# The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work - Phillip Rogaway

- Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress)
- Date: 2024-10-07
- Duration: 01:25
- Topics: Education
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-EavS_QabTcg
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EavS_QabTcg

## Description

Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what. This makes cryptography an inherently political tool, and it confers on the field an intrinsically moral dimension. The Snowden revelations motivate a reassessment of the political and moral positioning of cryptography. They lead one to ask if our inability to effectively address mass surveillance constitutes a failure of our field. I believe that it does. I call for a community-wide effort to develop more effective means to resist mass surveillance. I plead for a reinvention of our disciplinary culture to attend not only to puzzles and math, but, also, to the societal implications of our work.

https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral.html

## Transcript

my first imperative then that I'd like to suggest is that you should really attend to problems social values at least some of the time and do this kind of style of anti-s surveillance research that this is a good activity for cryptography and that it won't lead to stuff that's necessarily boring that uh that there's really fascinating problems that have social utility as one of their consequences I'd also like to say that in speaking with cryptographers about why they're working on what they're working on I often hear answers that are extraordinarily unconvincing you know that people are doing are working on the problem they're working on because ultimately they know how to do this kind of work and it gets published and people have done this sort of work before and you know these are bad reasons to be spending your life on something so I'd encourage you to really be introspective about your problem selection and introspection takes time and we seem to have a culture in which there's never enough time I think it's okay for people to be writing fewer papers I think as a community we should be producing a lot fewer papers and trying to produce papers of more relevance and particularly some papers of significant social relevance