Cypherpunks
“Cypherpunks is gripping, vital reading, explaining clearly the way in which corporate and government control of the internet poses a fundamental threat to our freedom and democracy.”
—Oliver Stone“Obligatory reading for everyone interested in the reality of our freedoms.”
—Slavoj Žižek“The power of this book is that it breaks a silence. It marks an insurrection of subjugated knowledge that is, above all, a warning to all.”
—John Pilgerabout the bookabout
Cypherpunks are activists who advocate the widespread use of strong cryptography (writing in code) as a route to progressive change. Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of and visionary behind WikiLeaks, has been a leading voice in the cypherpunk movement since its inception in the 1980s.
Now, in what is sure to be a wave-making new book, Assange brings together a small group of cutting-edge thinkers and activists from the front line of the battle for cyber-space to discuss whether electronic communications will emancipate or enslave us. Among the topics addressed are: Do Facebook and Google constitute “the greatest surveillance machine that ever existed,” perpetually tracking our location, our contacts and our lives? Far from being victims of that surveillance, are most of us willing collaborators? Are there legitimate forms of surveillance, for instance in relation to the “Four Horsemen of the Infopocalypse” (money laundering, drugs, terrorism and pornography)? And do we have the ability, through conscious action and technological savvy, to resist this tide and secure a world where freedom is something which the Internet helps bring about?
The harassment of WikiLeaks and other Internet activists, together with attempts to introduce anti-file sharing legislation such as SOPA and ACTA, indicate that the politics of the Internet have reached a crossroads. In one direction lies a future that guarantees, in the watchwords of the cypherpunks, “privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful”; in the other lies an Internet that allows government and large corporations to discover ever more about internet users while hiding their own activities. Assange and his co-discussants unpick the complex issues surrounding this crucial choice with clarity and engaging enthusiasm.
“Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet is an important wake-up call about a possible dystopian future, which is a technological reality now… While messengers of dangerous outcomes are always met at first with hostility and even mockery, history shows that we disregard such warnings as these at our peril.”
—Naomi Wolf
About The Author / Editor
Jacob Appelbaum is a staff research scientist at the University of Washington, and a developer and advocate for the Tor Project, which is an online anonymity system for everyday people to fight against surveillance and against internet censorship
Andy Müller-Maguhn is a long time member of, and former spokesman for, the Chaos Computer Club in Germany. A specialist on surveillance he runs a company called Cryptophone, which markets secure voice communication devices to commercial clients.
Jérémie Zimmermann is the co-founder and spokesperson for the citizen advocacy group La Quadrature du Net, the most prominent European organization defending anonymity rights online and promoting awareness of regulatory attacks on online freedoms.
Preview
AN EXCHANGE FROM CYPHERPUNKS:
JULIAN:
I want to look at what I see as a difference between a US cypherpunk perspective and the European perspective, which I think is quite interesting. The US Second Amendment is the right to bear arms. Just recently I was watching some footage that a friend shot in the US on the right to bear arms, and above a firearms store it says ‘Democracy, Locked and Loaded,’ and that’s the way that you ensure that you don’t have totalitarian regimes – that people are armed and if they are pissed off enough, then they simply take their arms and they retake control by force. Whether that argument is still valid now is actually an interesting one because of the difference in the types of arms that have occurred over the past 30 years. So, we can look back to this declaration that code-making, providing secret cryptographic codes that the government couldn’t spy on, was in fact a munition, and this big war that we fought in the 1990s to try and make cryptography available to everyone, which we largely won.
JAKE:
In the West?
JULIAN:
In the West we largely won and it’s in every browser – it is now perhaps being back-doored and subverted in different kinds of ways. The notion is that you cannot trust a government to implement the policies that it says that it is implementing, and so we must provide the underlying tools, cryptographic tools that we control, as a sort of use of force, in that if the ciphers are good no matter how hard it tries a government cannot break into your communications directly. Maybe it can put a bug in your house or whatever.
JAKE:
Force of authority is derived from violence. One must acknowledge with cryptography no amount of violence will ever solve the math problem.
in the media
Related Interest
Related Interest
Cypherpunks
“Cypherpunks is gripping, vital reading, explaining clearly the way in which corporate and government control of the internet poses a fundamental threat to our freedom and democracy.”
—Oliver Stone“Obligatory reading for everyone interested in the reality of our freedoms.”
—Slavoj Žižek“The power of this book is that it breaks a silence. It marks an insurrection of subjugated knowledge that is, above all, a warning to all.”
—John Pilgerabout the bookabout
Cypherpunks are activists who advocate the widespread use of strong cryptography (writing in code) as a route to progressive change. Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of and visionary behind WikiLeaks, has been a leading voice in the cypherpunk movement since its inception in the 1980s.
Now, in what is sure to be a wave-making new book, Assange brings together a small group of cutting-edge thinkers and activists from the front line of the battle for cyber-space to discuss whether electronic communications will emancipate or enslave us. Among the topics addressed are: Do Facebook and Google constitute “the greatest surveillance machine that ever existed,” perpetually tracking our location, our contacts and our lives? Far from being victims of that surveillance, are most of us willing collaborators? Are there legitimate forms of surveillance, for instance in relation to the “Four Horsemen of the Infopocalypse” (money laundering, drugs, terrorism and pornography)? And do we have the ability, through conscious action and technological savvy, to resist this tide and secure a world where freedom is something which the Internet helps bring about?
The harassment of WikiLeaks and other Internet activists, together with attempts to introduce anti-file sharing legislation such as SOPA and ACTA, indicate that the politics of the Internet have reached a crossroads. In one direction lies a future that guarantees, in the watchwords of the cypherpunks, “privacy for the weak and transparency for the powerful”; in the other lies an Internet that allows government and large corporations to discover ever more about internet users while hiding their own activities. Assange and his co-discussants unpick the complex issues surrounding this crucial choice with clarity and engaging enthusiasm.
“Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet is an important wake-up call about a possible dystopian future, which is a technological reality now… While messengers of dangerous outcomes are always met at first with hostility and even mockery, history shows that we disregard such warnings as these at our peril.”
—Naomi Wolf
About The Author / Editor
Jacob Appelbaum is a staff research scientist at the University of Washington, and a developer and advocate for the Tor Project, which is an online anonymity system for everyday people to fight against surveillance and against internet censorship
Andy Müller-Maguhn is a long time member of, and former spokesman for, the Chaos Computer Club in Germany. A specialist on surveillance he runs a company called Cryptophone, which markets secure voice communication devices to commercial clients.
Jérémie Zimmermann is the co-founder and spokesperson for the citizen advocacy group La Quadrature du Net, the most prominent European organization defending anonymity rights online and promoting awareness of regulatory attacks on online freedoms.
Preview
AN EXCHANGE FROM CYPHERPUNKS:
JULIAN:
I want to look at what I see as a difference between a US cypherpunk perspective and the European perspective, which I think is quite interesting. The US Second Amendment is the right to bear arms. Just recently I was watching some footage that a friend shot in the US on the right to bear arms, and above a firearms store it says ‘Democracy, Locked and Loaded,’ and that’s the way that you ensure that you don’t have totalitarian regimes – that people are armed and if they are pissed off enough, then they simply take their arms and they retake control by force. Whether that argument is still valid now is actually an interesting one because of the difference in the types of arms that have occurred over the past 30 years. So, we can look back to this declaration that code-making, providing secret cryptographic codes that the government couldn’t spy on, was in fact a munition, and this big war that we fought in the 1990s to try and make cryptography available to everyone, which we largely won.
JAKE:
In the West?
JULIAN:
In the West we largely won and it’s in every browser – it is now perhaps being back-doored and subverted in different kinds of ways. The notion is that you cannot trust a government to implement the policies that it says that it is implementing, and so we must provide the underlying tools, cryptographic tools that we control, as a sort of use of force, in that if the ciphers are good no matter how hard it tries a government cannot break into your communications directly. Maybe it can put a bug in your house or whatever.
JAKE:
Force of authority is derived from violence. One must acknowledge with cryptography no amount of violence will ever solve the math problem.