[neuralk]

>My children are doing GCHQ sponsored mathematics work (cryptography challenges) at the age of 10 probably in the vain hope that they will eventually see this as normal and be recruited before they have a chance to question the ethics of it all.

What? Care to elaborate? (I'm American if that explains why I have no idea what you are referring to)

[bananas]

Well it goes like this....

There was a lot of publicity and propaganda and hype around Alan Turing and cyber-security over the last few years in the UK media. This drove a whole codebreaking fascination thing with mathematics.

So not wishing to miss out on all the action, a project was started called The Enigma Project which features basic codebreaking challenges (basic substitution ciphers, OTP etc) aimed at primary school children. This was started by Simon Singh / Cambridge University after good old Si released a book called The Code Book after which he wanted to drum up publicity rapidly. No other reason.

So after a year or so of neglect these sheets work their way into "photocopy circulation" amongst schools in the UK as part of the typical "teachers don't give a shit and just want to hand out worksheets" culture that appeared.

Obviously any other material that could be assembled cheaply was chucked on the back. Turns out there's a couple of sheets plainly marked from GCHQ in there as well as "additional exercises". Rather interesting as they are above what you'd consider appropriate for that age (prime factorisation and rapid factorisation techniques etc). Very odd!

Now this in itself is pretty null and void but it leads into the culture which I experienced where we were asked in secondary school mathematics to enter various "challenges" to play off against other schools. I was pretty good at mathematics (at GCSE and A-level) and did well on these challenges but was approached after this by people recruiting for SIGINT rather than go to university. Other people who did well were similarly propositioned. I impolitely declined and relaxed into a life of electrical engineering, pizza and beer which I thoroughly don't regret.

I'm worried my children will be similarly filtered out and recruited to be honest.

[glitchdout]

Really interesting (if a bit disturbing, to be honest). Thanks for sharing.

[SamReidHughes]

The United States defense agencies also run and sponsor mathematics contests and summer program(s) for students. For example, the NSA sponsors the USA Mathematical Talent Search, the Office of Naval Research sponsors MOSP, the "Department of Defense" is listed for MathCOUNTS.