The n-Category Café

Ordinary honest folk like a bit of privacy but are mostly interested in security. In many circumstances security and privacy are opposites. For example the people who really care about privacy are criminals, and people pushing the limits of what’s legal who don’t want too much scrutiny (like maybe the entire finance industry). What we need to do is convince people that the greatest threat to their security is their own governments drifting in a 1984/North Korea direction. We need to counter that with much more accountability and sousveillance (see David Brin).

Ah, but /. didn’t link here, just to the New Scientist piece.

Wow. Thanks for telling me; no one else did!

Thanks very much for letting me know.

Here’s a quick translation:

A mathematician calls on his colleagues not to work for the NSA any more [but see my note 1 below]

Tom Leinster, of the University of Edinburgh, calls on his colleagues worldwide to boycott the NSA and refuse to work with the agency while it continues its global spying programme [note 2].

In an opinion piece published on the website of New Scientist, Tom Leinster, a mathematician at the University of Edinburgh, calls on his colleagues worldwide to boycott the NSA and refuse to work with the agency while it continues its global spying programme.

Tom Leinster notes that the American agency is “the largest employer of mathematicians in the US”, maybe the world. Mathematicians are essential to the development of the different surveillance programmes developed by the NSA, notably those concerning cryptography.

“At a bare minimum, we mathematicians should talk about this. Maybe we should go further. Eminent mathematician Alexander Beilinson of the University of Chicago has proposed that the American Mathematical Society sever all ties with the NSA, and that working for it or its partners should become ‘socially unacceptable’ in the same way that working for the KGB became unacceptable to many in the Soviet Union.”

I want to clarify two things about that summary.

[1] I don’t actually call for mathematicians not to work for the NSA (at least, not in this article). I list various dubious things that the NSA and GCHQ are doing, I say something about the role played by mathematicians, and I emphasize that we have the power to choose not to cooperate, if we so wish. But that’s as far as I go in this article. It’s actually rather cautious and conservative.

[2] The Mediapart summary uses the phrase “espionnage mondial”, which I assume translates as global/worldwide spying. I think that’s a slightly risky way of putting it. Pretty much everyone, including me, agrees that spying on targeted individuals is acceptable under certain circumstances. In that sense, it’s unobjectionable that the US has a global spying programme. The problem is the nature of its global spying programme — that it aspires to collect all communications of all people, not just those of a few justified targets at specific times.

Thanks! Personally, I got a kind German colleague down the corridor to translate it for me, but I don’t suppose the Zeit lawyers will descend on us if you feel like posting a translation here. (And if they do, we can simply remove it.)

There’s now also a Spiegel article and an article in Boing Boing.

I suppose I should have seen this coming, but most of these articles exaggerate my views in one way or another. E.g. Boing Boing headline it with “Mathematicians: refuse to work for the NSA!”, which is exciting but not what I say.

Similarly, some commenters on some of the articles object to the “fact” that I ask national mathematical societies to expel members who work for the NSA/GCHQ. Only, I don’t say that. I simply observe that the societies could do that (if they wanted), just as they can (if they want) cooperate unquestioningly with the secret services. The choices are ours to make.