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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).
"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.
We all have to eat.
Besides, it's not like the NSA comes down to where you work and slaps all the dicks out of your mouth.
John
I'm pulling back. This article is now officially false!
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...
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!!!
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.