Why Theoretical Computer Scientists Aren’t Worried About Privacy by Jeremy Kun.
From the post:
There has been a lot of news recently on government surveillance of its citizens. The biggest two that have pervaded my news feeds are the protests in Turkey, which in particular have resulted in particular oppression of social media users, and the recent light on the US National Security Agency’s widespread “backdoor” in industry databases at Google, Verizon, Facebook, and others. It appears that the facts are in flux, as some companies have denied their involvement in this program, but regardless of the truth the eye of the public has landed firmly on questions of privacy.
Barack Obama weighed in on the controversy as well, being quoted as saying,
You can’t have 100% security and 100% privacy, and also zero inconvenience.
I don’t know what balance the US government hopes to strike, but what I do know is that privacy and convenience are technologically possible, and we need not relinquish security to attain it.
Before I elaborate, let me get my personal beliefs out of the way. I consider the threat of terrorism low compared to the hundreds of other ways I can die. I should know, as I personally have been within an
fraction of my life for all
(when I was seven I was hit by a bus, proclaimed dead, and revived). So I take traffic security much more seriously than terrorism, and the usual statistics will back me up in claiming one would be irrational to do otherwise. On the other hand, I also believe that I only need so much privacy. So I don’t mind making much of my personal information public, and I opt in to every one of Google’s tracking services in the hopes that my user experience can be improved. Indeed it has, as services like Google Now will, e.g., track my favorite bands for me based on my Google Play listening and purchasing habits, and alert me when there are concerts in my area. If only it could go one step further and alert me of trending topics in theoretical computer science! I have much more utility for timely knowledge of these sorts of things than I do for the privacy of my Facebook posts. Of course, ideologically I’m against violating privacy as a matter of policy, but this is a different matter. One can personally loathe a specific genre of music and still recognize its value and one’s right to enjoy it.
But putting my personal beliefs aside, I want to make it clear that there is no technological barrier to maintaining privacy and utility. This may sound shocking, but it rings true to the theoretical computer scientist. Researchers in cryptography have experienced this feeling many times, that their wildest cryptographic dreams are not only possible but feasible! Public-key encryption and digital signatures, secret sharing on a public channel, zero-knowledge verification, and many other protocols have been realized quite soon after being imagined. There are still some engineering barriers to implementing these technologies efficiently in large-scale systems, but with demand and a few years of focused work there is nothing stopping them from being used by the public. I want to use this short post to describe two of the more recent ideas that have pervaded the crypto community and provide references for further reading.
Jeremy injects a note of technical competence into the debate over privacy and security in the wake of NSA disclosures.
Not that our clueless representatives in government, greedy bidders or turf building agencies will pick up on this line of discussion.
The purpose of the NSA program is what the Republicans call a “transfer of wealth.” In this case from the government to select private contractors.
How much is being transferred isn’t known. If we knew the amount of the transfer and that the program it funds is almost wholly ineffectual, we might object to our representatives.
Some constitutional law scholars (Obama) have forgotten informed participation by voters in public debate is a keystone of the U.S. constitution.