In this article I would like to touch upon such a theme as online privacy and privacy. As we know, now is the period of a pandemic, and it is at this time that rights and freedoms are being infringed, including on the Internet. Governments are using the pandemic as an excuse to restrict access to information. It also expands the powers to monitor and implement new technologies aimed at digitizing, collecting and analyzing personal data of people without adequate protection from abuse. Countries are introducing new Internet rules to restrict the flow of information across national borders.
But any action on the part of the government immediately provokes opposition, especially on the Internet. Indeed, for many users, the principles of unhindered access to information and free expression are fundamental to the development of civil society and economic prosperity. The history of the world wide web is also the history of the struggle for basic human rights, the possibilities for achieving which have grown immeasurably with the development of technology.
Next, let's analyze the 5 most famous program documents published in the network, which still remain relevant, iincluding for cryptocurrency supporters.
1. The Conscience of a Hacker
The first significant attempt to explain the philosophy of hackers was an essay, written in January 1986 and later published in the electronic journal Phrack, entitled The Conscience of a Hacker. It was written by a hacker from Texas called The Mentor, Loyd Blankenship. Referring to the collective image of the world of adults, including teachers who think in familiar patterns, Blankenship writes:
Blankenship's work is often referred to as the beginning of a story of confrontation between online activists and the real world in general, which later grew into a struggle with governments.
Lloyd Blankenship about the history of writing the Hacker's Manifesto. H2K2 Conference in 2002.
2. The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto
In the 1970s, when the first working prototypes of the Internet appeared, the issue of protecting data in an open environment became relevant. In 1978, American cryptographer David Chaum developed a blind digital signature - a public key encryption model. It allowed the creation of a database of people who could remain anonymous, while guaranteeing the reliability of the information they provided about themselves.
Chaum also dreamed of digital voting, the process of which could be verified without disclosing the identity of the voter, but primarily digital cash. In the mid-1980s, he was able to create a model in which users made payments while maintaining anonymity and guaranteeing the reality of funds. On the basis of these developments, the movement of cryptographers was born, advocating computer technology as a means of destroying the state. The main ideologist of this movement was the former leading researcher at Intel Timothy May.
Timothy May
Inspired by Chaum's 1985 paper "Security without identification: transaction systems to make big brother obsolete," which described a system that cryptographically hides the customer's identity, May set about exploring public key cryptographic security. He was firmly convinced that, when combined with networked computing, this technology could "destroy the structures of social power." In 1988, May published The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, an essay he wrote based on Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto:
It says that information technology will allow people to manage their lives without governments, but through cryptography, digital currencies and other decentralized tools. The anonymity these tools bring should be a catalyst for profound social change.
Timothy May writes:
According to May, the ideological foundation of The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto was anarcho-capitalism, a form of anarchism that emphasizes voluntary transactions and the free market. His essay was partly a source of inspiration for the first prototypes of Bitcoin, and many cryptocurrency proponents consider Timothy May to be one of those people who made a huge contribution to its ideological foundation. However, in 2018, when it was 10 years since the publication of the Bitcoin white paper, May stated that, observing what was happening, he experienced "some interest, a certain surprise and great disappointment", and that "Satoshi would vomit" if he saw all hype and yelling to the heavens and HODL, as well as ever tighter regulation.
In his opinion, attempts to "befriend" regulators are likely to kill the key use cases for cryptocurrencies, which should not be variations on PayPal or Visa.
3. A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
Timothy May also pioneered the cypherpunk movement, which he founded in 1992 with John Gilmore and Eric Hughes to champion the ideals of privacy and technology openness. It is believed that the movement was born in one of the informal meetings with close friends organized by May, Hughes and Gilmore. Such meetings began to be held regularly, and in order to attract other people who shared the interests and core values of the movement, an electronic mailing list called "Cypherpunk" was created. In a short time, she gained hundreds of subscribers who tested ciphers, exchanged ideas and discussed new developments. The correspondence was conducted using the latest encryption methods such as PGP.
The group members had heated discussions on topics of politics and philosophy, which, combined with the study of computer science, cryptography and mathematics, led to the emergence of the Cypherpunk Manifesto. The document containing the main ideological provisions of this movement was published in 1993 by the aforementioned Eric Hughes.
The manifesto emphasized that privacy and secrecy are not the same thing:
The ideas of cypherpunks were subsequently implemented to one degree or another in cryptocurrencies. The mailing list included the creator of the Proof-of-Work algorithm Adam Back, the authors of the b-money proposals Wei Dai and Bitgold Nick Szabo, the movement had a significant impact on the creator of Zcash Zuko Wilcox. And it was in the cypherpunk mailing list in October 2008 that someone under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published the famous white paper "Bitcoin: A Digital Peer-to-Peer Cash System."
4. A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
In February 1996, the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), John Perry Barlow, published an iconic document called A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, which is still considered a classic of Internet libertarianism. The document consisted of harsh and unprincipled statements addressed to world governments and became a response to the Telecommunications Decency Act signed before this US President Bill Clinton, with the help of which the authorities tried to censor the Internet. Barlow's goal was to show that if states are still able to set limits on the dissemination of seditious ideas in traditional media, then on the World Wide Web they are powerless and such attempts are doomed to failure. He did not set the goal of "freeing the Internet", because the Internet was and remains free, and cyberspace has an innate immunity to supreme power.
Despite the fact that the act signed by Bill Clinton later in the same 1996 by a federal court decision was declared unconstitutional, the struggle of supporters and opponents of freedom on the Internet continues, and Barlow's "Declaration" will remain relevant for a long time. Governments continue to practice blocking resources, seizing servers, and even physical arrests to this day, but cyberspace has resisted that too. New encryption tools, anonymization and blocking bypass tools appear.
5. Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
Time is like water - it flows and changes. The history of the struggle for fundamental rights on the Internet confirmed this when in 2008 the world saw the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, by Aaron Swartz.
According to Schwartz's manifesto:
Recently, it is often said that due to the coronavirus pandemic, life will never be the same again. This is probably partly true. But one thing will remain unchanged - the human need for basic rights and especially in the global network, where the main activity is now taking place. This means the inevitability of the emergence of new technologies, and with them - and new attempts by the state machine to crush them under itself.
And the emergence of new manifestos outlining the agenda for the future is only a matter of time. However, they already appear.
sources:
- http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html#article
- https://activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html
- https://forklog.com/ot-hakerov-i-shifropankov-do-zashhitnikov-svobody-v-onlajne-pyat-programmnyh-manifestov-interneta/
- https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
- https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
- https://manifesto.ai/
- https://openaccessmanifesto.wordpress.com/guerilla-open-access-manifesto/
But any action on the part of the government immediately provokes opposition, especially on the Internet. Indeed, for many users, the principles of unhindered access to information and free expression are fundamental to the development of civil society and economic prosperity. The history of the world wide web is also the history of the struggle for basic human rights, the possibilities for achieving which have grown immeasurably with the development of technology.
Next, let's analyze the 5 most famous program documents published in the network, which still remain relevant, iincluding for cryptocurrency supporters.
1. The Conscience of a Hacker
The first significant attempt to explain the philosophy of hackers was an essay, written in January 1986 and later published in the electronic journal Phrack, entitled The Conscience of a Hacker. It was written by a hacker from Texas called The Mentor, Loyd Blankenship. Referring to the collective image of the world of adults, including teachers who think in familiar patterns, Blankenship writes:
Quote
But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?
I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by me...Or thinks I'm a smart ass...Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.
You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us will-ing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.
I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me... Or feels threatened by me...Or thinks I'm a smart ass...Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here...Damn kid. All he does is play games. They're all alike.
You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us will-ing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.
This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.
Blankenship's work is often referred to as the beginning of a story of confrontation between online activists and the real world in general, which later grew into a struggle with governments.
Lloyd Blankenship about the history of writing the Hacker's Manifesto. H2K2 Conference in 2002.
2. The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto
In the 1970s, when the first working prototypes of the Internet appeared, the issue of protecting data in an open environment became relevant. In 1978, American cryptographer David Chaum developed a blind digital signature - a public key encryption model. It allowed the creation of a database of people who could remain anonymous, while guaranteeing the reliability of the information they provided about themselves.
Chaum also dreamed of digital voting, the process of which could be verified without disclosing the identity of the voter, but primarily digital cash. In the mid-1980s, he was able to create a model in which users made payments while maintaining anonymity and guaranteeing the reality of funds. On the basis of these developments, the movement of cryptographers was born, advocating computer technology as a means of destroying the state. The main ideologist of this movement was the former leading researcher at Intel Timothy May.
Timothy May
Inspired by Chaum's 1985 paper "Security without identification: transaction systems to make big brother obsolete," which described a system that cryptographically hides the customer's identity, May set about exploring public key cryptographic security. He was firmly convinced that, when combined with networked computing, this technology could "destroy the structures of social power." In 1988, May published The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, an essay he wrote based on Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto:
Quote
A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy.
It says that information technology will allow people to manage their lives without governments, but through cryptography, digital currencies and other decentralized tools. The anonymity these tools bring should be a catalyst for profound social change.
Timothy May writes:
Quote
Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner. Two persons may exchange messages, conduct business, and negotiate electronic contracts without ever knowing the True Name, or legal identity, of the other. Interactions over networks will be untraceable, via extensive re- routing of encrypted packets and tamper-proof boxes which implement cryptographic protocols with nearly perfect assurance against any tampering. Reputations will be of central importance, far more important in dealings than even the credit ratings of today. These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation.
According to May, the ideological foundation of The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto was anarcho-capitalism, a form of anarchism that emphasizes voluntary transactions and the free market. His essay was partly a source of inspiration for the first prototypes of Bitcoin, and many cryptocurrency proponents consider Timothy May to be one of those people who made a huge contribution to its ideological foundation. However, in 2018, when it was 10 years since the publication of the Bitcoin white paper, May stated that, observing what was happening, he experienced "some interest, a certain surprise and great disappointment", and that "Satoshi would vomit" if he saw all hype and yelling to the heavens and HODL, as well as ever tighter regulation.
In his opinion, attempts to "befriend" regulators are likely to kill the key use cases for cryptocurrencies, which should not be variations on PayPal or Visa.
3. A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
Timothy May also pioneered the cypherpunk movement, which he founded in 1992 with John Gilmore and Eric Hughes to champion the ideals of privacy and technology openness. It is believed that the movement was born in one of the informal meetings with close friends organized by May, Hughes and Gilmore. Such meetings began to be held regularly, and in order to attract other people who shared the interests and core values of the movement, an electronic mailing list called "Cypherpunk" was created. In a short time, she gained hundreds of subscribers who tested ciphers, exchanged ideas and discussed new developments. The correspondence was conducted using the latest encryption methods such as PGP.
The group members had heated discussions on topics of politics and philosophy, which, combined with the study of computer science, cryptography and mathematics, led to the emergence of the Cypherpunk Manifesto. The document containing the main ideological provisions of this movement was published in 1993 by the aforementioned Eric Hughes.
Quote
Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide. We don't much care if you don't approve of the software we write. We know that software can't be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can't be shut down.
For privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract. People must come and together deploy these systems for the common good. Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one's fellows in society. We the Cypherpunks seek your questions and your concerns and hope we may engage you so that we do not deceive ourselves. We will not, however, be moved out of our course because some may disagree with our goals.
For privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract. People must come and together deploy these systems for the common good. Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one's fellows in society. We the Cypherpunks seek your questions and your concerns and hope we may engage you so that we do not deceive ourselves. We will not, however, be moved out of our course because some may disagree with our goals.
The manifesto emphasized that privacy and secrecy are not the same thing:
Quote
Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn't want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn't want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.
The ideas of cypherpunks were subsequently implemented to one degree or another in cryptocurrencies. The mailing list included the creator of the Proof-of-Work algorithm Adam Back, the authors of the b-money proposals Wei Dai and Bitgold Nick Szabo, the movement had a significant impact on the creator of Zcash Zuko Wilcox. And it was in the cypherpunk mailing list in October 2008 that someone under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published the famous white paper "Bitcoin: A Digital Peer-to-Peer Cash System."
4. A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
In February 1996, the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), John Perry Barlow, published an iconic document called A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, which is still considered a classic of Internet libertarianism. The document consisted of harsh and unprincipled statements addressed to world governments and became a response to the Telecommunications Decency Act signed before this US President Bill Clinton, with the help of which the authorities tried to censor the Internet. Barlow's goal was to show that if states are still able to set limits on the dissemination of seditious ideas in traditional media, then on the World Wide Web they are powerless and such attempts are doomed to failure. He did not set the goal of "freeing the Internet", because the Internet was and remains free, and cyberspace has an innate immunity to supreme power.
Quote
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
Despite the fact that the act signed by Bill Clinton later in the same 1996 by a federal court decision was declared unconstitutional, the struggle of supporters and opponents of freedom on the Internet continues, and Barlow's "Declaration" will remain relevant for a long time. Governments continue to practice blocking resources, seizing servers, and even physical arrests to this day, but cyberspace has resisted that too. New encryption tools, anonymization and blocking bypass tools appear.
5. Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
Time is like water - it flows and changes. The history of the struggle for fundamental rights on the Internet confirmed this when in 2008 the world saw the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, by Aaron Swartz.
According to Schwartz's manifesto:
Quote
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal - there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's already being done: we can fight back.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral - it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it - their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge - we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?
"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal - there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's already being done: we can fight back.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral - it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it - their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge - we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?
Recently, it is often said that due to the coronavirus pandemic, life will never be the same again. This is probably partly true. But one thing will remain unchanged - the human need for basic rights and especially in the global network, where the main activity is now taking place. This means the inevitability of the emergence of new technologies, and with them - and new attempts by the state machine to crush them under itself.
And the emergence of new manifestos outlining the agenda for the future is only a matter of time. However, they already appear.
sources:
- http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html#article
- https://activism.net/cypherpunk/crypto-anarchy.html
- https://forklog.com/ot-hakerov-i-shifropankov-do-zashhitnikov-svobody-v-onlajne-pyat-programmnyh-manifestov-interneta/
- https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
- https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence
- https://manifesto.ai/
- https://openaccessmanifesto.wordpress.com/guerilla-open-access-manifesto/