“Satoshi Nakamoto” is the most famous non-person on the internet. The name is a pseudonym, meant to hide the shadowy programmer (or programmers) behind Bitcoin, a computerised currency designed to liberate money from the control of any central bank. He was one of the original “cypherpunks”, a small, influential band of cryptographers, philosophers and programmers who, in the early 1990s, helped stamp the early internet with its culture of rebelliousness, distrust of government and optimistic belief in the liberating power of technology. Two decades before Edward Snowden put the subject on front pages the world over, the cypherpunks were discussing how the coming age of the internet would allow governments and companies to pry ever more deeply and easily into the lives of their citizens and customers. But that same computer revolution would also hand ordinary people the power to fight back against the organisations that presumed to run their lives. Until that point, good quality encryption had been something available only to spy agencies and big companies. Computers would give people the power to carve out a mathematically guaranteed refuge from the powers that be, and to have a conversation that was provably, reliably private. For Mr Finney, who had spent his high-school years imbibing the supercharged libertarianism of Ayn Rand, and who was now earning a living writing video games, that was a heady challenge. He accepted it with gusto. “Here we are faced with the problems of loss of privacy, creeping computerisation, massive databases, more centralisation,” he wrote. “[But] the computer can be used as a tool to liberate and protect people, rather than to control them.” His aim was clear: “The work we are doing here, broadly speaking, is dedicated to this goal of making Big Brother obsolete.” He began helping, unpaid, with a program called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), putting in enough hours that it became a second job. It was well-named: even today, messages scrambled with it are thought to be unbreakable (Mr Snowden used PGP for his e-mail exchanges with the journalists to whom he leaked his documents). In 1991 Phil Zimmermann, PGP’s chief developer, uploaded it to the internet. America’s spies were aghast. Exporting encryption—which was classed as a weapon—was illegal. And here a group of self-proclaimed techno-liberators were proposing to just hand it over to anyone in the world—diplomat, criminal, teenager—who wanted it. economist/news/obituary/21615469-harold-finney-futurist-and-cypherpunk-died-august-28th-aged-58-hal-finney
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 22:21:48 +0000
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