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.
In its heyday in the late 90s, the list discussed the public policy issues related to cryptography, as well as more practical nuts-and-bolts mathematical, computational, technological, and cryptographic matters themselves. 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.
The 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 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. ...
There was also very much a feeling of an Us against Them battle, that 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.
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.
The term cypherpunk, derived from cipher and punk, was coined by Wired magazine writer Jude Milhon at one of the early cypherpunk gatherings, as a pun to describe cyberpunks who used cryptography.
Other uses
Cypherpunk, cypherpunks or cpunks are also occasionally used as a username and password on websites which require registration, especially if the user does not intend to return or does not wish to reveal information about himself. The account is left for later users. As of 2007, username "cypherpunks01" with password "cypherpunks01" seems to be one of the few of these "public use accounts" which seems to be widely available.
Some 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)