May posts a fake intelligence-trafficking notice to demonstrate that what can be built will be built

JUL 01 1993 · 12:05

Video: Blerim Skoro - CIA & FBI Asset / Al-Qaeda Infiltrator | SRS #198 Date: 1993-07-01 · Type: manifesto · Hub: bay-area · Tags: tim-may, blacknet, information-markets, crypto-anarchy, 1993, bay-area, anonymous-remailer, wikileaks-precursor A thought experiment dressed as an operational announcement. He revealed his authorship after a few months. May posted the BlackNet message anonymously to alt.extropian and the cypherpunks list in the summer of 1993, signing it from a fictional intelligence-trafficking organization. BlackNet, the message announced, was an 'information market' using PGP-encrypted communications and anonymous remailers to broker the buying and selling of trade secrets, industrial processes, classified materials, and corporate intelligence. Payment would be in anonymous digital cash — CryptoCredits, in May's framing — and transactions would be provably untraceable. It was speculative cryptography dressed as a recruiting notice, and it achieved its rhetorical purpose almost immediately: it made the cypherpunk program feel operational, imminent, already here. The message circulated far beyond the cypherpunk list, was reposted on Usenet, archived, passed around. May revealed his authorship after a few months. The text was reprinted in his Cyphernomicon in 1994 as a chapter on information markets. It was later cited in U.S. military classified-information-security training materials as the cautionary example of where unregulated strong cryptography led — a reception that May would have found satisfying. BlackNet is the conceptual ancestor of WikiLeaks's submission model and, further along the genealogy, of the anonymous whistleblowing and darknet market ecosystems that followed. Andy Greenberg's This Machine Kills Secrets (Dutton, 2012) traces the line explicitly. The distances from BlackNet to Silk Road (2011) and to the WikiLeaks cablegate submission portal (2010) are shorter than either the security establishment or the cypherpunks' admirers generally acknowledge. May's genius was to see that the distance was short and say so in public, anonymously, before the tools existed to traverse it. Facts • First posted summer 1993, alt.extropian and cypherpunks list, distributed anonymously via remailer • Solicited: trade secrets, industrial processes, classified materials; payment in anonymous 'CryptoCredits' • May revealed his authorship after a few months; reprinted in Cyphernomicon (1994), Chapter 16 • Cited in U.S. military classified-information training materials as cautionary example • Andy Greenberg's This Machine Kills Secrets (2012) identifies BlackNet as the conceptual ancestor of WikiLeaks Primary Documents • BlackNet — full text via P2P Foundation wiki — https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Untraceable_Digital_Cash,_Information_Markets,_and_BlackNet • Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities (Tim May, 1994) — https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/crypto/cypherpunks/may-virtual-comm.html