Justice for Turing

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Justice for Turing

Post by s1m0n »

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8226509.stm

There's a solid argument to make that Turing is the man that won the war.
Thousands of people have signed a Downing Street petition calling for a posthumous government apology to World War II code breaker Alan Turing.

Writer Ian McEwan has just backed the campaign, which already has the support of scientist Richard Dawkins.

In 1952 Turing was prosecuted under the gross indecency act after admitting to a sexual relationship with a man. Two years later he killed himself.

The petition was the idea of computer scientist John Graham-Cumming.

He is seeking an apology for the way the young mathematician was treated after his conviction. He has also written to the Queen to ask for a posthumous knighthood to be awarded to the British mathematician.

Alan Turing was given experimental chemical castration as a "treatment" and his security privileges were removed, meaning he could not continue work for the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

"This added insult and humiliation ultimately drove him to suicide," said gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, who also backs the campaign. "With Turing's death, Britain and the world lost one of its finest intellectual minds. A government apology and posthumous pardon are long overdue."
And now there was no doubt that the trees were really moving - moving in and out through one another as if in a complicated country dance. ('And I suppose,' thought Lucy, 'when trees dance, it must be a very, very country dance indeed.')

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Re: Justice for Turing

Post by crookedtune »

The 1950s were just an all-around bad idea.
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Re: Justice for Turing

Post by fearfaoin »

His test still sucks.
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Re: Justice for Turing

Post by MTGuru »

fearfaoin wrote:His test still sucks.
Exactly what a Turing bot would say!
Vivat diabolus in musica! MTGuru's (old) GG Clips / Blackbird Clips

Joel Barish: Is there any risk of brain damage?
Dr. Mierzwiak: Well, technically speaking, the procedure is brain damage.
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Re: Justice for Turing

Post by fearfaoin »

MTGuru wrote:Exactly what a Turing bot would say!
Oops! Caught!
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Re: Justice for Turing

Post by fel bautista »

fearfaoin wrote:
MTGuru wrote:Exactly what a Turing bot would say!
Oops! Caught!
Yes, but how could you tell...
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Re: Justice for Turing

Post by jim stone »

I've read that one of the reasons there will be no apology is that Turing has no surviving family.

It isn't clear that he committed suicide--it's possible that he died by accident (as his mother
maintained) or, as I believe Richard
Dawkins has suggested, was murdered by the British government as a security risk. If Turing did commit suicide (as he probably did) it isn't plain that it was because of his arrest and its consequences. Turing remained very active intellectually, working in biology and physics, and, as far as I can
tell, remained actively homosexual--he saw nothing wrong with it. He remained a
feisty guy, not a humiliated victim. This was a complicated man,
we don't know why he killed himself, in fact,
and it does Turing a kind of violence to reduce him to a martyr for gay rights.

No question that the laws were horrible, but then I suppose there is no reason to apologize
to Turing in particular. Why not to everybody prosecuted? Of course
the laws are gone.

Turing needs no apologies, he has been honored repeatedly, especially in the UK.
He is going to be remembered as one of the greats. The father of the digital
computer! A bit like exploiting Isaac Newton as a poster-boy
to further some current cause. We make him smaller.
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Re: Justice for Turing

Post by Caj »

While we may not know the cause of death for absolute certain, we do know that he was prosecuted, his security clearance was revoked, and he was forced to undergo hormone treatments that screwed up his body. Suicide seems the short-odds explanation, but even it it wasn't, there is still much to apologize for.

While some people will frame this as a gay rights issue, I see it as more of an individual injustice. For one of Britain's and the world's prominent intellectuals to be treated this way, for this or any comparable reason, is an embarrassment that is worth an official remark.

Why not apologize to everyone else so afflicted? Well, first of all the revocation of security clearance and interference with his career is specific to Turing. Secondly, Turing is now recognized as a member of Britain's intellectual heritage; he gets an apology for the same reason that the Catholic Church gave one to Galileo.

Thirdly, to apologize to everyone actually exacerbates the "martyr for a cause" effect you mention. If the Pope apologized to Galileo, it's specific to Galileo; if they made it a blanket apology for heresy, then Galileo becomes a poster boy for a larger cause of atheism, freedom from religion or whatnot.

I figure that countries should be proud of their scientific and intellectual giants, and should brag about them, put them on money and postage stamps; but to earn the right to do so, if they were at all mistreated that deserves an official apology.
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Re: Justice for Turing

Post by Caj »

Incidentally, if you want a very lucid explanation of what Turing really did, a great book on cryptography for the layperson is The Code Book by Simon Singh.

I actually teach an undergraduate course in cryptography (my next lecture is at 3:30) and I've seen a lot of both textbooks and regular books. This is the clearest and most readable regular book I've looked at, and yet it actually goes into mathematical details rather than glossing over ideas. Singh explains how Turing regarded the Enigma machine as a composition of fixed and changing permutations, and how he used this to combine machines in a way that canceled out most of the encryption key.
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Re: Justice for Turing

Post by jim stone »

Thanks for the book reference.

I want to set aside the question of an apology for the moment, and talk about some interesting details. The first is that I don’t think the conviction for homosexual behavior in 1952 had much effect on Alan Turing’s intellectual work, most of which was going on in university and did not depend upon his having security clearance. So the idea that the conviction significantly affected his career is doubtful.

Here’s some information about what he was up to after the war. Following this I want to say something about why he lost his security clearance.

http://www.thocp.net/biographies/turing_alan.html

(By 1948 Newman was the professor of mathematics at the University of Manchester and offered Turing a readership there. Turing resigned from the National Physical Laboratory to take up the post in Manchester. Newman writes in [12] that in Manchester:-

... work was beginning on the construction of a computing machine by F C Williams and T Kilburn. The expectation was that Turing would lead the mathematical side of the work, and for a few years he continued to work, first on the design of the subroutines out of which the larger programs for such a machine are built, and then, as this kind of work became standardised, on more general problems of numerical analysis.

In 1950 Turing published Computing machinery and intelligence in Mind. It is another remarkable work from his brilliantly inventive mind which seemed to foresee the questions which would arise as computers developed. He studied problems which today lie at the heart of artificial intelligence. It was in this 1950 paper that he proposed the Turing Test which is still today the test people apply in attempting to answer whether a computer can be intelligent.

Turing did not forget about questions of decidability which had been the starting point for his brilliant mathematical publications. One of the main problems in the theory of group presentations was the question: given any word in a finitely presented groups is there an algorithm to decide if the word is equal to the identity. Post had proved that for semigroups no such algorithm exits. Turing though at first that he had proved the same result for groups but, just before giving a seminar on his proof, he discovered an error. He was able to rescue from his faulty proof the fact that there was a cancellative semigroup with insoluble word problem and he published this result in 1950. Boone used the ideas from this paper by Turing to prove the existence of a group with insoluble word problem in 1957.

Turing was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1951, mainly for his work on Turing machines in 1936. By 1951 he was working on the application of mathematical theory to biological forms. In 1952 he published the first part of his theoretical study of morphogenesis, the development of pattern and form in living organisms.

Turing was arrested for violation of British homosexuality statutes in 1952 when he reported to the police details of a homosexual affair. He had gone to the police because he had been threatened with blackmail. He was tried as a homosexual on 31 March 1952, offering no defence other than that he saw no wrong in his actions. Found guilty he was given the alternatives of prison or oestrogen injections for a year. He accepted the latter and returned to a wide range of academic pursuits.

Not only did he press forward with further study of morphogenesis, but he also worked on new ideas in quantum theory, on the representation of elementary particles by spinors, and on relativity theory. Although he was completely open about his sexuality, he had a further unhappiness which he was forbidden to talk about due to the Official Secrets Act.

The decoding operation at Bletchley Park became the basis for the new decoding and intelligence work at GCHQ. With the cold war this became an important operation and Turing continued to work for GCHQ, although his Manchester colleagues were totally unaware of this. Now after his conviction, his security clearance was withdrawn. Worse than that, security officers were now extremely worried that someone with complete knowledge of the work going on at GCHQ was now labelled a security risk. He had many foreign colleagues, as any academic would, but the police began to investigate his foreign visitors. A holiday which Turing took in Greece in 1953 caused consternation among the security officers.

Turing died of potassium cyanide poisoning while conducting electrolysis experiments. The cyanide was found on a half eaten apple beside him. An inquest concluded that it was self-administered but his mother always maintained that it was an accident. ]

Why did Turing lose his security clearance? I don’t know for sure and I’m not in a position to do the research now but I do think it goes something like this.

The British government was riddled with KGB agents during World War II and the postwar period. These were high profile British citizens, highly educated, and usually homosexual, sometimes quite openly. Four or five of them had been to Cambridge. People like Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, Kim Philby sent hundreds of British agents and contacts in Eastern Europe to their deaths, they helped the Soviets get nuclear weapons, they informed the Soviets about decoding efforts in which Turing had been involved, some of them are said to have played an essential role in initiating the Berlin Blockade. Several of these people defected to the Soviet Union in the late 40s and early 50s. Others remained under cover for longer. But surely the British government knew they probably were still there. I believe some of John Le Carres novels are about this.

Anybody homosexual could be blackmailed by the KGB, given the laws in place in the UK. Alan Turing had studied at Cambridge, he had been a left-winger, and he probably had known some these spies personally and moved
in the same circles. And he was very openly homosexual, another reason he would have known them. He fit the profile of the spies, he was vulnerable to blackmail, he had a penchant for traveling outside the UK, probably to have homosexual relationships with young men (something he continued to do after the estrogen injections ended– they went on for a year– which scared the BeJesus out of the British government, as mentioned above). The people who lifted Turing’s security probably did not much like the law that he had been convicted of breaking, and it is unlikely that they cared about Turing's homosexuality per se. But under the circumstances, the world close to the brink of World War III, I believe they judged that Turing was too vulnerable and potentially too dangerous to have continued access to top-secret British decoding efforts.
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Re: Justice for Turing

Post by s1m0n »

jim stone wrote: Here’s some information about what he was up to after the war. Following this I want to say something about why he lost his security clearance.
Let me get this straight: you're saying that Turing's career ended when he was either murdered or killed himself because he was a security risk, and he was a risk because of the unjust laws against homosexuality; laws under which he had already been convicted, but that his career wasn't affected by the law, his conviction, or his sentence?

That's, um, audacious. An audacious thesis indeed.
And now there was no doubt that the trees were really moving - moving in and out through one another as if in a complicated country dance. ('And I suppose,' thought Lucy, 'when trees dance, it must be a very, very country dance indeed.')

C.S. Lewis
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Re: Justice for Turing

Post by jim stone »

s1m0n wrote:
jim stone wrote: Here’s some information about what he was up to after the war. Following this I want to say something about why he lost his security clearance.
Let me get this straight: you're saying that Turing's career ended when he was either murdered or killed himself because he was a security risk, and he was a risk because of the unjust laws against homosexuality; laws under which he had already been convicted, but that his career wasn't affected by the law, his conviction, or his sentence?

That's, um, audacious. An audacious thesis indeed.
No, I'm saying that the conviction and withdrawal of security clearance did not have a significant
affect on Turing's career by making it difficult for him to continue his research and writing. That went on largely
as before while he was getting the injections and throughout the two remaining years
of his life. His research and writing didn't depend on his security clearance.
His close friends were surprised by his death, because he was so busy.

It isn't clear that Turing was either murdered or that he committed suicide.
Turing was working with cyanide in experiments at home, he was a sloppy fellow and his mother remained
steadfast that cyanide he got on his fingers during an experiment had accidentally contaminated an
apple he was munching on. Probably he committed suicide, IMO, but there is some
question about this. I really don't know what the argument for murder amounts to, but
the theory is not widely held. Obviously British security was worried about him,
and his travel to Greece for a vacation in 53 concerned them. But I don't know
if there is anything more.

I'm suggesting that Turing was considered a risk for multiple reasons.

Wiki on Alan Turing:'At the time, there was acute public anxiety about spies and homosexual entrapment by Soviet agents, possibly due to the recent exposure of the first two members of the Cambridge Five, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, as KGB double agents. Turing was never accused of espionage but, as with all who had worked at Bletchley Park, was prevented from discussing his war work.'

Like Burgess and Maclean, Turing was a Cambridge grad, he had been a left-winger, an open homosexual, I expect he had moved
in the same circles as these men at Cambridge--both as a left-winger and a homosexual
it's likely that he knew them personally.
And he was vulnerable to entrapment, having been convicted and carried on with his open
homosexuality. These spies (responsible for the death of hundreds and all sorts of other havoc)
had defected close before the
time Turing was convicted. Likely there were other spies.
It's at least possible that Turing would have lost his clearance even
if he hadn't been convicted, given recent events and the fact that he so closely
fit the profile of the spies. Turing would have been just the sort of fellow
of whom British intelligence would have seen suspicious. The fear was that
he was already a KGB agent or that he might be blackmailed to become
one.
Last edited by jim stone on Thu Sep 03, 2009 8:39 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Justice for Turing

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I don't understand the need for these belated apologies we see occasionally now. The individual is dead. Those involved with him are dead. The persecutors are dead. Who gains from the apology?

My great++++++++++++ grandfather was burned at the stake in England in the 1600s. I'd like an apology from the descendants of those who burned him, or the Prime Minister and the Queen if the fire starters can't be found. I'd also like restitution as his income was drastically reduced after he was dead and his family suffered. Plus, it'd make me feel so much better.

Susan
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Re: Justice for Turing

Post by dwest »

susnfx wrote:I don't understand the need for these belated apologies we see occasionally now. The individual is dead. Those involved with him are dead. The persecutors are dead. Who gains from the apology?

My great++++++++++++ grandfather was burned at the stake in England in the 1600s. I'd like an apology from the descendants of those who burned him, or the Prime Minister and the Queen if the fire starters can't be found. I'd also like restitution as his income was drastically reduced after he was dead and his family suffered. Plus, it'd make me feel so much better.

Susan
I think it makes a difference as to how belated it is. Individuals who knew Turing and worked with him are still living, the state that prosecuted him still functions. I think it is important that state recognize it's mistakes.
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Re: Justice for Turing

Post by jim stone »

Well, the law was repealed more than 40 years ago. There is an Alan Turing Bridge in Manchester,
there are several buildings bearing his name in universities, there are several statues of
Turing up in the UK, there are major awards in his name. Why isn't that enough?
Repealing the law recognizes the mistake.

What we have is this: Turing was convicted and punished under an awful law under which, I suppose,
many were convicted. He probably committed suicide, though it is uncertain, and the conviction
may well have had something to do with it, though we don't know that either.

Almost certainly many others were even more drastically affected by this law,
people who lost their career, their family, and their livelihood due to conviction, and
most certainly committed suicide because of it. Turing was lucky because,
in fact, he was positioned so that his life could largely go on--no wife,
no children, no divorce, his research largely unaffected, his major work going on
in a milieu in which the conviction mattered little.

So why apologize to Turing and not to others who were harmed as much, if not
more, than he was? And more obviously so, in fact. Was his life worth more than
theirs? Was the harm done him more serious because he was a genius, was it less
serious for less clever men?

Generally the call for an apology is meant to further a current political agenda.
That may or may not be a good thing. In effect nothing elevates
a disadvantaged class more than the state's getting down on its knees
and begging forgiveness. That's why the apology is required,
why nothing less will do. But it does give me a strange feeling,
as if someone I respect is being used.

If Apology is the means democracies must follow to recognize harm done in
the past by bad but widely supported laws, we will do little else than apologize.
I was myself imprisoned due to arrests in civil rights demonstrations, it truly sucked and it
cost me plenty in the long term. And I'm still alive!
I demand an apology.
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