Mathematicians Uncomfortable With Ties To NSA, But Not Pulling Back 181
An anonymous reader writes: When we talk about how the NSA operates, it's typically about the policymakers and what the agency should or should not do. It's worth remembering that the NSA is built upon the backs of world-class mathematicians, whom they aggressively recruit to make all their underlying surveillance technology work. A new piece in Science discusses how the relationship between mathematicians and the NSA has changed following the Snowden leaks (PDF). But as Peter Woit points out, these ethical conundrums are not actually spurring any change. This is perhaps due to the NSA's generous funding of mathematics-related research.
The article talks about the American Mathematical Society, which until recently was led by David Vogan: "...after all was said and done, no action was taken. Vogan describes a meeting about the matter last year with an AMS governing committee as 'terrible,' revealing little interest among the rest of the society's leadership in making a public statement about NSA's ethics, let alone cutting ties. Ordinary AMS members, by and large, feel the same way, adds Vogan, who this week is handing over the presidency to Robert Bryant, a mathematician at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. For now, U.S. mathematicians aren't willing to disown their shadowy but steadfast benefactor."
The article talks about the American Mathematical Society, which until recently was led by David Vogan: "...after all was said and done, no action was taken. Vogan describes a meeting about the matter last year with an AMS governing committee as 'terrible,' revealing little interest among the rest of the society's leadership in making a public statement about NSA's ethics, let alone cutting ties. Ordinary AMS members, by and large, feel the same way, adds Vogan, who this week is handing over the presidency to Robert Bryant, a mathematician at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. For now, U.S. mathematicians aren't willing to disown their shadowy but steadfast benefactor."
Shame on them (Score:3, Insightful)
Shame on them
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Indeed. It's blood money they're taking.
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When I worked on a project with DARPA our project leader was always talking about the missle system he helped develop with DARPA. So DARPA is not completely innocent.
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I don't get it. What do you think these people are for? The NSA is built to spy on other countries and people communicating with those countries. DARPA is a "Department of Defense" agency. Their purpose is to build and design things for the Defense Department. If they can be used for the common good fine but that's not their first purpose. I don't understand hating these people for doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing. Jeez!
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Well choosing to follow a path that leads to more people being killed more efficiently seems evil to me. That's why I avoided doing that in my career, where it was a very real option, and I judge those that came to the wrong decision poorly.
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So you did nothting to help the West defend itself or to defeat Soviet and Nazi power [youtube.com]? And you think that is a good thing?
I judge those that came to the wrong decision poorly.
Pride in poor judgment is it?
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I don't have a problem with your decision to not participate. I do have a problem with you condemning people who have decided to help with building the national defense. If you think that this technology is being misused that is an issue to be taken up with Congress and the President. The people that work towards building the necessary framework for the defense of the country obviously hope that their work will be used for the good of the USA. I for one look at groups like ISIS and am glad that the mean
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I think you should step away from your terminal and stop using the Internet. After all, it was developed by DARPA. And DARPA also developes weapons. Go on. Be principled.
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Soldiers eat baked beans. Step away from that tin can.
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Oh, there is more to it than that. Canning was a vital element of Napoleon's war machine.
Why Napoleon Offered A Prize For Inventing Canned Food [npr.org]
1. Napoleon's Food Preservation Prize (1795)
Napoleon offered 12,000 francs to improve upon the prevailing food preservation methods of the time. Not surprisingly, the purpose was to better feed his army "when an invaded country was not able or inclined to sell or provide food". Fifteen years later, confectioner Nicolas François Appert claimed the prize. He devised a method involving heating, boiling and sealing food in airtight glass jars — the same basic technology still used to can foods.
How many of those cogs of a war machine do you have at the moment? Shouldn't you rid yourself of them for the sake of purity so you don't feel compelled to hold yourself in contempt?
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Wait until the next J. Edgar Hoover comes along. With the power of the modern security state behind him, he will seem more like Lavrenti Beria.
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Which Christian nation is this you're talking about? Certainly it can't be the USA, which was built on a foundation of religious freedom long before it even became an independent nation and formalized the non-religiousness of government into the supreme law of the land.
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Also congress can easily override the rulings of the court. The branches are co-equal. One does not override another
Try as I might to reconcile the first and third statements to find a consistent thought, I just can't do it.
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To the Nazis it certainly was. And it became that way for everyone towards the end. The entire 1900s were a time of religious warfare between fanatical supporters of various nations and ideologies.
Any ancient Athenian would instantly recognize, say, the American Eagle as the local equivalent of Athena. Which is fine, people need group identities to cooperate effectively, and these group identities will inevitably end up havin
Re:Shame on them (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense, they're just following the most basic of mathmatical formulas:
Money > Ethics
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Precisely.
Money motive is a sound scientific principle.
Given a choice ... (Score:2)
Given a choice when answering about what you do for a living at a social get-together, which is cooler:
a) I'm a mathematician
or
b) I work for a three-letter government spy agency. Sorry, my work is classified. I can't tell you more or I'd have to kill you. Now please, try some of this wine which I assure you is not drugged.
Hint - Go watch True Lies.
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Eh, we used to live in the DC metro area and went to those parties. Government employees are government employees, and friendly people. Even the ones in the military.
Also, at least half of the people who work at the NSA are the whitehats, responsible for really boring things like system hardening guides
https://www.nsa.gov/ia/mitigat... [nsa.gov]
Frankly I'm glad they're there doing their thing, and hopefully keeping an eye on some of the blackhats they have running around on their TS/SCI projects.
Re:Shame on them (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense, they're just following the most basic of mathmatical formulas:
Money > Ethics
Put another way:
Ethics = Brain(Money)
There are rational arguments in favour of the NSA's spying, it's in the Mathematicians' interest to adopt those arguments.
Given the choice between a) giving up a ton of money and feeling morally sound, b) accepting a ton of money and feeling morally compromised, or c) accepting a ton of money and feeling morally sound, most people want to choose c, and since it's a lot easier to change ethics than sources of money the morality is the part that's going to adapt.
Hell, I'm from Alberta, oil sands central. A massive portion of our economy comes from oil. Even though I believe in global warming and my work only has a secondary connection to oil & gas there's still a part of me looking for reasons to justify our continued extraction. I have no doubt Mathematicians are playing with similar rationalizations.
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It's entirely possible that they feel they are acting ethically by serving their country. Not everyone feels that it's wrong to work for the Department of Defense. While there are some problems with the lack of oversight on the NSA they still perform a necessary function for the Defense of the country.
Re:Shame on them (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking as a PhD candidate in mathematics, while I personally won't have anything to do with the NSA (other than being on their watchlists, natch. I guess I shouldn't have dared to ever glance at Linux Journal,) I can't bring myself to hate on mathematicians who do. For all I know, my fellow grad students and I are only studying math because the NSA gave the university money to cover some of our stipends. In fact, that's probably the case.
Like it or not, if mathematicians cut ties with the NSA, there would be fewer mathematicians. Not just fewer mathematicians directly employed by the NSA, but also fewer mathematicians doing research at all and fewer mathematicians in training. American mathematical research would suffer a setback. I can see why the American Mathematical Society doesn't want that to happen.
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Work for the fascists, become a fascist yourself. There are times where you have to take a stand or become part of the forces of evil.
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And this is not one of them. No compelling case for it being one has been made.
Re:Shame on them (Score:5, Insightful)
And this is not one of them. No compelling case for it being one has been made.
Most people interested in the topic are too busy shouting anti-American slogans to actually discuss the moral implications and formulate counter-arguments to the arguments in support of the nanny state.
They don't realize that they're the NSA's best friends, akin to the UFO nuts who helped the Air Force keep certain aircraft research programs secret after crashes that killed test pilots and could have exposed the programs.
If these fools were more serious about creating change than patting themselves on the back, the first thing they'd do is start speaking out against pejorative attacks on anybody that disagrees with them. You have about 0% chance of changing people's minds when you start calling them names instead of talking to them, and if you place yourself on the same "team" as people calling names, then anybody who disagrees with you can write you off without question. They may not know the truth about whatever the Government is doing, but they can easily dismiss anti-social bullies.
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If they are really fools, they'd benefit by picking up a text book and studying until they are no longer fools.
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If they are really fools, they'd benefit by picking up a text book and studying until they are no longer fools.
I've yet to see a textbook that successfully teaches intellectual curiosity, so I assume that even if you convinced them to spend years reading text books, they wouldn't retain anything beyond what they memorized temporarily to pass a test.
If they at least became engaged in civic process, then they might be exposed to the basics of which levers of power they can influence, and be taught some tactics for effective public debate and advocacy. As it is now the debate is so weak, it doesn't even require respons
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I admit It doesn't really reach the modern pedagogical standards that (the rare examples of) solid educational research has established. But that wasn't what I was aiming for.
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Quite to the contrary. But you have to be willing to listen to understand them. One of the most important is that all this surveillance is not done for the reasons claimed. Others are rather drastic chilling effects, police officers lying to courts under oath ("parallel construction"), no democratic oversight, lessons learned in totalitarian states what dramatic risks blanked surveillance brings with it, etc.
Re:Shame on them (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree that the mathematicians in the direct employ of NSA should take a long hard, look at their own ethical code, but the fact of the matter is, the NSA provides lots of funding for university mathematics departments. For research that is open to public scrutiny. From TFA, $4 million goes to a grant program administrated by the AMS and things like undergraduate research programs and number theory conferences. The NSA is just throwing money at mathematicians on the off chance that they discover something useful to national security.
If the AMS were to sever ties with the NSA, there goes $4 million of funding for public mathematical research in a puff of impotent outrage.
I'm all with you when it comes to not working for fascists, but we're talking about public research here, for the enrichment of all humanity. Not shady spying stuff.
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It may be that they're not just clueless bumbling math nerds with no understanding of their work. It may be that they already took a long hard look, and saw, for example, records released from Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union that confirmed that numerous Soviet generals wanted to burn the whole world on the assumption that Communists would be better at rebuilding in a few thousand years.
It may be that the scale of evils of nuclear first strike threats vs excessive passive spying are an easy equatio
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You just assume you're so much more intelligent and worldly and wise than these leading mathematicians, but that isn't obvious to me at all.
Wait, are you addressing me specifically? If you are, that's decently insulting. If not, you sound like you're a bit off your rocker. Like a guy ranting on a streetcorner.
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Indeed. Same impression here.
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Suggesting somebody might be "off their rocker" somewhat precludes your complaint about a lack of politeness. It certain makes it unlikely that the person address thusly will be concerned.
As for the semantics, they are as written and it shouldn't be ambiguous. If you don't understand it, or it doesn't make sense to you, that is fine. As with other things that you don't understand, you can parse it until you find a way of doing so where it makes sense, in which case you probably understood the intended meani
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You seem to be completely unaware how patronizing and presumptuous your analysis was, even while getting particularly sensitive of your own feelings simply from somebody defending the ability of mathematicians to exercise free will successfully.
I am a mathematician, and quite frankly I don't want you defending me.
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I didn't defend you, so go away.
Do you have permission from all mathematicians to speak for them? No? Then all of my statements stand. (of course)
Being a member of a group doesn't give you a special right to talk about them.
I never said I was defending you, and anybody who thinks I said that should really re-read what I said.
Gosh, that would be rather insulting and patronizing to think you needed defending. That would be just as patronizing as deciding on your behalf what your moral dilemmas should be.
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4 Million? That is almost nothing. I had no idea that these people were selling their honor and integrity _that_ cheaply.
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I had no idea
The only true part of that post.
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Agreed.
Every person in the NSA involved in the wholesale spying on Americans Should be Shooting themselves as a Domestic Terrorist.
Did anyone (Except Snowden...) actually Listen to the Oath they Took?
The "End justifies the Means" historically leads to Slaughter in the End.
Purity is pretty, but sterile: (Score:2)
It's all clean sharp and black and white in your universe.
So, to be safe from moral hazard, maybe he should just not do math. Nobody should do math. Because it might end up being used for a bad end or be paid for by the "wrong" people.
I'll leave the moral purity to you, religious fundies, and other true believers.
It may be morally uplifting, but, sharing the world with you is going to a little chilly, because even fire has been used as a weapon.
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That is a rather simplistic statement. And it completely misses the point.
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How silly. The NSA has run amok a few times due to lack of oversight but to compare them to the forces of evil is ludicrous. Sadly they have fallen prey to a common failing of many people, to feel that the end justifies the means.
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Work for the fascists, become a fascist yourself. There are times where you have to take a stand or become part of the forces of evil.
In order to stand against evil you generally must be able to identify it. You seldom succeed in this since you are generally anti-American and substitute America for evil while either ignoring actual evil or claiming it wouldn't exist if not for America. That isn't a recipe for successful stands against evil. It's almost the opposite.
Re:Shame on them (Score:5, Insightful)
On the subject of the NSA funding mathematical research, I'd describe myself as somewhat wary but generally indifferent. What would concern me is what strings might be attached to the money. Can the researchers publish results in the open literature from studies funded by the NSA? If so, then fine. Otherwise it hurts on many levels. Not only would the NSA stifle the sharing of research results, but also the researchers themselves would have their careers impeded by non-publication, or co-opted into more classified NSA work because they couldn't find funding elsewhere without a publication record.
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Shame on them? The NSA is one of the principal funders of pure mathematical research. It was their dollars that created almost all of the encryption algorithms. Most of this research has no goal or direction from the NSA, it's block grants given based on the idea. The program isn't much different than what DARPA used to do with their pure research dollars where they had a group that threw money and anything regardless of application by the military then had a second group that put their money at only target
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"It was their dollars that created almost all of the encryption algorithms. "
Theirs, and a lot of Belgian Euros belonging to Vincent Rijmen. But other than that, yes. US Dollars.
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If the devil payed you to successfully research a method to eliminate poverty would you do take his money?
If your goal is to eliminate poverty there is no need to research for a new method. The efficiency of producing food and buildings has gone up by a factor of tens or hundreds in last few centuries. If the humankind has still been not able to provide all people with enough food and shelter, then it's just a shame.
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Try again.
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Those are very strong assumptions you make. Has it even been established that your team is the arbiter of what is good or evil? Or do you just assume that your subjective judgement should be sufficient to tell people what is right and wrong?
There is a huge gap between, "I believe ____ therefore I will do ____" and "I believe ____ therefore everybody else should do ____."
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Have you missed the "devil" in the statement? That the "devil" is evil kind of obvious. Or are you disputing that?
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Have you missed the "devil" in the statement? That the "devil" is evil kind of obvious. Or are you disputing that?
No, it is not obvious at all that somebody being demonized is automatically evil, or that somebody being revered is good.
Haven't you read Job?!
Re:Shame on them (Score:5, Insightful)
--Tom Lehrer, "Wernher von Braun"
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--Tom Lehrer, "Wernher von Braun"
Ding ding ding ding! We've got a winner here! One Godwin'ed Slashdot thread! (ok, I'm not actually sure you won, but I didn't see anything up above).
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Shame on them
Easy to say, when you don't have to choose between doing what you love for a morally dubious master vs getting a crap job.
You don't get the "morally dubious master" either way? I've been robbed!
It's called self-interest (Score:5, Insightful)
How many entities have significant funding that they are willing to dump into basic mathematical research?
Engineering and applied science programs can probably find any number of industry partners at home or abroad. I expect mathematicians have the most limited pool of well-financed donors.
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They do not. Mathematicians have had constant good job opportunities for the past century or so and funding of basic research always was adequate. Sure, you do not get rich that way, but the argument that they somehow have to take the devil's money in order to not starve is completely bogus and ignores reality completely.
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That's not the argument. Mathematicians aren't going to starve, but they're also not going to find many opportunities in industry to do mathematical research without direct, obvious application. Research that we have no way of measuring the value of, because applications haven't been found.
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You are completely removed from reality in mathematics. What you say is untrue in general. Maybe in the US funding for academic mathematics departments is really pathetic, but that is not the general situation.
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I will soon be graduating with my PhD in mathematics, and my experience thus far as a graduate student in the US is that it's really hard to get a position in academia where your research is more important than your teaching, and it's almost impossible to get an industry job where you can research what interests you instead of what's immediately applicable to your company.
I won't have any trouble getting a job. I won't even have trouble getting a very well-paying job. But getting a job that lets me pursue m
I RTFA (Score:4, Insightful)
TL;DR - Money talks (except when you ask the NSA how much they get/spend).
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Thank Snowden for revealing the exception you pointed out. I don't recall when news organization ran the budget breakdown.
Translation: (Score:4, Interesting)
"The NSA makes us uncomfortable, but their money makes us very comfortable indeed."
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It certainly helped reduce the spread of Soviet communism, and therefore Soviet concentration camps. Very few people were comfortable in those.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
Before you banish them, perhaps you can explain how you expect to remain free? I'm quite certain that snark and contempt are not sufficient.
Mathematician here. (Score:2, Funny)
I'm pulling back. This article is now officially false!
Who cares who is paying for fundamental research? (Score:2)
From the article most of the spending is on things that are beneficial to society as a whole, not just NSA. These include K-12 funding for science fairs, math clubs, and STEM summer camps. Unless the NSA is influencing these in harmful ways, such as pushing ideology beyond the normal "if you do well in school, you could do cool spy work for us" recruiting I don't see a problem with taking their money. Same for the research grants and conferences, which all result in publicly published fundamental research,
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The correlate is dollars spent on anything beneficial to society are dollars that can't be spend on less altruistic pursuits.
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A) Dollars not spent by the government on a government program probably wouldn't otherwise go to your pet causes
B) There is nothing altruistic, or claimed to be such, about supporting children's science education. It is done because it benefits America, not because they good warm fuzzies from helping kids.
C) Economies are not zero-sum. Not investing in something does not automatically mean something else will increase; actually the opposite is more often true. Money doesn't get spent once and then evaporate
Oh, (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean like the elliptic curve cryptography that they backdoored and then pressured the NIST in to backing so that millions of people's data was both available to them and also potentially at risk to any 3rd party to find out about it? The one that's specifically mentioned in the article?
"But the agency appears to have created its own back door into encrypted communications. The computer industry, both in the
United States and abroad, routinely adoptssecurity standards approved by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). But in 2006, NIST put its seal of approval on one pseudorandom number generatorâ"the Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator, or DUAL_EC_DRBGâ"that was flawed. The potential for a flaw was first identified in 2007 by Microsoft computer security experts. But it received little attention until internal NSA memos made public by Snowden revealed that NSA was the sole author of the flawed algorithm and that the
agency worked hard behind the scenes to make sure it was adopted by NIST. "
Yes, beneficial to society indeed...
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Ask yourself why you weren't alarmed by the dual-ec-drbg until the Snowden thing happened.
Those of us who were having to make decisions about the design and deployment of RNGs prior to Snowden were under no illusion that it wasn't backdoored and acted accordingly. The papers were published. The facts were known. Snowden added nothing but publicity and drew focus from the media.
I would express my opinion on it to anyone who's eyes wouldn't glaze over, which it approximately nobody who didn't already know. No
Understandable... I don't see a problem (Score:2)
The Snowden revelations about constitutionally-questionable domestic spying have been with the full co-operation of telecom and internet companies, hence no super-smart mathematicians necessary, just a bunch of IT guys and CompSci specialists to deal with the large amount of data.
NSA's "traditional" activities, which involve espionage and codebreaking applied against foreign powers (requiring the aid of mathematicians for codebreaking) is an accepted and normal part of international relations, in a traditi
Same thing happened with Starwars program (Score:2)
There was a small backlash and few campaigns appealing against taking military money
http://articles.latimes.com/19... [latimes.com]
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The IACR stood up. Slashdot reported on it: here [slashdot.org]
And thereby they are just as guilty... (Score:2)
When the coming totalitarian, fascist regime is finally overthrown, mathematicians will be identified as a key group that helped to put them in power. Apparently, far too many of these people have no ethics at all and are willing to sell their honor and integrity for a steady meal-ticket.
Math whores (Score:2)
they start YOUNG (true story) (Score:2, Interesting)
couple yrs ago I got home from work & my daughter asks to borrow my mac to go to a website for her target ("gifted" program - not bragging/relevant fact) homework. I ask which one & she says: "n-s-a-dot-gov-slash-kids" which immediately causes my head to snap & say: "WHAT?!? let me see that!" it was a front & back sheet w/questions like: "what are the two basic types of ciphers?" (fwiw I wasn't sure if they meant symmetric vs asymmetric or block vs stream), "what is a frequency count
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" what are the two basic types of ciphers?" (fwiw I wasn't sure if they meant symmetric vs asymmetric or block vs stream)"
The answer they were looking for was: substitution and transposition.
Straight from the NSA activity book for kids. I have a copy. They give (or gave) them away at the museum next door.
Optional XKCD (Score:2)
http://xkcd.com/504/ [xkcd.com]
How far does the taint go? (Score:3)
Somebody already asked the question. Would you take money from the NSA to feed the poor? If the answer is no, how far do you have to get away from the NSA before you would take such money? I assume that the NSA, like most large organizations, has many sub organizations, some of which probably do radically different things. I suspect that the mathematicians who work for the NSA are not involved with the data collection and were probably ignorant of the data collection until Snowden came along. So I have some sympathy for their plight. But that sympathy only goes so far. NSA is an off-budget secret organization. When have such organizations ever been morally clean? I find it ironic (and hypocritical) that normally severely left of center political types appear to be willing to work for such an organization.
I personally don't think of NSA as evil -- generally those who are given a particular job to do (such as data collection) will do that job with a zeal that pushes them beyond sensible moral limits. Many Law & Order episodes deal with the problems caused by police pushing the bounds of legality in pursuit of a criminal. I don't see those police as evil either -- even if they have broken both moral codes and laws.
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On the other hands the NSA mathematicians who created intentionally flawed cryptographic algorithms knew damned well that theywere acting to undermine the privacy and security of the nation - or if not can only blame willful ignorance.
As for the cops, etc. that break the law in overzealous pursuit of their duties - I agree, that doesn't make them evil. What makes them evil is that they then stand united in defense of those illegal actions, even when committed wilfully and in full knowledge of their illega
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That bit was responding specifically to the "I suspect that the mathematicians who work for the NSA..."
As for the rest... Ask your self this - why does any bureaucratic agency fund anyone? Because they have reason to believe the benefits will outweigh the costs. Always. Maybe they're aiming for the 1-in-a-million discovery that benefits them a billionfold. Maybe they just like the PR benefits. But if the agency has demonstrably evil objectives then you must ask yourself, exactly what cause are you servin
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Who said anything about dollar terms? What is the dollar value of being an absolute dictator? Money is not the goal of power, it's just one way to keep score.
As for Satan funding public works - I would absolutely refuse that money. Satan's reputed to be a canny old bastard, and if he's offering funds for "good works" then you can rest assured that he's working an angle with a near guarantee that all your good works will serve only to promote a greater evil.
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>as long as it is publicly disclosed (and this is the case) then the nefarious party gains no more than anyone else.
Trivially false - that assumes that the nefarious party has no more resources to leverage the knowledge than anyone else. The knowledge of how to build an atom bomb for example was rapidly "shared" (largely thanks to espionage, but nonetheless) around the world - but it was only of value to those parties that had the resources to actually build such a thing.
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>we're talking about ivory-tower researchers whose work is mostly not applicable to either the real world or the digital one.
Actually I could do with a few hard core mathematicians. I have some very real world cryptographic implementation issues that pivot on the truth of some heavily ivory-tower-esque mathematical questions.
There are companies that can and do employ academic mathematicians and appreciate the work they do. Both large corps and small companies.
There's probably an old professor somewhere w
Strange (Score:2)
Interesting NSA is able maintain such a dominate position when it comes to employment of mathematicians in todays "high technology world".
I can see professional cosmologists not wanting to piss off NASA yet something seems quite wrong with my world view for there to exist such a lack of demand for mathematicians across the board.
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Theres plenty of demand for mathematicians but most of it is going to be applying existing mathemical theorems/techiques or minor developments of existing theorems/techiques to someone's problem.
Top mathematicians don't want to be doing that. They want to be developing new theorems/techiques which may or may not turn out to have practical applications and that generally means working in a university under government grants.
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We all have to eat.
Besides, it's not like the NSA comes down to where you work and slaps all the dicks out of your mouth.
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So what exactly distinguishes one of these mathematicians from a common whore?
It is completely different. When a common whore provides services to her client, the client does not use the results of those services to invade anyone's privacy. Stop insulting whores.
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So what exactly distinguishes one of these mathematicians from a common whore?
It is completely different. When a common whore provides services to her client, the client does not use the results of those services to invade anyone's privacy. Stop insulting whores.
It seems to me that either way you're paying for getting f*cked.
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Most "common whores" would rather starve than to participate on evil of this magnitude.
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So what exactly distinguishes one of these mathematicians from a common whore?
Nothing. They're both equal victims of your bullying pejorative attacks.
Also, probably neither care what you think.
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Citation needed. You're just waving your hands and saying "NSA" next to the word "corruption." Has that been established? Is that even part of the alleged misdeeds?
It strikes me as odd that people become more credulous of anything anti-American after hearing accusations that the NSA did more work than some people knew about or approved of. How does NSA over-spying make media like The Guardian more trustworthy? The obvious answer is that it doesn't, and if your belief in NSA capabilities increased, your leve
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Maybe your should re-watch it, and try to find some plot themes. I don't think there was anything in it about having to agree with anti-government positions. It might be that the moral themes are all entirely personal, and no politics was covered.
Somebody from the NSA could just as easily wave their hands as you can, and say (some random movie that involved math) supports their position, and is an example of the good done by their support of math programs.