The cypherpunk movement emerged in the early-1990s, advocating the widespread use of strong digital cryptography—or crypto—as the best means for defending individual privacy and resisting authoritarian governments in the digital age. “At the core of the cypherpunk philosophy,” political scientist Robert Manne explains, “was the belief that the great question of politics in the age of the internet was whether the state would strangle individual freedom and privacy through its capacity for electronic surveillance or whether autonomous individuals would eventually undermine and even destroy the state through their deployment of electronic weapons newly at hand.” For the cypherpunks, censorship and surveillance are the twin evils of the computer age, and they view encryption as a means to circumvent both.
There are three recognized founders of the cypherpunk movement: Timothy May, Eric Hughes, and John Gilmore. May was a computer scientist and physicist who retired from Intel in 1986 and who was influenced by libertarian philosophy, Ayn Rand, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Hughes was a mathematician and programmer who studied cryptography with the famous David Chaum. Gilmore was a programmer who who retired from Sun Microsystems in 1986; he also cofounded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) with John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor. Though the group initially called itself Cryptology Amateurs for Social Irresponsibility, the movement received its permanent name from Jude Milhon, who coined the name cypherpunk by combining the word “cipher” from cryptographic lingo with the word “cyberpunk,” a science fiction subgenre that imagines dystopian futures defined by technological advancement and social disorder.
While the cypherpunks are most well-known for their privacy advocacy, they are also advocates of government, and sometimes corporate, transparency. Thus, the cypherpunk maxim: privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful. “The cypherpunks,” Suelette Dreyfus notes, “believed in the right of the individual to personal privacy—and the responsibility of government to be open, transparent and fully accountable to the public.”
To be sure, the cypherpunk movement cannot be defined by one monolithic ideology. The movement is unified by a shared understanding that crypto is an essential social and political tool in the digital age, but cypherpunks subscribe to a wide variety of political ideologies. Many cypherpunks express libertarian or anarchists views, including Timothy May, who is perhaps one of the most influential cypherpunk intellectuals. Other cypherpunks, like Julian Assange, tend to think about politics through the lens of cosmopolitanism and anti-imperialism rather than libertarian theories of rights.
The cypherpunks are not, however, without their critics. In the 1990s, David Brin criticized the cypherpunks in his book The Transparent Society (1998). Brin accused the cypherpunks of succumbing to “the type of self-righteous tunnel vision that might keep us from finding useful answers to some of the perils we will face in the coming decades.” Brin’s criticism not only betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the cypherpunk motto privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful, it is also incredibly naive about power relations. Most of the force of Brin’s critque of the cypherpunks comes from his smug rhetoric than from a deep insight into the movement’s philosophy.
More recently, in his book Surveillance Valley (2018), Yasha Levine criticized the cypherpunks and other privacy advocates for their seemingly uncritical acceptance of US government-created crypto networks, like Tor. According to Levine, one would expect critics of government power to be suspicious of US Navy programs like Tor project, but the belief in the political independence of mathematics—the laws of physics, as the cypherpunks sometimes put it—seemed to cancel out their critical politics at a moment when they should have been most critical. Though he was widely denounced for questioning Tor, Levine’s criticism is much more well grounded than Brin’s, for Levine offers an immanent criticism, showing how cypherpunks may not have consistently applied their own principles. But he never says that cypherpunk principles are wrong or bad in themselves.
For those who are interested in learning about the cypherpunk movement in general and Assange and WikiLeaks’ relation to the movement, please check out the following (non-exhaustive list of) books and articles:
Secondary Sources
Levy, Steve. Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government—Saving Privacy in the Digital age. New York: Penguin, 2001.
Manne, Robert. “The Cypherpunk Revolutionary.” The Monthly. 16 February 2011. http://archive.fo/kwI60
Greenberg, Andy. This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information. New York: Dutton, 2012.
Primary Sources
Hughes, Eric. “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto.” In Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, ed. Peter Ludlow, 81-84. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. [Link]
May, Timothy. “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.” In Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, ed. Peter Ludlow, 61-64. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. [Link]
May, Timothy. “Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities.” In Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias, ed. Peter Ludlow, 65-80). Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. [Link]
Gilmore, John. “Privacy, Technology, and the Open Society.” Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility‘s First Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, Burlingame, CA, March 26-28, 1991. [Link]
Assange, Julian. Julian Assange: The Unauthorized Autobiography. Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2011. [Chapter 5 on the cypherpunks.]
Assange, Julian, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann. Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. New York: OR Books, 2012.