So Kamara has worked on developing secure database schemes in which data can be audited and checked privately but transparently, that does not allow data to be exported or duplicated, and that deletes entries automatically after a given amount of time without special authorization from an authority like a judge.
"I think there is an intersection between traditional cryptography and privacy and what I was calling 'crypto for the people,'" Kamara says. "There is research and there are tools that can be beneficial to large subsets of people, as in the encrypted messaging app Signal. But there are also problems and adversarial models that are unique to marginalized groups, and those problems are not being investigated. For example, not everyone ends up in a gang database, and certainly very few cryptographers or academic computer science researchers end up in gang databases."
Kamara also advocated using the flexibility and security of tenured professorships as an opportunity to push the envelope of what cryptographic research can be—including in the case of his own talk. "I went into it thinking, 'I’m glad I have tenure, because this is going to cost me,'" he says. But Kamara says the response has been very positive so far. "I’m sure there are many others who disagree and didn’t like the talk, but so far they haven’t reached out to let me know," Kamara says.
The long-standing question of morality in cryptography rarely makes it to the foreground, even within the academic community itself. The discourse flared up in the wake of Edward Snowden's 2013 revelations about mass digital surveillance by the National Security Agency, particularly after a cryptography marginalized communities
