[6] One motivation of Cate's work was to provide a haven from increasing internet censorship in China, in France, Germany, and the United States; he mentioned the U.S.' Communications Decency Act of 1996 as an issue of major concern to him.
[9] In 1997, Cate collaborated with cypherpunk Robert Hettinga and Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Rafael Hirschfield to organise the International Conference on Financial Cryptography.
[11][12] Cate engaged in civil disobedience against U.S. cryptography policy by setting up a webpage inviting readers to "become an international arms trafficker in one click".
The page contained an HTML form which, when submitted, would e-mail three lines of Perl code implementing the RSA public-key encryption algorithm to a server in Anguilla; this could have qualified as unlicensed export of munitions under U.S. law at the time.
In April 1999, a notice confirming his loss of U.S. citizenship was published in the Federal Register as required by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.