Google programmer won the NSA award, and then said that this organization needs to be abolished

Last week, Dr. Joseph Bonneau (Joseph Bonneau) learned that he had won the competition of the National Security Agency Science of Security (SoS) . The competition awards authors of the most interesting scientific works in the field of information security, important from a state point of view. Bonnau's work — analyzing 70 million passwords for Yahoo users for endurance and security — won the prize as Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper.

The SoS competition is held for the first time, but the NSA hopes to make it annual. Unfortunately for national intelligence, the first pancake came out lumpy. Joseph Bonno was awarded on July 18 at a special event by the NSA, speaking to an audience of computer security experts, and the next day he posted on a blog what he thinks about the NSA .

Joseph Bonno said that it is a great honor for him to win recognition from outstanding scientific experts who were able to gather in the NSA scientific jury .

“On my own behalf, it would be an omission to keep silent about my conflicting feelings about the award,” writes Dr. Bonno. - given what we know about the large-scale monitoring of private communications by the NSA. Like many in the community of specialists in cryptography and information security, I am sad that we did not sufficiently inform the public about the dangers and dubious benefits of mass surveillance systems. And like many American citizens, I am ashamed that we allowed our politicians to pull the country on this path.
')
Accepting the award, I do not justify monitoring the NSA. To put it bluntly, I do not think that a free society is compatible with an organization like the NSA in its current form. Nevertheless, I am glad that I received a rare opportunity to visit the NSA and thank the hosts for their sincere hospitality. A lot of engineers came to listen to my speech, asked sharp questions, understood the importance of studying passwords to improve the protection of private data. This corresponds to my feelings that the main problems of America are in Washington and not in Fort Meade [where the headquarters of the NSA are located - approx. trans.]. Our goal should be to win the public debate on citizen observation and the creation of improved confidential data protection technologies. And I hope that this competition of scientific works, organized to establish contacts with scientific researchers, can be a small positive step. ”

In an interview with Animal, as well as on Twitter, the award winner clarified his position even more clearly and disowned the charge of trying to protect the NSA: “I would prefer that [the NSA] be abolished altogether than to allow it to exist in its current form ... I don’t want to live in the country where the organization works, which is now the NSA. " Joseph Bonno said that when he found out about receiving the award, his first thought was to refuse it, but then he thought that it could be used for the benefit of society.