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. The cypherpunk movement originated in the late 1980s and gained traction with the establishment of the "Cypherpunks" electronic mailing list in 1992, where informal groups of activists, technologists, and cryptographers discussed strategies to enhance individual privacy and resist state or corporate surveillance. Deeply libertarian in philosophy, the movement is rooted in principles of decentralization, individual autonomy, and freedom from centralized authority. 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 money.
The movement has also contributed to the mainstreaming of encryption in everyday technologies, such as secure messaging apps and privacy-focused web browsers.
History
Before the mailing list
Until about the 1970s, cryptography was mainly practiced in secret by military or spy agencies. However, that changed when two publications brought it into public awareness: the first publicly available work on public-key cryptography, by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, and the US government publication of the Data Encryption Standard (DES), a block cipher which became very widely used.
The technical roots of Cypherpunk ideas have been traced back to work by cryptographer David Chaum on topics such as anonymous digital cash and pseudonymous reputation systems, described in his paper "Security without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete" (1985).Arvind Narayanan: What Happened to the Crypto Dream?, Part 1 . IEEE Security & Privacy. Volume 11, Issue 2, March–April 2013, pages 75-76, ISSN 1540-7993
In the late 1980s, these ideas coalesced into something like a movement.
Etymology and the Cypherpunks mailing list
In late 1992, Eric Hughes, Timothy C. May, and John Gilmore founded a small group that met monthly at Gilmore's company Cygnus Solutions in the San Francisco Bay Area and was humorously termed cypherpunks by Jude Milhon at one of the first meetings—derived from cipher and cyberpunk.Robert Manne: The Cypherpunk Revolutionary - Julian Assange . The Monthly March, 2011, No. 65 In November 2006, the word was added to the Oxford English Dictionary.The Cypherpunks mailing list was started in 1992, and by 1994 had 700 subscribers. At its peak, it was a very active forum with technical discussions ranging over mathematics, cryptography, computer science, political and philosophical discussion, personal arguments and attacks, etc., with some spam thrown in. 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. The number of subscribers is estimated to have reached 2,000 in the year 1997.
In early 1997, Jim Choate and Igor Chudov set up the Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer,Jim Choate: "Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer ". Cypherpunks mailing list. February 1997. a network of independent mailing list nodes intended to eliminate the single point of failure inherent in a centralized list architecture. At its peak, the Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer included at least seven nodes. By mid-2005, al-qaeda.net (Riad S. Wahby) ran the only remaining node. In mid-2013, following a brief outage, the al-qaeda.net node's list software was changed from Majordomo to GNU Mailman,Riad S. Wahby: "back on the airwaves ". Cypherpunks mailing list. July 2013. and subsequently the node was renamed to cpunks.org.Riad S. Wahby: "domain change ". Cypherpunks mailing list. July 2013. The CDR architecture is now defunct, though the list administrator stated in 2013 that he was exploring a way to integrate this functionality with the new mailing list software.
For a time, the cypherpunks mailing list was a popular tool with mailbombers, who would subscribe a victim to the mailing list in order to cause a deluge of messages to be sent to them (usually as a prank, in contrast to the style of terrorist referred to as a mailbomber). This precipitated the mailing list sysop(s) to institute a reply-to-subscribe system. Approximately two hundred messages a day was typical for the mailing list, divided between personal arguments and attacks, political discussion, technical discussion, and early spam.
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. These discussions continue both on the remaining node and elsewhere as the list has become increasingly moribund.
Events such as the GURPS Cyberpunk raid lent weight to the idea that private individuals needed to take steps to protect their 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. The list had a range of viewpoints and there was probably no completely unanimous agreement on anything. The general attitude, though, definitely put personal privacy and personal liberty above all other considerations.
Early discussion of online privacy The list was discussing questions about privacy, government monitoring, corporate control of information, and related issues in the early 1990s that did not become major topics for broader discussion until at least ten years later. Some list participants were highly radical on these issues.
Those wishing to understand the context of the list might refer to the history of cryptography; in the early 1990s, the US government considered cryptography software a munition for export purposes (PGP source code was published as a paper book to bypass these regulations and demonstrate their futility). 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). The US government had also tried to subvert cryptography through schemes such as Skipjack and key escrow. 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.
The original cypherpunk mailing list, and the first list spin-off, coderpunks, were originally hosted on John Gilmore's toad.com, but after a falling out with the sysop over moderation, the list was migrated to several cross-linked mail-servers in what was called the "distributed mailing list." The coderpunks list, open by invitation only, existed for a time. Coderpunks took up more technical matters and had less discussion of public policy implications. There are several lists today that can trace their lineage directly to the original Cypherpunks list: the cryptography list ([email protected]), the financial cryptography list ([email protected]), and a small group of closed (invitation-only) lists as well.
Toad.com continued to run with the existing subscriber list, those that didn't unsubscribe, and was mirrored on the new distributed mailing list, but messages from the distributed list didn't appear on toad.com. As the list faded in popularity, so too did it fade in the number of cross-linked subscription nodes.
To some extent, the cryptography list acts as a successor to cypherpunks; it has many of the people and continues some of the same discussions. However, it is a moderated list, considerably less zany and somewhat more technical. 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.
Main principles 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. ... We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy ... 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 ... we're going to write it."
Some are or were senior people at major hi-tech companies and others are well-known researchers (see list with affiliations below).
The first mass media discussion of cypherpunks was in Crypto Rebels, a 1993 Wired article by Steven Levy. The three masked men on the cover of that edition of Wired were prominent cypherpunks Tim May, Eric Hughes and John Gilmore. Later, Levy wrote a book, Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government – Saving Privacy in the Digital Age, covering the crypto wars of the 1990s in detail. "Code Rebels" in the title is almost synonymous with cypherpunks.
The term cypherpunk is mildly ambiguous. In most contexts it means anyone advocating cryptography as a tool for social change, social impact and expression. However, it can also be used to mean a participant in the Cypherpunks electronic mailing list described below. The two meanings obviously overlap, but they are by no means synonymous.
Documents exemplifying cypherpunk ideas include Timothy C. May's The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto (1992) and The Cyphernomicon (1994), as well as Hughes's A Cypherpunk's Manifesto.
Privacy of communications
A very basic cypherpunk issue is privacy in communications and data retention. John Gilmore said he wanted "a guarantee – with physics and mathematics, not with laws – that we can give ourselves real privacy of personal communications."
Such guarantees require strong cryptography, so cypherpunks are fundamentally opposed to government policies attempting to control the usage or export of cryptography, which remained an issue throughout the late 1990s. The Cypherpunk Manifesto stated "Cypherpunks deplore regulations on cryptography, for encryption is fundamentally a private act."
This was a central issue for many cypherpunks. Most were passionately opposed to various government attempts to limit cryptography—export laws, promotion of limited key length ciphers, and especially escrowed encryption.
Anonymity and pseudonyms
The questions of anonymity, pseudonymity and reputation were also extensively discussed.
Most cypherpunks have the position that the possibility of anonymous speech and publication is crucial for an open society and genuine freedom of speech.Emphasis on the word possibility; as Sarah Smith notes, even cypherpunks recognize the impossibility of absolute anonymity. For a range of discussion on the complexities of defending anonymity within maintaining security (against terrorism e.g.), see Sarah E. Smith, "Threading the First Amendment Needle: Anonymous Speech, Online Harassment, and Washington's Cyberstalking Statute", Washington Law Review 93/3 (Oct. 2018): 1563-1608; Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Muller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet (OR Books, 2012/2016). , Ebook ; Dennis Bailey, The Open Society Paradox : Why the 21st Century Calls for More Openness — Not Less (Dulles VA: Potomac, 2004), 28-29; and Eric Hughes <[email protected]>, "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto" (9 March 1993): https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
Censorship and monitoring
In general, cypherpunks opposed the censorship and monitoring from government and police.