Mathematicians Urge Colleagues To Refuse To Work For The NSA

 In January, the math community had its big event of the year — the Joint Mathematics Meeting — where 3,000 mathematicians and math students gathered to talk about new advances in the field and jostle for jobs. The National Security Agency is said to be the largest employer of mathematicians in the country and so it always has a sizeable presence at the event to recruit new candidates. This year, it was even easier for the agency as the four-day conference took place at the Baltimore Convention Center, just 22 minutes away from NSA headquarters in Fort Meade. Thomas Hales, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who describes himself as a “mathematician who’s upset about what’s going on,” is dismayed at the idea of the brightest minds in his field going to work for the agency. In reaction to the Snowden revelations — which started exactly a year ago –  about NSA’s mass surveillance and compromising of encryption standards, Hales gave a grant to the San Francisco-based civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation to fly a representative to Baltimore to try to convince mathematicians young and old not to go help the agency with data-mining and encryption-breaking.

“Mathematicians aiding in national defense goes all the way back to Archimedes, defending against the Roman siege and designing the catapult. Mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson destroyed his work after realizing researchers in poison gas were looking at it. Mathematicians were involved in the Manhattan Project, developing nuclear weapons,” says Hales. “Many mathematicians work for the NSA or organizations with ties to it. They’re involved in facial recognition development and big data aspects of mass surveillance. If privacy disappears from the face of the Earth, mathematicians will be some of the primary culprits.”

 The EFF sent to the conference a newly-hired staff technologist, Yan Zhu, a woman whose dyed red hair surely helped her stand out. She had a tiny table — between a math educational software company and Mathcamp — while the NSA had a huge “awesome” booth with multiple people and “lots of swag,” including laundry bags with the NSA logo. She said it was tough competing. “Students are mainly just interested in getting a job after graduation not in activism. People were around the NSA booth all the time when I walked by. When I looked at the NSA sign-up sheet for people who wanted to interview on site for summer internships, it was always full,” says Zhu. I imagine those interviews may have started like this scene from Good Will Hunting but didn’t end like it:

Zhu was dismayed by the NSA’s popularity at the event and the relative lack of attention to civil liberties concerns. “The NSA is illegally mass-spying on people,” says Zhu, who admitted she snagged an NSA laundry bag for herself. “I realize that people who have done pure math probably don’t have a lot of other career options, but I encouraged those who wanted to talk to learn to code or program, and pointed out that EFF has hired a lot of mathematicians.We weren’t doing recruiting just trying to inform them that there are people who are very against the NSA.”

Hales said he got depressed “every day walking in and seeing all the mathematicians gathered at the NSA booth,” but he is far from the only mathematician who is on the outs with the NSA right now. There have been a series of editorials written by mathematicians in the New Scientist and  Slate urging fellow mathematicians to speak out about how their research is being used in unconstitutional ways by the agency. Charles Seife is a mathematician who worked for the NSA briefly two decades ago, and is now a journalism professor. He wrote in Slate, “The agency insisted, over and over, that the weapons we were building—and weapons they are, even if they’re weapons of information—would never be turned on our own people, but would only be used upon our enemies. What do we do now that we have to face the fact that the Agency broke its word? … I feel compelled to speak out to say that I’m horrified. If this is really what the agency stands for, I am sorry to have helped in whatever small way that I did.”

The American Mathematical Society, a membership organization for mathematicians, has been addressing the anxiety within the profession in its newsletters. Last year, it printed a letter from Professor Alexander “Sasha” Beilinson of the University of Chicago asking the Society to cut ties with the NSA and stop accepting their grants for mathematical research. “The NSA destroyed the security of the Internet and privacy of communications for the whole planet,” wrote Beilinson. “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. Any relationship with an organization whose activity is so harmful for the fabric of human society is unhealthy. For the sake of integrity, the AMS should shun all contacts with the NSA.”

Beilenson says he “got some letters of support, mostly from the young mathematicians, which was very nice” but otherwise no response from the AMS after writing the letter. The leadership of the American Mathematical Society says it is not planning to deter members from working for the spy agency nor will it stop accepting grants from the NSA, noting that those grants support innocuous research on algebra, number theory, discrete mathematics, probability, and statistics. “Cryptology and classified research are specifically excluded from the grants,” say AMS president David Vogan and executive director Donald McClure in a statement. “The work of [the grant program] is directly in line with the mission of the American Mathematical Society ‘to further the interests of mathematical research and scholarship.’ It is strongly supported by the leadership of the AMS and, we believe, by a majority of the members.”

But the AMS is devoting six pages of its next newsletter — due out next week — to a discussion of the Snowden revelations. Notices of the AMS editor, Allyn Jackson, says she “solicited articles from mathematicians who we thought would write thoughtful and informative pieces.” I read an advance copy in which Andrew Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota, decries society’s preoccupation with terrorism but seems more troubled by the government’s failure in allowing the leakage of documents and secrets than by what those leaks revealed.  “I do not see the NSA as a rogue organization engaging in amoral activities,” he writes. He says it fills an “important role both in spying on numerous hostile actors and setting security standards” and that he will not discourage students from applying there.

The other mathematician who wrote a piece, Keith Devlin of Stanford University, worked on Defense Department projects after September 11th and takes a far more critical view of the NSA after the Snowden revelations. He writes that he felt “intense betrayal when I learned how [the 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 almost certainly weaken our ability to defend ourselves.”

“I think mathematicians should refuse to work for the NSA until they both follow the US Constitution and demonstrate responsible use of mathematical tools,” says Devlin in an email to me. “The latter is something they clearly failed to do by engineering weaknesses into mathematical crypto systems, which mathematicians know to be a very dangerous thing to do. I think it is very regrettable that the current NSA leadership has broken the immense goodwill that most of us in the mathematical community once had toward them.”

Thomas Hales, who sponsored the EFF representative to try to dissuade mathematicians from going to work for the NSA, says he taught a graduate level course on mathematical cryptography this fall and that it was influenced by Snowden.  “I would not have taught the course if not for the Snowden documents,” he says. He sees the spread of cryptographic practices as a defense against the NSA. When Google, for example, released an “end-to-end” encryption tool for Gmail this week, it placed a smiley face message in its code, an inside joke that was a subtle dig at the NSA, and a celebration of the fact that it will be harder for spying types to get access to messages sent this way by Gmail users. Hales says he has had students go work for the NSA in the past, but that he will discourage them from doing so moving forward

“I’m a mathematician, I’m not in politics,” says Hales. “As a citizen, I’m outraged by what’s happening, and find the small size of the public response to be very disturbing. It seems that the most influence I can have is within the mathematics community. I really hoped that things would change for mathematicians as a result of the Snowden documents, but it’s happening more slowly than I hoped it would.”