The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work • Hacker News Board

Re: The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work

#71

Post by brbsix » Fri, Dec 04, 2015, 8:54 AM UTC

jvdh wrote: post #63

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #5

They lead one to ask if our inability to effectively address mass surveillance constitutes a failure of our field. I believe that it does. I call for a community-wide effort to develop more effective means to resist mass surveillance. What's funny is that you could talk to any number of law enforcement officials who believe that the moral failing is on the cryptography community for not providing a "backdoor" into en…

Morality is subjective at the edges. We all share a common morality, otherwise our society would not function. Most of the common morality is captured by laws. I completely agree with you that law enforcement officers will see it that way. I posit that that is a matter of limited perspective. They see backdoors as a means to catch criminals, and do not consider the implications for surveillance, democracy and freedom…

I agree. The opinion of law enforcement is irrelevant in the sense that we should not defer authority on the matter to them. Law enforcement might similarly have thoughts on how to run the judicial branch or alter the Constitution so as to better "catch criminals" (or some other excuse), yet that is no reason to grant them it.

Law enforcement will naturally seek to expand their power by any means available to them, in the same way that various branches of government or political parties will. Hence we have separation of powers.

Re: The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work

#72

Post by Natanael_L » Fri, Dec 04, 2015, 11:30 AM UTC

woodman wrote: post #56

shkkmo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... you are talking about preferences that 'define a human being', but then those preferences are only tautologically universal (since you are excluding any possible exception). This seems absurd. So if I were to tell you that I really did prefer to be a slave you would say I am not human? You are excluding as 'human' any individual who are not capable of understanding the concept of 'ownership'. Do you seriously b…

Nope, exceptions get their own subclass. Babies would be baby-humans, the mentally ill would be - well you get the idea. These classes are actually a predictable reality given an accurate definition of "human being", a component of the whole. Imagine a dependency graph, with the edge cases as leaf nodes. So the definition of human isn't related to a single entity, or the averaging of the qualities of the entire popul…

You should be aware that there's a significant risk you'll have to turn every single human who ever lived into its own class, and even then you'll run into the Halting problem while trying to identify each case of each classification.

You won't end up with any single seed values you can match any given instance against, but with multidimensional matrices that represents multidimensional scales.

Re: The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work

#73

Post by jroitgrund » Fri, Dec 04, 2015, 11:37 AM UTC

The biggest thing I took away from this was reading the slides and seeing the FBI's suicide letter to Martin Luther King.

I didn't know about that, and reading that right after seeing the jury dury article on the front page today is chilling to say the least.

Re: The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work

#74

Post by gcb0 » Fri, Dec 04, 2015, 12:15 PM UTC

everyone has those talks 30yrs ago when crypto was labeled munition by the usa.

if this article has any content that warrant discussion, is how out of touch with reality the social sciences are.

... and sadly, yet another proof of how necessary Snowden was.

Re: The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work

#75

Post by jvvw » Fri, Dec 04, 2015, 12:33 PM UTC

This was one of the factors (certainly not the only one) that made me move out of the field of cryptography - I was doing work related to attempting to break a major cryptosystem and I realised that I wasn't completely sure what the right course of action was ethically in the slim chance that I succeeded. My background was in pure mathematics and up until I moved into cryptography, it seemed obvious that openess of information was an obvious good. However, once in the crypto field, it became much a much more ambiguous issue.

Re: The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work

#76

Post by nathan_long » Fri, Dec 04, 2015, 1:00 PM UTC

pcl wrote: post #6

From the abstract: Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what. I'd argue that the reverse is really the issue that needs more attention. Online systems that do not provide strong cryptography rearrange power, as compared to their offline equivalents. It was not feasible to scan all phone calls for keywords in 1970, since that required effort from humans to do the patching and listening. T…

Good point. And even longer ago, all conversations required meeting, and were private unless an eavesdropper was physically nearby.

Tech has created more extreme possibilities on both sides. On the privacy side, it's possible to exchange messages at a distance in an unreadable and nearly undetectable way. On the surveillance side, it's possible to eavesdrop on nearly everyone (except the very sophisticated).

We can't and (don't want to) go back in time. The real question is "which danger is greater: conspiracy or oppression?"

Re: The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work

#77

Post by PhaseMage » Fri, Dec 04, 2015, 3:22 PM UTC

nathan_long wrote: post #76

pcl wrote: post #6

From the abstract: Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what. I'd argue that the reverse is really the issue that needs more attention. Online systems that do not provide strong cryptography rearrange power, as compared to their offline equivalents. It was not feasible to scan all phone calls for keywords in 1970, since that required effort from humans to do the patching and listening. T…

Good point. And even longer ago, all conversations required meeting, and were private unless an eavesdropper was physically nearby. Tech has created more extreme possibilities on both sides. On the privacy side, it's possible to exchange messages at a distance in an unreadable and nearly undetectable way. On the surveillance side, it's possible to eavesdrop on nearly everyone (except the very sophisticated). We can't…

> private unless an eavesdropper was physically nearby.

I completely agree with your post. I have an idea for how to resolve this via networking topology. Right now, TCP/IP seems to me to be an engine for centralizing power: Limited hop count and hierarchical address assignment leads to star topologies, leading to economies of scale that again support centralization.

I propose a network protocol stack that encourages a mesh topology, where it actually makes economic sense to physically link my home to 2 or more of my immediate neighbors. I surmise that all my neighbors (or all the neighbors of the person I'm communicating with) would have to be my adversary in order to spy on my communications (See secret splitting on Wikipedia). I feel that mass surveillance doesn't scale with this topology.

I've been working for some time on designing such a networking protocol stack... What do folks here think? Is this worth my time?

Re: The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work

#78

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Dec 04, 2015, 3:22 PM UTC

nathan_long wrote: post #76

pcl wrote: post #6

From the abstract: Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what. I'd argue that the reverse is really the issue that needs more attention. Online systems that do not provide strong cryptography rearrange power, as compared to their offline equivalents. It was not feasible to scan all phone calls for keywords in 1970, since that required effort from humans to do the patching and listening. T…

Good point. And even longer ago, all conversations required meeting, and were private unless an eavesdropper was physically nearby. Tech has created more extreme possibilities on both sides. On the privacy side, it's possible to exchange messages at a distance in an unreadable and nearly undetectable way. On the surveillance side, it's possible to eavesdrop on nearly everyone (except the very sophisticated). We can't…

[deleted]

Re: The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work

#79

Post by mbrock » Fri, Dec 04, 2015, 3:30 PM UTC

afarrell wrote: post #37

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #5

They lead one to ask if our inability to effectively address mass surveillance constitutes a failure of our field. I believe that it does. I call for a community-wide effort to develop more effective means to resist mass surveillance. What's funny is that you could talk to any number of law enforcement officials who believe that the moral failing is on the cryptography community for not providing a "backdoor" into en…

> Morality is, unfortunately, subjective. Genuine question: What do people who believe this use as their reason for refraining from harming others for personal gain? I understand that simple intuitive preferences against seeing others suffer will often work, but what do you do about instances where either the rewards of screwing someone over are very great or where your intuition tells you that you would get a lot of…

They don't mean "subjective" as in "determined by arbitrary selfish choice," they mean "not resolvable in objective, axiomatic, universal ways."

If you "believe" there's an objective morality, isn't that just another subjective position? You can't justify it, so why don't you abandon the notion and go with your selfish whims?

It's a flawed dichotomy. Morality is in your perception like how you know to respect other people's personal spheres. It's not based on rule based rationality or some axiomatic selfishness.

If you want to sleep well at night, you refrain from screwing people over in terrible ways. Probably you screw people over to the extent that you can get away with it in a moral-cultural sense, unless you're particularly saintly.

Re: The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work

#80

Post by mangeletti » Fri, Dec 04, 2015, 5:28 PM UTC

PhaseMage wrote: post #77

nathan_long wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point. And even longer ago, all conversations required meeting, and were private unless an eavesdropper was physically nearby. Tech has created more extreme possibilities on both sides. On the privacy side, it's possible to exchange messages at a distance in an unreadable and nearly undetectable way. On the surveillance side, it's possible to eavesdrop on nearly everyone (except the very sophisticated). We can't…

> private unless an eavesdropper was physically nearby. I completely agree with your post. I have an idea for how to resolve this via networking topology. Right now, TCP/IP seems to me to be an engine for centralizing power: Limited hop count and hierarchical address assignment leads to star topologies, leading to economies of scale that again support centralization. I propose a network protocol stack that encourages…

Unfortunately, the other thing that doesn't scale with this topology is the network itself. A centralized network needs to be trusted for transporting data over vast expanses of underpopulated areas, or even urban bottlenecks (e.g., LA communicating with SF)).

Ignoring this fact makes most "mesh" seem like the answer, but the real answer, especially pertaining emergence, is continual improvements in encryption, etc., not a replacement of the entire construct of the Internet, which itself is emergent.