Cypherpunk

The cypherpunks were an informal group of people interested in privacy and cryptography who originally communicated through the cypherpunks mailing list. The aim of the group was to achieve privacy and security through proactive use of cryptography. The term cypherpunk, derived from cipher and cyberpunk, was coined by Wired magazine writer Jude Milhon at one of the early cypherpunk gatherings.

In its heyday in the late 90s, the list discussed the public policy issues related to cryptography, as well as more technical mathematical, computational, technological, and cryptographic matters. At that time, it was a very active list; traffic averaged about 200 messages a day, divided between personal arguments and attacks, political discussion, and technical discussion, with some spam thrown in. There were also cypherpunk "physical meetings" and parties.

A coderpunks list, open by invitation only, existed for a time. Coderpunks took up more technical matters and had less discussion of public policy implications.

In Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon many characters are on the "Secret Admirers" mailing list. This appears to be based on the cypherpunks list.

Cypherpunk ideas

The cypherpunks list had a variety of viewpoints and many rather heated discussions, but there was a overall attitude exemplified in these quotes from Tim May's Cypherpunk Manifesto:

Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. ...

We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak. ...

We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. ...

Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it. ... We don't much care if you don't approve of the software we write. We know that software can't be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can't be shut down.

There was also a feeling of an Us against Them battle; most cypherpunks were fundamentally opposed to many government policies on cryptography. As May put it in the Manifesto "Cypherpunks deplore regulations on cryptography, for encryption is fundamentally a private act." John Gilmore, whose site hosted the original cypherpunks list, wrote:

We are literally in a race between our ability to build and deploy technology, and their ability to build and deploy laws and treaties. Neither side is likely to back down or wise up until it has definitively lost the race.

Cypherpunks did build and deploy quite a bit of code. Anonymous remailers such as the Mixmaster Remailer were almost entirely a cypherpunk development. Among the other projects they have been involved in were PGP for email privacy, FreeS/WAN for opportunistic encryption of the whole net, Off-the-record messaging for privacy in Internet chat, and EFF's TOR project for anonymous web surfing.

There is a cypherpunk FAQ.

Jim Bell and "Assassination Politics"

Jim Bell took the general cypherpunk tendencies toward anarchism or libertaranism farther in an essay titled "Assassination Politics" [1]:

Imagine for a moment that as ordinary citizens ... see an act by a government employee or officeholder that they feel violates their rights ... If only 0.1% of the population, or one person in a thousand, was willing to pay $1 to see some government slimeball dead, that would be, in effect, a $250,000 bounty on his head. Further, imagine that anyone considering collecting that bounty could do so with the mathematical certainty that he could not be identified, ... Perfect anonymity, perfect secrecy, and perfect security.

He worked out the mechanisms for this in considerable detail, and speculated extensively on the political consequences. Naturally, the discussion on the list was intense.

Later, Bell was arrested and convicted [2] for tax evasion, with accusations of attempts to intimidate IRS agents. Still later, another case was brought against him, alleging "stalking and intimidating local agents of the IRS, Treasury Department and BATF" [3]. Another list subscriber, Carl Johnson, was also convicted [4] of sending threatening emails. Discussion of Bell's essay played a prominent part in all three trials.

Well-known cypherpunks

The Cypherpunks included several notable computer industry figures.

• Jon Callas (Technical lead on OpenPGP specification and Chief Technical Officer of PGP Corporation)
• Hugh Daniel (Former manager of the FreeS/WAN project)
• John Gilmore (Sun Microsystems' fifth employee, and one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation)
• Ian Goldberg (Assistant Professor, University of Waterloo, designer of the Off-the-Record Messaging protocol)
• Lucky Green (Author of first free software implementation of ring signatures)
• Eric Hughes (Author of A Cypherpunk's Manifesto)
• Tim May (Former chief scientist at Intel, author of A Crypto Anarchist Manifesto)
• Jude Milhon (A founding member of the cypherpunks)
• Sameer Parekh (former CEO of C2Net)
• Len Sassaman (Current maintainer of the Mixmaster Remailer software)
• Peter Shipley (A founding member of the cypherpunks)
• Philip Zimmermann (Creator of PGP)

Other uses

Cypherpunk, cypherpunks or cpunks are sometimes used as a username and password on websites which require registration, for users who do not wish to reveal information about themselves. The account is left for later users. Some such accounts were publicly announced on the list.