I think its fair for you to sign away your right to claim invention if you're doing top secret work. Its not like GCHQ would ever have pushed public key into civilian service, so its almost a moot point. This whole black-ops world of "Oh, we knew that" shouldn't be rewarded.
If major innovations are being done behind closed doors, then we're doing something wrong. Why should we reward these organizations that poach the best and the brightest and drain tax dollars that could be used for more constructive things? There's something almost perverse about the research arms of intelligence services. Its the opposite of the idea of open academic paper publishing and if they continue to snap up all the best talent, of course the academic world won't be able to keep up. Imagine if the government had a secret soccer team that would draft the top three players every year. How competitive would the civilian team be? What, if any, credit should we give the government team?
Maybe some disincentives like these would make some people think twice about getting in bed with the NSA or the GCHQ. Sure, you'll make some real money, maybe work on some interesting problems, but if you do something amazing your name won't be known.
Near the bottom of the Atlantic article is a link to this piece by Simon Singh on the British work:
http://cryptome.org/ukpk-alt.htm Well worth a read.
I was going to post a link to this book, but to my delightment someone beat me to it...
This book is highly recommended if you want to know more about encryption, but are afraid of the mathemathical concepts. It starts of super easy with a simple caesar shift (the kind of secret code children use) and builds from there. I'm a total math noob but thanks to this book I wrote a simple public-key encryption service. The book contains tons of examples and even challenges, if you're up to it.
Typically the Atlantic fails to mention Ralph Merkle the actual inventor of DH. But since he was just a student who went to his professors with that concept, they published the paper. Read about it:
http://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/107353
"if you’re going to put names on it, it should be called Diffie-Hellman-Merkle key exchange, since it’s actually based on a concept of Merkle’s. We give him credit for that in the paper, but it was in a paper by Diffie and Hellman, so it’s called Diffie-Hellman key exchange."
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 29.4 ms ] threadOne wonders what marvels are still classified...
If major innovations are being done behind closed doors, then we're doing something wrong. Why should we reward these organizations that poach the best and the brightest and drain tax dollars that could be used for more constructive things? There's something almost perverse about the research arms of intelligence services. Its the opposite of the idea of open academic paper publishing and if they continue to snap up all the best talent, of course the academic world won't be able to keep up. Imagine if the government had a secret soccer team that would draft the top three players every year. How competitive would the civilian team be? What, if any, credit should we give the government team?
Maybe some disincentives like these would make some people think twice about getting in bed with the NSA or the GCHQ. Sure, you'll make some real money, maybe work on some interesting problems, but if you do something amazing your name won't be known.
I have in the many years since I read this one, become quite the fan of all his works.
This book is highly recommended if you want to know more about encryption, but are afraid of the mathemathical concepts. It starts of super easy with a simple caesar shift (the kind of secret code children use) and builds from there. I'm a total math noob but thanks to this book I wrote a simple public-key encryption service. The book contains tons of examples and even challenges, if you're up to it.
If you haven't read this book, go on and do so!
a little bit silly... especially the link to the Blackberry...