In the 1950s, a group of scientists spoke out against the dangers of nuclear weapons. Should cryptographers take on the surveillance state?
.. I spoke to Rogaway about why cryptographers fail to see their work in moral terms, and the emerging link between encryption and terrorism in the national conversation. A transcript of our conversation appears below, lightly edited for concision and clarity.
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Kaveh Waddell: Why should we think of computer science as political—and why have many considered it to be apolitical, for so long?
Phillip Rogaway: I think that science and technology are inherently political, and whether we want to think about it that way or not, it’s the nature of the beast. Our training as scientists and engineers tends to deemphasize the social positioning of what we do, and most of us scientists don’t give a whole lot of thought to how our work impacts society. But it obviously does.
.. There is a tradition, especially in physics, of activism. But computer scientists have not tended to be active in the political sphere.
.. Rogaway: My sense is that politics is there, whether one acknowledges it or not. When you have an ostensibly apolitical department, but you scratch beneath the covers and discover that three-quarters of the faculty are funded by the Department of Defense, well, in fact that’s not apolitical. That is very much working in support of a particular ethos, and one simply hasn’t called it forth.
.. Rogaway: In principle, the tenure process should free academics who have already been tenured to venture out and question matters in a way that could offend power. In practice, it doesn’t seem relevant. By the time a faculty member is tenured, it’s likely that his or her way of seeing the world will have already been so set that they’re very unlikely to become political at that point if they haven’t been already.
.. Anyone who really wants to encrypt their communication is going to find a method for doing so, whether it’s bundled with mass-market products or not. When you make encryption harder to get for ordinary people, you don’t deny it to terrorists. You just make the population as a whole insecure in their daily communications.
.. These aren’t somehow the dark times for either law enforcement or intelligence. These are the times of extraordinary information. Nowhere in history has it been so easy to learn so much about everybody. So, in some sense, we’re really talking about protecting the smallest remnants of remaining privacy.
.. Fortunately, criminal behavior has never been such a drag on society that it’s foreclosed entire areas of technological advance.
.. Rogaway: I think that when you’re hiring faculty members at a public university, that it’s fair game to ask them what their social views are, their views of social responsibility of scientists. I think you have to be careful in how you do this that you’re not applying some kind of political test, that the candidates’ political opinions match up with your own.
But part of the purpose of the public university, land-grant universities like my own, is to serve the public welfare. And if a faculty candidate doesn’t believe that that’s a part of the purpose of his or her work at all, then I think that that’s not appropriate.
.. Rogaway: It’s perfectly practical, in the sense that you can be a successful faculty member without accepting DoD funding. You won’t have as many students, you won’t be able to support as large a research group. And in some areas of computer science, and I’m sure in some areas more broadly, the vast majority of funding may be from the DoD.
I remember speaking to a computer architect, asking if there was any person in computer architecture he was aware of that wouldn’t take DoD money, and he said there was not. And he didn’t really believe that such a person could exist and be successful in the field, as there is no access to adequate resources just from the [National Science Foundation], say.
In my own area, cryptography, I think one can do fine living just on NSF money. But you won’t have a group of 10 students, or something.
Ada Lovelace: Cracking coder
Ada has garnered the attention not just because of her mathematical achievements but because she is a great story. When she was a month old her mother, Anne, wife of George Gordon, Lord Byron, had had enough of her husband’s profligacy (he disposed of her vast inheritance within a year), promiscuity (he had an affair with his half-sister Augusta among many, many others) and general horridness (he would send his wife up to bed while he dallied with Augusta downstairs), and stole away from the marital home with her baby. Neither mother nor daughter ever saw the mad and bad poet-peer again, but when he died at the age of 36 he was such a celebrity that Ada was, royalty aside, London’s most famous child.
.. “She was”, wrote Bruce Collier, one of Babbage’s biographers, “a manic-depressive with the most amazing delusions about her own talents, and a rather shallow understanding of both Charles Babbage and the Analytical Engine…I guess someone has to be the most overrated figure in the history of computing.” But the world will continue to give Ada the benefit of the doubt – because it needs her.
Silicon Valley: Too Heavy on Engineering and Light on Liberal Arts
The educational backgrounds of many Silicon Valley workers — heavy on engineering and light on liberal arts — also play a role in shaping the industry culture.
“What I worry about is how unidimensional computer science students have become as a result of the rigor of the curriculum,” Mr. Sacca said. “They don’t get to study abroad. They don’t have summer jobs. They don’t wait on tables — what you get is a 23-year-old engineer at Google yelling at a chef because they ran out of pheasant that day. They don’t understand how people get by in the developing worlds. They don’t know anyone trying to make payday loan payments. I really worry about how homogeneous our culture is getting in Silicon Valley because of the lack of experience.”