Cypherpunk
A cypherpunk is one who advocates the widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a means of effecting social and political change.
Deeply libertarian in philosophy, the movement is rooted in principles of decentralization, individual autonomy, and freedom from centralized authority.
[1][2] Its influence on society extends to the development of technologies that have reshaped global finance, communication, and privacy practices, such as the creation of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which embody cypherpunk ideals of decentralized and censorship-resistant money.
The movement has also contributed to the mainstreaming of encryption in everyday technologies, such as secure messaging apps and privacy-focused web browsers.
An email from John Gilmore reports an average of 30 messages a day from December 1, 1996, to March 1, 1999, and suggests that the number was probably higher earlier.
[16][17] The cypherpunks mailing list had extensive discussions of the public policy issues related to cryptography and on the politics and philosophy of concepts such as anonymity, pseudonyms, reputation, and privacy.
In its heyday, the list discussed public policy issues related to cryptography, as well as more practical nuts-and-bolts mathematical, computational, technological, and cryptographic matters.
In 1992, a deal between NSA and SPA allowed export of cryptography based on 40-bit RC2 and RC4 which was considered relatively weak (and especially after SSL was created, there were many contests to break it).
It was also not widely known that all communications were logged by government agencies (which would later be revealed during the NSA and AT&T scandals) though this was taken as an obvious axiom by list members[citation needed].
A number of current systems in use trace to the mailing list, including Pretty Good Privacy, /dev/random in the Linux kernel (the actual code has been completely reimplemented several times since then) and today's anonymous remailers.
[citation needed] The basic ideas can be found in A Cypherpunk's Manifesto (Eric Hughes, 1993): "Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.
Though the battleground seems remote, the stakes are not: The outcome of this struggle may determine the amount of freedom our society will grant us in the 21st century.
[26]The three masked men on the cover of that edition of Wired were prominent cypherpunks Tim May, Eric Hughes and John Gilmore.
John Gilmore said he wanted "a guarantee -- with physics and mathematics, not with laws -- that we can give ourselves real privacy of personal communications.
Arguably, the possibility of anonymous speech, and publication is vital for an open society and genuine freedom of speech—this is the position of most cypherpunks.
Steven Schear first suggested the warrant canary in 2002 to thwart the secrecy provisions of court orders and national security letters.
As a result, Cypherpunks have discussed and improved steganographic methods that hide the use of crypto itself, or that allow interrogators to believe that they have forcibly extracted hidden information from a subject.
Likewise, cypherpunks have also discussed under what conditions encryption may be used without being noticed by network monitoring systems installed by oppressive regimes.
As the Manifesto says, "Cypherpunks write code";[25] the notion that good ideas need to be implemented, not just discussed, is very much part of the culture of the mailing list.
In 1998, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, with assistance from the mailing list, built a $200,000 machine that could brute-force a Data Encryption Standard key in a few days.
Cypherpunks provided significant input to the 1996 National Research Council report on encryption policy, Cryptography's Role In Securing the Information Society (CRISIS).
Later events such as the final rulings in the cypherpunks lawsuits forced a more complete relaxation of the unconstitutional controls on encryption software.
[citation needed] Until 1997, cryptographic code was legally a munition and fell under ITAR, and the key length restrictions in the EAR was not removed until 2000.
[46] In 1995 Adam Back wrote a version of the RSA algorithm for public-key cryptography in three lines of Perl[47][48] and suggested people use it as an email signature file: Vince Cate put up a web page that invited anyone to become an international arms trafficker; every time someone clicked on the form, an export-restricted item—originally PGP, later a copy of Back's program—would be mailed from a US server to one in Anguilla.
Much of the plot revolves around cypherpunk ideas; the leading characters are building a data haven which will allow anonymous financial transactions, and the book is full of cryptography.
