Hughes writes the cypherpunk program as a programmer's love letter

MAR 09 1993 · 12:00

Video: A Cypherpunk's Manifesto (1993) Privacy is the foundation of a free world Date: 1993-03-09 · Type: manifesto · Hub: bay-area · Tags: eric-hughes, manifesto, cypherpunks, privacy, 1993, bay-area, anonymous-remailer, code-is-speech "Cypherpunks write code." If May's manifesto is theatrical Marx, Hughes's is something stranger: declarative, almost liturgical, a programmer's statement of method rather than a revolutionary's statement of intent. 'Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age,' it begins, then carves a line — 'Privacy is not secrecy' — that has been quoted by every privacy advocate since. The distinction is precise and consequential: secrecy is hiding what you're doing from the world; privacy is the power to choose what you reveal and to whom. The two are easy to conflate and important to separate. Posted to the cypherpunks list on 9 March 1993, the manifesto's most consequential phrase is its program statement: Cypherpunks write code. The line refused, in advance, the entire genre of policy advocacy that the EFF was already practicing. The cypherpunk position was not that privacy legislation should be lobbied for, not that courts should be petitioned, but that the code itself was the argument. You ship the binary; the binary does the work. Hughes was himself the first operator of an anonymous remailer, a Chaumian mix node, which made the manifesto simultaneously descriptive and autobiographical. Read alongside May's document, the two manifestos form a diptych: May supplies the political theory and the speculative scale, Hughes supplies the operational ethics and the immediate practice. Together they established the register the cypherpunk project would maintain for the next decade — serious, technical, adversarial toward state power, and constitutionally uninterested in asking permission. 'We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any,' Hughes wrote. The verb is defend, not request. Facts • Posted to the cypherpunks mailing list, 9 March 1993 • Hughes was a Berkeley-trained mathematician and co-founder of the cypherpunks list • He was the first operator of an anonymous remailer — a working implementation of his own manifesto's program • Key lines: 'Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world'; 'Cypherpunks write code' • Often paired in anthologies with May's manifesto and John Gilmore's censorship-routing aphorism (Time, 1993) Primary Documents • Full text — activism.net — https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html