The Man Who Made the UK Say “I’m Sorry For What We Did To Turing.”

John Graham-Cumming used cunning and data to get the apology

Arriving in theaters this fall is a major new film about Alan Turing, the man who broke the German codes, an achievement critical in winning World War II. Turing is also one of the greatest computer scientists ever — the father of machine theory and artificial intelligence.

John Graham-Cumming knows the story well. As a computer scientist, a security specialist and somewhat of a math nerd, he shares some intellectual DNA with Turing. But his name is intertwined with Turing’s more indelibly by a campaign he led in the summer of 2009.

After 55 years of shameful silence, this gentle geek made Britain apologize for Turing’s death.

Like Turing, Graham-Cumming was a child prodigy, inexplicably talented in math. He would do jigsaw puzzles face down because it was easier for him to put them together solely by the shapes of the pieces. He was fascinated by the same theories of computation that had occupied Turing, particularly in areas of computational provability. (This interest began at age 6, when on a visit to Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge—Turing’s alma mater—he asked one of the scientists how a computer worked. The scientist described to him what is known as a Turing Machine, a proof of universal computation named after the man who created it.) As a specialist in computer security, Graham-Cumming had visited Bletchley Park, the home of Turing’s great wartime cryptanalytical feats. Naturally, Graham-Cumming was appalled at the facts of Turing’s demise. Turing was a gay person, and in 1952 the government had convicted him for violating the existing laws against expressing homosexuality. It stripped him of his security clearance and even demanded his castration. The prosecution led Turing to kill himself in 1954. He was 41 years old.

“If he had not died, I probably would have had him as one of my Oxford teachers,” says Graham-Cumming, now 47, and a programmer for the Internet security company CloudFlare. (He is also author of The Geek Atlas, a travel book for engineering nuts.)

Graham-Cumming, like many who learned in horror of England’s odious treatment of one of its greatest citizens, never thought to do anything about those early 1950s atrocities—until June 23, 2009. On that day, he randomly came across a tweet by British author and actor Stephen Fry about Turing’s 97th birthday:

All of Graham-Cumming’s feelings about the horrible loss of one of computing’s greatest minds suddenly rushed to the surface. “It made my blood boil,” he recalls now. Instead of ranting to his wife — she was away on a trip — he decided to write something on his blog.

The blog’s description was, “The troubled thoughts of a caustic coder. Mostly code but sometimes rants, randomness and politics.” Recent posts included a call for iPhone 3GS serial numbers and an entry entitled “Does Benford’s Law apply to election results?” But his new post, which poured out of him less than an hour after he saw the Fry tweet, clearly fell under the rubric of the other three categories. It was entitled, “Alan Turing deserves an apology from the British government.”

Alan Turing (Photo: The Turing Digital Archive)

“This man, younger than me, killed himself because at the time homosexuality was illegal,” he wrote, “and having been prosecuted he was chemically castrated in an attempt to ‘cure’ him.” Graham-Cumming noted that it was not until 1994 that the government parceled out any honor to the man who had arguably done more than any other in the 20th century to preserve the nation — and then by naming a stretch of the A6010 road in Manchester, his hometown, “Alan Turing Way.”

“A frikkin’ Ring Road!” he wrote.

The next day, still steaming, Graham-Cumming followed up with a draft of an apology that the government might want to issue. The crux of it was that Turing provided us an enlightened view of humanity, with the eponymous test he devised to mark the moment when computers became intelligent. The Turing Test was in a sense an exercise in anti-prejudice. It did not distinguish color, sex or sexuality. To those who ask what good an apology to a dead man would be, Graham-Cumming suggested the test itself could be a guide.

An apology is really an atonement for the past, wrapped around a promise for the future. My promise. . . is that we won’t let prejudice prevent us from applying our own Turing Test to the people we deal with.

Graham-Cumming now says that he felt an apology would allow us to speak about Turing without the unjustifiable cloud of shame that hung over the hero. “If we could just get it out, we would be able to celebrate him in accounts like the movie coming out now,” he says, ,”without the mumbling at the end that comes with the murky circumstances of his death.”