Thousands call for Turing apology

Discussion in 'Top Secret' started by Elven6, Sep 1, 2009.

  1. Steve Mac

    Steve Mac Very Senior Member

    The arguments about Alan Turing's homosexuality and his war time service are being blurred here - whether on purpose or not. They have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

    What Alan Turing admitted was 'gross indecency' and the law then proscribed a prison sentence. He was offered the choice of imprisonment or chemical castration, he chose the latter. The current day attitude to these facts is irrelevant.

    For his war time achievements he deserves all the pothumous laurels this nation can provide - a brilliant man. If the nation has neglected its responsibility in this respect, it should make amends.

    Best,

    Steve.
     
  2. RemeDesertRat

    RemeDesertRat Very Senior Member

    Just my tuppenceworth but, I think it is important to have him pardoned as having a criminal conviction may (rightly or wrongly) be an obstacle to him receiving the honours he so rightly deserves.
    Also does anyone know what honours his peers received that he didn't?
     
  3. woapysittank

    woapysittank Member

    I understand the morals of the past and things were different then I have often argued you cannot judge the past by todays standards. But by any standards my country's treatment of Turing was and still is a f***ing disgrace. If he'd have been a Priest it would have been covered up, if he'd been in show business it to a degree would have been ignored. This man was a hero of an order so high it is incomprehensible. The word genius barely begins to cover his talents and the role that this one man had in ensuring the defeat of Nazism is probably unsurpassed by any single individual. Political correctness can come to call this once and let this misjudged individual have the honours he truely deserves.
     
  4. geoff501

    geoff501 Achtung Feind hört mit

    Also does anyone know what honours his peers received that he didn't?

    His OBE was commensurate to the awards given to his peers, some higher up the ladder got a higher Empire order. It arrived in the post; the King was ill.
     
  5. kiwigeordie

    kiwigeordie Senior Member

    An apology for the treatment of Turing was made back in 2009 (?) by then PM Gordon Brown.
    Turing, a brilliant man and one who contributed vastly to the successful outcome of the war, was convicted under the laws of the time, whether we agree with those laws now or not.
    Where does retro-justice end? There are moves to have those soldiers executed by firing squad in WW1 pardoned and I can empathise more closely with many of their cases than with this particular issue.
    As for an earlier comment which draws a parallel with being unable to criticize issues such as slavery and 9 year olds working in mines, of course we should criticize. Many have and will criticize what happened to AT and that is fine and is what free speech and opinion is all about.
    What we shouldn't do is attempt to retro-legislate.
    Pete
     
  6. geoff501

    geoff501 Achtung Feind hört mit

    An apology for the treatment of Turing was made back in 2009 (?) by then PM Gordon Brown.


    "We're sorry Alan, you deserved better" - not very good was it Gordon?
    Why he chose the chemical treatment rather than prison, I don't know. Perhaps it would allow him to continue his work. When working at BP in the war years, he would often go in on days off to work in the heated hut on his personal research projects.

    Turing, a brilliant man and one who contributed vastly to the successful outcome of the war, was convicted under the laws of the time, whether we agree with those laws now or not.

    Actually his contribution was unique. Possibly no other person would have come up with the idea of a Turing Bombe. Looking at it in detail now, it is not so hard to understand it, but it required genius to actually come up with the original idea. Next, he broke the Naval Enigma keying system. No one wanted to do this because they thought it impossible and therefore not worth wasting effort on. Turing was delighted, as he could have the problem all to himself and it was an important contribution to The Battle of The Atlantic.
    The treatment offered to him was unprecedented and no one knew its effect, this does not seem to me to be in keeping with 'the laws of the time'. Probably it caused brain damage.

    Where does retro-justice end? There are moves to have those soldiers executed by firing squad in WW1 pardoned...

    All the British soldiers executed in WW1, except those found guilty of murder, have been 'pardoned' and now have the same status as those who were found guilty but had their sentence commuted to a lesser penalty than death, not actually a full pardon.

    ...and I can empathise more closely with many of their cases than with this particular issue.
    Some may have been guilty, some had rough justice, I'm not going to go there...
     
  7. kiwigeordie

    kiwigeordie Senior Member

     
  8. geoff501

    geoff501 Achtung Feind hört mit

    My understanding is that the idea of the 'bombe' was that of a Polish cryptologist, Marian Rejewski. Turing's genius lay in developing the idea into a workable solution.


    The two systems are entirely different. Rejewski was a mathematical genius who recovered the entire machine wiring mathematically in a few weeks towards the end of 1932. His 'Bomba' was used to run through rotor settings to find a key, this was possible due to the way the key was enciphered. They later changed this and made it impossible.

    Turing's 'Bombe' (more correctly the Turing-Welchman Bombe) worked on a different principle to recover the machine settings from a crib word, using a parallel system of up to 30 Enigma machine replicas. The Enigma used by the German forces was different to the one commercially available in that it had a plug board to give a permutation of the alphabet. This was believed to add a additional level of security that would be impossible to break. Turing's idea made the plugboard totally invisible, it did not matter how they plugged up the permutation, his machine would find the key if the crib was good.
     
  9. geoff501

    geoff501 Achtung Feind hört mit

    There are currently moves in this part of the world to have pardons granted to a number of Australian and New Zealand soldiers who were executed.I assume from this that the pardons referred to above did not extend to 'colonial' troops.

    Five New Zealanders, executed in WW1, were pardoned by their Parliament in 2000.
    No Australians were executed, as far as I'm aware.
     
  10. Fred Wilson

    Fred Wilson Member

    Bump.

    Turing should be recognised more for his great achievements in Computer Science and cryptology. Something like a posthumous knighthood or some lasting honour seems more appropriate. Lee

    The life and achievements of Alan Turing - the mathematician, codebreaker, computer pioneer, artificial intelligence theoretician, and gay/cultural icon - are being celebrated to mark what would have been his 100th birthday on 23 June.

    To mark the occasion the BBC has commissioned a series of essays to run across the week, ...

    See cont at: BBC News - Alan Turing: why the tech world's hero should be a household name
     
  11. DaveB

    DaveB Very Senior Member

    Just watching the SBS news here in Australia and towards the end of the news-hour it relayed a 5 minute story from the BBC covering the Turing display at the National Science Centre (in London).

    Featured an interwiew with one of his assistants from the 1940 (Woodger) and a few talking heads as science and history experts.
     
  12. chick42-46

    chick42-46 Senior Member

  13. Jonathan Ball

    Jonathan Ball It's a way of life.

  14. geoff501

    geoff501 Achtung Feind hört mit

  15. geoff501

    geoff501 Achtung Feind hört mit

  16. geoff501

    geoff501 Achtung Feind hört mit

  17. Drew5233

    Drew5233 #FuturePilot 1940 Obsessive

    When I was driving home from Kew the other week there was a live session on Radio 2 with the Pet Shop Boys. They have wrote an album dedicated to him and his life.
     
  18. Owen

    Owen -- --- -.. MOD

  19. Owen

    Owen -- --- -.. MOD

    Here's the Pet Shop Boys concert on BBC radio2

    [YOUTUBE]l8ZeTVY7LuE[/YOUTUBE]


    Track inspired by Turing

    [YOUTUBE]YYntL_TYOyc[/YOUTUBE]
     
  20. Smudger Jnr

    Smudger Jnr Our Man in Berlin

    Owen,

    Thanks for posting the videos, most enjoyable.

    Regards
    Tom
     

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