CSE209B: Seeing the Invisible: Cryptography, Society and Beyond

READINGS

Longs

1. Daniel Quinn. Ishmael: A Novel.
2. Rupert Read and Samuel Alexander. This Civilization is Finished.
3. Thoman Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
4. Cathy O'Neil. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.
5. Shoshana Zuboff. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.
6. William Deresiewicz. Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life.
7. Gloria Steinem. Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem.
8. Daniel Kahneman. Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Shorts

• Film: The Social Dilemma
• Why Privacy Matters Glenn Greenwald.
• How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind Tristan Harris.
• Your Addiction to Social Media Is No Accident Julian Morgans.
• Under digital surveillance: how American schools spy on millions of kids Lois Beckett.

• American Society Would Collapse If It Weren’t for These 8 Myths Lee Camp.
• You did not act in time Greta Thunberg.
• The Animal that Became a God, Afterword from Harari's Sapiens.

• The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work Phillip Rogaway.
• Caught Between Theory, Practice and Peer Review Mihir Bellare.
• Crypto for the People Seny Kamara.
• This World of Ours James Mickens.
• Not Even Close: The State of Computer Security James Mickens.
• Callisto: Technology to Combat Sexual Assault
• Dear Differential Privacy, Put Up or Shut Up Paul Francis.

• This Is Silicon Valley Gloria Liou.
• The Crossroads of Should and Must Elle Luna.
• Some Modest Advice for Graduate Students Stephen Stearns.
• On Creativity Maria Popova.
• Students Aren't Coddled. They're Defeated. John Warner.

• Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain Kai Stinchcombe ; Blockchains Are a Bad Idea James Mickens.
• Look! There! Where? Emerging Use Cases For ZKPs in 2019 Anna Rose.
• The Case Against Quantum Computing Mikhail Dyakonov.

• Center for Humane Technology
• Extinction rebellion
• Tristan Harris
• Harry Halpin

Academic

We will consider some lines of contemporary research, listed below:

• Secure Multi-Party Computation
• Homomorphic Encryption
• Functional Encryption
• Ethical algorithms
• Differential Privacy
• Complexity Theory
• Indistinguishability Obfuscation

We will ask questions, like the following, about each of these, and aim to create a matrix with possible answers:

• What problem does this solve?
• What problems is it sold as solving?
• Who benefits? Does it benefit Power, or People?
• What other ways are there to solve the same problem, and how do they compare? What makes one solution more "successful" than another?
• What are the implicit cultural assumptions underlying the pursuit of research on this topic?
• At which of Kuhn's stages of evolution (revolution, normal science, ...) is this area currently? How is this reflected in the work?
• If all research on this topic stopped tomorrow, what difference would it make, and to who?