Phillip Rogaway (Professor of CS at UC Davis) has released in the form of an essay his keynote talk from Asiacrypt. Very interesting reflection on the politics of crypto, historically and at present. -- "The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work" Phil Rogaway http://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/papers/moral-fn.pdf 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 plea for a reinvention of our disciplinary culture to attend not only to puzzles and math, but, also, to the societal implications of our work. -- -=rsw