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An Open Letter from US Researchers in
Cryptography and Information Security

January 24, 2014

Media reports since last June have revealed that the US government conducts domestic and international surveillance on a massive scale, that it engages in deliberate and covert weakening of Internet security standards, and that it pressures US technology companies to deploy backdoors and other data-collection features. As leading members of the US cryptography and information-security research communities, we deplore these practices and urge that they be changed.

Indiscriminate collection, storage, and processing of unprecedented amounts of personal information chill free speech and invite many types of abuse, ranging from mission creep to identity theft. These are not hypothetical problems; they have occurred many times in the past. Inserting backdoors, sabotaging standards, and tapping commercial data-center links provide bad actors, foreign and domestic, opportunities to exploit the resulting vulnerabilities.

The value of society-wide surveillance in preventing terrorism is unclear, but the threat that such surveillance poses to privacy, democracy, and the US technology sector is readily apparent. Because transparency and public consent are at the core of our democracy, we call upon the US government to subject all mass-surveillance activities to public scrutiny and to resist the deployment of mass-surveillance programs in advance of sound technical and social controls. In finding a way forward, the five principles promulgated at http://reformgovernmentsurveillance.com/ provide a good starting point.

The choice is not whether to allow the NSA to spy. The choice is between a communications infrastructure that is vulnerable to attack at its core and one that, by default, is intrinsically secure for its users. Every country, including our own, must give intelligence and law-enforcement authorities the means to pursue terrorists and criminals, but we can do so without fundamentally undermining the security that enables commerce, entertainment, personal communication, and other aspects of 21st-century life. We urge the US government to reject society-wide surveillance and the subversion of security technology, to adopt state-of-the-art, privacy-preserving technology, and to ensure that new policies, guided by enunciated principles, support human rights, trustworthy commerce, and technical innovation.


Martín Abadi Professor Emeritus, University of California, Santa Cruz
Hal Abelson Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Alessandro Acquisti Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
Boaz Barak Editorial-board member, Journal of the ACM1
Mihir Bellare Professor, University of California, San Diego
Steven Bellovin Professor, Columbia University
Matt BlazeAssociate Professor, University of Pennsylvania
L. Jean Camp Professor, Indiana University
Ran Canetti Professor, Boston University and Tel Aviv University
Lorrie Faith Cranor Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
Cynthia Dwork Member, US National Academy of Engineering
Joan Feigenbaum Professor, Yale University
Edward Felten Professor, Princeton University
Niels Ferguson Author, Cryptography Engineering: Design Principles and Practical Applications
Michael Fischer Professor, Yale University
Bryan Ford Assistant Professor, Yale University
Matthew Franklin Professor, University of California, Davis
Juan Garay Program Committee Co-Chair, CRYPTO2 2014
Matthew GreenAssistant Research Professor, Johns Hopkins University
Shai Halevi Director, International Association for Cryptologic Research
Somesh Jha Professor, University of Wisconsin – Madison
Ari Juels Program Committee Co-Chair, 2013 ACM Cloud-Computing Security Workshop1
M. Frans Kaashoek Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Hugo Krawczyk Fellow, International Association for Cryptologic Research
Susan Landau Author, Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies
Wenke Lee Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology
Anna Lysyanskaya Professor, Brown University
Tal Malkin Associate Professor, Columbia University
David Mazières Associate Professor, Stanford University
Kevin McCurley Fellow, International Association for Cryptologic Research
Patrick McDaniel Professor, The Pennsylvania State University
Daniele Micciancio Professor, University of California, San Diego
Andrew Myers Professor, Cornell University
Rafael PassAssociate Professor, Cornell University
Vern Paxson Professor, University of California, Berkeley
Jon Peha Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
Thomas Ristenpart Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin – Madison
Ronald Rivest Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Phillip Rogaway Professor, University of California, Davis
Greg Rose Officer, International Association for Cryptologic Research
Amit Sahai Professor, University of California, Los Angeles
Bruce Schneier Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School
Hovav Shacham Associate Professor, University of California, San Diego
Abhi Shelat Associate Professor, University of Virginia
Thomas Shrimpton Associate Professor, Portland State University
Avi Silberschatz Professor, Yale University
Adam Smith Associate Professor, The Pennsylvania State University
Dawn Song Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley
Gene Tsudik Professor, University of California, Irvine
Salil Vadhan Professor, Harvard University
Rebecca Wright Professor, Rutgers University
Moti Yung Fellow, Association for Computing Machinery1
Nickolai Zeldovich Associate Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology


This letter can be found at: http://MassSurveillance.info

Institutional affiliations for identification purposes only. This letter represents the views of the signatories, not necessarily those of their employers or other organizations with which they are affiliated.

1 The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is the premier organization of computing professionals.
2 CRYPTO is an annual research conference sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research.