Privacy is Power

This is the sixth in a series exploring the hidden history of crypto: where it came from, who shaped it, and the systems of power it sought to subvert.

In the early 1990s, the internet still smelled of solder and possibility. Governments didn’t understand it. Corporations hadn’t yet captured it. The state had not yet learned to mask its eyes in fibre-optic wire.

And into this atmosphere stepped Eric Hughes.

A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto, written in 1993, is less a call to arms than a user manual for dissent. It does not whisper of reform, nor shout for revolution. It simply proceeds, as if the argument is already settled. Privacy, it claims, is not secrecy. It is agency. And in the networked world, privacy must be won with code.

Hughes was not alone. He co-founded the Cypherpunks mailing list with Timothy C. May and John Gilmore in the early ’90s, a subterranean forum where encryption, freedom, and resistance to surveillance weren’t just debated but developed.

By then, Phil Zimmermann’s PGP had already triggered a criminal investigation. The NSA had its hooks in Silicon Valley. And cryptography remained classified as a munition. This was the setting in which Hughes made his stand.

It was not an appeal to policymakers. It was a declaration of non-cooperation:

We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence.

So they built their own systems instead.

Hughes understood that privacy could not be begged for. It had to be engineered.

His core insight was both technical and political:

When my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of the transaction, I have no privacy.

This was not a legal complaint, but an architectural one.

So the solution was to write systems that didn’t know who you were. Anonymous remailers. Encrypted messages. Digital cash. Software that functioned without trust and without memory.

Therefore, privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems.

It’s a statement that reads like a theorem, not a plea. Privacy wasn’t a moral right, it was a feature that must be built.

To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy, and to encrypt with weak cryptography is to indicate not too much desire for privacy.

These weren’t slogans. They were parameters.

This wasn’t utopia. Hughes was no idealist. The manifesto accepts that governments, corporations, and institutions will collect data, surveil citizens, and exploit information flows:

It is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak.

The answer, then, was not to silence them. It was to render their speech irrelevant:

The act of encryption, in fact, removes information from the public realm.

This was the quiet radicalism at the heart of the manifesto, not to defeat the state, but to route around it. Not to seek permission, but to remove the need to ask.

We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.

And yet, a contradiction.

Hughes wrote:

For privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract.

But the systems he envisioned required effort, discipline, and participation. Most people chose convenience.

That wasn’t a failure of the manifesto. It was a misreading by those who sought to make it universal. Hughes didn’t claim that everyone would (or should) become a cypherpunk:

We don’t much care if you don’t approve of the software we write.

Cypherpunk privacy was never a mass-market product. It was a craft, practiced by a dedicated few. And when others tried to democratise it, through user-friendly crypto wallets, onboarding tutorials, and branded blockchains, it began to unravel.

The democratisation of the cypherpunk ethos may have undermined it.

Still, A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto remains a landmark. Its language became canonical. Its assumptions hardened into infrastructure. And its impact, though quiet, ran deep:

Cypherpunks write code.

Not charters. Not press releases. Code.

The manifesto gave the digital underground a mission: defend privacy not with policy, but with tools. Create systems the state can neither regulate nor revoke.

That spirit hasn’t vanished, but it’s scattered.

Most who speak of decentralisation now do so in the language of markets, not autonomy. Cryptography has become infrastructure for speculation. And few still identify as cypherpunks.

But the tools remain.

The manifesto still speaks, but its voice is quieter now. Less a call to arms than a steady hum beneath the systems we use, the choices we make, the illusions we accept.

Eric Hughes didn’t ask for power. He didn’t organise a movement. He wrote a set of instructions and walked away.

Let us proceed together apace.

And the machine, somewhere, kept humming.

• Hughes, Eric. (1993). A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto.

• May, Timothy C. (1988). The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto

• Levy, Steven. (2001). Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government—Saving Privacy in the Digital Age

• Greenberg, Andy. (2012). This Machine Kills Secrets

• Assorted Cypherpunks Mailing List Archives (1992–1996)

• Interviews with Eric Hughes, John Gilmore, and Tim May

• EFF Legal Case Files on Cryptography and Anonymity