• How the tech industry sidelined women
• "this is written for people who are dismayed that Google fired the author of the recent diversity manifesto"
• An evolutionary biologist / psychologist comments on the memo
• Why people are outraged about the memo

We, the undersigned, are employees of tech organizations and companies based in the United States. We are engineers, designers, business executives, and others whose jobs include managing or processing data about people. We are choosing to stand in solidarity with Muslim Americans, immigrants, and all people whose lives and livelihoods are threatened by the incoming administration’s proposed data collection policies. We refuse to build a database of people based on their Constitutionally-protected religious beliefs. We refuse to facilitate mass deportations of people the government believes to be undesirable.

Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what.

I'd argue that the reverse is really the issue that needs more attention. Online systems that do not provide strong cryptography rearrange power, as compared to their offline equivalents.

It was not feasible to scan all phone calls for keywords in 1970, since that required effort from humans to do the patching and listening. The power dynamic changed when our industry brought those calls into a centralized, trivially-storable clear-text format. Encrypting the conversations is simply a partial return to the status quo of a few decades ago.

• Natural language interfaces
• Centralized social networks
• "the death of the filesystem"

• The AI from 'Her'? Oh, about 2029 says Ray
• But no, because the difficulty's probably nonlinear

• This site is blocked in Iran
• but available in China