This week a group of more than fifty prominent security and cryptography researchers signed a letter protesting the mass surveillance efforts of the NSA, and attempts by NSA to weaken cryptography and privacy protections on the Internet. The full letter can be found here.

Most of you have already formed your own opinions on the issue over the past several months, and it’s unlikely that one letter is going to change that. Nonetheless, I’d like a chance to explain why this statement matters.

For academic professionals in the information security field, the relationship with NSA has always been a bit complicated. However, for the most part the public side of that relationship has been generally positive. Up until 2013 if you’d asked most US security researchers for their opinions on NSA, you would, of course, have heard a range of views. But you also might have heard notes of (perhaps grudging) respect. This is because many of the NSA’s public activities have been obviously in everyone’s interest — helping to fund research and secure our information systems.

Even where evidence indicated the possibility of unfair dealing, most researchers were content to dismiss these allegations as conspiracy theories. We believed the NSA would stay between the lines. Putting backdoors into US information standards was possible, of course. But would they do it? We thought nobody would be that foolish. We were wrong.

In my opinion this letter represents more than just an appeal to conscience. It measures the priceless trust and goodwill the NSA has lost — and continues to lose while our country fails to make serious reforms to this agency.

While I’m certain the NSA itself will survive this loss of faith in the short term, in the long term our economic and electronic security depend very much on the cooperation of academia, industry and private citizens. The NSA’s actions have destroyed this trust. And ironically, that makes us all less safe.