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.