people being introduced I'll introduce
myself the next speaker will be Phil
rock away from the University of
California Davis please Phil thanks for
that generous introduction so yeah so I
have a kind of long talk so I want to
make sure that I don't lose too much
time but you all look so far away do you
think you could humor me by like coming
up Jenny I would add I you thank you
thank you so as you like so a lot of
people seem to think that cryptography
is is really this amazing apparatus I i
sense even in cryptographic discourse
these days a kind of utopian vision that
if we just mangle bits in the right way
then heaven on earth will be here
something like this and I'm often the
beneficiary of this I think because you
know when I identify myself as a
cryptographer then I get a kind of
stature from this that maybe isn't
particularly deserved and what's odd in
some ways is that this stature is is
neared in both academia and in popular
culture which is kind of unheard of that
they agree on anything but in academia
cryptography is definitely a well-loved
academic discipline you know fully ten
of 63 Turing Award winners or
cryptographers this is amazing because
well it's not just you know
cryptographers don't comprised of
academic researchers in computer science
photographers don't comprise one percent
of academic researchers in computer
science so this is way out of proportion
and then you know in you know depictions
of cryptography in film and in books
well I can't complain I don't know
cryptographers or the brilliant and
handsome mathematicians that the country
needs to have working on it fight power
asked to have in its in its corner
it can get a little bit chilly on
YouTube a few weeks ago this fellow here
was explaining how to memorize like
anything by creating what he called a
memory palace and he showed he
demonstrated how to remember you know
100 digits of pi using his contrivance
and someone you know rings in in the
online comments so this won't work for
you know memorizing tens of thousands of
digits but someone else Gallic and
sniper here says hey no man with
cryptography it's totally possible so
yeah I I have to disappoint galcon
sniper and tell you that cryptography
will not improve your memory in any
manner whatsoever so I think that
there's you know lots of claims about
what cryptography can do that clearly
are you know within the within the realm
of its capacities and there are lots of
claims about wealth cryptography can do
that are clearly outside the realm of
its capacity but there's also affair a
fairly large gray space where I think
there's this contested territory of
whether cryptography is somehow up to
the task and the problem i'm really
interested in and have been interested
in for a few a few years in this
contested space if whether cryptography
can actually be a democratizing kind of
technology whether in particular
democracy who cryptography holds
potential for staving off
authoritarianism and I think my interest
in authoritarianism should be kind of
obvious so I I mean I don't think we
have to look hard to find the signs of
of emerging authoritarianism in
contemporary society and if you don't
buy this political narrative I won't
convince you in the next minute anyway
but I i think the signs are ostensible
and I should I should make clear that
the rise of authoritarianism
can US political culture doesn't begin
with Donald Trump one can find the roots
for this going back several years now
and many would say that the political
power of the new wave of
authoritarianism is a consequence of the
of what's called the feathering strategy
this idea in the late 1960s that the
Republican Party would court wipe
southern voters by kind of playing in
exactly to the tenets that ring strongly
true for those with authoritarian
tendencies so I've been brandishing this
word authoritarianism around for a bit
without actually specifying what I mean
so authoritarianism he is this worldview
rooted in personality rooted in in human
psychology that values order and
authority and additionally distrust
outsiders and social change and among
its tenants or this loyal acceptance of
authority a willingness to accept
established hierarchies a strong
aversion to ambiguity a clear desire for
answers the pairing of these comprise
what psychologists sometimes call a need
for cognitive closure a desire for
traditionalism strong notions of group
who is in my group and who is outside
this group perhaps strangely a tendency
towards feelings of disgust which maybe
don't seem natural but empirically are
linked to the rest of these categories
is nicely demonstrated in a plls article
a few years ago fear fear seems to be a
hallmark of authoritarianism and in fact
modern theories of authoritarianism
suggest that non authoritarians will in
fact act like authoritarians when when
pushed especially by external fears by
fears of someone they recognized as an
outsider
high confidence in one's beliefs that is
a kind of growth minded us and finally a
tendency to ascribe a single cause to
complex problems so I might comment that
while authoritarianism is quite a loaded
term it's impossible to say this word
without people saying like that's not me
psychologists who study this well they
failed to find an alternative word but
they try not to view this as in a kind
of pejorative manner this is simply a
cluster of personality characteristics
to many who who work in this field
authoritarianism got off to a really
rocky start in the academic literature
it really begins just before World War
two with the psychologist Eric from
trying to explain his understanding of
the groundwork for authoritarianism and
continues just after the war in 1950
with a famous book by adorno and other
is called the authoritarian personality
but as I was saying the field kind of
existed in a kind of intellectual
no-man's land not really getting a
decent reputation in academia in part
because of fundamental problems in
instrumentation in trying to measure
authoritarianism and the instruments
that originally had been used would ask
political questions and then try and say
look it's correlated with these kind of
political out views and outcomes and
that didn't really make sense so finally
in the early 1990s and then popularized
in a paper by Feldman and scanner a way
of assessing authoritarianism was found
that severed it from its political
context and the clever idea was to use
simple questions about child-rearing as
a kind of surrogate to understand
authoritarianism and well why don't you
take the test for yourself so
you can scribble it down or mentally
scribble it which is more important for
a child to have a independence be
respect for elders which is more
important for a child to have a
obedience the self-reliance which is
more important for a child to have a
curiosity be good manners all of these
responses are alphabetical so don't try
and do now with it which is more
important for a child to be a
considerate or be well-behaved all right
so too for this test to give yourself a
quarter point for each of the indicated
answers be a BB so you'll have a score
now of 0 to 1 and if your score is three
quarters or 1 congratulations you're an
authoritarian if it's hero or a quarter
your non authoritarian if you're a half
I guess you're right there in the middle
and this instrument perhaps surprisingly
has been shown to their remarkable
correlation with much longer instruments
that try to assess much more directly
the property that had been called rwa
right-wing authoritarianism and it turns
out to be a wonderful predictor for
support for Donald Trump in fact it is
the best predictor for support for
Donald Trump that's been found apart
from supporting Donald Trump and this is
an example from December 2015 there were
at this time lots of candidates in the
Republican primaries and it shows as a
function of the score on that test i
just gave you whether callers a favored
trump or somebody else this is limited
to this is limited to white republican
voters in the primaries the instrument i
gave incidentally doesn't seem to be a
good indicator of authoritarianism for
blacks it's kind of an interesting
phenomenon
my own interest in the relationship
between authoritarianism and
cryptography actually began well before
Trump entered the political stage it
occurred with the Snowden revelations in
the summer of 2013 so following that
exciting summer of Snowden as I like to
think of it lots of comment aters spoke
of the threat to individual privacy
which was suggested by by the
revelations my own concern with always
something a little bit different I was
interested in the threat to democracy as
as opposed by the existence of programs
for mass surveillance and certainly I
wasn't the only one Snowden himself in
one of the two interviews with Laura
Poitras just after the revelations said
eventually there will be a time where
policies will change because the only
thing that restricts the activities of
the surveillance state are policy and
because of that a new leader will be
elected they'll flip the switch and
there will be nothing the people can do
at that point to oppose it and it'll be
turnkey tyranny just after the Snowden
revelations in an interview with a
German newspaper Jimmy Carter said
simply America does not have a
functioning democracy at this point in
time now it certainly wasn't you know
Snowden and other commentators at the
time that were early to suggest that
maybe cryptography could help out in in
addressing this problem the the speakers
who who addressed this problem most
eloquently and early were really the
cypherpunks the cypherpunks remember
emerged in the early 1990s unified by
this mailing list and a kind of set of
shared sensibilities concerning the
threats to democracy and human autonomy
by changes in technology and of the of
an example of the kind of discourse from
the cypherpunks in this direction I
might read this little piece from the
crypto anarchists manifesto bike inmate
Tim a is one of the founding cypherpunks
he writes a specter is haunting the
modern world the specter of crypto
anarchy cryptologic methods
fundamentally alter the nature of
corporations and government interference
in alter the nature of corporations and
government interference and economic
transaction combined with emerging
information markets crypto Anarchy will
create a liquid market for any and all
material which can be put into words and
pictures and justice barbed wire made
possible to fencing off a vast ranches
and farms so too will cryptography come
to be the wire clip Clippers which
dismantle the barbed wire around
intellectual property arrive you have
nothing to lose but your barbed wire
fences this kind of very optimistic
discourse among the cypherpunks
continued throughout the 90s and really
continued until the present day so the
cyberpunk movement I suppose has morphed
quite a bit since then um here's Edward
Snowden speaking again actually in the
run-up to his disclosure is an email to
Glenn Greenwald in words for history let
us speak no more a faith in man but bind
him down from mischief by the chains of
cryptography really expressing I think
quite perfectly this kind of of cyber
punk ethos
but from where does this kind of
optimism that cryptography would save us
from from the encroachments of the state
where does this arise why end is this
optimism actually actually realistic but
one answer might be that this optimism
is actually born of a kind of pessimism
that if you believe that data will
invariably be read and exploit it if
it's not encrypted then in some sense
your only chance is to make sure that
essentially everything is encrypted and
so maybe it's simply that but I think
there's more to it that that has lent
weight to the optimistic position with
respect to the utility of cryptography
and I think if we disentangle it the
implicit mental model is effectively
this the technological change is
creating the conditions which lead to a
widespread increase in our surveillance
capabilities these particular
technological conditions are of course a
movement of more and more information
flow into the digital realm the ability
to capture all of this information which
is slowed or which is stored and then
the third piece which has entered the
stage only more recently if our ability
to actually analyze these mountains of
information in order to glean some
actionable content if you believe that
technology induces all of these improved
capabilities and you look out upon our
political history you probably will come
to the conclusion that these
capabilities will almost certainly be
exploited in order to expand
surveillance this expansion of
surveillance both benefits authoritarian
leaders and then they in turn push for
further expansions in surveillance and
surveillance capabilities if this is the
roadmap then how is cryptography going
to somehow come to interfere with it
well the most obvious manner is that
cryptography will create a kind of
alternative technological landscape in
which
the crypto actually obstructs our
surveillance capabilities it will
obstruct it by ensuring that he who
gathers information will gather nothing
of any utility nothing but meaningless
bits you might hope that he who gathers
the information also gains no
particularly informative metadata that
the information that slowed doesn't
speak to who is trying to communicate to
whom there is a second way in which
cryptography might help to confront
authoritarianism and you might call this
the I don't know strong program of the
cypherpunks this was the possibility
that crypto would create new entirely
new democratic possibilities so domains
like electronically entirely electronic
money for one of the early cyberpunk
wishes one that finally came into
fruition in a practical way with Bitcoin
and one could certainly imagine that
Bitcoin used pervasively is such a new
anti-authoritarian capability I think
I'm more politically significant crypto
enabled technological change that the
cypherpunks had wished for and that
finally did come on the stage you've
improved capacities for whistleblowing
in particular web sites like WikiLeaks
so how is this program worked out has
crypto actually done much to obstruct
surveillance capabilities and have
crypto led to entirely new liberties
which counter authoritarian tendencies
and I think the answer to both of these
is clearly know that in particular
crypto were to genuinely be obstructing
surveillance capabilities would be
posing a risk to to both capital and the
state that it really wouldn't find
tolerable and we've never really had
significant quantities of data being
pulled out of the realm of surveillance
no perhaps until quite
I think you can say that the
popularization of messaging protocols
like whatsapp actually have removed
significant amounts of content though
nothing has touched the metadata story
as for the new liberties will there too
I think the situation is disappointing
if one was hoping that whistle blowing
sites like WikiLeaks would lead to
expanded Democratic potential I think
the story is quite mixed as to whether
in the end the tendency is one that is
favoring Democratic movements or one
that's actually oppositional to it I
think another explanation for the
optimism surrounding cryptography of
capacity to improve democracy is based
simply on the architecture of encryption
so encryption whether it's in the
symmetric setting or in the public key
setting as a bunch of things going for
it which seemed to promote democratic
tendencies those things would include
well first the basic mathematics of hard
functions that we really believe it's
possible to create the super polynomial
even exponential differences in the
amount of efforts that are neat the
effort that's needed to encrypt and to
decrypt under an unknown key furthermore
cryptography unlike something like you
know nuclear power doesn't require
anything exotic is easy to to set up
it's cheap no exotic materials or costly
resources needed it's actually quite
difficult to regulate he who has the
ability to program and a general-purpose
computer probably has the ability to get
some sort of encryption going even the
nomenclature surrounding encryption
seems to embody this kind of everyman
ethos you know the parties that are
encrypting or the Alice's and Bob's of
the world they're the kind of they're
the kind of everyone characters
and yet I think you can counter all of
these arguments first the uses of
encryption are certainly varied and if
you're using encryption not to send a
private message to your buddy but to
ensure that you know the netflix content
isn't used for some purpose other than
you yourself viewing that movie well you
haven't actually done anything to
empower the end user you've actually
done something to further empower the
the service provider we can say sure
mass is embodied we can say sure the
mathematics somehow sounds like it's
favoring the defender but once the mass
is actually embodied in some actual
system that mask even what you're going
to attack the locus of attack moves to
the embodied system and there well
offense seems to have the advantage over
defense encryption can in fact be
regulated and it doesn't have to be
perfectly regulated to be effectively
regulated the US government program of
regulating the export of encryption was
actually highly effective for
accomplishing the task which it actually
aimed to do which was to ensure that the
volume of encrypted traffic remained low
even the claim that well anyone can do
this you just need the ability to
program in a general-purpose computer
this too is subject to contention these
days it seems that we've been slowly
drifting away from general-purpose
computation and more and more computing
is embodied in special-purpose
appliances finally I would comment that
crypto is not encryption crypto is a
much broader set of topics and just
because symmetric or public key
encryption might in the end somehow
favor democratic institutions that
doesn't mean crypto as a whole has any
such tendency in fact even if you step
away from the conventional setting of
encryption and just move to a slightly
neighboring one it seems that the
tendencies are already radically
different so here's a picture showing
what's called identity based encryption
I ve suggested by shamir and first
realized by Bonet in Franklin in a
desirable manner and you know in
identity based encryption everybody can
send you a message by using your email
address let's say at your public key and
this is always the advertised advantage
of identity based encryption that it
minimizes the key distribution problem
by ensuring that something that you
already have is the public information
that's needed for you but this you know
this version of the story own it's
something really crucial which is the
only way that you get your public key to
be your email address is that some
authority the public key generator it's
usually called in the ibe literature has
issued you your secret key identity
based encryption is a form of key escrow
in fact it's a particularly problematic
form of key escrow because this public
key generator knows everybody secret key
it knows everybody secret key that has
been issued and that will ever be issued
looked at in this manner this flavor of
Ivy doesn't seem to have democratizing
tendencies at all it would seem to favor
very much the power that's embedded in
the PKG and furthermore even if you
think that your PKG is good well the PKG
itself becomes a ripe target for
subversion you know this one secret key
that unlocks all others sometimes I
think the tendencies within a
cryptographic setting are really not at
all obvious so what I've drawn here now
is the flow diagram depicting fully
homomorphic encryption fhe the idea here
is that I'm going to somehow overcome
the tyranny of cloud computing by
sticking only encrypted data in the
cloud and furthermore I'm going to be
the one who owns the decryption key okay
so what could go wrong here
when I want the the cloud to do some
computation on my data I'll send it the
function f I hope to be computed and I
can actually obscure this sling to if I
really want to to somehow encrypt ass as
well and the cloud by the magic of fhe
is going to send me back the encryption
of F applied to the message m what could
be more wonderful the cloud doesn't
understand the message m that it's
storing nor does it understand f of em
the content that is just created for me
and yet as though by magic it manages to
produce the encryption of f of em which
i can happily decrypt using my
decryption key have I said the sounds it
sounds wonderful this sounds idyllic
from the point of view of who has what
power we are disempowering the cloud but
I think when you scratch just a little
deeper not all is as it appears most
importantly it really seems that fhe is
unlikely in any foreseeable time frame
to become a practical technology on the
other hand we have many tens of the
world's best cryptographers working on
this technique what we really do by
promoting fhe and like highly
theoretical technologies is to kind of
bump up the prestige of what i call
crypto for crypto cryptography that
isn't actually intended for the real
world and we'll probably never have any
practical impact on the real world that
really does wonders for improving your
career as a cryptographer this creates a
kind of large-scale diversion of
resources and it also kind of induces a
sort of pseudo pragmatism in which
you'll see in grant proposals and in
introductions to papers people touting
the practicality of fully homomorphic
encryption without really facing up to
the fact that we're
not likely to ever get there and that
there are really very pressing privacy
problems going on right now have I
indicated before one of the things we
could hope to be optimistic about is
that cryptography can benefit privacy or
it could do other things and that this
balance is really up to us in a nice
short paper by Arvind re onon he
partitions cryptographic work into kind
of two camps he speaks of crypto for
privacy which is the kind of crypto that
underlies tour for example and crypto
for security which is the crypto that
underlies something like ssl/tls
marianas conclusion is that Krypto for
security has really done well certainly
it has done well enough that it supports
billions of dollars of electronic
commerce crypto for privacy on the other
hand it's kind of been an abject failure
I think tour is actually the thing that
has succeeded most and yet even it is
achieving you know a tiny amount of of
obfuscated at web traffic furthermore
marry on ins conception of cryptography
of being cooked over privacy and crypto
for security mrs. really important
pieces of the puzzle one is the one that
I just mentioned crypto for crypto most
cryptographers really aren't doing work
that fits into either of these two
categories if you pick up the
proceedings to crypto euro crypt or Asia
crypt and try your best to classify each
paper has crypto for privacy crypto for
security or crypto that's just really
meant to get another paper published I'm
afraid they almost all fall into the
last category and the remainder over
here even then we're not really done
what is it exactly that the NSA is doing
with its billions of dollars in a crypto
spending well it's kind of over here
crypto for power
this is the ideas you know kind of
nicely explained in the open literature
in young and Young's work on kleptocracy
in which we can try and exploit
cryptography itself in order to bolster
existing power structures you could say
then that the extent to which
cryptography really helps privacy is
kind of the extent to which our our our
resources and mental efforts fall within
this rightmost category and if you take
this point of view then you're probably
not happy because of drawing closer to
scale icier looks much more like this
crypto for power seems to get by far the
largest amount of capital expenditure
these two are actually rather hard to
compare the expenditures in companies
are almost entirely here and the
expenditures in academia are almost
entirely on the left and crypto for
privacy well they have the pet
conference now there's very little that
goes that goes on there in truth still
continuing in this explanation for how
why optimism might be might be realistic
I might point to the kind of discourse
suggested by Lawrence Lessig in his code
is law kind of troops so he's not
referring strictly to software here but
to the idea that how we architect our
systems the software the hardware the
complete architecture of our computing
systems defines that which we can do on
them it defines the realm of what's
visible it sets where we have the
ability to regulate and in this manner
it operates very much like the law
regulating in an elegant manner similar
kinds of ideas were suggested in the
short blog post by Mitch cape or that
many people know
this is again potentially quite useful
it just says if we were to get you know
the internet architecture right we could
make we could make a very democratic
system the kind of system that many
people imagine the Internet to have them
but it also says that we can get things
very wrong and that we will get things
wrong if power is the one who determines
the shape of this architecture and I'm
afraid that that very much is what have
happened when we say that we can
architect the Internet I'm afraid that
the architecture of the Internet these
days is mostly determined by you know
standardization committees and political
processes which are dominated by
fundamentally illiberal companies and
governments so if somehow one imagines
as if by magic that the voices of civil
society would percolate up and and
determine the most democratic
architecture for our computing systems I
think this is my Eve I believe another
aspect of the support for crypto is a
democratizing technology stems from the
claim that lots of cryptographers are
super smart and and they'll save us
again this kind of echoes back to the
the depiction of cryptography in in the
films and books on the subject but my
own observation is a cryptographer is
that yeah lots of cryptographers really
are very smart and they're very smart in
the one thing that they work on that
there doesn't necessarily seem to be any
spillover that you know cryptographers
any more than any other set of
individuals are particularly attuned to
the political and social consequences of
what they construct and more broadly i
would say that technologists across the
spectrum tend to be really quite
tone-deaf these days too
the social consequences of the
technological work that they do most
work by most cryptographers is really
has nothing to do with privacy as I've
said before and we should add to all of
this the fact that the crypto community
in any case is extremely tiny I
mentioned this at the very beginning
there are fewer than a thousand people
in the world who have published as many
as three papers in an IAC are sponsored
conference or workshop three papers is a
very low bar for what one would take to
be considered a cryptographer you know
so we're looking at a fields that is you
know an order of magnitude or more
smaller than you know fields like
computer graphics or you know natural
language processing and the truth is
that most of my colleagues really could
not care less about mass surveillance
this was true before Snowden published
and I really hope that Snowden would be
kind of a sea change in setting our
priorities it hasn't worked out that way
simply scanning all I ACR conference
proceedings the thousands of pages for
the word surveillance will reveal that
it didn't appear in any paper in the
word 2000 the year 2011 nor 2012 nor
2013 and I can go back many other years
before this it first appeared finally in
a 2014 paper of mine and then it
continued to appear at this kind of
trickle of a rate by me and my
colleagues this has never particularly
captured the entrance of cryptographers
and sadly the Snowden revelations didn't
change this fundamental dynamic
here's something that might have changed
this dynamic and that's who funds work
in cryptography well it's hard to get
good numbers on this I don't know how to
determine total dollar expenditures to
academia from the NFF versus DoD
agencies like DARPA but one thing I was
able to do actually a student was able
to do it for me was to go through all
the olds conference proceedings of I see
our conferences Urich ripped Asia crypt
crypto pkc and TCC and to simply
identified among those papers which
acknowledged extra mural us funding what
fraction of them acknowledge DoD funding
and you can see how it's written that
prior to 2003 and before there was very
little DoD money being spent in
cryptography and by around 2007 2008
this substantially picked up nowadays
almost all of my colleagues who support
more than a couple of students get some
DARPA money and often money from other
DoD agencies as well in fact it can be
kind of funny-looking the
acknowledgement section on grants which
will sometimes identify half a dozen or
more different grants some cocktails
oops mostly of DoD agencies you might
say though that you know maybe my
colleagues anemic we were just not
needed anyway the cryptography can
function perfectly well with the
contributions of kind of amateurs and
outsiders and there's some reason to
believe that this is actually so you
know diff Ian hellmann's 1976 paper had
this kind of remarkable sentence skill
and production crypt analysis has always
been heavily as always I think we should
say relied relied heavily on the side of
professionals but innovation
particularly in the design of new types
of cryptographic systems has come
primarily from amateurs
I think this is a depressing thought if
you spent your life as an academic that
you thought you were somehow ahead of
the amateurs and I think there's
actually a lot of evidence for diff Ian
hellmann's claim if I look to the
artifacts that seemed to have mattered
most in getting cryptography into the
real world in recent decades here are
ones that came to mind pgp crowborough
store pls bitcoin signal secure drop I
really like they have an interesting
commonality not one of them involved any
significant contribution from any
academic cryptographer nowadays TLS has
been gathering loss of attention from
loss of academics it's come quite lately
Kerberos you might imagine had loss of
academic support it came out of MIT I
was actually at MIT at the time the
Kerberos was being developed I was in
the cryptography group neither I nor any
of my professors had ever heard of it it
was going on at a different floor I
think there's some reasons for optimism
even from the point of view of a
curmudgeon like me first of all I would
say that cryptographers actually do have
the potential to act politically when I
got frustrated that the the IAC our
board wouldn't it seem put out a
statement somehow acknowledging Snowden
and the the existential threat to
cryptography that in some sense was
posed by pervasive surveillance when the
icr didn't want to say this I finally
just went to a board meeting who I'm
sorry a membership meeting among
cryptographers and proposed that the
membership adopt such a statement
membership of the icr repudiates mass
surveillance in the undermining of
cryptographic solutions and standards
and so on and what I found remarkably
was it in this context cryptographers
were more than happy to raise their hand
and say yes in fact that resolution was
unanimously pass
in Copenhagen a couple of years ago
along with Joan Feigenbaum and other
colleagues I also put together an open
letter from cryptographers and some
computer security professionals and took
a lot of work but eventually we were
able to get 50 odd well-known
cryptographers and others to sign on to
this letter which made reasonably strong
statements about mass surveillance and
cryptography one of the things i think
that concerns me most about cryptography
having an impact in this direction is
the extent to which this problem has
been successfully framed by tower and
cryptographers like most people in the
united states and abroad really seem to
buy into this framing very strongly let
me give the basic tenets of it you first
of all privacy is seen as a personal
good it's that which she you need in
order to somehow go about your business
with a feeling of security and contrast
security is viewed as a collective good
it somehow what we all need in order to
ensure that we can walk down the street
without you know an Isis terrorists
coming and slitting our throat and that
these two things privacy and security
are inherently in conflict as privacy
benefits security security gets the
short end of the rope and vice versa and
furthermore that this necessary conflict
between privacy and security have now
gotten quite out of whack and it's
gotten out of whack because of
technology that encryption in particular
has disturbed the prior balance privacy
is winning now and we all run the risk
of going dark somehow our world which
will turn into this dark place of a dark
closet and because of this the bad guys
will win and the bad guys are very bad
there are terrorists and child molesters
and drug kingpins and we just can't
allow this to
this is the framing some people call the
going dark framing or the law
enforcement framing and it's nicely
enunciated by by James Comey the FBI
director and the problem with this going
dark framing is well kind of the whole
thing is fiction that it's all really
bullshit and that much more realistic
framing what one might call the
surveillance studies framing or the
Golden Age of surveillance framing says
the text matter all the way our world is
working but surveillance is not some
kind of tool for confronting terrorists
but it's that it's an instrument of
power and the terrorism is little more
than the cover for action which we have
found to be so useful where the power
has and that technology is in fact
changing this landscape but it's not
changing it by helping privacy at all
the technological changes are working to
make surveillance much cheaper in fact
they're making the incremental cost of
surveilling just one more individual
essentially zero and at that kind of
valuation you know as long as it has
potential value it doesn't even have to
have actual realized value people do it
the surveillance is closely tied to
cyber war and assassinations and it is
not really possible to disentangle what
we're doing is a society domestically
with our intense for using surveillance
internationally and in conflicts the
privacy and security are actually quite
rarely in conflict that by and large
privacy supports security and that the
two work together quite well furthermore
but a world in which surveillance has
become routine eyes and ubiquitous that
we all suffer in very severe ways that
people become conforming they become
fearful they become boring and the
surveillance stifles dissent that we
won't have any possibility for
legitimate political action
in a realm in which surveillance is
effectively administered on
population-wide scales finally I would
add that the cost of surveillance are
not borne equally across society that in
poor communities and communities of
color the costs for surveillance are
already far higher than in rich white
communities in the prevailing framing of
surveillance surveillance is being used
for two principal goods those goods are
fighting terrorism and selling you lots
of stuff as long as we accept this
framing I think we're kind of in trouble
and I think it's not very accurate about
what the real purposes of surveillance
actually are the ambitions are actually
much greater even according to NSA
documents themselves terrorism is just
one of their missions very try to serve
their customers and what their customers
most want to most want to do is to know
the future and they want to know the
future so that they can change the
future and this is exactly what
corporations want to do as well they
want to be able to predict you and they
want to be able to gently nudge you in
the directions that will be useful
because if you can know the future and
if you can gently adjust that future
well then first of all you can make tons
of money but in addition you have
enormous power you can win elections you
can spiteful descent you can shape
public opinion in the manner that you
hope to be most in your interest you
achieve what Donna Haraway sometimes
calls the god trick this idea of well
being able to see everything and to
shape that which you see as well a God
from on above of course in harrow waves
view the God trick is an illusion we
can't actually have such vision and we
certainly lack the wisdom
with which to adjust behaviors that
would be consistent with having such an
all-encompassing view the ability to
make lots of money and have lots of
power I think have always been
attractive but I think it has a special
appeal these days because there are in
fact major challenges facing the world
these challenges aren't actually coming
from terrorism or something like that
that I think we all really know at some
level is a cover story but that there
are real problems and those real
problems I think are mostly coming from
environmental collapse climate change
and other environmental threats and
they're coming from the ever increasing
wealth distribute wealth inequality
problems and these two things together
we'll make a population eventually want
to rebel but you can't rebel if you are
effectively surveilled and effectively
adjusted you know in the we care so
after the first Snowden revelations I
had the pleasure of going to the Turing
award ceremonies where my adviser Silvio
McCauley was was getting the Turing
award and Silvio is is always
wonderfully optimistic he spoke at that
event saying computer science of marking
an epical change in human history we are
conquering a new and vast scientific
continent virtually all areas of human
activity in virtually all areas of human
knowledge are benefiting from our
conceptual and technical contributions
and you know it kind of bothered me the
entire event occurring while we were in
the midst of seeing what in fact our
technology was bringing forth on mankind
the ability to look into the minutiae of
every individual's life and ultimately
to be able to use this knowledge to
shape those lives and desired directions
and i think the kind of over-the-top
optimism the technological optimism
which carries forward so many who work
in technology I think it's actually a
dangerous trend because if you believe
that no matter what we do as a society
the technology is going to somehow make
it right then you don't adequately
direct that technology and you get the
kind of world that we're creating right
now I think a much more realistic
assessment of where we are is this the
computer science really is marking
ethical changes in human history but
many of these changes actually threaten
human values and even human existence
and that it's going to be very difficult
for mankind to give somehow get above
around this bump and it will take a lot
of work and wisdom and luck to survive
these threats I didn't have time to talk
about all of the thoughts I had in
connection with the interaction between
cryptography and authoritarianism I put
a kind of summary here including lots of
things I didn't get to discuss and I'll
just close out with that on though on
the board all right I think I do have
time for a few questions if you like so
the question refers to the extent to
which the recent congressional decision
to to overturn Obama air privacy rules
with respect to isps I think it's just
more of the same that we've seen a
steady erosion of of privacy rights and
this one was quite expected and
yeah I don't know it's a problem please
storing things encrypted in the cloud is
perfectly feasible that's feasible today
but in fully homomorphic encryption you
don't just want to keep things encrypted
in the cloud you then want the cloud to
do all your computation for you without
understanding anything about that which
it's computing and that's asking for a
lot technologically we can achieve
something close to it much more
realistically using a concept called
secure computation or a multi-party
computation the model is a little bit
different but it achieves basically the
same end of carrying out computations in
a manner in which individual holders of
data don't understand the nature of the
computation that they're jointly
accomplishing even then and i would say
that secure computation for lots of
problems has become quite practical even
then I don't see us moving in directions
in which secure computation multi-party
computation is becoming is becoming more
important or ubiquitous and in part i
think the incentive structures are all
wrong one thing that you know the cloud
provider really wants to make sure it
can do is know your data because that's
part of the the model for its
monetization so i'm not hopeful that
even if we could flip a switch and
somehow have the complexity problems
solved even then i don't know that we
would see a world in which computation
in the clouds private computation in the
clouds became ubiquitous and i would
guess I would also add that there's a
kind of irony in all of this because
storage has become really cheap and we
don't need the cloud anymore for storing
the kind of quantities of data that
individual end users are wanting to
store why are you all sticking your
stuff in you know in Gmail in a Google
cloud you could in principle have this
you know working in the same manner as
an answering machine in your home you
can back it up to your mom's answering
machine if it were a you know a
distributed cheap appliance that
provided your own local cloud you get
essentially all of the advantages of
cloud storage namely you know a shared
common view of the state and transparent
backup but without having given away the
the content itself to this sum to this
provider which represents a major shift
in power actually I'll take maybe one
more and then I better leave room for
the next speaker please the question is
if we really were able to shift power
successfully to the week like what would
happen politically and I think we would
see major opposition I think the moment
one really was effective at keeping data
from Facebook and Google the moment one
was truly effective at hiding metadata
content associated telephony there'd be
immediate and strong pushback in our
political process I better wrap up for
them but I'll be around if people would
like to chat with me anymore thanks