Have any prominent mathematicians been disappeared by the NSA?

Factual Questions
1

A few days ago, I popped in to see an my old CS lecturer and he was in the middle of giving a talk about DES and how the NSA suggested modifying the algorithm in a very particular but seemingly random way. It was only many years later than public mathematicians realised that this made DES much more secure and, thus, this proves that, at least back then, the NSA was astoundingly far ahead of public cryptogrophers.

It occurs to me that it should be fairly easy to find out exactly who the NSA is hiring. A young mathematician, brings out a string of really clever papers, then just disappears from view for the rest of his life. So are there any confirmed cases of people who we are fairly certain were nabbed by the NSA?

2

Just curious, when you say ‘disappear from view’, do you mean literally, or do you mean that the mathematician accepts a well-paying job with an obscure DOE-related agency or something like that? I doubt that the NSA has many of its “hires” completely vanish from the face of america without a trace, for the simple reason that it’s too easy for someone to find out about with a little research. (And that families, friends, fiancees etcetera might raise a howl, call the missing persons bureau, etcetera.)

And for the record, I realize that DOE is not nearly the same as the NSA… however I imagine that NSA does have the wherewithal to create ‘cover jobs’ in other agencies if they don’t want it to be obvious that someone is working for them directly.

3

I’ve met young mathemeticians who work for NSA. At one DC United soccer game I chatted with a guy for quite a long time about how he came to work for that particular agency, and he was quite open about the fact that he designed secret codes.

I haven’t seen him since then, so maybe he was “disappeared” after the match… Hmmm.

4

Well, disappear in the professional sense. Obviously, they aren’t allowed to publish any more papers closely related to their field of study.

Myabe not now but, during the cold war, I also imagine that if what they do is particularly sensitive, then the NSA might want to take some steps to protect them from the other side?

5

Well, they’d probably be able to publish any papers that don’t refer to what the NSA considers sensitive material or closely related to what they’re working on for the spooks… some might have some material in their ‘field of study’ that isn’t too closely related.

On the other hand, I would imagine that there are a lot of brilliant research academics who leave for jobs in industry or government and then don’t publish any papers afterward, because they’re too busy with other things and not immersed in the scholastic world anymore.
Talk of literal disappearances reminded me of Isaac Asimov’s short story “Spell my name with an S”, which has as a plot point a nuclear agency scientist-administrator and a high security officer examining the dossier of an apparently minor russian nuclear physicist and commenting that he had ‘disappeared without a trace’. The obvious conclusion was that he’d done something to displease the party officials and had been methodically executed, but between the two of them “I just wonder if he’s been whisked away for top secret research… based on his papers he might have been inching towards gamma-ray reflection”

Since it’s revealed at the end that the evidence that let them to this russian guy had essentially been fabricated, it’s not clear if the russians HAD whisked him away for research or if he’d been killed after all, or maybe just run away.

6

As I understand it, not everything that NSA mathematicians work on is top secret, and they are allowed to publish some of their stuff after review. Perhaps Wendell Wagner will show up and set us straight.

7

Indistrial mathematics (NSA, engineering firms, etc) is very different from academic mathematics. I don’t know many people who have gone into industry who didn’t want to do that from the get-go, and the “rising stars” don’t tend to want to. Also, people considered prodigies these days are generally working in fields that have little to no current application. Further, a large portion of the best young mathematicians are Russian, Chinese, or Iranian and are never going to get clearance.

The upshot is that the types of mathematicians who end up at the NSA and the types who end up getting Fields medals are very different, and are so from very early on.

Incidentally, last I checked there was a certain undercurrent of paranoia outside the NSA that the S-boxes are only superficially stronger (and indeed hardened against differential attacks), but that they may now have a “back door”.

8

I’m an engineer/mathematician at the NSA. Not all of our work is classified, and we are allowed to publish after internal review.

9

If anyone was going to “disappear” I’d expect it to be someone along the likes of Bruce Schnier, Vincent Rijmen or Ron Rivest. AFAIK, they’re all quite visible.

As for whether or not the crypto people at NSA were and are more advanced than anyone else, well, for one, they are in the business of being better at crypto than anyone else, and there has been a bit of controversy whether they *weakened * IBM’s Lucifer algorithm and called it DES back in 1974 or so, so presumably, there are handful of people that know much more about these algorithms than most cryptographers.

10

Oops… if anyone’s googling names, you’ll have better luck with Bruce Schneier.

11

Any chance you would be willing to do a “Ask the NSA guy” thread? Or has this been done before?

Too many movies with junk info. :frowning:

12

I’m currently reading Body of Secrets by James Bamford, which purports to be a history of the NSA. I can’t vouch for its accuracy (there’s some amazingly inflammatory but apparently well-documented stuff about Israel’s sinking of the U.S.S. Liberty, for example), but one thing that’s definitely striking about the agency’s narrative, as laid out by Bamford, is how it seems to vacuum up promising mathematicians for cryptographic work.

Perhaps Mr. Shakespeare would be willing to expand on his comments, as it’s certainly a fascinating topic.

13

I call bullshit on the “vacuuming-up”. If this were true I’d have seen dozens of my peers get sucked in. In reality we get more come-ons from Wall Street firms than the NSA.

What may be true is that the NSA during wartime (Vietnam, say) was good at getting men who were drafted with master’s degrees in mathematics or related fields assigned to the Pentagon, where they could work in what amounted to NSA outposts in the army. I know for a fact that this went on at some scale. However, almost all such mathematicians did their time and returned to real work. Many didn’t make it that far, in fact. A fair portion of the best and brightest at that time were rather anti-war, mathematicians not being given to knee-jerk opposition to Communism. Lots of these put up a big fight when they were drafted, never made it through basic, were dishonorably discharged, and went back to the ivory tower where nobody cares what the military thinks about you (KOFFKOFFneil koblitzKOFFKOFF).

14

While F.U. ponders this offer (and confers with his department head about what he can say), I’ll chime in with a little info. I live about 20 minutes from NSA’s main headquarters at Ft. Meade, MD, and have known several people who worked there. Twenty years ago, when I was about to graduate from college, I took NSA’s aptitude test and was offered a choice of jobs in several areas. I declined.

What I’m about to say was true (to the best of my recollection) 20 years ago, but things may have changed since then.

Employees of NSA are permitted to publish, but, as F.U. said, everything must be reviewed by NSA before being published. This applies to everything, including in apparently unrelated fields. If your hobby happens to be collecting bottle tops, and you want to publish an article in a bottle top collectors’ magazine, it has to be reviewed. Furthermore, this applies for the rest of your life, even after you leave NSA’s employ.

NSA has also established a very insular community and encourages employees to participate in NSA chess clubs, car clubs, and so on, and fill as many of their social needs as possible within NSA.

It used to be the case that when they were asked where they worked, NSA employees were instructed not to reveal that they worked for the agency, which led to its being referred to in this area as “No Such Agency.” For a long time, when you met someone around here who said only “I work for the government,” or “I work for the Department of Defense,” he/she was usually NSA.

These days people aren’t quite so reluctant to admit working for NSA.

They tend not to say much about their actual jobs, for obvious reasons. A college classmate who went to NSA after graduating told me that she was working as a translator, but refused to tell me what language. I didn’t have a “need to know.”

15

Cool. Personally I was just more of interested in what areas the NSA is officially concerned, and which fables of Movie Lore can also be dropped quite officially–and then everything else we can just ignore. :stuck_out_tongue:
For instance I would wonder what all stuff the NSA works on with the private sector–whether they publish reviews of encryption algorithms that are used in the public (SHA-1 and such.) Or whether making certain algorithms illegal to be used outside of the US (and friendly nations) yet still allowed to be publicly displayed on the internet serves some good at their end.

This of course makes one wonder if “Shakespeare” isn’t the codename for F.U.'s personal overseer…?

16

The book also discusses that many people use the NSA as a stepping stone for their career, like accountants (at least ones around here) used to use Arthur Anderson. You work your ass off for a couple of years and when you’ve got that mark on the your resume, you get a job that pays better and has room for advancement. It’s been awhile since I read the book, but having brilliant, but relatively short-term employees is a major problem for them.

17

[QUOTE=commasense]
For a long time, when you met someone around here who said only “I work for the government,” or “I work for the Department of Defense,” he/she was usually NSA./QUOTE]

Also very common in the mid-to-late ‘80s was “I work with computers”. I remember that phrase coming up a lot at my parents’ parties.

18

I’m sorry, I should have been clear: I’m in the middle of the book, which means I’ve only read up to the mid 1960s. Things have evidently changed since then.

19

I’ll be glad to answer questions, but the restrictions on what I’m allowed to say, coupled with limitations in what I know, will limit the value of my answers. (I’m not highly placed, just a worker bee).

Cervaise, I haven’t read ‘Body of Secrets’, and I’m afraid I don’t know any inside info on the Liberty incident. Really, I don’t – I’d say ‘no comment’ otherwise.

commasense, the requirement to have non-work-related writings reviewed has indeed loosened up since I first came here in 1986. It was never really strict to begin with – I once brought to pre-pub a letter I was sending to the editor of National Review. It had absolutely nothing to do with NSA matters (it was about abortion). The reviewing official seemed a little surprised that I was even submitting it. (And no, Sage Rat, my username (as related in this post) refers to Pete Rose’s comments in Jim Bouton’s 1970 sports tell-all book Ball Four.)

The NSA community is fairly insular, but that’s not something anyone strives for – it’s more a result of hiring people who are more introverted, nerdy and clean-living (drugs and excessive drinking are no-nos for a clearance) than the general public – they tend to have common interests. I am more Bohemian than most people here, and I have very little to do with my colleagues outside work.

Yes, when I came here, we were instructed explicitly to tell people we worked for ‘the government’ or ‘the Defense Department’. But since everyone in the region knew what that meant, the results were sometimes comical: “I work for the DoD”; “Oh, you work for the NSA?”; “Uh, I work for the DoD”; etc. We weren’t ‘under cover’ – we could tell people we worked here, especially in ongoing dealings, like landlords and mechanics. We just weren’t supposed to blab it to strangers.

The work culture is a little more aggressive and competitive than at most other government agencies. But since it’s often introverts trying to interact with other introverts, it’s more clumsy and stilted than in the FBI or a Fortune 500 company. While the average person here is smart, distribution of smarts follows a bell curve. There are people here who’d be working at Wal-Mart if they left; and there are indeed people here as smart as any I’ve ever met (if they worked in the appropriate areas of math, they’d be contenders for Fields medals). Most of us are basically competent journeymen types.

Chairman Pow, like any place that pays government-level salaries, ‘superstar’ types often conclude that rewards here are limited. OTOH, if a ‘superstar’ wants to work on the specific problems the Agency deals with, they can often find a better-paying private-sector position with a company that contracts with the Agency. It was tougher to hire qualified people during the telecomms boom (even I contemplated leaving, and I’m no superstar).

Although it’s tough to prove a negative, I would agree with Mathochist (great name, by the way!) that ‘vaccuuming’ doesn’t exist now. I was only here for the waning years of the Cold War, so I don’t know first-hand about things in the 50’s and 60’s. But I’ve never heard tell of it. He is right that mathematicians tend to be politically left-of-center, certainly when compared with the general Agency population.

The movies have really done a number on us. In summary, they portray us as smarter, better-organized, and more evil than we really are.

20

<Gleefully straying vaguely off-topic>
As far as cryptography goes, the aforementioned Bruce Schneier thinks the academic world is catching up to the NSA

(from his blog at http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/10/the_legacy_of_d.html)