The cypherpunks. Now there is a group that has long worked at the nexus of cryptography and politics: the cypherpunks.67 The cypherpunks emerged in the late 1980’s, unified by a mailing list and some overlapping values. The core belief is that cryptography can be a key tool for protecting individual autonomy threatened by power.

The cypherpunks believed that a key question of our age was whether state and corporate interests would eviscerate liberty through electronic surveillance and its consequences, or if, instead, people would protect themselves through the artful use of cryptography. The cypherpunks did not seek a world of universal privacy: many wanted privacy for the individual, and transparency for the government and corporate elites. The cypherpunks envisioned that one could hack power relations by writing the right code. Cypherpunk-styled creations— think of Bitcoin, PGP, Tor, and WikiLeaks—were to be transformative because they challenge authority and address basic freedoms: freedom of speech, movement, and economic engagement.

Exactly how such tools are to shape society is not always obvious. Consider WikiLeaks. The hope is not just that a better informed public will demand accountability and change. Rather, Assange sees governmental and corporate abuse as forms of conspiracy that could be throttled by the mere threat of leaks. Conspiracies are like graphs, the conspirators nodes, the pairwise relations among them, the edges. Instead of removing nodes or disrupting links, you can weaken any conspiracy by suffusing it in an ever-present threat of leaks. The more unjust the conspiracy, the more likely leaks will occur, and the more damage they will do. As elites become fearful to conspire, they do so reservedly. The conspiratorial creature’s blood thickens and it dies. It is a fascinating vision.

It is cypherpunks, not cryptographers, who are normally the strongest advocates for cryptography. Julian Assange writes:

But we discovered something. Our one hope against total domination. A hope that with courage, insight and solidarity we could use to resist. A strange property of the physical universe that we live in.

The universe believes in encryption.

It is easier to encrypt information than it is to decrypt it.

We saw we could use this strange property to create the laws of a new world.

Similarly, Edward Snowden writes:

In words from history, let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of cryptography.

When I first encountered such discourse, I smugly thought the authors were way over-promising: they needed to tone down this rhetoric to be accurate. I no longer think this way. More engaged in implementing systems than I’ll ever be, top cypherpunks understand more than I about insecure operating systems, malware, programming bugs, subversion, side channels, poor usability, small anonymity sets, and so on. Cypherpunks believe that despite such obstacles, cryptography can still be transformative.