I posted this to PM's mailing list, but he apparently zapped it without comment. so here it goes to a less authoritarian forum. context: posters to his list were remarking on the recent declassification of information in Britain that suggested they had discovered the key aspects of RSA before it was discovered in the open literature by Diffie & Hellman etc. ------- Forwarded Message To: cryptography@c2.net Subject: a rant on the morality of confidentiality scientists who agree to government secrecy to develop their inventions are agreeing to a lot more than mere secrecy. they are committing to a paradigm that is at odds with science itself, which only advances through the open literature. furthermore, they are giving away their power, so to speak, to governments that do not have the same motives they do. essentially they are working for a war machine, or a suppression machine. how can they be sure their inventions will not be used for dark purposes? imho, by not working within a system that poses that risk. that no such system seems to exist is irrelevant. a truly responsible scientist would help create one and wouldn't work without one. I think the scientists who worked on the atom bomb and today within the NSA are working under a key false assumption. "if we don't develop it, the enemy will, and he will use it against us". but perhaps if scientists around the world united against the government warmongers that have been manipulating them for many generations, particularly within the 20th century with grotesque results, perhaps a different story would emerge. yet even Einstein himself urged our government to "develop a weapon of mass destruction before the Joneses do". how smart is that? perhaps scientifically clever, but morally, socially, and spiritually vacuous. it is a feeble mind in my opinion who takes refuge in the saying that "technology is neutral". perhaps so, but not the humans who use and *develop* it, and the latter are particularly responsible for the former. how smart were those nuclear weapons scientists, anyway, such as Feynmann? imho they agreed to the terms of their own manipulation, and failed to question their basic motives and intents and of those who paid them. I believe those that work within the NSA and other secret agencies are betraying the principles of science under the guise of protecting humanity. I believe they have the power to change this system, but they have reneged on their responsibility as human beings. Wayner covers the simplistic issues in his piece for the NYT, but they key issues at stake are far deeper and have never even been recognized by some of the so-called greatest minds of our century. so I view with distaste, to say the lest, the scientists who later try to break the secrecy and come out in the open merely so that they can have credit for something that was classified they claim to deserve. they deserve credit only for supporting and participating in a vast and sinister system of scientific manipulation for dark and inhumanitarian purposes. Chomsky is one of the few scientists of our time who has the brilliance to recognize the ulterior side of the government we support. surprise! he is largely ignored or even blacklisted by his morally- and socially- handicapped colleages who believe it is not their place to question the status quo, but only to fit into it or advance through it. all those scientists who have ever complained about the lack of funding for your branch, or who have fought with each other over the scraps handed to you like dogs-- do you have any concept of how much tax money is put into military research? how much is funnelled into the NSA? this is money that is funded by the public for public welfare-- is it really being used for that? NSA and other secret agencies have become vast parasites feeding on public dollars that have no accountability, and largely because scientists, who should lead the pack, instead lack the intelligence to recognize it or the courage to challenge it. these are my thoughts as I read how the NSA's Inman pops up to say that the credit for RSA is the NSA's, or a British agency does the same. secrecy is directly contradictory to the principles upon which this country is founded. and imho it is becoming a large source of its ongoing demise. quite simply, the scientists are fiddling while Democracy burns. ------- End of Forwarded Message