Alan Turing had not only been found out, but had been found behaving with what to the official mind, or indeed to the mind of anyone alive to the demands of national security, would appear a horrifying indiscretion.
在这样的背景下,图灵不但受到指控,而且对于官方来说,他还表现出一种可怕的顽固态度。每一个对国家安全敏感的人,都对此感到不寒而粟:
His brain, filled with knowledge of the British cryptographic and cryptanalytic work of not ten years before, had been allowed to mingle with the street life of Oxford Road—and who knew where else?
这个人的脑子里,装着英国十年来最高级别的机密和情报,而他现在却在酒吧街上寻花问柳,谁知道他还去过别的什么地方?
Besides the wartime work, the consultation since 1948 would have given him knowledge at least of special problems, and meanwhile the very idea of computer methods, when only a handful of computers existed in the world, was at the frontier of knowledge.
除了大战时期的军事情报,和1948年以后的顾问工作之外,他还知道计算机技术,在全世界只有几台计算机的年代,这也是要求保密的注。
Whether or not directly relevant to Soviet interests, it was knowledge not only secret, but whose very existence was a secret.
不但这些信息的内容是机密,更重要的是,这些信息的存在本身,就是一种机密。
He had done the unthinkable. A member of the Inner Party, he had compromised himself with the proles.
图灵作为一个如此敏感的人,却做出了不可理喻的荒唐事。
And he had done it in a way that Orwell himself would have dismissed in one word as 'perversion', while Aldous Huxley regarded the demand for sexual freedom as a concomitant of growing dictatorship.He was a law unto himself. It could well be argued—and perhaps he argued it himself—that his conduct had shown precisely that he was not liable to blackmail.
这可以作为一种辩护,可能图灵也确实做了这样的辩护:这种顽固的态度,恰恰说明他不怕勒索。