Dear researchers: the hard part of problems like “traceability” is not the part where you build a mass surveillance system. Building mass surveillance systems is *easy*.
The hard part is building systems that don’t utterly shatter the security guarantees that the private system offered, and don’t have caveats like “obviously this can be abused, stopping that is future work.”
When I go out to see what our research community has been doing in this area, I expect them to understand what makes this research problem hard. Not to find slides like this one. 
I don’t usually like to call out fellow researchers for solving only part of the problem, because research is incremental. But there are certain kinds of research where solving only “the easy part” actually makes the world worse.
Don’t 👏 Give 👏 Authoritarian 👏 Regimes 👏 The 👏 Tools 👏 To 👏 Stifle 👏 Dissent
And then claim that preventing them from doing so is “future work”.
Your conference publication is not that valuable.
And then claim that preventing them from doing so is “future work”.
Your conference publication is not that valuable.
I’m just going to add that I’m *not* telling people they shouldn’t write papers I disagree with.
Go ahead and write them.
But if the hard part of the problem is “how do we prevent abuse”, that can’t be left to Future Work.
Go ahead and write them.
But if the hard part of the problem is “how do we prevent abuse”, that can’t be left to Future Work.
If what you’re looking for is Least Publishable Units, go find a different area to work in. Lots of areas that don’t affect people’s lives at all.
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