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+* The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work :crypto:society:
+An appeal to cryptographers to ponder on the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%E2%80%93Einstein_Manifesto][Russell-Einstein
+manifesto]], consider the moral implications of their work, take a step
+back from "crypto-for-crypto", and focus on "crypto-for-privacy" (or,
+to name the threat more explicitly, "anti-surveillance research").
+
+Harps on FBI Director James Comey's "law-enforcement framing":
+
+#+begin_quote
+1. Privacy is /personal/ good.  It's about your desire to control
+   personal information about you.
+2. Security, on the other hand, is a /collective/ good.  It's about
+   living in a safe and secure world.
+3. Privacy and security are inherently in conflict.  As you strengthen
+   one, you weaken the other.  We need to find the right /balance/.
+4. Modern communications technology has destroyed the former balance.
+   It's been a boon to privacy, and a blow to security.  Encryption is
+   especially threatening.  Our laws just haven't kept up.
+5. Because of this, /bad guys/ may win.  The bad guys are terrorists,
+   murderers, child pornographers, drug traffickers, and money
+   launderers.  The technology that we good guys use - the bad guys
+   use it too, to escape detection.
+6. At this point, we run the risk of Going Dark.  Warrants will be
+   issued, but, due to encryption, they'll be meaningless.  We're
+   becoming a country of unopenable closets.  Default encryption may
+   make a good marketing pitch, but it's reckless design.  It will
+   lead us to a very dark place.
+#+end_quote
+
+This framing is dismissed as "inconsistent with the history of
+intelligence gathering, and with the NSA's own mission statement",
+without further explanation.
+
+I wish the author had spent some prose explaining how exactly this
+framing is fallacious.  There is a footnote providing some references,
+but as far as I can tell these references mainly reinforce the point
+that the NSA's surveillance methods are a threat to privacy; it is not
+obvious how "the NSA overreaches" contradicts "it's harder to catch
+bad guys once they get better crypto".
+
+For what it's worth, I found that [[#banning-encryption-to-stop-terrorists-a-worse-than-futile-exercise][Aaron Brantly's article]] does a
+better job at showing the shortsightedness of this line of reasoning,
+as does this footnote:
+
+#+begin_quote
+When crypto is outlawed only outlaws will have crypto.
+#+end_quote
+* Banning Encryption to Stop Terrorists: A Worse than Futile Exercise :crypto:society:
+The debate can be phrased as follows:
+
+#+begin_quote
+Is increasing security in one narrow area worth degrading it in every
+other?
+#+end_quote
+
+Answering "yes" overlooks two things:
+
+1. Weakening officially distributed encryption will not impact
+   terrorists, who will simply move to new, unregulated platforms.
+
+2. Once they have done that, we end up in a situation where lawful
+   citizens are stuck with insecure communication channels, and
+   terrorists are the only ones benefiting from state-of-the-art
+   confidentiality/integrity/authenticity.
+* [[https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.06171][The Usability of Ownership]] :rust:
+I'm glad I learned "incompleteness" as a more concise way to express
+"the borrow checker not being smart enough to accept code that does
+not violate Rust's theoretical ownership rules".