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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?
It is completely different. When a common whore provides services to her client, the client does not use the results of those services to invade anyone's privacy. Stop insulting whores.
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...