Rogaway was my professor of cryptography at Davis. Amongst his peers he focuses strongly on the ethics of his work, noticing and calling attention to ethical failings by students and professors alike, as well as mentoring students for their future careers.<p>He also teaches a call called "Ethics in an age of technology". The reading list is that of a philosophy professor rather than a cryptographer. I could not more highly recommend engaging with this surprisingly "unrelated" material.<p><a href="https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/spring23/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/spring23/</a><p>Rogaway challenged us in small group settings to explore not the implications of computers and the internet, but if technology itself on humanity. I.e the automobile, industrialization, printing press, etc.<p>Thank you Phil, you've changed my life for the better
Agree with the general point. It’s one of few subfields which is about <i>reducing</i> “interop”, or what is allowed to be done within a system. Auth(n,z) are also in that domain, yet perhaps not academic fields in their own right.<p>Interestingly, this is also true for DRM, which is <i>also</i> political but does not protect individuals, generally. So restricting what “can be done” as a political expression depends on the “for who?”, even if the tech itself is inanimate and neutral.
Those interested in this topic might also find a couple other papers by Phil interesting:<p>1. Practice-Oriented Provable Security and the Social Construction of Cryptography: <a href="https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/cc.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/cc.pdf</a><p>2. An Obsession with Definitions (Section 5): <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=SwOkDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA18&ots=bMtIgWHprB&dq=%22I%20am%20constructing%20a%20definition%22%20rogaway&pg=PA17#v=onepage&q&f=false" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://books.google.com/books?id=SwOkDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA18&ots=...</a>
> Cypherpunk-styled creations — think of Bitcoin, PGP, Tor, and WikiLeaks—were to be transformative because they challenge authority and address basic freedoms: freedom of speech, movement, and economic engagement.<p>I know it's not a widely accepted view on HN but you shouldn't downvote just because you hate cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin and Ethereum (Ethereum which has switched to proof-of-stake, now consuming a negligible amount of energy) are actually two semi-successes of the cypherpunks. They were created as challenges to authority and released as free for anyone to use.<p>What happened next is open for discussion but I don't think the intentions were bad.
Related:<p><i>The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work (2015)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34451250">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34451250</a> - Jan 2023 (9 comments)<p><i>The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work (2015) [pdf]</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28086917">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28086917</a> - Aug 2021 (15 comments)<p><i>The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10673055">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10673055</a> - Dec 2015 (93 comments)
This and "Security Engineering as Caring-For" [0] have been the guideposts in my security career, helping me think about what I should work on (or not) and reminding me why I keep working on bad days.<p>Essays like these aren't just moral admonishments; they offer a way to find deeper meaning in your work or figure out what work would have meaning for you. Personally and politically, there can be so much more to your tech career than just "puzzles and math."<p>[0] <a href="https://noncombatant.org/2016/03/27/security-as-caring-for/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://noncombatant.org/2016/03/27/security-as-caring-for/</a>
I take a more skeptical view of the relationship between politics and technology (not specifically on cryptography, though I think my point stands in this context) in a recent (scholarly) article:<p><a href="https://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/17/2/000690/000690.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/17/2/000690/000690.htm...</a><p>Abstract: A consideration of the political meaning of software that tries to add greater philosophical precision to statements about the politics of tools and tool building in the humanities. Using Michael Oakeshott's formulations of the “politics of faith” and the “politics of skepticism,”[Oakeshott 1996] it suggests that while declaring our tools be morally or political neutral may be obvious fallacious, it is equally problematic to suppose that we can predict in advance the political formations that will arise from our tool building. For indeed (as Oakeshott suggests), the tools themselves give rise to what is politically possible.
While I am not a professor, apparently I get to say I was cryptographer according to this paper (albeit accidentally). Normal software developers take on pressure to manage technical debt, where engineers are pressured to reduce costs against safety and reliability. In finance, they get pressure to fudge models to hide risk. In security and cryptography, the pressure is the ethical pressure to be the one who takes the shortcut only you and your business sponsor undersand, which weakens the scheme in favour of some other economic purpose, or worse a political one.<p>To work professionally in privacy and cryptography is adversarial to the point of being gladiatorial, where there are very serious (and sometimes dangerous) interests involved. This work is not for the meek.<p>The moral aspect of it is that you need a belief in truth and the value of personal integrity that would sabotage most other careers. When you design security protocols, you are engaged in governance by other means. With real government and the economy using the internet as its substrate, using math and technical reasoning to moderate their more extreme urges is a kind of moral responsibility. Not to pontificate too much, but when I was a kid wanting to become a hacker, it was because it represented a way to be an ethical steward operating outside these systems. Not a gatekeeper or spoiler, but someone whose skills maintain a balance. In a career as a hacker working on these problems in govt, I did good work that I think has kept some specific totalitarian urges in check, by depriving them of the certainty and impunity an abuser requires. I tell younger people working in Privacy in govt that it is the only place in the public sector where demonstrating courage is the job.<p>This is a great paper, and almost a decade later I would observe that if you want to really make a difference in the world where you can secure the freedom for yourself and others to really flourish and be a benefit to humanity, finding ways to practice the triad of math, courage, and compassion together is the indomitable x-factor. Each without the other are useless, but the person using them together is often history's most decisive actor, imo.