"As the political and legal battles of the first ‘crypto-war’ were heating up in the
1990’s, the technologist and activist Timothy C. May (1992) authored the Crypto
Anarchist Manifesto. The manifesto proclaims cryptographic software “will alter
completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control
economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the
nature of trust and reputation” while also recognising the potential that “crypto anarchy
will allow national secrets to be trade freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials
to be traded… an anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent
markets for assassinations and extortion” (May, 1992, paras. 1, 3). Similarly,
prominent crypto-anarchist Jim Bell (1996) published the tenth (and final) volume of
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his essay Assassination Politics in 1996, where he argued for an online assassination
market as a tool of social control in service of the comparatively powerless. The idea
was that citizens could use cryptography to mask their identities to place ‘bets’ on the
time of death of public officials and business leaders. The logic is that everyone who
is willing to contribute to a bounty will place a ‘bet’ on the time of death, while the
‘winner’ would be the person who conducts the assassination via their foreknowledge
of the time of death. The proposal attests to how the politics of privacy protection were
particularly controversial during the 1990s.
It is for this reason that the ‘crypto-war’ was so fiercely fought on both sides,
prompted by the initial release of public key encryption to members of the public.
Following the Second World War, cryptographic software was legally classified as a
munition and subject to strict regulation and export controls (Levin, 1998, p. 532). By
the early 1990s, the NSA was attempting to install a ‘Clipper Chip’ within telephones,
to provide the US Government with ‘backdoor’ access to encrypted communications
(Froomkin, 1995, p. 745). As a result of the proposal, technologist Philip Zimmerman
published public-key encryption tool Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) via file-sharing
services in June of 1991. Characteristic of crypto-anarchists of the time, Zimmerman
(1994) published PGP’s code in a physical book titled PGP Source Code and Internals,
so the technology could be discretely distributed. As Zimmerman (1994, para. 3)
observes in the foreword of the book, “cryptography is a surprisingly political
technology.” By publishing the code, Zimmerman became the subject of an
investigation by the US Customs Service examining whether he had violated the US
Arms Export Control Act (1976), although the case was dropped in 1996 without
explanation (Lauzon, 1998, p. 1327). The release of public-key encryption technology
thus empowered ordinary users to protect their privacy.
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The popularity and development of such privacy-enhancing technologies has
increased significantly since the ‘crypto-war’ of the 1990s. Tracking the trends in their
development during the decade from 1997, Goldberg (2007, p. 11) observes how the
then-recently developed Tor Browser was exponentially growing in popularity.
Similarly, in response to growing awareness about mass surveillance, the CryptoParty
movement was established in 2011 to educate the public about cryptographic software.
The decentralized movement promotes “crypto parties” where experts educate citizens
about encryption and digital anonymity. In this vein, they are a type of information
security workshop (e.g. Albrechtsen & Hovden, 2010). Data provided by the Tor
Project (2018) highlights how the number of publicly52 connecting users increased sixfold after the Snowden Disclosures in June 2013. Subsequent studies suggest some of
this increase was attributable to a Ukrainian botnet connecting to the network (Gehl,
2016, p. 1223), however there has been a sustained two-fold increase (amounting to at
least two million daily users) on the network (Tor Project, 2018). Evidently, such
privacy-enhancing technologies are becoming increasingly popular.