They all believed that the great political issue of the day was whether governments of the world would use the Internet to strangle individual freedom and privacy through digital surveillance, or whether autonomous individuals would undermine and even destroy the state through the subversive tools digital computing also promised.
"Pretty Good Privacy," or PGP, was published free online in 1991, and remains the most widely used form of email encryption to this day.
If the government can't monitor you, he argued, it can't control you.
What was needed, May argued, was new software that could help ordinary people evade government surveillance.
The first post on the list, even before the introduction from Hughes, was a repost of a 1987 speech given by mathematician Chuck Hammill called "From Crossbows to Cryptography: Thwarting the State via Technology." It set the tone perfectly for what would follow: "For a fraction of the investment in time, money, and effort I might expend in trying to convince the state to abolish wiretapping and all forms of censorship," wrote Hammill, "I can teach every libertarian who's interested how to use cryptography to abolish them unilaterally."
The list quickly grew to include hundreds of subscribers who were soon posting every day: exchanging ideas, discussing developments, proposing and testing cyphers.
This remarkable email list predicted, developed, or invented almost every technique now employed by computer users to avoid government surveillance.
Someone would write a piece of software, post it to the list, and others would test it and improve it.
Above all, the code they wanted to write was encryption.
Encryption is the art and science of keeping things secret from people you don't want to know them, while revealing them to those you do.
From the time of the Roman Empire until the 1970s, encryption was based on a "Single key" model, with the same code both locking and unlocking the message.
Modern computing made encryption far more powerful, but the underlying principle was the same: If you wanted to communicate secretly with someone, you still had to get the code to them-which presented the same problem you started with.
Two MIT mathematicians called Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman solved this in 1976 with a system they called "Public key encryption." Each user is given his own personal cypher system comprised of two "Keys," which are different but mathematically related to each other through their relationship to a shared prime number.
Public key encryption transformed the potential uses of encryption, because suddenly people were able to send encrypted messages to each other without having to also exchange a code, and indeed without even having to ever meet at all.
Up until the early '90s, powerful encryption was the sole preserve of governments.
The United States had even classed powerful encryption as a "Munition" in 1976 and made its export illegal without a license.
As more people ventured into cyberspace, the U.S. government began to take a greater interest in what they were doing there.
Worse still, in 1993 the U.S. government announced the "Clipper Chip": industry standard encryption for the Internet, to which the National Security Agency would hold all the keys.
Many early adopters of the net considered this to be an attempt by the U.S. government to control cyberspace, which until that point had operated largely outside state control.
For years, Zimmermann had dreamed of creating an encryption system for the masses based on public key encryption that would allow political activists to communicate free from the government's prying eyes.
The U.S. government, needless to say, wasn't happy.
"We were very worried about the spread and adoption of powerful encryption like PGP," he said.
The British government even briefly considered following France in legislating to control encryption.
The U.S. government decided on a different course.
Zimmermann, having released his PGP source code on the Internet, was considered by the U.S. government to have exported munitions.
This battle over encryption became known as the Crypto-Wars, fought between those who believed citizens should have the right to possess strong cryptography, and the government who did not.
In 1994, May published Cyphernomicon , his manifesto of the cypherpunk world view, on the mailing list.
In it, he explained that "Many of us are explicitly antidemocratic and hope to use encryption to undermine the so-called democratic governments of the world." On the whole, the cypherpunks were rugged libertarians who believed that far too many decisions that affected the liberty of the individual were determined by a popular vote of democratic governments.
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/cypherpunks-write-code
