an ominous comment

[Seth]

On Tue, 21 Jul 2015 13:54:25 -0700, Lance Cottrell <loki at obscura.com>  
wrote:

> I recall it being more nuanced and diverse.

I wasn't there in the beginning so I don't have any firsthand knowledge.

According to this piece, [1] "Almost all cypherpunks were anarchists who  
regarded the state as the enemy."

I'm basing the claim on the fact that founding member Timothy May wasn't  
exactly shy about his crypto *anarchy* vision of the future.

Not sure what exactly what Eric Hughes or John Gilmore's were at the time.


[1]  
http://onlyinamericablogging.blogspot.jp/2011/03/robert-manne-julian-assange-cypherpunk.html

<snip>

The cypherpunks emerged from a meeting of minds in late 1992 in the Bay  
Area of San Francisco. Its founders were Eric Hughes, a brilliant Berkeley  
mathematician; Timothy C. May, an already wealthy, former chief scientist  
at Intel who had retired at the age of thirty-four; and John Gilmore,  
another already retired and wealthy computer scientist – once number five  
at Sun Microsystems – who had co-founded an organisation to advance the  
cause of cyberspace freedom, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They  
created a small group, which met monthly in Gilmore’s office at a business  
he had created, Cygnus. At one of the early meetings of the group, an  
editor at Mondo 2000, Jude Milhon, jokingly called them cypherpunks, a  
play on cyberpunk, the “hi-tech, low-life” science-fiction genre. The name  
stuck. It soon referred to a vibrant emailing list, created shortly after  
the first meeting, which had grown to 700 by 1994 and perhaps 2000 by 1997  
with by then up to a hundred postings per day. It also referred to a  
distinctive sub-culture – eventually there were cypherpunk novels,  
Snowcrash, Cryptonomicon, Indecent Communications; a cypherpunk porno  
film, Cryptic Seduction; and even a distinctive cypherpunk dress:  
broad-brimmed black hats. Most importantly, however, it referred to a  
political–ideological crusade.

At the core of the cypherpunk philosophy 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. Many cypherpunks were optimistic that in  
the battle for the future of humankind – between the State and the  
Individual – the individual would ultimately triumph. Their optimism was  
based on developments in intellectual history and computer software: the  
invention in the mid-1970s of public-key cryptography by Whitfield Diffie  
and Martin Hellman, and the creation by Phil Zimmerman in the early 1990s  
of a program known as PGP, “Pretty Good Privacy”. The seminal historian of  
codes, David Kahn, argued that the Diffie–Hellman invention represented  
the most important development in cryptography since the Renaissance.  
Zimmerman’s PGP program democratised their invention and provided  
individuals, free of cost, with access to public-key cryptography and thus  
the capacity to communicate with others in near-perfect privacy. Although  
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was one of the cypherpunks’  
foundational texts, because of the combination of public-key cryptography  
and PGP software, they tended to believe that in the coming battle between  
Big Brother and Winston Smith, the victor might be Winston Smith.

At the time the cypherpunks formed, the American government strongly  
opposed the free circulation of public-key cryptography. It feared that  
making it available would strengthen the hands of the espionage agencies  
of America’s enemies abroad and of terrorists, organised criminals, drug  
dealers and pornographers at home. For the cypherpunks, the question of  
whether cryptography would be freely available would determine the outcome  
of the great battle of the age. Their most important practical task was to  
write software that would expand the opportunities for anonymous  
communication made possible by public-key cryptography. One of the key  
projects of the cypherpunks was “remailers”, software systems that made it  
impossible for governments to trace the passage from sender to receiver of  
encrypted email traffic. Another key project was “digital cash”, a means  
of disguising financial transactions from the state.

Almost all cypherpunks were anarchists who regarded the state as the  
enemy. Most but not all were anarchists of the Right, or in American  
parlance, libertarians, who supported laissez-faire capitalism. The most  
authoritative political voice among the majority libertarian cypherpunks  
was Tim May, who, in 1994, composed a vast, truly remarkable document,  
“Cyphernomicon”. May called his system crypto-anarchy. He regarded  
crypto-anarchy as the most original contribution to political ideology of  
contemporary times. May thought the state to be the source of evil in  
history. He envisaged the future as an Ayn Rand utopia of autonomous  
individuals dealing with each other as they pleased. Before this future  
arrived, he advocated tax avoidance, insider trading, money laundering,  
markets for information of all kinds, including military secrets, and what  
he called assassination markets not only for those who broke contracts or  
committed serious crime but also for state officials and the politicians  
he called “Congressrodents”. He recognised that in his future world only  
elites with control over technology would prosper. No doubt “the clueless  
95%” – whom he described as “inner city breeders” and as “the  
unproductive, the halt and the lame” – “would suffer, but that is only  
just”. May acknowledged that many cypherpunks would regard these ideas as  
extreme. He also acknowledged that, while the overwhelming majority of  
cypherpunks were, like him, anarcho-capitalist libertarians, some were  
strait-laced Republicans, left-leaning liberals, Wobblies or even Maoists.  
Neither fact concerned him. The cypherpunks formed a house of many rooms.  
The only thing they all shared was an understanding of the political  
significance of cryptography and the willingness to fight for privacy and  
unfettered freedom in cyberspace.

<snip>