Most voters trust themselves more than either Congress or President Obama when it comes to the economy, but they have way more confidence in themselves when it comes to the news media.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 85% of U.S. voters trust their own judgment more than the average reporter when it comes to the important issues affecting the nation. Only four percent (4%) trust the average reporter more. Eleven percent (11%) aren’t sure.

To me, this says two things: (1) Despite all the slander and misinformation spread by the media, Americans are not stupid—they know when someone is trying to push and nudge them in a direction they don’t want to go, and they resent it; (2) This is how a once respectable profession gets destroyed—through politicization and injection of overt bias in what is supposed to be professional work.

The collapse of mainstream journalism is something scientists should take notice from—it could happen to us. Some scientists think they know better than the John Q. Public. They think that they need “scare” the public into action, “for their own good.” They think they need to misrepresent their own work (you know, tweak a point here, hide some data there, to make, e.g. global warming seem more dire than it actually is, etc. etc.) so that the public will be duped into doing the “right thing”.

They are playing with fire, and its their reputation and credibility that’s going to burn, much as that of journalists has.

At least for the moment, the public trusts scientists in generic terms. Perhaps they take a step back on specific issues such as evolution or global warming, but in general, when a scientist speaks, they listen and trust. This should be more a note of caution than jubilee and abandon, for with great trust comes great responsibility—not to betray that trust.

But will scientists listen to this warning (I’m sure others have said this many times; at least Prof. Muller said a similar version at the colloquium earlier this semester), or will their ego make them hear without listening?

“Retired University of Tennessee Professor Dr. John Reece Roth has been sentenced to four years in prison after he allowed a Chinese graduate student to see sensitive information on Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones. In 2004, the company Roth helped found, Atmospheric Glow Technologies, won a US Air Force contract to develop a plasma actuator that could help reduce drag on the wings of drones, such as the ones the military uses. Under the contract, for which Roth was reportedly paid $6,000, he was prohibited from sharing sensitive data with foreign nationals. Despite warnings from his university’s Export Control Officer, in 2006, Roth took a laptop containing sensitive plans with him on a lecture tour in China and also allowed graduate students Xin Dai of China and Sirous Nourgostar of Iran to work on the project. ‘The illegal export of restricted military data represents a serious threat to national security,’ says David Kris of the US Department of Justice. ‘We know that foreign governments are actively seeking this information for their own military development. Today’s sentence should serve as a warning to anyone who knowingly discloses restricted military data in violation of our laws.’ During his trial, Roth testified that he was unaware that hiring the graduate students was a violation of his contract. ‘This whole thing has not helped me, it has not helped the university,’ said Roth. ‘And it has probably not helped this country, either.’”

If the facts as represented are accurate, it seems clear enough: the professor is guilty, if not of actual treason against this country, then of extremely poor judgment. Even naturalized U.S. citizens (to my great dismay) have betrayed this country before either for the sake of money or for the sake of their “motherland” (as if after they took the naturalization oath, they belonged to any country other than United States of America). Foreign graduate students are not U.S. citizens. They are not even permanent residents. Their stay in the U.S. is contingent not only on the visas we issue them, but on the validity of their passport. They can not only be persuaded by their home government but even pressed into service against their will, given how much control over their life the foreign government has. As brilliant as these people are, they cannot work on sensitive projects, and they cannot be allowed access to sensitive data, even inadvertently.

No one said that we cannot hire foreign graduate students—that would be great tragedy indeed, as they are some of the brightest people in American graduate schools (at least judging by test scores and classroom grades). We just cannot hire them for sensitive projects (at least before they decide to stay in this country and become naturalized). This professor was an idiot for not properly shielding his graduate students from sensitive information that would be too tempting for them—or even if not, the access itself, whether they actually used it or not, could be brought against them to arouse sufficient suspicion.

More specifically, what about the secrets that protect our data? Like an increasing number of people who care about the security and integrity of their data, I have encrypted all my hard-drives – the ones in my laptops and the backup drives, using 128-bit AES – the Advanced Encryption Standard. Without the passphrase that unlocks my key, the data on those drives is unrecoverable, barring major, seismic advances in quantum computing, or a fundamental revolution in computing.

After considering a few options that most people who think about this particular problem would, including an option I might have considered adequate, a safebox containing the passphrase (or an unencrypted private key which can be used to similar effect), and rejecting them, he concludes,

Finally, I hit on a simple solution: I’d split the passphrase in two, and give half of it to my wife, and the other half to my parents’ lawyer in Toronto. The lawyer is out of reach of a British court order, and my wife’s half of the passphrase is useless without the lawyer’s half (and she’s out of reach of a Canadian court order).

Obviously this makes the attack on the passphrase slightly easier: if it was originally 10-characters long, then now the attacker needs to consider only 5-character passphrase, once he gets the control of one. But it’s probably easy enough to make your passphrase long enough to minimize this problem, i.e. make your passphrases 40-chars long instead of the recommended 20-chars (for my full hard drive encryption, I use a 26-char password and it’s probably not too difficult for me to memorize one that’s twice as long).

And if you don’t mind a little bit of technical complexity, you can split the key mathematically rather than as a string: i.e. for each character, take its ASCII code, and split it, randomly, into two numbers (running both positively and negatively, say from -255 to 255; it wouldn’t be possible to split them into another sets of printable ASCII codes, as lowest 32 numbers aren’t printable, so may as well just turn each character into numbers) so that when they are added together, you get the correct character back, and store information about these two sets of numbers separately—and either of these two sets by itself is literally nothing but a random set of numbers, betraying no information about the actual passphrase.

Overall, I think this is a good scheme, except, well, it only works for people with connections in two countries (and if the liberals have their way, we will have the One World Government pretty soon, so splitting jurisdiction may not be an option soon).

It seems like, at least in any scenarios I can think of, if you want to share a secret with someone else and wants to keep it secret (between the two of you), then the only way to do it is under some subterfuge—either regarding the fact that you have a secret, or that the other person shares it (so that you can prevent the person from getting subpoenaed).