"Perhaps we never fully understand that balance until one of those secret rights disappears without warning, because no one even knew it mattered until it was gone." — Peter Valkenburgh (Your Secret Right to Cash, 2017) #rights #warning #privacy #freedom

"Building security from day one is much easier than adding it on as an afterthought." — Martin Hellman (Charles Babbage Institute Oral History, 2004) #security

"If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don't understand the problems and you don't understand the technology." — Bruce Schneier (Secrets and Lies, 2000) #security

"The scandal isn't how they're breaking the law. The scandal is that they don't have to break the law." — Edward Snowden (Joe Rogan Experience, 2019) #surveillance #law #government #legal

"Cash is an escape valve in our increasingly intermediated and therefore surveilled world." — Jerry Brito (The Case for Electronic Cash, 2019) #cash #privacy #surveillance #freedom

"Strong cryptography can resist an unlimited amount of violence. No amount of coercive force will ever solve a math problem." — Tim May (Cypherpunks Mailing List, 1993) #cryptography #violence #mathematics

"In one direction lies unprecedented scrutiny and control of people's lives; in the other, secure parity between individuals and organizations. The shape of society in the next century may depend on which approach predominates." — David Chaum (Security Without Identification: Transaction Systems to Make Big Brother Obsolete, 1985) #privacy #surveillance

"Every action I took was out of a desire to enable people to have freedom and control over their own lives." — Ross Ulbricht (Letter to Judge Forrest, 2015) #freedom #autonomy

"If cryptography's most basic aim is to enable secure communications, how could it not be a colossal failure of our field when ordinary people lack even a modicum of communication privacy when interacting electronically?" — Phillip Rogaway (The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work, 2015) #cryptography #privacy

"Courage is contagious. If you demonstrate that individuals can leak something and go on to live a good life, it's tremendously incentivizing to people." — Julian Assange (Forbes, 2010) #whistleblowing

"Some have predicted that the initial success of electronic money may be in the form of a technically illegal 'black market' where crypto-hackers buy and sell information, using cryptography to protect against government crackdowns." — Hal Finney (Protecting privacy with electronic cash, 1993) #digitalcash #cryptography #resistance

"I never understood the classical notion of a key distribution center, which is a trusted resource that you have to share." — Whitfield Diffie (ITAS Interview, 1992) #cryptography #trust

"The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen." — Julian Assange (Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, 2012) #internet #surveillance #totalitarianism

"If you go into a store today and make a purchase with cash, no records are left tying you personally to the transaction. With no records, there is nothing to go into a computer database. The goal of electronic cash is to allow these same kinds of private transactions to take place electronically." — Hal Finney (Protecting privacy with electronic cash, 1993) #digitalcash #privacy #transactions

"The keyboard is the great equalizer — better than the Glock .45." — St. Jude (Jude Milhon) (Modem Grrrl (Wired), 1995) #technology #empowerment #equality #defense

"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind." — John Perry Barlow (A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 1996) #cyberspace #independence #government

"Technology has let the genie out of the bottle. Crypto anarchy is liberating individuals from coercion by their physical neighbors—who cannot know who they are on the Net—and from governments." — Tim May (Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities, 1994) #cryptoanarchy #freedom #government

"What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If a nonconformist tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope, it would draw suspicion." — Philip Zimmermann (Why I Wrote PGP, 1991) #privacy #encryption #conformity

"The age of the printable gun has arrived, and there's nothing anyone can do about it." — Cody Wilson (Come and Take It, 2016) #3dprinting

"There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture." — Aaron Swartz (Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, 2008) #civildisobedience #openaccess