Spying Math: Punishment for Spyware

Intelligence agencies hire a lot of mathematicians, but potential employees need to understand that their job will be “peering” on everyone, says Tom Leinster.


Over the past 10 months, a major international scandal has engulfed some of the world's largest employers. These organizations are accused of violating the law on an industrial scale , and are currently the subject of widespread outrage. How did the community of mathematicians react? In many ways, they ignore this fact.

These employers — the United States National Security Agency and the Government Communications Center ( DSP ) of the United Kingdom — systematically monitored our lives as best they could, including mailboxes, SMS messages, Skype, phone calls, Web browser history, banking operations and location data. By connecting to the Internet’s trunk cables , they tapped public and political leaders , hacked into cloud services, and “destroyed” legitimate groups of activists, all under the banner of the NSA. Purpose, according to the former director of the ANB, Kit Alexander:

collect all the data all the time.

A typical rationale for this mass surveillance is the prevention of terrorism. American officials have repeatedly stated that mass surveillance prevented 54 attacks. But the NSA eventually admitted that it was a couple of times; the best of which was an estimated $ 8500 donation to the terrorist group.

Some argue that the information gathered is “metadata only” —the phone numbers and the duration of the calls, not the recordings of the conversations themselves. This is wrong, the DSP collected images from the webcams of millions of people. In any case, it’s wrong to believe that even collecting metadata leaves privacy intact. As the ex-lawyer of the NSA Stuart Baker said:

Metadata tells absolutely everything about someone's life .

Others say that they are not worried about recording their daily activities, they are sure that no one is interested in this. They may be right: if you never "interfered" with the government, it is possible that the government will never watch you. But despite this, do we want these organizations to have such powerful tools to stifle dissent, activists and even journalism?
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So back to the role of mathematicians in all of this. The NSA calls itself the largest employer for mathematicians in the United States . This is also true for the CPS, which is also a major employer for mathematicians, and works in close collaboration with the special services of Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Some mathematicians work full time. Others work during the summer holidays or during the holidays.

We will never know exactly what mathematics has done for these institutions. The CPS does not comment on this situation, citing the fact that these are intelligence issues. But thanks to the revelations of the former NSA employee Edward Snowden, some conclusions can be drawn.

For example, it is known that the NSA has undermined Internet encryption. Some pseudo-random number generation methods based on the theory of elliptic curves are used to create encryption keys. This ensures that only the sender and the recipient can see data, such as credit card information.

Snowden announced that the NSA had inserted the backdoor into a widely used algorithm of elliptic curves, which makes it possible to compromise encrypted data. This is not possible without deep mathematical knowledge, the details of which were recently described by Thomas Hales of the University of Pittsburgh in the Notes of the American Mathematical Society ( vol. 60, p. 190 ).

Mathematicians rarely face ethical issues. We enjoy the feeling that what we do is not related to everyday life. The hardy theorist in the field of numbers in 1940 wrote:

I have never done anything useful. None of the discoveries made by me, or most likely, which I will make, directly or indirectly, is good or bad - the least affected the comfort of this world.

Hardy's maxim is not currently relevant. Mathematics, obviously, has a practical application that is directly related in our world (life), not least the encryption used on the Internet.

Our work can be used as a blessing, as well as to the detriment. Unfortunately for us, society notices this fact last.

Thus, mathematicians must decide: are we cooperating with the intelligence services or not?

Our position can be compared with the position of nuclear physicists in 1940. But nevertheless, they knew that they were building an atomic bomb, while mathematicians working on the NSA and DSP very often have little idea how their work will be used and for what purposes. Those of them who believe that they are contributing to the legitimate protection of national security can reasonably feel deceived.

At a minimum, we have mathematics to talk about it. Or maybe go even further. Eminent mathematician Alexander Beilison of the University of Chicago invited the American mathematical community to break all ties with the NSA, and working for them or with its partners should become “socially unacceptable” in the same way that working for the KGB became unacceptable for many in the Soviet Union.

Not everyone will agree, but it reminds us that we have a choice and collective power. Individuals may withdraw their labor. Heads of university departments may prohibit their employees from working for the NSA or CPS. National mathematical communities may stop publishing assignments of agencies, abandon their money, or even exclude members who work for “mass surveillance agencies.”

At the very least, we must admit that the choice is ours. First of all, we are people, and only then mathematicians, if we don’t like what the special services do, we shouldn’t cooperate.

P / S / Tom Leinster is a mathematician from the University of Edinburgh, UK.