Our students’ recent action inspires me: As the darkness of our moment looms, their courage reminds me how these small, bright points of resistance are more necessary now than ever.

By my second semester teaching at Bowdoin, I was made aware that two of my senior colleagues, Thom Pietraho and Jen Taback, had either long-standing collaborations with researchers at the National Security Agency (NSA) or worked for the NSA in a more direct capacity. No one ever told me directly, (though many indirect allusions were made) but the evidence quickly added up: references to security clearances, regular trips to prominent NSA research locations, student research support with NSA funds, faculty research specialties following NSA priorities, strange gaps in CVs and collaboration visitors from the Center for Communications Research (the public-facing research center for the NSA in La Jolla, CA) all pointed in one direction. That the remaining senior faculty treated this as an open, if somewhat odious, non-secret made clear the disposition of the department. So I came to accept that among the most basic requirements of my tenure at Bowdoin was silent complicity with the NSA. I write this publicly today to make clear: My continued participation with this profound corruption of mathematics and what it has wrought here at Bowdoin is over.

The NSA is the U.S. spy agency responsible for monitoring communications worldwide. While the NSA’s targeting of civil rights movements, corruption of public evidence and back doors into cryptographic standards are well documented, its prominence in the American imagination largely comes from the 2013 Snowden revelations, when a federal contractor provided detailed evidence of a vast and largely illegal set of surveillance programs, including explicit targeting of prominent Muslim activists, the country-wide monitoring of nearly all digital communications and blanket surveillance of foreign nationals. Subsequent disclosures made clear its central role in international drone strikes and the assassination of civilians by allied governments. It also happens to be the largest employer of mathematicians in the world and thus among the most influential institutions in American mathematics. Since the NSA would be sorely weakened in its current operations without the material support the mathematics community provides it, the NSA’s crimes are also American mathematics’ crimes.

Mathematics’ supposed neutrality is often a fig leaf for its militarism. The single largest plank of American research mathematics is likely the support of the U.S.’s vast military and surveillance efforts. The research topics within mathematics follow these priorities, emphasizing specific types of (often abstract) problems over the more context-dependent investigations that could be used to advance science or understand societal problems. I believe that mathematics intrinsically contains a liberatory kernel—what group of people is better positioned to contextualize the dynamics of the housing crisis, the scale of wealth inequality, the complex and the dangerous implications of climate change—but instead our funding priorities have given over our discipline to violent, racist and anti-democratic ends, often unwittingly. To accomplish this requires a mathematics education system that must stifle critical inquiry precisely because even a passing acquaintance with the results of our labor would horrify most students interested in the subject.

I often think of our Bowdoin Math department as the Tea Room: well-appointed, agreeable, always excited to have you join the conversation (only in a deferential fashion, of course) and possessed of unflagging belief in its own good intentions. Questioning how the material conditions of such an arrangement come to be, who selects the questions asked and, crucially, who gets to decide the boundaries of what mathematics is, well, that just isn’t done. It somehow just never quite comes up that our tools are visibly rendered into mechanisms of violence, economic extraction and surveillance. John von Neumann’s advocacy for war crimes and its connection to game theory will never be remarked upon. The well-documented use of statistics and mathematics in the intentional elimination of civilian populations during the firebombing of Japan isn’t something you will learn about anywhere in our liberal arts curriculum. The NSA’s current use of cryptography and machine learning to enhance the capacities of illegal surveillance programs is probably news to the majority of our students, even those taking our courses in these subjects. Our complacent departmental culture works in perfect concert with what the NSA needs from American mathematics: a ready stream of compliant but well-trained technical labor, untroubled by questions of American imperial violence.

Complicity always ends with a rupture. The tear in the social fabric occurs precisely because we have let something we know to be wrong go on for too long. My complicity has been rooted in my pride: The idea of being a statistics professor at one of the most prestigious institutions in my home state was greater than my willingness to stand up to this corruption and amorality. But I cannot bear any longer to work within a framework that quietly aids and abets in providing targeting solutions for civilians without doing my utmost to end it. Fortunately, there are two effective antidotes to the anti-democratic darkness of the NSA: democratic norms and critical thought. My responsibility now is to spend the remainder of my tenure at Bowdoin trying to help those take root in the Math Department.

THE NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY, MATHEMATICS AND AMERICAN EMPIRE

What is the National Security Agency (NSA)?

The NSA, founded secretly in 1952 and first publicly acknowledged in 1975, is the main U.S. government organization charged with collecting and analyzing communications intelligence, including internet, phone and satellite communications. Its budget, like its charter, is secret but part of the $50 billion allocated to intelligence agencies annually. The NSA maintains a vast set of data collection centers both within the U.S. and across the globe, capturing data from a wide swath of global telecommunications infrastructure. It provides material support to U.S. intelligence and U.S. military both in conflict zones, as well as additional surveillance of both U.S. and foreign politicians, journalists, scientists and activists. In the last decade, it has focused on the development of machine learning and artificial intelligence tools. Since 2013, the NSA has been openly violating US law, engaging in illegal surveillance of US citizens, foreign nationals—including allied leaders—and using that data to assist U.S. and allied militaries to support their interests. Currently, it plays a significant role in U.S. drone assassinations and assists in targeted assassination programs for allied countries.

NSA’s historical role in U.S. military aggression and subversion of domestic liberation movements

The NSA is an inherently clandestine organization that has operated with little to no democratic oversight for the entirety of its existence. Consequently, what is known about its efforts constitutes the bare minimum of its exploits. Throughout the Cold War, it provided translation, intelligence and logistical support for a number of military interventions, most notably the invasion of Vietnam where it effectively administered South Vietnamese intelligence. In 2005, leaked documents revealed the NSA was largely responsible for manufacturing evidence around the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the key event used by the U.S. to justify the invasion of South Vietnam. Similarly, the NSA played a pivotal role in creating international support for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Domestically, through the 1960s and 1970s, the NSA engaged in illegal surveillance and subversion of civil rights and anti-war activists, including Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, U.S. senators and several prominent journalists. During the Vietnam War, it provided detailed documentation on the activities of student and anti-war leaders to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). These illegalities, along with similar abuses by the CIA and FBI, led to the Church Senate hearings, where many of these facts came to light. The reforms adopted after the Church hearings strongly bounded the NSA’s operations, so much that it was a fraction of its former size by 2000. The September 11 attacks, and the consequent wave of Congressional support for surveillance, reopened the floodgates, vastly expanding both budgets and diminishing expectations for democratic or legal scrutiny.

Revelation of global surveillance apparatus 

In 2013, Edward Snowden, then an NSA consultant, revealed that the NSA was engaging in several extrajudicial programs that violated U.S. and international law and were against the stated claims of NSA leadership. As put at the time, “This isn’t a wire-tap, it’s a country-tap.” These included a series of different programs that vastly expanded the surveillance capacity both within the U.S. but also the Global North more broadly. These included:

– A series of secret treaties between the U.S. and allied nations (UK, France, Germany, Norway, Canada, Israel and others) that vastly expanded the international sharing of citizen information.

– Infrastructure to directly surveil individuals using the backbone infrastructure of the internet.

– A data warehousing system to store much of the metadata of American communications and a substantial fraction of international communications, archived indefinitely for later use; in many situations, this information can be used by the FBI as part of criminal investigations without use of a warrant.

– The specific surveillance and broader targeting of prominent American Muslims.

– Machine learning methods for uncovering broader social networks of individuals from captured communications metadata.

These disclosures were followed by statements to Congress from NSA leadership dismissing their accuracy, later found to be lies. The majority of these programs were found to be illegal under U.S. law.

The NSA and American mathematics

The NSA requires enormous numbers of mathematicians and statisticians to maintain its operations and is consequently one of the largest funders of mathematical research in the world. The NSA budget for research is indicated to be about $400 million, about 50 percent higher than the National Science Foundation budget for Mathematical Sciences. It directly employs approximately 600 mathematicians, making it likely the single largest employer of mathematicians in the world. However, a substantial fraction of NSA research is performed by mathematicians with posts at universities and colleges. The size of this population is unknown but is likely five to ten times the size of the directly employed mathematicians and so may account for five to 15 percent of all eligible American mathematicians. (For context, there are roughly 75,000-100,000 mathematicians in the U.S., of whom about roughly 50 percent are foreign nationals and so not eligible for NSA employment.) Consequently, there is no academic community more thoroughly implicated in the crimes of the NSA than American mathematics.

Most mathematicians working at the NSA work on problems that have been scrubbed of context, so as to present a “neutral” problem unrelated to the actual context in which it will be used, providing a screen of plausible deniability between academic researchers and the violence and illegality of the institution they work for. Since the vast expansion of domestic and international surveillance permitted after 9/11 and abetted by the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the NSA has been retraining researchers to focus on problems in machine learning and artificial intelligence, to analyze their data collections or pilot autonomous weapons systems.

Mathematicians that have spoken publicly about the misuse of their efforts by the NSA—including the subversion of the academic literature and the inclusion of backends in common cryptographic software—have been met with stiff backlash, including harassment by the FBI. Most recently, the Just Mathematics Collective has executed a number of direct actions against NSA recruitment at American Mathematical Society-sponsored conferences, only to be forcibly removed from the conference.

NSA collaboration with foreign countries and drone targeting

The NSA works closely with similar state surveillance bureaucracies of allied states, including the UK, Canada, Australia, Israel and New Zealand. This includes algorithmic and technical assistance, as well as passing unfiltered, raw data on U.S. citizens. Initially prohibited from providing information for use in assassination in other countries, foreign lobbying rescinded this order so that the NSA regularly provides direct information on U.S. and non-U.S. citizens that may be used for assassination targeting. This is in addition to the targeting and direction of drone attacks within non-allied states that target individuals solely based on communications meta-data using poorly constructed statistical algorithms that may have killed thousands of civilians.

NSA legality and presidential immunity

The U.S. courts, long deferential to national security claims, have provided scant oversight over the NSA and how it interacts with domestic law enforcement, such as the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration, largely through the lax standards set by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Agency (FISA) court. This includes spying on domestic activists, the use of surveillance to evaluate immigrants and the providing of NSA resources to law enforcement and private contractors. However, after the Snowden revelations made clear that the illegality of the NSA far exceeded what was allowed by even the permissive Patriot Act and several of its provisions were tested in U.S. federal court, the finding was that these actions violated both U.S. law and the U.S. constitution. The recent decision in Trump v. United States holds the U.S. president immune for official acts. This presumably includes all NSA work done at the president’s direction, including the surveillance of student activists, immigration enforcement and drone assassinations. The lawlessness of the NSA no longer has any clear boundary.

Jack O’Brien is an Associate Professor of Mathematics.