I spoke to Rogaway about why cryptographers fail to see their work in moral terms, and the emerging link between encryption and terrorism in the national conversation. A transcript of our conversation appears below, lightly edited for concision and clarity.

Kaveh Waddell: Why should we think of computer science as political—and why have many considered it to be apolitical, for so long?

Phillip Rogaway: I think that science and technology are inherently political, and whether we want to think about it that way or not, it’s the nature of the beast. Our training as scientists and engineers tends to deemphasize the social positioning of what we do, and most of us scientists don’t give a whole lot of thought to how our work impacts society. But it obviously does.

It’s not something easily taught, either. I’ve taught an ethics and technology course myself, for several years, and the students are not predisposed to get the message that things technological are also political. We tend to analyze what we’re working on from a very self-directed perspective. [We focus on] how it impacts us and how it impacts the small group or the company with which we’re dealing, and the broader social influences of what we do aren’t usually on the horizon.

Waddell: What led you to understand the political implications of your own work?

Rogaway: I myself had been thinking increasingly in these terms when the Snowden revelations came out. Those revelations made me confront more directly our failings as a community to have done anything effectual about stemming this transition of the Internet to this amazing tool for surveilling entire populations.

Waddell: In your paper, you compare the debate over nuclear science in the 1950s to the current debate over cryptography. Nuclear weapons are one of the most obvious threats to humanity today—do you think surveillance presents a similar type of danger?

Rogaway: I do. It’s of a different nature, obviously. The threat is more indirect and more subtle. So with nuclear warfare, there was this visually compelling and frightening risk of going up in a mushroom cloud. And with the transition to a state of total surveillance, what we have is just the slow forfeiture of democracy.

Waddell: Who else in the wider class of scientists—besides nuclear scientists, besides computer scientists—has this level of political responsibility?

Rogaway: I think this holds for all scientists and engineers. Very few of us are doing something so esoteric that it’s unlikely to end up connected to the social well-being. If you’re going to exclude people, maybe pure mathematicians, for example. But we live in an age of technology, and what scientists and other technologists do reshapes the character of our world.

Waddell: Are there any other historical examples of scientists acting according to moral principles rather than pursuing pure academic inquiry?