That's surprising. What do you perceive to be the basic premise of the Rogaway article? It's certainly not about cutesiness. "Politically superficial" is not how I'd choose to describe it.
If I recall the gist of the Rogaway article, from memory, (again, it's an important enough article that it really does merit serious attention):
he argues 1) cryptographers (and computer scientists in general) should be more political (good!), 2) cryptography needs a new framing (good!), 3) privacy and exception from government search is an unalloyed right (not so good), 4) better crypto will solve privacy issues (not so good).
In sum, the article does a lot of good work, and more than anything, it contains some important and refreshing rethinking of the field of crypto. This is all very important. Nonetheless, it ends up taking for granted a number of political positions that should, I think, also be contested (Rogaway takes the first step!). More crypto does not equal a better world.
Also from memory, but I recall the biggest takeaway from that article being that cryptographers should be mindful that the direction the research community pulls the field to is not necessarily congruent with the public interest. The field of cryptography is fascinated with tricky hard problems, but some of those problems may be more useful to those who would harm privacy than to those who would protect it. So, for instance, if we stipulate an actively hostile signals intelligence community and a polity that is being pushed towards weakening end-to-end crypto, we ought not to be spending much research time making key escrow more effective, which we might accidentally be doing.
I don't think "Alice" and "Bob" have really much to do with it.
