We are told that in the future, new technologies will allow all humans to be efficiently and continuously connected to each other and to almost any object around us. This will have an inevitable corollary: the end of privacy, because every phone call, every email, our every movement, and almost every thought we have will be recorded, and all this information can be monitored by any private company or government.
Actually, the loss of privacy will not happen in the future, it has already been happening for years. This is precisely what Edward Snowden, a young data engineer at the US National Security Agency, reported in 2013. In June of that year, Snowden handed over a huge amount of electronic files to journalists Glenn Greewald and Laura Poitras, whom he had met in Hong Kong. The files were the result of a massive surveillance programme put in place by the US government to access phone calls, emails, web searches, etc., made by anyone in the world. From that moment on, his country considered Snowden a traitor, and he will certainly face life imprisonment when he is captured (he is currently a refugee in Russia), if he is not blown up by a drone bomb first.
Last summer, Snowden published his biography, and in it, mathematics has its own place. In some ways, according to Snowden, mathematics’ help in encrypting information is the last remaining hope for protecting our privacy: “Altogether, the documents I selected fit on a single drive,” Snowden explains, “which I left at home on my desk as it was. I knew that the security of the materials there was the same as it had been in the office. But they were actually safer because of the multiple levels and methods of encryption. That is the incomparable beauty of the art of cryptology,” he adds:
A little bit of mathematics can do what all guns and barbed wire are incapable of doing: a little bit of mathematics can be used to keep a secret.
References
Permanent record, E. Snowden, Barnes & Noble, 2019.
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