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Thirty-two years ago this week, in May 1993, WIRED released its second-ever print edition featuring three legendary cypherpunks on the cover: Tim May, Eric Hughes and John Gilmore.
Steven Levy’s piece, “Crypto Rebels,” handily documents the genesis of the Cypherpunk movement, starting almost two decades earlier in 1975, when Whitfield Diffie led the creation of public-key cryptography alongside Martin Hellman and Ralph Merkle.
Until then, the US government codebreakers had dominated cryptography through the National Security Agency (NSA). Cryptographic tools were considered weapons under the Arms Regulation law, “right alongside tanks and bomber planes,” Levy wrote.
The act of giving regular citizens access to “military-grade” privacy tech like public-key cryptography — which would allow information to be stored trustlessly and sent securely over unsecure networks — was then a brave act of defiance for personal liberty. A fight against government tyranny.
Public-key cryptography would go on to be a cornerstone of the modern internet, protecting emails, bank accounts, website interactions, many other online matters, and, of course, everyone’s bitcoin.
Or as late The Codebreakers author David Kahn wrote, public-key cryptography was the “most revolutionary new concept in the field since…the Renaissance.”
Satoshi, is that you?
Around the same time, MIT scientists Rivest, Shamir and Adleman developed a separate public-key method, RSA, which had far greater potential than the government-created Data Encryption Standard, which didn’t use public keys at all.
WIRED’s article also detailed the plight of cryptographer Phil Zimmermann in the wake of his invention of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) — a mighty, free alternative to RSA that utilized RSA patented technology without permission.
Zimmermann went to great lengths to build PGP, missing five mortgage payments and “coming within an inch” of losing his home. But he wasn’t selling the software — he simply released it into the wild (internet bulletin boards), “like thousands of dandelion seeds blowing in the wind,” he wrote.
Still, the US government made Zimmermann the target of a criminal investigation for munitions export without a license, which was still ongoing at the time of WIRED’s piece.
Two years later, Zimmermann published the entire PGP source code in a hardback book released by MIT Press — allowing anyone in the world to build their own privacy tech all by themselves.
Exporting books is a First Amendment right that should trump any restrictions on the exportation of cryptographic software. The investigation was eventually closed and the Feds brought no charges.
To say that there might be no Bitcoin without the Cypherpunks is a severe understatement. Satoshi Nakamoto himself may very well be underneath one of the many masks featured in WIRED’s article.
Here’s how deep the parallels go: at multiple points in Levy’s writing, one could easily sub Bitcoin-related terms into any number of sentences describing the fight for accessible cryptography:
“Diffie recognized that the solution rested in a decentralized system in which each person held the literal key to his or her own privacy financial sovereignty.”
“In the Cypherpunk mind, cryptography money is too important to leave to governments or even well-meaning companies.”
