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.
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?
is it possible that trained engineers who take this engineering sermon to heart, are then not prepared to deal with daily, common corrupt practices and dark-patterns so prevelant in real-life money handling?
Second, different question -- To what extent do you have to believe in good, to do good in real life. How much overlap does that have with the practice of cryptography ?
Third question - are specialists in a complex society, able to have say and dominion over the tasks they are paid to do? Not theoretically, in practice now.
>Second, different question -- To what extent do you have to believe in good, to do good in real life. How much overlap does that have with the practice of cryptography ?
I think an interesting example we could study might be non-violent sociopaths who live within society. They learn to pass well enough to fit in which means emulating "good" behavior while not necessarily attached to any specific value of the ethical systems of society.
By the same token, someone who doesn't believe in good probably could possess enough self preservation instincts to realize they live amongst masses who do believe and realize adopting the axioms of that value system will allow them to thrive.
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.
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.
How? What would be the scenario here? The Fed stops issuing USD and starts managing the economy using BTC? Why would the US ever undermine their own sovereignty by doing that?
Even if I give you that BTC is a viable currency, it's another currency alongside all the others. What is the viable path to it becoming the primary currency of a country without that country's consent? The IRS is still going to want your taxes paid in USD.
It depends how the Blockchain is implemented. A common misconception about cryptocurrencies is that they are private. The crypto means cryptographically secure, not cryptographically private.
A Blockchain based digital currency could also hold the entire history of all transactions made by people and a privileged party could identify the holder of each wallet. In fact we can kinda do this with BTC, but we can't identify who holds the wallet until they cash in or out through an institution.
This technology is the wet dream of a fascist regime. There are no secret transactions. Cash is non existent. Cash is only used by criminals. If you aren't using a traceable currency then you have something to hide. All transactions are stored. This should also be an issue for many because laws change and aren't consistent. Buy weed legally today, it gets criminalized, get punished. Buy a drink at the local gay bar, travel to a LGBTQ unfriendly country, get interrogated.
It's not about what is happening so much about what could happen. How can the technology be abused. Maybe it's fine with our government but is it everywhere? It's about not giving power to saints that devil's my inherit.
But this is why we have privacy coins. Some coins don't even maintain the leger but a hash of it (hashes all the way down). You can't peek at the leger but you can verify it is consistent (added benefit of keeping a static leger size too). You can have zero knowledge transactions. You can have differential privacy. All these technologies are not a necessary condition of a blockchain but are privacy enhancing. These are not a fascists wet dream but rather a major roadblock for them. Those fighting against them are allowed to operate beyond their knowledge.
So the bigger again is what is the cost benefit analysis? Are terrorists and tax evaders such a problem that it is worth the technology that a future fascist could inherit? Or are they not?
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 54.0 ms ] threadIt’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.
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?
Second, different question -- To what extent do you have to believe in good, to do good in real life. How much overlap does that have with the practice of cryptography ?
Third question - are specialists in a complex society, able to have say and dominion over the tasks they are paid to do? Not theoretically, in practice now.
I think an interesting example we could study might be non-violent sociopaths who live within society. They learn to pass well enough to fit in which means emulating "good" behavior while not necessarily attached to any specific value of the ethical systems of society.
By the same token, someone who doesn't believe in good probably could possess enough self preservation instincts to realize they live amongst masses who do believe and realize adopting the axioms of that value system will allow them to thrive.
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.
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.
there's a reason all political parties promote it (while campaigning), besides the populist parasocial emulation for votes.
Please elaborate?
BTC would break the money printer and iff people self custody and use lightning then privacy can also be achieved.
Monero does all that by default.
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.
How? What would be the scenario here? The Fed stops issuing USD and starts managing the economy using BTC? Why would the US ever undermine their own sovereignty by doing that?
Even if I give you that BTC is a viable currency, it's another currency alongside all the others. What is the viable path to it becoming the primary currency of a country without that country's consent? The IRS is still going to want your taxes paid in USD.
A Blockchain based digital currency could also hold the entire history of all transactions made by people and a privileged party could identify the holder of each wallet. In fact we can kinda do this with BTC, but we can't identify who holds the wallet until they cash in or out through an institution.
This technology is the wet dream of a fascist regime. There are no secret transactions. Cash is non existent. Cash is only used by criminals. If you aren't using a traceable currency then you have something to hide. All transactions are stored. This should also be an issue for many because laws change and aren't consistent. Buy weed legally today, it gets criminalized, get punished. Buy a drink at the local gay bar, travel to a LGBTQ unfriendly country, get interrogated.
It's not about what is happening so much about what could happen. How can the technology be abused. Maybe it's fine with our government but is it everywhere? It's about not giving power to saints that devil's my inherit.
But this is why we have privacy coins. Some coins don't even maintain the leger but a hash of it (hashes all the way down). You can't peek at the leger but you can verify it is consistent (added benefit of keeping a static leger size too). You can have zero knowledge transactions. You can have differential privacy. All these technologies are not a necessary condition of a blockchain but are privacy enhancing. These are not a fascists wet dream but rather a major roadblock for them. Those fighting against them are allowed to operate beyond their knowledge.
So the bigger again is what is the cost benefit analysis? Are terrorists and tax evaders such a problem that it is worth the technology that a future fascist could inherit? Or are they not?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28088809.
The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10673055 - Dec 2015 (93 comments)