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

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.

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.

what did you work on out of college?

and how do you feel about apple scaning all your local device data and reporting hash matches to the (undisclosed) authorities under the "think of the children" banner?

The whole philosophy behind Bitcoin is a mistrust of institutions, primarily the FED, and the wish to replace them with what’s supposed to be “neutral”.

But the criticism that is offered tends to be far off the mark: the FED isn’t a “private bank”, to name just one conspiracy theory. It is also far better at its job as people make you believe: the time of runaway inflation is a 100 years behind us, and even the worst of recent crises in the financial industry is but a shadow of the Great Depression that saw actual starvation. It seems that economists may have improved somewhat, to the point where they are at least able to outperform the outcome of an algorithm that doesn’t even try to use monetary policy for the greater good.

Despite its flaws, the FED is also, ultimately, democratically legitimized. Bitcoin, despite its talk of democratization, allocates power proportional to mining power or, ultimately, wealth. That’s closer to feudalism than any recent idea of democracy.

There are dozens of other misconceptions that were baked into BC and other coins only to blow up. Sometimes spectacularly so. For example, the community seems to believe the law is nothing but pretense allowing judges to arbitrarily enforce their opinions. Hence, it is seen as desirable to allow for contracts that are not subject to any interpretation. This mostly comes up when someone makes a stupid mistake like omitting a decimal separator and paying 100x what’s reasonable.

In the “normal” economy, such errors are almost always easily healed. But the cryptocurrency community believes that anything that cannot be expressed in source code is somehow invalid. Indeed, they seem to take some gleeful enjoyment from seeing people subjected to punishment for minor mistakes, even where it is completely out of proportion.

That points at where it could be called “fascist”: that ideology abhors all deviation from the norm and punishes it severely. That’s why Singapore’s extreme laws against drugs or chewing gum are sometimes called fascist, and also why some on the right can’t really understand why anybody would take offense at the idea of public executions for weed dealers.