The revolution began in the late 1970’s but the first shot was fired in 1992 when a group of civil libertarian cryptologists, known as the Cypherpunks, started a mailing list. By 1997, there were thousands of subscribers who discussed politics, privacy, cryptography, philosophy, and wrote code. While the net was still in its infancy, these were the men and women who foresaw what was to come. They understood the battle about to be waged between privacy and secrecy. A manifesto was written in which the opening line reads:
Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy… An anonymous system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired; this is the essence of privacy.
What the Cypherpunks saw was a world in which the technology would soon exist where every transaction, every email, every purchase could, and therefore would, be tracked by governments and corporations against the public’s will. What made the Cypherpunks so unique is that rather than resist and rebel against this technology, they openly embraced it and transformed it in a way that protected privacy and attacked government secrecy.
We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do. We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.
Up until the 1970’s, cryptology had been something only governments were involved with. But in 1975, a computer hacker named Whitfield Diffie [pictured left] came up with a new system called “public-key” cryptography. What was so revolutionary about this was that it used an asymmetric key algorithm so that the key used to encrypt a file was not the same used to decrypt it. Traditionally, if you wanted to send an encrypted text, known as “cyphertext”, you also had to send the recipient the key to decrypt it into “plaintext”. The problem was that the information would need to be sent over insecure channels and was, therefore, susceptible to interception. But public-key cryptology changed that by using two separate keys, one for encrypting and one for decrypting, one public and one private. The publicly available encrypting key is widely distributed, while the private decrypting key is known only to the recipient. Messages can be encrypted with the recipient’s public key but can only be decrypted with the corresponding private key. To put it in laymen’s terms, the strength of the key is determined by its size. The bigger the key, the harder it is to hack. While the government’s data encryption standard (DES) at the time used a symmetrical key, it was limited to only 56-bits. But Diffie’s public-key allowed for a key to be used with an unlimited size which made it nearly impossible to crack.
Before Diffie, files had been secured with a password and stored somewhere that was protected by a system administrator. However, Diffie knew that the file was only as safe as the administrator would allow it to be. “You may have protected files, but if a subpoena was served to the system manager, it wouldn’t do you any good,” Diffie argued. “The administrators would sell you out, because they’d have no interest in going to jail.” So Diffie set out to decentralize the system so that each person held the key to his own privacy. It was a revolutionary idea that not only changed cryptography but personal computing forever.
Nearly two decades later, when the Cypherpunks entered the scene, they took up Diffie’s crusade of democratizing privacy. Cypherpunk, Eric Hughes wrote,
Cypherpunks write code. They know that someone has to write code to defend privacy, and since it’s their privacy they’re going to write it…
In The Cyphernomicon, a book written by Cypherpunk and former Chief Scientist at Intel, Timothy May, the question was asked, “ Why is crypto so frightening to governments?” May’s answer:
“It takes away the state’s power to snoop, to wiretap, to eavesdrop, to control…”
Don’t be fooled by their name. This isn’t a group of anarchistic punks. These are law professors, tech researchers, and CEO’s. While most of these guys aren’t household names, within their respective fields, a lot of big names came from the Cypherpunks. Perhaps the best known is Julian Assange. And while I won’t comment on the man, his motivation, or the controversy that surrounds the leaked material, the website, Wikileaks, may already be done with but the Cypherpunk torch has already been passed. In its place, a new site is in the works called Openleaks. And many other sites have existed long before Wikileaks’ 2007 launch. For instance, Cypherpunk, John Young’s website, Cryptome.org has been around since the late 1990’s . In fact, it was Young [pictured right] who started Wikileaks before leaving the group for personal reasons. Young had a strong opposition to the amount of money Assange was looking to generate from donations and felt, quite correctly, that the millions of dollars he would eventually receive would raise too many red flags with the public. It has since been reported by some journalists that the money came from a well-known US spy agency. Others have claimed to have followed the money to George Soros. (Perhaps saying the same thing.) Whatever the truth is, Young was right that the money has become a distracting controversy for the cause. The Cypherpunks will certainly learn from this experience and adapt accordingly.
While the talking heads on TV continue to comment on Julian Assange, the man, what the media is missing entirely about this story, is that Wikileaks isn’t about Assange at all. If anything, his story is proof that one shouldn’t put a public face on a privacy issue. Assange is but one Cypherpunk amongst thousands. And as he goes down, others will take his place. Even as the government and mega corporations try to clamp down on net neutrality, the fight will continue. Regardless of your politics or how you feel about Wikileaks or Assange, it had long been suspected in the alternative media that DynCorp and contractors like it [read Halliburton] are involved in human trafficking. But it took Wikileaks to take this story out of the realm of conspiracy theory and into the realm of fact. And while this story remains under-reported in MSM, the government protects these companies from prosecution. Is it any wonder why Assange has become Public Enemy #1? The question that needs to be asked is, “Who benefits from secrecy and who benefits from privacy?” For the Cypherpunks, privacy is not just about civil liberty, its also a human rights issue.
What started with Diffie has now spilled over into the mainstream. It took 35 years for that to happen. And like it or not, it took Wikileaks to bring it to the fore. This may be the first you are hearing about the Cypherpunks, but I can assure you, it’s not the last. The group that started as a small circle of libertarian crypographers is now on the tip of everyone’s tongue. The Cypherpunks may go by different names now, “Wikileaks” is just one incarnation, but the spirit of the group is still alive and well. The loss of Assange is not the end to the Cypherpunks. This is a battle between government secrecy and personal privacy. And this war is far from over. There are way too many Cypherpunks out there and that’s why the leaks cannot be stopped no matter who goes to jail.
I think Eric Hughes said it best in the Cypherpunk Manifesto:
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 publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide. 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.
Cypherpunks deplore regulations on cryptography, for encryption is fundamentally a private act. The act of encryption, in fact, removes information from the public realm. Even laws against cryptography reach only so far as a nation’s border and the arm of its violence. Cryptography will ineluctably spread over the whole globe, and with it the anonymous transactions systems that it makes possible.
For privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract. People must come and together deploy these systems for the common good. Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one’s fellows in society. We the Cypherpunks seek your questions and your concerns and hope we may engage you so that we do not deceive ourselves. We will not, however, be moved out of our course because some may disagree with our goals.
The Cypherpunks are actively engaged in making the networks safer for privacy. Let us proceed together apace.
Onward.
http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2010/12/13/here-come-the-wikileaks-copycats-indoleaks-brusselsleaks-and-balkanleaks/
Hey Josh, this is very interesting, thanks. I’m curious, what is the gain for the cypherpunks of releasing intelligence leaks? Is it just to show that they can, or do they have a more strategic interest in undermining our national security interests?
hmm…I don’t think its about undermining national security or to simply show that they can. I mean, one could ask: Why did Woodward and Bernstein write about Watergate? Why did Daniel Ellsberg release the Pentagon Papers? Maybe they were motivated by fame and money…or maybe they felt a sense of duty that the public had a right to know about these things. I really can’t say.
But, not all the cypherpunks are involved with wikileaks. Those that were involved early on wanted to expose government and corporate corruption by giving whistle blowers a safe forum to come and tell their stories. That was the initial idea behind wikileaks, back when John Young started the site. It became a sensationalized intel dump mostly because of Assange. Personally, I think he’s motivated by money and fame, wanting to feel like a secret agent. Notoriety.
If you compare wikileaks and cryptome, the two sites couldn’t be farther from each other, yet deal with similar material. John Young is very open and honest. He even posts his home address, email, and phone numbers. He hides nothing and works as an architect, running the site in his spare time with his own money. He filters nothing and has no political slant in what he posts. The information he publishes aren’t illegal, though he is being sued by a major bank for disclosing the information about the bank’s stress test and how the test was fudged in order to make the bank appear in better shape than it really is. But, it’s all public information. The problem is no one in the media ever reports on it. The government says, “we did a stress test and the bank is doing great” and that’s what the media reports without bothering to check whether that’s true or not. The bank froze his Paypal account in retaliation. Yet he did nothing illegal. Just posted the letter. He’s often file FOIA letters and post what he gets from the government.
So, for guys like Young, its a sense of journalistic integrity to share with the public information he believes we have a right to know since these things affect our lives and the media often hides the truth from us. But he has nothing to gain from it.
On the other hand, Wikileaks operates from a secret location and seeks massive funding. In fact, in 2007 Assange wanted to raise $5 million in the first 6 months of the site’s inception. It was at that point Young began to realize that wikileaks was about turning a profit. And the problem with a for profit site about leaks is you have to get even more sensational with each leak to keep the funds coming.
check out the emails re: the $5 mil.
http://cryptome.org/0003/wikileaks-lash.htm
So, to answer your question, I think for Assange, its about personal gain and fame. But for the other Cypherpunks, most of whom are independently wealthy and much older than Assange, they’re motivated by truth and uncovering corruption to maintain a free society.
I think this may be what Pete was getting at, but I feel like this story has two conflicting agendas. One is to appeal to the need for more privacy by constructing code that protects our information… and yet at the same time it is praising people that release information that was meant to be private?
I’m not sure what the end meaning is supposed to be?
They see a difference between personal privacy and government secrecy. Leaking that DynCorp used public funds to supply Afghanis with child prostitutes is not an invasion of privacy. It used to be called journalism. Wikileaks seeks to protect the privacy of the leaker so that people feel safe blowing whistles. What started with the Cypherpunks’ aim of creating systems that protect privacy has evolved into a system that helps expose war crimes, corruption, theft, etc…for the public benefit.
Just watched this documentary called “Wikirebels”. worth a look if you have the time. About an hour long.
http://svtplay.se/v/2264028/wikirebels_the_documentary
Interesting piece. It begs some very difficult questions: What limits should there be to personal privacy? What limits should there be to government secrecy? What limits should there be to corporate secrecy? In this technological age, how feasible is privacy and secrecy? Do the natural forces of free enterprise promote privacy and secrecy limit them?