In reply to Spread the word about Tor:
May I suggest that Tor Project brainstorm with two more important groups of potential allies in the struggle against the Surveillance State?
o legal think tanks such as the Brennan Center
o groups whose membership is drawn from the professions on which the Surveillance State depends utterly for technical support, such as
Federation of American Scientists (FAS)
1725 Desales Street NW, Suite 600
Washington, DC 20036
American Mathematical Society (AMS)
201 Charles St
Providence RI 02904
It is well known that the American STEM professions (Stat-Sci-Tech/ Engineering/Math) were largely beholden to the Defense-Industrial complex even prior to 9/11. In particular, for decades NSA has been proud to bill itself as the largest single employer of PhD mathematicians in the world. The reason NSA needs so many math PhDs is that everything NSA does critically depends upon mathematics, often novel mathematics which can only be created by dedicated cadres of specialists in arcane areas of number theory, graph theory, probability theory, differential equations, and other fields.
Not so well known, perhaps, is the extent to which, after 9/11, the USIC moved onto American campuses. Many US universities have joined the University of Maryland, College Park* in hosting USIS agents in on campus USIC-funded academic programs, in addition to inviting NSA to embed "talent spotters", "advisors", and "consultants" in academic departments. Some go so far as to say that since 9/11, the American mathematical profession has effectively become an NSA captive.
*Edward Snowden's first worksite, as an employee of the Surveillance-Industrial Complex, was a large NSA-funded research facility on the campus of UM College Park.
However, after publication of the first Snowden leaks, many members of the AMS suffered a dramatic change of heart about working on the behalf of the Surveillance State. There are now at least two active mathematician-led anti-NSA campaigns, which seek to
o force AMS to break off all ties with NSA,
o induce faculty senates to vote USIC off American college campuses.
These movements are supported by EFF; why not Tor Project too?
The Notices of the AMS has been publishing an on-going "debate" on the demerits of working on behalf of NSA. Somewhat comically, the editors complained that they tried hard to find mathematicians who would speak up for NSA post-Snowden, but could only obtain comments from current or former employees, who are hardly impartial commentators.
Some excerpts from the rather one-side "debate":
Stefan Forcey (University of Akron) laid out the problem:
From Volume 61, Number 1 (January 2014)
Dear NSA: Long-Term Security Depends on Freedom
https://www.ams.org/notices/201401/rnoti-p7.pdf
> Many mathematicians earn NSA funding for their research, their students, and their universities through an annual grant competition administered by the American Mathematical Society.
He explained why NSA is so terrified by the prospect of being ostracized from the AMS:
> It would be shortsighted for the NSA to push away our top scientists by appearing negligent. Leadership at the NSA evidently realizes the vital importance of public and scientific support. A portion of their effort is dedicated to improving all levels of math education and supporting open, unclassified math research in the United States.
Forcey neglected to discuss an important aspect of the controversy: NSA sometimes classifies "open" research after the fact, and has not hesitated to retaliate against anyone who resists classification of research not funded by NSA (an attitude which has encouraged the growth of the mathematical underground, which represents another community which could use improved Hidden Services to advantage, for example for sharing underground technical reports or "liberated" NSA sponsored research).
Two leading mathematicians urged that AMS ostracize NSA:
Volume 60, Number 11 (September 2013)
AMS Should Sever Ties to NSA
Alexander Beilinson (University of Chicago)
https://www.ams.org/notices/201311/rnoti-p1432.pdf
> I am writing this Letter to the Editor to suggest the AMS sever all ties with the NSA (National Security Agency)... the NSA destroyed the security of the Internet and privacy of communications for the whole planet. But if any healing is possible, it would probably start with making the NSA and its ilk socially unacceptable just as, in the days of — my youth, working for the KGB was socially unacceptable for many in the Soviet Union.
Volume 61, Number 2 (February 2014)
Thomas C. Hales (University of Pittsburgh)
The NSA Backdoor to NIST
> In my opinion, an algorithm that has been designed by NSA with a clear mathematical structure giving them exclusive back door access is no accident, particularly in light of the Snowden documents.
This eventually drew a response from Michael Wetherheimer, Director of Research at NSA:
The Mathematics Community and the NSA
Encryption and the NSA Role in International Standards
https://www.ams.org/notices/201502/rnoti-p165.pdf
(See the blog posts by Matthew Green for a detailed rebuttal of his claims.)
One mathematician who is not a full time employee of NSA but longstanding ties to that agency, struggled to find something positive about NSA. Andrew Odlyzko (University of Minnesota), a leading coding theorist, wrote:
Volume 61, Number 6 (June/July 2014)
The Mathematical Community and the National Security Agency
https://www.ams.org/notices/201406/rnoti-p623.pdf
> My carefully considered view is that our society has become preoccupied with terrorism to an absurd and harmful degree. That is what has driven the intelligence agencies to the extreme measures they have taken... much of this activity is worse than a crime; it’s stupid. Terrorism is a threat to our society, but it is simply not an existential threat that justifies extraordinary measures. We face a variety of threats—from car accidents, which take about as many lives each month as the 9/11 tragedy, to weather (ranging from sudden disasters, such as hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, to the dangers from climate change), to global avian flu pandemics. The moves taken in the name of fighting terrorism, including the intrusive NSA data collection that has recently come to light and more generally the militarization of our society, are not justified by the dangers we currently face from terrorism. In fact, these moves will likely inhibit our ability to deal with many of the other threats and probably will even inhibit the antiterrorism campaign.
A former NSA employee, Richard George (Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory) attempted to defend NSA's dragnet:
Volume 61, Number 7 (August 2014)
NSA and the Snowden Issues
https://www.ams.org/notices/201407/rnoti-p772.pdf
> As an NSA employee, I was aware of the rules about signals intelligence. When public discussions about foreign intelligence take place, there are some facts about the SIGINT system that people need to know: NSA is a supplier of intelligence, not a consumer; NSA does not choose its targets; NSA activities and processes are driven by laws established by Congress and by directives from the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI).
Another former NSA employee, whistle-blower William Binney, contradicted these claims:
Volume 61, Number 8 (September 2014)
The Danger of Success
https://www.ams.org/notices/201408/rnoti-p902.pdf
> NSA removed the privacy protections for US citizens and decided to collect and store as much data as it could ingest. No one had privacy from the government anymore. I of course objected, as in my mind these actions were, at a minimum, a violation of the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments to our Constitution. The First Amendment was violated because the graphing of social networks (enhanced by other knowledge bases—for example, a reverse lookup of the phone book) would show the people you are associated with. The First Amendment says you have the right to peaceably assemble, and the Supreme Court has held (e.g., in NAACP v. Alabama) that the government does not have a right to know with whom you are assembling. The collection of your email, chatter, and phone calls (recorded or transcribed) is a violation of the Fourth Amendment right to be secure in your affairs. And using content data in order to search for criminal activity can be a violation of the Fifth Amendment, which gives the right not to be a witness against yourself. An example of this is the “parallel construction” techniques used by the FBI and the DEA’s Special Operations Division...
A NSA retiree, Roger Schlafly, contemptuously dismissed such concerns:
Volume 61, Number 11 (November 2014)
Opposing an NSA Boycott
https://www.ams.org/notices/201410/rnoti-p1183.pdf
> Some mathematicians are urging boycotts and other political actions based on overwrought laments about the National Security Agency (NSA)... There is a long history of academics getting over-excited about relatively inconsequential issues.
Schlafly added:
> Google and Facebook are huge multi-billion dollar companies that make all their money by inducing you to use free services, spying on you while you do, and then selling ads based on your preferences. When your privacy is not being sold, it is being stolen. Nearly everything about you is being tracked, recorded, archived, indexed, sold, and used for commercial purposes. Most of this is unregulated. New technologies are likely to accelerate this trend.
This letter drew furious responses from many mathematicians. Tom Leinster (University of Edinburgh) wrote:
Volume 62, Number 2 (February 2015)
The AMS Must Justify Its Support of the NSA
https://www.ams.org/notices/201502/rnoti-p120.pdf
> In 2011, the NSA explicitly stated its goal of universal surveillance, describing its “posture” as “collect it all”, “know it all”, “exploit it all”. The same year, the NSA’s close British partner GCHQ said it was intercepting over fifty billion communication events per day. In 2012, a single NSA program celebrated its trillionth metadata record.
> Schlafly is, at least, correct in noting that outrage at the intelligence agencies’ abuse of surveillance powers is nothing new: from the FBI’s bugging of Martin Luther King and subsequent attempt to blackmail him into suicide, to the 2011 extra-judicial killing of an American child by CIA drone strike (a program to which the NSA supplies surveillance data). He is justified in worrying about the data held by Google, Facebook, etc., but he writes as if concern over that and state surveillance were mutually exclusive, which of course they are not; and much of that data is harvested by the NSA’s PRISM program anyway.
Daniel W. Stroock (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) wrote:
Volume 62, Number 2 (February 2015)
Difference between the NSA and Google
https://www.ams.org/notices/201502/rnoti-p120.pdf
> No doubt the practices of Google are a real danger, but commercial companies are subject to regulations and can be brought before open courts whose judges are appointed by an elected president and have to be approved by the Senate. The regulations governing the NSA are classified, and the NSA is answerable only to a closed court whose judges are appointed, without further review, by a man who himself was appointed by a president who believed that one can defeat terror by declaring a war on it. Maybe these distinctions seem trivial to Dr. Schlafly, but even he should be able to understand why somebody like Alexander Beilinson, who grew up in a country where all courts were secret, does not.
Perhaps the most remarkable contribution to date came from a leading writer of popular math books, Keith Devlin (Stanford University), who revealed that he had been working on dragnet programs for several years:
Volume 61, Number 6 (June/July 2014)
The NSA: A Betrayal of Trust
https://www.ams.org/notices/201406/rnoti-p623.pdf
> Over the course of my work on NIMD, I saw systems demonstrated under nonclassified circumstances that, in a few seconds, could produce incredibly detailed and deeply personal profiles of individuals based on an Internet search that pulled in many isolated publicly available facts. So when I hear officials from President Obama down say, “It’s just metadata,” I smell a deliberate attempt to mislead the population they are supposed to serve. Metadata tells you practically everything you need to know! In fact, much of the focus of my NIMD work was on the degree to which contextual features of signals (information sources) play a role in the knowledge that can be acquired from that signal. I was asked to join Veridian’s project in NIMD precisely to look at that issue.
And what did Devlin learn during his years working for the Surveillance State? He learned that these programs cannot possibly work for their alleged counterterrorism purpose:
> based on everything I learned in those five years, blanket surveillance is highly unlikely to prevent a terrorist attack and is a dangerous misuse of resources that, if used in other ways, possibly could prevent attacks (such as the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing). Anyone with a reasonable sense of large numbers could surmise a similar conclusion. When the goal is to identify a very small number of key signals in a large ocean of noise, indiscriminately increasing the size of the ocean is self-evidently not the way to go...
> And the bigger you make the dataset, the wider the information trawl, the more unlikely that it will lead to an effective countermeasure. Thus, not only did NIMD fail to meet its goal, but as the data collection grew (we did not know about the pending degree of growth at the time, of course, nor its scope), the more inaccessible that goal became. It is reasonable to assume that the number of genuine potential terrorists is small and not growing (at least not dramatically). Consequently, the bigger the data trawl, the harder it is to spot the bad guys, no matter how much computing power you bring to the problem.
Devlin expresses a post-Snowden emotional catharsis familiar to many who have "sold their soul" to the Surveillance state:
> The only reason I am putting these words down now is the feeling of intense betrayal I suffered when I learned how my government and the leadership of my intelligence community took the work I and many others did over many years, with a genuine desire to prevent another 9/11 attack, and subverted it in ways that run totally counter to the founding principles of the United States, that cause huge harm to the US economy, and that moreover almost certainly weaken our ability to defend ourselves...
> Personally, I would not trade freedom in order to prevent terrorist attacks, even if they were more frequent than the current de facto frequency of every ten years or so. If you do that, the terrorists have won. To give up those freedoms to run an Orwellian surveillance program that, based on the intelligence community’s own research, is known to not only not work but to divert resources that if properly targeted (i.e., narrow and deep) could work, is completely wrong.
> As things currently stand, I would not collaborate further with any of the US intelligence services. They have betrayed all of us who were glad to do what we could for the benefit of the free world and have used our work to trample over the Fourth Amendment, to do immense harm to US economic competitiveness, to weaken the Internet on which modern society depends, and to expose us to increased danger from our enemies (the latter two are “own-goals” that result from deliberately weakening the mathematical cryptosystems used in the Internet). I urge all my fellow mathematicians to take a similar stand.
Further essays by leading mathematicians decrying NSA's War on US have appeared in other venues, including:
Edward Frenkel (UC Berkeley)
The perils of hacking math
Slate
30 Sep 2013
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/09/nsa_misuse_of_mathematics_secret_formulas_and_backdoor_cryptography.html
Tom Leinster
Maths spying: The quandary of working for the spooks
New Scientist
23 Apr 2014
http://www.newscientist.com
Tom Leinster
Should mathematicians cooperate with GCHQ?
London Mathematical Society Newsletter
http://maths.ed.ac.uk/~tl/LMS_newsletter_April_2014.pdf
The anti-NSA movement has drawn some attention, but not enough, from the mainstream media:
Mathematicians Urge Colleagues To Refuse To Work For The NSA
Kashmir Hill
5 Jun 2014
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/05/mathematicians-urge-colleagues-to-refuse-to-work-for-the-nsa/
I urge Tor Project to try to help EFF, ACLU, allies in AMS, and other concerned citizens place other stories in the mainstream media explaining the growing anti-NSA movement among USA STEM professionals.
To repeat an argument which has appeared in several blog comments in this space: the Surveillance state must be opposed by means technical, political, psychological and sociological. In particular, a concerted effort by the leadership of the US STEM professions could starve NSA of the talent pool it needs to continue its abuses of freedom.