Maths spying: The quandary of working for the spooks
▻http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229660.200-maths-spying-the-quandary-of-working-for-the-spooks.htm
FOR the past 10 months, a major international scandal has engulfed some of the world’s largest employers of mathematicians. These organisations stand accused of law-breaking on an industrial scale and are now the object of widespread outrage. How has the mathematics community responded? Largely by ignoring it.
Mathematicians seldom face ethical questions. We enjoy the feeling that what we do is separate from the everyday world. As the number theorist G. H. Hardy wrote in 1940: “I have never done anything ’useful’. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world.”
That idea is now untenable. Mathematics clearly has practical applications that are highly relevant to the modern world, not least internet encryption.