Authors: Jamie Bartlett
Bitcoin’s dramatic rise to prominence resulted in an explosion of investment, exchange companies, and even ATM machines. Many members of the Bitcoin community have entered into complex negotiations with governments and regulators about how to make the new digital currency work alongside the traditional. The Bitcoin Foundation, a semi-official body that represents the currency, was established in 2012 in order to standardise the core development required to keep the system working securely and effectively. Although no one is really in charge of Bitcoin, the Foundation is probably the closest thing there is to a governing body. In 2013, the Bitcoin Foundation’s annual conference was called ‘The Future of Payment’, a title that reflects the views of many of its users: that Bitcoin can be part of the system. But not all of them.
Amir begins his talk about the Dark Wallet by describing some of the technical challenges he’s faced, but soon drifts into a polemic. ‘Bitcoins aren’t a fucking payment innovation,’ Amir shouts. ‘Bitcoins are a political project.’
‘Maybe we should work with governments?’ one audience member suggests. ‘Wouldn’t it help to extend Bitcoin’s reach?’
‘No!’ Amir replies. ‘The government is just one big bunch of gangsters! You can’t placate gangsters! Right now, it’s us who have the initiative. And we’re not going to give it back.’
For people like Amir, Bitcoins are the frontline in a bigger battle over the right to anonymity and freedom online. Amir believes you should be free to be whoever, say whatever and do whatever you want
online without censorship or surveillance – and that such freedoms will lead to political revolutions. He is a cypherpunk.
One day in late 1992, retired businessman Tim May, mathematician Eric Hughes and computer scientist John Gilmore – the creator of
alt.
* – invited twenty of their favourite programmers and cryptographers to Hughes’ house in Oakland, California. After taking a degree in physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, May went to work for Intel in 1974, where he made a brilliant breakthrough in redesigning Intel’s computer memory chips. He retired at the age of thirty-four and dedicated himself to reading: computing, cryptography, physics, mathematics – and to politics. Gilmore was Sun Microsystems’ fifth employee; like May, he retired young to pursue political ideas. Hughes, a brilliant mathematician from the University of California, Berkeley, had spent time working in the Netherlands with David Chaum, perhaps the world’s best-known cryptographer at that point. May, Hughes and Gilmore were natural bedfellows. All were radical libertarians and early adopters of computer technology, sharing an interest in the effects it would have on politics and society. But while many West Coast liberals were toasting the dawn of a new and liberating electronic age, Hughes, May and Gilmore spotted that networked computing might just as likely herald a golden age of state spying and control. 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.
At their first meeting, May set out his vision to the excited group of rebellious, ponytailed twenty- and thirty-somethings. If the government can’t monitor you, he argued, it can’t control you. Fortunately, said May, thanks to modern computing, individual liberty can be assured by something more reliable than man-made laws: the unflinching rules of maths and physics, existing on software that couldn’t be deleted. ‘Politics has never given anyone lasting freedom, and it never will,’ he wrote in 1993. But computer systems could. What was needed, May argued, was new software that could help ordinary people evade government surveillance. The group was set up to find out how.
Soon the group began to meet every month in the office of Cygnus Solutions, a business that Gilmore had recently set up. At one of the first meetings in 1992, one member – Jude Milhon, who wrote articles for
Mondo 2000
under the alias St Jude – described the growing movement as ‘the cypherpunks’, a play on the cyberpunk genre of fiction made popular by sci-fi writers such as William Gibson. The name stuck. ‘It was a bit of a marketing ploy, to be honest,’ May told me over the phone from his home in California. ‘A bit like Anonymous wearing the Guy Fawkes masks.’
The group began to grow. Eric Hughes decided to set up an email list to reach out to other interested parties beyond the Bay Area. The list was hosted by the server that ran Gilmore’s personal website,
toad.com
. 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. Tim May proposed, among other things, secure crypto-currencies, a tool enabling people to browse the web anonymously, an unregulated marketplace – which he called ‘BlackNet’ – where anything could be bought or sold without being tracked, and a prototype anonymous whistleblowing system.
The cypherpunks were troublemakers: controversial, radical, unrelenting, but also practical. They made things. Someone would write a piece of software, post it to the list, and others would test it and improve it. When Hughes put forward a programme for anonymous remailers – a way to email people without being traced – another influential poster to the list, Hal Finney, worked to correct a flaw he’d spotted in it, then posted his improved version. Among the cypherpunks, writes
Forbes
journalist Andy Greenberg in his history of whistleblowing, creativity was more admired than theorising. It was Hughes who coined the expression that would define them: ‘cypherpunks write code’.
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. The mathematics behind it is complicated, but the idea is simple. It means you can share your ‘public’ key with everyone, and they can use it to encrypt a message into a meaningless jumble that can be decrypted only with your secret ‘private’ key. 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 nineties, powerful encryption was the sole preserve of governments. The US 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 US government began to take a greater interest in what they were doing there. In 1990 the FBI launched an over-the-top crackdown on computer hackers, known as Operation Sundevil. This was swiftly followed, in early 1991, by a proposed piece of US Senate legislation that
would force electronics communications service providers to hand over people’s personal data. (The key clause, S.266, was pushed by the then chairman of the US Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Joe Biden.) Worse still, in 1993 the US 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 US government to control cyberspace, which until that point had operated largely outside state control. Phil Zimmermann, an anti-nuclear activist and computer programmer, was worried that digital technologies appeared to be eroding citizens’ privacy, rather than liberating them. 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. However, juggling a freelance job and two children, he had never found the time to realise it. On learning of Biden’s S.266 clause, he feverishly set out to complete the project, almost losing his house in the process. When Zimmermann finished his software in 1991, he published it all online – on a Usenet group, of course – free for anyone who wanted to use it. He called it ‘Pretty Good Privacy’, or PGP for short, and within weeks it had been downloaded and shared by thousands of people around the world. ‘Before PGP, there was no way for two ordinary people to communicate over long distances without the risk of interception,’ said Zimmermann in a later interview. ‘Not by phone, not by FedEx, not by fax.’ It remains the most widely used form of email encryption to this day.
The US government, needless to say, wasn’t happy. They believed
too many people using strong cryptography like PGP would make life a lot harder for the security services. The British government was also watching nervously. Sir David Omand, who was working for the British intelligence agency GCHQ at this time, recalls the period well. ‘We were very worried about the spread and adoption of powerful encryption like PGP.’ The British government even briefly considered following France in legislating to control encryption. In the end, they decided against: once Zimmermann had released the source code online, it was going to be almost impossible to try to remove it from the public domain. Besides, it was increasingly obvious that encryption technology was vital for the health of the rapidly expanding internet, especially for online trade and commerce. A more secure internet would be trusted by more people. The US government decided on a different course. Zimmermann, having released his PGP source code on the internet, was considered by the US government to have exported munitions. The United States Customs Service launched a criminal investigation, seeking to prosecute Zimmermann under the Arms Export Controls Act.
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. For May, Gilmore and Hughes, making sure crypto was available to all was a means to an end. The cypherpunks hoped and believed their endeavours would eventually bring about an economic, political and social revolution. Their list fizzed with political radicalism. 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 anti-democratic 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. The cypherpunks were advised to read
1984
, the cult science-fiction novels
The Shockwave Rider
and
True Names
, David Chaum’s paper ‘Security without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete’ and perhaps most importantly,
Atlas Shrugged
. In Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, the most productive citizens of a dystopian American society refuse to pay taxes and disappear to ‘Galt’s Gulch’, a secluded community whose inhabitants are free to pursue greatness. May hoped to see similar ‘virtual regions’ where individuals could make consensual economic arrangements among themselves with no state at all.
The mailing list became the favourite watering hole for hundreds of talented computer programmers and hackers from all over the world, many of whom would use the list to learn about crypto before setting out to pursue May’s vision in their own way. One of them was a programmer named ‘Proff’, who joined the cypherpunk mailing list in late 1993 or early 1994. He immediately got stuck into the raucous and aggressive exchanges that characterised the cypherpunks: insulting newcomers, ruthlessly criticising perceived shortcomings in others’ technical knowledge, and plotting the downfall of governments. When Esther Dyson, head of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) – a civil liberties group committed to free internet expression and privacy, co-founded by Gilmore – argued on the list that some limits to anonymity might be acceptable if there were very strict laws respecting privacy, Proff shot back: ‘It is clear that the personal beliefs of those involved in EFF are
those of compromise, present-day politics, and a general lack of moral fiber.’ Proff even speculated that Dyson worked for the CIA. Dyson replied, ‘For the record, I am not a tool of the CIA nor have they pressured me, but there’s no reason for you to believe me.’
fn1
‘Proff’, it transpired, was a gifted young Australian programmer called Julian Assange. Although Assange was a libertarian, he did not share May’s unashamed elitism: in the
Cyphernomicon
May spoke disparagingly of ‘non-productive’ citizens, ‘inner-city breeders’ and, most notoriously, the ‘clueless 95 per cent’. In one of his last posts on the list, Assange wrote (likely in rebuttal to May) that ‘the 95 per cent of the population which compromise the flock have never been my target and neither should they be yours. It’s the 2.5 per cent at either end of the normal that I have in my sights.’ (When I asked May if he thought Assange was a ‘true’ cypherpunk, he replied, ‘Yes, absolutely. I count him as one of us. He did things, he set things up, and he built things.’)