Cypherpunks Charter

John Young jya at pipeline.com
Mon Sep 5 13:24:14 PDT 2016


Also Eric Hughes: A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, 9 March 1993

http://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html

Understanding distinction between privacy and secrecy is essential,
for it is secrecy that corrupts in all its forms and is totally hostile to
privacy, and true privacy totally hostile to secrecy. Privacy policies are
fraudulent because they allow secretkeepers to violate privacy with
"lawful" impunity. Which is why Snowden, Tor, media, corporations,
NGOs, security experts, dual hatters, lawyers, privileged parties of
all stripes, and many others are masterful bullshitters to urge
"curation," censorship, withholding, redacting information by
which secretkeepers empower themselves against the public by
"self-regulated" access, that is self-serving.

It is ridiculous to believe technical crypto by itself will not be subverted
for political purposes, that mathematics will provide sufficient protection
against wily opponents lawfully empowered to use any methods required
to exploit vulnerabilities in people, technology, governance (standards
setting, education, contracts, advisory boards, prizes, leaks, bribery,
coercion -- partially listed in the troll tools, but far from all).

 From day one and continuing, cypherpunks warned of the unavoidable
corruption of the list by malevolent subscribers, as well as of the
Internet and digital technology in general. This malevolence has
come to pass worldwide, through a range of treacheries from
anonymization to crypto to HTTPS to OTR to leak sites to universities,
to whatever tool is funded and promoted as the hot shit latest means
to defy authority. Authority always wins. As authority bullshits and
honors and hires those too timid to exceed conventional cowardice.

Few cypherpunks have gone to jail for their convictions, many more have
gone on to pretty good paying jobs, start-ups, buy-outs by IBM, MS, Cisco,
Google, others in cahoots with authority. But some have seduced others to
go to jail, crying ACLU-EFF-Greenwald grade crocodile tears at the injustice
(advertising "donate to us" for the poor suckers). Blaming the victim of
this seduction is rife as it is in deliberately faulty, highly 
monetized comsec.

If all goes well, cataclismic cyberwar will provide the doomsday climax to
persistent cypherpunk screwing. Assange aims at just that having imbibed
the cryptoanarchy joy juice here. Tim May will continue to ridicule the fool
as he did Jim Bell and CJ. This is the cypherpunk secret charter for being
a bullshitting "force for good."




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




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