[1]https://eprints.qut.edu.au/199696/1/Michael_Wilson_Thesis.pdf
   [partial quote follows]
   "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 78 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. 79 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.
   [end of partial quote]

References

   1. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/199696/1/Michael_Wilson_Thesis.pdf