Statement of Condemnation of U.S. Mass-Surveillance Programs, and a
Reminder of Our Ethical Responsibilities as Computer Scientists
We have all been hearing about the NSA’s mass-surveillance programs, which go by names
like PRISM, BULLRUN, Boundless Informant, and X-Keyscore. The extent of these systems,
and of corporate cooperation in U.S. mass-surveillance efforts, have been made public due to
disclosures by whistle-blowers like William Binney, Mark Klein, and Edward Snowden, and
by authors/journalists like James Bamford, Siobhan Gorman, and Glenn Greenwald.
As a scientist who has spent his career studying cryptography—the “mathematical” study of
privacy and security—I herein condemn and assert my repugnance of the USA’s masssurveillance programs, and those of all other countries. Mass-surveillance is intimidating,
abuse-prone, and anti-democratic. It is likely to engender a dystopian future. I assert that:
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Surveillance data should be collected only on specific targets and for specific cause;
entire populations should never be surveilled.
It is contrary to the ethical obligations of cryptographers, computer scientists, and
engineers to participate in the development of technologies for mass surveillance. It
is also a violation of professional codes of conduct.
It is contrary to corporate responsibility for a company to develop, sell, or support
artifacts, such as server farms, routers, or analytic engines, intended for mass
surveillance.
Cryptographic protections must never be intentionally subverted by bulk
provisioning of private keys or plaintexts to any authority. If such compromise is
ordered by a court, users must be informed. If the court order forbids disclosure, it
lacks ethical legitimacy.
Automated means of mass surveillance, including methods enabled by advances in
data mining, big data, natural-language processing, and machine learning, are at least
as dangerous as headphones and binoculars. A communication is intercepted when it
is stored or algorithmically processed for any intelligence purpose, not when it is
monitored by a human.

Both US-persons and non-US-persons have a right to be free of routinized surveillance. This
right does not spring solely from the US Fourth Amendment; it is a human and natural right
as well.

Phillip Rogaway
August 30, 2013
Updated September 9, 2013

The author is a professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis, USA.