In the 1950s, a group of scientists spoke out against the dangers of nuclear weapons. Should cryptographers take on the surveillance state?
I don’t think you can have a healthy democracy without healthy journalism, and I don’t think you have healthy journalism without the ability to conduct a private conversation.
And that includes not just what you’re saying, but whom you’re saying it to. If every contact a journalist makes—and the weight of that contact: the number of minutes, the frequency, and such—is something that hundreds of thousands of analysts can get from a Google-like search tool, I think that this makes serious investigative journalism effectively impossible.
Source: The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists – The Atlantic