its own back door into encrypted communications. The computer industry, both in the
United States and abroad, routinely adoptssecurity standards approved by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). But in 2006, NIST put its seal of approval on one pseudorandom number generatorâ"the Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator, or DUAL_EC_DRBGâ"that was flawed. The potential for a flaw was first identified in 2007 by Microsoft computer security experts. But it received little attention until internal NSA memos made public by Snowden revealed that NSA was the sole author of the flawed algorithm and that the
agency worked hard behind the scenes to make sure it was adopted by NIST. "
Yes, beneficial to society indeed...
Everyone, including the mathematicians, knows catapults win games.
There was a small backlash and few campaigns appealing against taking military money
http://articles.latimes.com/19...
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
When the coming totalitarian, fascist regime is finally overthrown, mathematicians will be identified as a key group that helped to put them in power. Apparently, far too many of these people have no ethics at all and are willing to sell their honor and integrity for a steady meal-ticket.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
that about sums it up I think
Probably many of them faced the same crisis Snowden did; knowing that abuse was going on but fearing what happens to whistle blowers.
This is our fault. We allowed the NSA to get to this point, and we allow the government to ruin the lives of those who stand up and do something about it.
Want to do something about it without ruining your life? You can start by signing the petition to grant Snowden clemency. It doesn't matter if it is unlikely to work; it is what you can do, so what are you waiting for?
You owe Snowden that much.
couple yrs ago I got home from work & my daughter asks to borrow my mac to go to a website for her target ("gifted" program - not bragging/relevant fact) homework. I ask which one & she says: "n-s-a-dot-gov-slash-kids" which immediately causes my head to snap & say: "WHAT?!? let me see that!" it was a front & back sheet w/questions like: "what are the two basic types of ciphers?" (fwiw I wasn't sure if they meant symmetric vs asymmetric or block vs stream), "what is a frequency count & how is it useful in cryptanalysis?", etc.
she was in SECOND FRAKIN' GRADE at time!!! I told her to make sure she missed at least one so we didn't end up like the family in Mercury Rising (no, I haven't let her watch it/she didn't get reference)
again, 100.0% true story/no embellishment!!!
http://xkcd.com/504/
If you got a grant from the NSF for research to create new antibiotics, would that be wrong? The NSF works for the US government and so does the NSA. There is some evidence that the politicians give more money to NSF than they might otherwise get because it is good for fundamental research science & math and science & math is good for DARPA and DARPA is good for NSA.
Somebody already asked the question. Would you take money from the NSA to feed the poor? If the answer is no, how far do you have to get away from the NSA before you would take such money? I assume that the NSA, like most large organizations, has many sub organizations, some of which probably do radically different things. I suspect that the mathematicians who work for the NSA are not involved with the data collection and were probably ignorant of the data collection until Snowden came along. So I have some sympathy for their plight. But that sympathy only goes so far. NSA is an off-budget secret organization. When have such organizations ever been morally clean? I find it ironic (and hypocritical) that normally severely left of center political types appear to be willing to work for such an organization.
I personally don't think of NSA as evil -- generally those who are given a particular job to do (such as data collection) will do that job with a zeal that pushes them beyond sensible moral limits. Many Law & Order episodes deal with the problems caused by police pushing the bounds of legality in pursuit of a criminal. I don't see those police as evil either -- even if they have broken both moral codes and laws.
A) Dollars not spent by the government on a government program probably wouldn't otherwise go to your pet causes
B) There is nothing altruistic, or claimed to be such, about supporting children's science education. It is done because it benefits America, not because they good warm fuzzies from helping kids.
C) Economies are not zero-sum. Not investing in something does not automatically mean something else will increase; actually the opposite is more often true. Money doesn't get spent once and then evaporate, it gets spent again and again, and the amount of trade in an economy vastly outweighs the number of dollars in that economy. Anything trade that you just cross off and don't spend on, that is a decrease in the total amount of economic activity. It doesn't increase anything.
D) The NSA budget is mostly black. Congress gives them a large pile of money, and doesn't get to see the books for what it is spent on. If they decreased spending on a math program, any earmarked money that might be re-assigned would go to secret NSA programs, it would not in any circumstance magically be handed over to some imagined Department of Altruism. What it would actually do is decrease the funding for schools, and increase funding for hidden parts of the programs. That would almost certainly decrease the economic activity associated with the expenditure, because schools and education generally has lower average wages than the NSA, and has a higher percent of the budget going to salaries. Wages generally, and especially lower wager, get re-spent faster than other types of expenditures and increase the economy more. So you would almost certainly decrease the available funds to whatever non-education pet causes you imagine would benefit.
Given a choice when answering about what you do for a living at a social get-together, which is cooler:
a) I'm a mathematician
or
b) I work for a three-letter government spy agency. Sorry, my work is classified. I can't tell you more or I'd have to kill you. Now please, try some of this wine which I assure you is not drugged.
Hint - Go watch True Lies.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Interesting NSA is able maintain such a dominate position when it comes to employment of mathematicians in todays "high technology world".
I can see professional cosmologists not wanting to piss off NASA yet something seems quite wrong with my world view for there to exist such a lack of demand for mathematicians across the board.
It's all clean sharp and black and white in your universe.
So, to be safe from moral hazard, maybe he should just not do math. Nobody should do math. Because it might end up being used for a bad end or be paid for by the "wrong" people.
I'll leave the moral purity to you, religious fundies, and other true believers.
It may be morally uplifting, but, sharing the world with you is going to a little chilly, because even fire has been used as a weapon.
its like anything else. No one wants to gamble on new horizons except people with money to blow. You see this is business all the time, invest short term profits rather than taking the hit in R&D to try to get something new. The only mathematicians currently employable are those that are applied and go to business intelligence and predictive analysis.
Thats why the government put a man on the moon, thats why the government built a nuke because they could blow money on just pure theorists on the off chance that the newly discovered theory pays off.
Shame on them
They and their family need to eat too
Unfortunately, you are right on one count --- they are just too damn stupid to see that what they are doing is putting more harm on themselves and their families than the temporary luxury that they are getting
By deciding not to cut ties with the snoops their legacy will definitely be forever tarnished --- like some bishops and popes of the past whom, although didn't participate in the slaughter of innocent lives directly, have bloods on their hands due to their association with those bloody motherfuckers who killed people using God's name
There are appropriate uses for both "who" and "whom," but "trying to make myself sound smarter by using whom" is not one of them.
The government keeps calculating bigger and bigger new prime numbers for them, with all their fleet of classified quantum computers, and as we all know, mathematicians derive stimulation from primes. Many can't get up in the morning without a Mersenne or two. So really the NSA is just a big drug dealer, enslaving our poor mathematicians who just can't get enough of indivisibility. If you've never seen a thousand digit prime disappear up a rolled-up $100 bill into the eager nose of a cryptologist, you haven't lived.
Money, Prostitutes and "Crystal Blue Persuasion".
At least that's probably how a math genius would rationalize being in bed with sociopaths.
Mathematics have helped to create and break codes to protect our military and citizens.
..like that other blabber mouth money. It talks and talks and talks....
"Come on now, professor Falken... why all this hostility? It would be a shame if this email conversation with Melissa would somehow fall into the hands of your wife, would it? That's a good man!"
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
not surpiesd thou, I have always found mathematics to have poorly formed political morals and instincts and it has cost them dearly in the past where they have been all too quickly willing to swallow the party line