The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work (2015) [pdf]

It's a valuable reference article by a lunimary I am not qualified to disagree with, and it captures the time well.

When you look at who the antagonists to privacy are, they are political institutional actors. Rogaway even suggests they are in-effect predators on those they surveil. Framed that way, I'd wonder whether cryptography engineering for privacy is a substitute activity, and its neglect is just an enabler for what has historically been the meekness and even cowardice that facilitates the domination of human populations. As though there is a generation of young (mostly men) who are saying, "yes, the institutions are compromised, there are spies on every platform and brownshirts in the streets, but if we can just get this blockchain product to market, we can escape them." History indicates that's not how it works, and I think the time for cryptographic solutions has passed.

I had the absolute pleasure of studying both Theory of Computation and Ethics in the Age of Technology under Professor Rogaway during my time at UC Davis and no other professor in the department challenged me both in the technical and ethical ways that Rogaway did.

It’s as a direct result of his classes that I have carefully crafted my career in computer science to not do work that would be potentially harmful to others. I wish more software engineers had the opportunity or interest to study and consider the ethical dimensions of our jobs. We have the power and the obligation to prevent a lot of harm and abuse by taking cryptography and security seriously. I’m disappointed by the recent backsliding Apple has done since they were one of the few companies I could trust to make this a priority.

There is an upside to political neutrality: It reduces the threat of politically-motivated attacks on academic researchers, which are dependent for the most part on government funding. TOR was begun under Navy (ONR?) funding, if I recall correctly.

I agree with the premise, and wish the culture could shift to support more individual / societal privacy tools. However, advocacy for change at the societal level is as important as having a nice widget. TFA calls this _overt_ politics vs the kind of _implicit_ politics inherent in the power-transferring innovation that science/tech produces.

Favorite quote from Hellman talking about Diffie, "When I met you, you were traveling around the country as an itinerant cryptographer..."

is it possible that trained engineers who take this engineering sermon to heart, are then not prepared to deal with daily, common corrupt practices and dark-patterns so prevelant in real-life money handling?

Second, different question -- To what extent do you have to believe in good, to do good in real life. How much overlap does that have with the practice of cryptography ?

Third question - are specialists in a complex society, able to have say and dominion over the tasks they are paid to do? Not theoretically, in practice now.

Discussed at the time:

The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10673055 - Dec 2015 (93 comments)

Who are the signees of your root certificates?