I’ve been involved in research that lead to major changes in TLS deployments across the Internet and so I can tell you that (1) research absolute can and should be structured to drive security improvements! You’re crazy if you think that isn’t an important goal. And (2) the way you structure, identify and disclose findings matters a lot when considering how well you achieve this goal.

Just to give an example of effective change-driving work: I would argue that persistent efforts via tools like Shodan and Censys have done a huge amount to clean up the Internet, at least as compared to one-off research efforts followed by “appoint activists to do the rest.” The reason is that companies respond to persistent measurement campaigns in a way that they don’t respond to one-off PR dings.

Most of the research you cite is pretty obscure and you’d have to search for it. Most of it didn’t get a lot of follow-up. When some of the firms with unencrypted backhauls were contacted by the current researchers, they didn’t even know that their backhauls were unencrypted. Finding and communicating this stuff, then following up on it relentlessly is the difference between “we knew and nobody did anything” and “it got fixed.”

Also don’t think for a second the vocal political types can do this work without constant communication from researchers who are willing to continue this work over a period of years.