WWII codebreaker Alan Turing gets royal pardon for gay conviction

CBS News ^ | 12/24/2013 | Reuters

[thetallguy24]

Mathematician Alan Turing, who helped Britain win World War Two by cracking Nazi Germany's "unbreakable" Enigma code, was granted a rare royal pardon on Tuesday for a criminal conviction for homosexuality that led to his suicide.

Turing's electromechanical machine, a forerunner of modern computers, unravelled the code used by German U-boats in the Atlantic. His work at Bletchley Park, Britain's wartime codebreaking centre, was credited with shortening the war.

However, he was stripped of his job and chemically castrated with injections of female hormones after being convicted of gross indecency in 1952 for having sex with a man. Homosexual sex was illegal in Britain until 1967.

Turing killed himself in 1954, aged 41, with cyanide.

[thetallguy24]

I am honestly surprised that Obama hasn't already been doing this, but its almost guaranteed he will now or at least a Democrat successor will.

[Viennacon]

How completely unnecessary. He’s dead.

[TurboZamboni]

I predict USPS will give him his own stamp next year.

[mrsmel]

The Phil Robertson brouhaha is not going their way, they have to find a way to disappear it.

[VRW Conspirator]

I am in the middle of reading Crytonomicon. Great book.

[Carriage Hill]

1954? Today, he’d get parades all over the globe, except Iran.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

What they did to Turing, who apparently only had consensual sex with other adults, was terrible. Turing made major contributions to early computer science. His contributions to the Enigma solution saved many thousands of lives, thousands of them American.

[wideawake]

In other words, the UK government is saying that it is a good thing for a 40 year old man to pick up teenagers on the streets for money.

Turing was brilliant, but he was no innocent and no angel.

[Viennacon]

I’m aware of that, but postmortem pardons seem a little redundant to me.

[wideawake]

What they did to Turing, who apparently only had consensual sex with other adults, was terrible.

He was picking up teens on Manchester's Oxford Road.

That was infamously an area frequented by runaway teenagers who would sleep with adults in exchange for money, liquor, clothes or even hot meals or ration cards.

The particular person he was caught with that day claimed to be 19.

He was 41.

So we have a military scientist with a top security clearance picking up youngsters on the streets.

Any chance that might have been a bad idea? Potentially a bit of a security risk in cold war Britain? Not to mention disgustingly exploitive of vunerable children?

[GeronL]

of course

People in important and sensitive positions need to be held to higher standards, not the lower or invisible ones we have now

[Bobalu]

Yes, an interesting read.

An early computer known as Colossus was built by Tommy Flowers, an engineer of the British telephone system. He followed the design suggested by Turing in his 1936 paper "On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem"

That paper is one of the most important scientific papers ever written.

Turing was on a par with scientific greats like Newton and Einstein.

Colossus was used to break coded messages created by the German code machine called "Tunny" it was a 12 rotor machine loosely based on the German Enigma machine. Like Enigma, it was a one-time-pad automated system that relied on a pseudo-random number generator utilizing the rotor wheels in the machine.

The work at Blechley Park was kept secret for so long that it clouded the true history of computing...some facts are still secret.

Turing was later the key man on a team that created the worlds first programmable electronic computer with stored program... The Manchester Baby. also created in the UK.

Alan Turing

Tommy Flowers

The Manchester Baby

The Tunny machine

[sinsofsolarempirefan]

Its empty symbolic pandering, especially when you consider that those who are still alive who were convicted prior to the legalisation of gay sex in 1967 still have criminal records...

[fwdude]

So, a man who was a near technology genius also happened to be a homosexual.

But the Gaystapo portrays this as his "gayness" contributing to his talent.

[hattend]

He’s dead, Jim.

[sinsofsolarempirefan]

If he was a security risk, it was only because he was doing something that shouldn’t have been illegal in the first place. Regardless of what one thinks of the ‘gay agenda’ an act between consenting adults is between them and God, not the state.

[christx30]

And the other side totally dismisses his genius because of his gayness. Neither side is 100% correct.

[Gay State Conservative]

If they're “born that way” (highly unlikely,IMO) then they can simply keep in their pants.To do otherwise is absolutely a very serious violation of God's law or,for those atheists in the audience,a violation of the laws of nature (which the atheists *do* worship).

[SamAdams76]

However, he was stripped of his job and chemically castrated with injections of female hormones after being convicted of gross indecency in 1952 for having sex with a man.

Really? They would inject homosexual men with female hormones? How was that supposed to help the problem?

[SkyDancer]

Yeah, he’ll come back as one of the ghosts of Christmas saying “We’re good now right mate?”