Cypherpunks Charter

[Stephen D. Williams]

(Apologies for rehashing this, but it seems a good time to make another pass at consensus.)

This is how I always thought about the Cypherpunks charter:

Cypherpunks exists to promote free speech, establish that free speech includes the freedom to have secure private speech, and to
explore how this can be accomplished.  In support of this, to understand implications of technology-enabled free speech and the
technical, commercial, and political moves needed to protect free speech.

While the Cypherpunk Manifesto focuses mainly on predicting how the then-new ideas might play out, it is very thin on clarity of
what should happen and what roles those present should play.  I think that was intentional and strategic.  It was also written at
the beginning of a period of serious conflicts about using encryption at all, public knowledge of encryption and secure methods,
export, government access and control boundary exploration, etc.

What this does not include is promoting or bashing particular political systems or plotting their demise or constantly going on
about insane nonsense.


What is your concise summary of Cypherpunks?  Can you justify it?  What does the above get wrong and why?


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto-anarchism
[2] http://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html

Recent commentary repeated for coherency, entertainment, and to forestall the need for certain predictable responses:

Regardless of what Tim may or may not have wanted to happen in some or all cases, it doesn't say it in his signature, or in the
manifesto.

Cypherpunks has always straddled a number of areas; exploring the implications of crypto-anarchism is one of them.  Even in May's
quotes in [1], it isn't necessarily the point to have a collapse of a system as a goal, but to examine it as a possibility.  I think
the attitude is that if you come to believe that encryption and other security measures must be available, perhaps as an extension
of free speech, and those cause weak or broken systems to collapse, then so be it.

Some discussion of "* anarchy" isn't really anarchy, it is just maybe anarchy to someone fixated on a fixed definition of their
favorite system.  Or a signal by someone suggesting such a departure.  Any real political anarchy has been a failure.

The philosophokiddie cypherpunks are thoroughly punked and parodied in Mr. Robot:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-creator-of-mr-robot-explains-its-hacktivist-and-cult-roots

sdw

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