The n-Category Café

In the state of California, a ridiculous number of laws are passed by ballot referendum, i.e., all registered voters in the state vote on them directly. I personally think this is a terrible system, but the state does a good job of providing voters with a lot of information to help make an informed decision. The literature from the state includes, among other things, statements from a supporter and a detractor of each ballot measure, along with the supporter’s and detractor’s rebuttals of each other’s statements. When I lived in California, I frequently found that the best way to decide how to vote was to identify the weaker rebuttal.

Incidentally, certain turns of phrase in Richard Pinch’s letter strongly suggest that he’s not writing personally as a mathematician employed by GCHQ, but speaking officially for GCHQ. For instance:

it is impossible for GCHQ to recognise them as a description of its activities

and

GCHQ does not comment on intelligence matters, but would draw your readers’ attention to the comments of the Foreign Secretary

(my bold).

Of course, I’d expect an opinion piece about GCHQ by an employee of GCHQ to be vetted by GCHQ. But it’s noteworthy that it’s worded as an official statement, not a personal opinion.

Makes me angry.

And now there’s a further answer to Richard Pinch’s assertion that

GCHQ, along with the other intelligence agencies of the UK, is subject to some of the most rigorous legislative and oversight arrangements in the world.

A committee of Members of Parliament (who usually try to outdo each other in sycophancy to the intelligence agencies) has just released a report into counterterrorism that sharply criticizes the weakness of the oversight system. Section 6 begins like this:

The oversight of the security and intelligence agencies has long been a matter of concern for this Committee … We believe that the current oversight is not fit for purpose.

Here are two press summaries of the report (1, 2), and here’s the report’s helpful Annex B, which compares the UK and US oversight systems.

Out of curiousity I plotted the occurance of ‘mass surveillance’ on Googles ngram viewer using their corpus of books published in English; and interestingly enough there was a huge peak in the seventies about this - presumably this must have about the former Soviet Union as well as its satellite states. But since 2000, there has also been a sharp increase in incidence, but its still only about a third as high as the peak in the seventies.

Unfortunately the corpus only goes upto 2008. It would be interesting to see how this compares to looking at the internet at large - blogs, twitter & other social media. Is there a way to do that?

Avaaz, the global online advocacy group, has a couple of petitions about this (here and here), but they haven’t harvested much public support; I guess its just not capturing the publics imagination.

This promises to be interesting: PBS Frontline documentary on the NSA; two part series starting 5/13.

On the subject of mathematicians and their cooperation: Thanks Tom. I think the continuation of global attention and criticism is a good thing, since if 1) mathematicians can really help fight injustice in the world and 2) there is still hope that state intelligence in some form can have a net positive effect in that fight, then it follows that these agencies must find a way to demonstrate their willingness to serve the same interests that the rest of the world (including mathematicians) perceives as good.

Apparently, CMU did take two million dollars from the NSA. I am not sure what “human behavior” research is, but it sounds a bit like social physics: predicting the behavior of people as if they were particles.

Interestingly, Cylab is involved. This lab hosts e.g. prominent privacy economist Aquisti. However, I cannot find the precise constitution of the NSA lab. It might be a good exercise to consider whether this was a moral act on CMUs part.

Ciaran McCreesh wrote:

This helps with finding molecules with certain properties for biochemistry and drug design (good), designing better biological weapons (bad), verifying communications protocols and circuits (good), finding exploitable weaknesses in communications protocols and security systems (bad, although criminals and governments we don’t like are doing this anyway, so maybe it’s good that we get there first?), identifying fraud, tax evasion and money laundering (good), identifying donations to political groups that don’t meet the approval of the government of your choice (bad), reducing fuel use and carbon emissions when scheduling vehicles (good), reducing the cost of invading an oil-rich country (bad?), producing better web search results (good) and providing better privacy-violating advertising (bad).

Tom Leinster wrote:

Seriously, I agree with you that trying to assign a moral value to a piece of foundational research is absurd. But was anyone actually trying to do that? I thought Bas was mainly asking about the morality of accepting money from the NSA.

It is certainly questionable to assign “a” moral value to a piece of foundational research. And it may even be problematic to give a more fine-graded evaluation like in Ciaran McCreesh text (5 good 4 bad if I didnt miscount), but these kind of discussions are important and given that it looks as if we are living more and more in an increasingly human shaped future I think they will get even more important. Last but not least morality is about how one imagines the world one would like to live in should look like. If one introduces a new piece of research into the public then this is thus in some sense automatically a moral decision.

Here it is to be asked what is the right and duty and what should be the possibilitites of the respective researchers in guiding the future use of the fruits of their research, i.e. their brain childs. There are currently basically no other measures to guide such a process after publication, than giving recommendations. But even researchers recommendations are often not asked for. This may be understandable if there are like financial interests in promoting research uses, but it often also occurs for the case of objecting research uses. Interestingly in this context is that researchers are often attributed to lack social intelligence for being able to recommend. In particular there is e.g. no kind of veto right/duty or some other measures for a higher influence on preventing certain public uses of research and technology like if researchers see that their research is used in (for them) unmoral/problematic ways.

This seems to be mostly due to the fact that it is assumed that the public is (fastly) informed enough to be able to judge equally (or like for the social component even better). Unfortunately this is not always the case. And it takes time and effort to communicate major problems and sometimes they may even be hardly foreseeable for researchers. And even if e.g. bans are imposed like in the case that politics starts to adress some problems this may not be enough.

And since apart from maybe withhelding research from publication (which is usually a career killer) researchers are not really able to care much about the future use of their research and thus they also do not really need to care for it after releasing it into the public (this is by the way usually different for real childs, which usually need to be educated).

Mathematics is no exemption as should be clear from the recent revelations about mass surveillance and this discussion here, even if this wasn’t maybe forseeable for Hardy. And this refers to all branches of mathematics, not only the one done at GCHQ or other secret services.

By the way does someone know how big is the percentage of mathematicians working at GCHQ or similar ?