Turing's Secrets

Alan Turing is famous for being the father of modern computing, the author of computing's peskiest problem, and for being gay. The first made him famous, the second notorious among the Technorati, and the third got him fired, chemically castrated and may have driven him to suicide. There's a lesson here for the modern day internet and for all of us.

You see, Turing told a police officer about his boyfriend in the course of reporting a burglary. He believed the burglary was a crime that need to be persecuted and the truth about his boyfriend was just background information. That backfired rather spectacularly in the moral confines of mid 20th century England.

Computing is founded on theories of what is computable, and Turing laid a strong foundation with his eponymous Turing Machine, which models what kind of problems are computable and how. An upshot his theoretical framework is that when you add sufficient complexity to computing systems to get to work on complex problems, errors will occur that are neigh impossible to detect and resolve. We know and hate these errors as bugs. Basically we cannot make computers complex enough to be useful without a lot of bugs.

Bugs in software contribute to many evils, from a blue screen of death on your office computer to Air France flight 447 pancaking into the ocean because the autopilot's error message didn't contain any useful information for the pilots.

Bugs are also the source of vulnerabilities in software, vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malicious hackers, state agencies and clever pranksters. Vulnerabilities can and do reveal the secrets we artlessly entrust to our computers, much like Turing entrusted the fact of his gayness to a cop. There has been much ado about the Heartbleed vulnerability recently, one that impacts the integrity of 'secure' connections. It turns out that for a number of years this assumed integrity was, in fact, absent and an unknown number of supposedly secure connections were tapped.

You see, it's not about what is recorded or by whom. It's all just ones and zeroes that we pretend mean something real. The internet is the most epic story we ever told together. The problem is that we cannot control how others interpret our parts of that story. Virtual deeds have very real consequences, and we cannot predict what those consequences will be.

The moral confines of this age mean that it is okay to work online, play games online and look at naked adults online, but it's not okay to incite hatred or threaten someone online. But what of the next epoch? Russia, China the US and the EU are changing our world, right now, as you read this. What is okay today might be hugely embarrassing tomorrow, or even land you in jail.

There is a huge amount of mistrust against the state agencies who are surveying the internet, but not nearly enough. It's as if we can't make ourselves believe that our shared illusion is real enough to shatter lives, even though it does so on a daily basis. Our passwords are weak and often repeated. Kids post copies of their passports on social media instead of faxing it because they have no concept of how dangerous that is. People download or stream illegal copies of music and film even though they know they shouldn't. And people are going to jail, as the EU is proud to report. Sometimes fairly, oftentimes not so fairly. We just don't know if what we do today incurs penalties tomorrow.

Remember Turing. Turing the genius for his work on computing and his wartime work cracking Nazi code. Turing the innocent for not being more circumspect about his gayness. Turing the persecuted for his inhuman treatment at the hands of righteous moralists. Remember the lesson his story teaches, so we may avoid his misadventures.