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" Lots of people working in cryptography have no deep concern with real application issues. They are trying to discover things clever enough to write papers about. "
Whitfield Diffie
People
Trying
Clever
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" I call up Amazon. It seems to me they do a major thing wrong, right. I mean, they protect me against the loss of a $50 liability I have of something on my credit card, but they do nothing to protect me against somebody who is watching to see what books I'm interested in, what new perversions I've developed. "
Whitfield Diffie
Nothing
Loss
See
" One of the things that characterizes good intellectual work is a certain self-importance. "
Whitfield Diffie
Things
Intellectual
Good
" I was, from early on, interested in science. And my parents were very obliging about that. My father used to take me to the museum of natural history, and I knew much more scientific stuff early on. From the time I was 11 or 12, I wanted to be a mathematician. "
Whitfield Diffie
Parents
History
Science
" We in science are spoiled by the success of mathematics. Mathematics is the study of problems so simple that they have good solutions. "
Whitfield Diffie
Mathematics
Success
Science
" I really believe in the radical viewpoint. And I have always believed that one's politics and the character of his particular work are inseparable. "
Whitfield Diffie
Character
Politics
Work
" I think that the people who are trying to shut down WikiLeaks are going to have to accept this as a fact of reality that cryptography allows you to do this kind of thing. "
Whitfield Diffie
Think
You
People
" I certainly enjoy going on stage and lecturing and talking to Congress. That's a personality explanation. And given government proposals, I thought I had a clear view that they were antagonistic to human freedom. "
Whitfield Diffie
Enjoy
Government
Freedom
" If you have ambition, you might not achieve anything, but without ambition, you are almost certain not to achieve anything. "
Whitfield Diffie
Achieve
You
Almost
" In a sense, communications networks can be defined entirely by who has cryptographic keys, and I think a lot of networks will work that way in the future. "
Whitfield Diffie
Think
Work
Sense
" Some people make sharp distinctions sort of between their recreational musings and their professional work. I don't make that distinction very much. "
Whitfield Diffie
Professional
People
Some People
" I understood the importance in principle of public key cryptography but it's all moved much faster than I expected. I did not expect it to be a mainstay of advanced communications technology. "
Whitfield Diffie
Much
Technology
Expect
" I thought of computers as very low class. I thought of myself as a pure mathematician and was interested in partial differential equations and topology and things like that. "
Whitfield Diffie
Class
Thought
Pure
" I think, and I've thought this for a long time, that we live, roughly speaking, in the last generation of human beings. "
Whitfield Diffie
Time
Thought
Long
" Two people can work on a problem better than one. "
Whitfield Diffie
Problem
Two
Work
" I thought cryptography was a technique that did not require your trusting other people-that if you encrypted your files, you would have the control to make the choice as to whether you would surrender your files. "
Whitfield Diffie
Surrender
You
Control
" Intellectual work is essentially a lonely process, and if you can find a way of doing something so that you're in company without being disturbed, that, for me, is the critical thing. I often get to feel isolated so often if I'm sitting either where there aren't people or isn't a view. "
Whitfield Diffie
Lonely
Work
View
" If you are designing cryptosystems, you've got to think about long-term applications. You've got to try to figure out how to build something that is secure against technology in the next century that you cannot even imagine. "
Whitfield Diffie
Think
You
Technology
" I guess, in a very real sense, I'm a Gnostic. I had been looking all my life for some great mystery... I think somewhere deep in my mind is the notion that if I could learn just the right thing, I would be saved. "
Whitfield Diffie
Life
Deep
Great
" Cloud computing means you are doing your computing on somebody else's computer. Looking ahead a little, I firmly believe cloud - previously called grid computing - will become very widespread. It's much cheaper than buying your own computing infrastructure, or maybe you don't have the power to do what you want on your own computer. "
Whitfield Diffie
Power
Doing
You
" I am not convinced that lack of encryption is the primary problem. The problem with the Internet is that it is meant for communications among non-friends. "
Whitfield Diffie
Lack
Convinced
I Am
" Without strong encryption, you will be spied on systematically by lots of people. "
Whitfield Diffie
You
Strong
Lots
" It isn't that secrets are never needed in security. It's that they are never desirable. "
Whitfield Diffie
Security
Needed
Never
" No right of private conversation was enumerated in the Constitution. I suppose it never occurred to anyone at the time that it could be prevented. "
Whitfield Diffie
Constitution
Right
Conversation
" We have experienced an utter explosion in investigative techniques. Walk the streets, look at the cameras! They are now recognising people automatically from photos; we have DNA fingerprinting, infrascan photos that can identify you from the veins in your face. "
Whitfield Diffie
Walk
Face
Look
" If you depend on a secret for your security, what do you do when the secret is discovered? If it is easy to change, like a cryptographic key, you do so. If it's hard to change, like a cryptographic system or an operating system, you're stuck. You will be vulnerable until you invest the time and money to design another system. "
Whitfield Diffie
Security
Change
Design
" People are leaving trails everywhere they go; automated web crawlers tell you an awful lot about their social activities. The flow of information in fundamentally unobtrusive ways into social control organisations has risen dramatically. "
Whitfield Diffie
Information
Flow
Control
" The most important impact of technology on communications security is that it draws better and better traffic into vulnerable channels. "
Whitfield Diffie
Security
Better
Impact
" Cloud computing is a challenge to security, but one that can be overcome. "
Whitfield Diffie
Challenge
Security
Overcome
" People constantly face problems they've never seen before, and they have to solve them somehow. So a million people come up with a million solutions that are just a little bit different. If computing is being done by fewer resources, there will be enormous security gains by pushing things into standard practices. "
Whitfield Diffie
Problems
Face
Done
" The decisions we make about communication security today will determine the kind of society we live in tomorrow. "
Whitfield Diffie
Live
Communication
Decisions