I consider that the Central Intelligence Agency is currently in an ethical, legal, and moral morass. Back in the President Gerald Ford Presidential Administration, our then Commander-in-Chief hired George Herbert Walker Bush, a World War II hero, veteran, future Vice President and President to become Director of the CIA to cleanup its messes and put the agency on a righteous path. In his brief stint at the helm of the CIA Bush 41 made it well known that future Presidents would not allow the agency to get involved in the assassinations of enemy heads of state. We got in trouble in the late 1950s and early 1960s attempting to get mob (organized crime syndicate, e.g. Mafia) accomplices to kill Fidel Castro. That effort inadvertently led to the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy by the lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald. Evidently the CIA is back into assassinations and enhanced interrogations (water-boarding and other tortures).
I also believe the National Security Agency/Central Security Service is in its own ethical, legal, and moral quagmire regarding the advent of the quantum computer and cyberwarfare. I believe we should slow down on three areas of computer science: the dual Holy Grails of the discipline – quantum computers and human level artificial intelligence, and state-sponsored black hat hacking = cyberwarfare. I am against all forms of hacking and believe the United States should be a signatory to a treaty banning all forms of deleterious computer and software developments.
Author: jamespatewilliamsjr
My whole legal name is James Pate Williams, Jr. I was born in LaGrange, Georgia approximately 70 years ago. I barely graduated from LaGrange High School with low marks in June 1971. Later in June 1979, I graduated from LaGrange College with a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry with a little over a 3 out 4 Grade Point Average (GPA). In the Spring Quarter of 1978, I taught myself how to program a Texas Instruments desktop programmable calculator and in the Summer Quarter of 1978 I taught myself Dayton BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) on LaGrange College's Data General Eclipse minicomputer. I took courses in BASIC in the Fall Quarter of 1978 and FORTRAN IV (Formula Translator IV) in the Winter Quarter of 1979. Professor Kenneth Cooper, a genius poly-scientist taught me a course in the Intel 8085 microprocessor architecture and assembly and machine language. We would hand assemble our programs and insert the resulting machine code into our crude wooden box computer which was designed and built by Professor Cooper. From 1990 to 1994 I earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from LaGrange College. I had a 4 out of 4 GPA in the period 1990 to 1994. I took courses in C, COBOL, and Pascal during my BS work. After graduating from LaGrange College a second time in May 1994, I taught myself C++. In December 1995, I started using the Internet and taught myself client-server programming. I created a website in 1997 which had C and C# implementations of algorithms from the "Handbook of Applied Cryptography" by Alfred J. Menezes, et. al., and some other cryptography and number theory textbooks and treatises.
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Numerical Explorations 