"The law enforcement folks were stuck longer in the hard-core phase, and still are, even now using Bin Laden to suggest that crypto has GONE TOO FAR, damn it."
— Steven Levy (The WELL - Crypto Discussion, 2001)
#lawenforcement #cryptography #government #terrorism
"What is the greatest unsolved problem in cryptography today? Lack of user awareness."
— Martin Hellman (Charles Babbage Institute Oral History, 2004)
#cryptography
"I think the greed and hype and nattering about 'to the Moon!' and 'HODL' is the biggest hype wagon I've ever seen."
— Tim May (CoinDesk, 2018)
#bitcoin #hype #greed #criticism
"Cryptography rearranges power: it configures who can do what, from what. This makes cryptography an inherently political tool, and it confers on the field an intrinsically moral dimension."
— Phillip Rogaway (The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work, 2015)
#cryptography #politics
"A hash function should be a one-way function — easy to compute but difficult to reverse."
— Ralph Merkle (A Certified Digital Signature, 1989)
#cryptography
"When a company goes to develop a product, that has only two options, secure or insecure, they should, from day one, define the product as either secure or insecure."
— Martin Hellman (Charles Babbage Institute Oral History, 2004)
#security #transparency
"There is nothing quite so disempowering as a government that can read all your most intimate thoughts and correspondence."
— Philip Zimmermann (Why I Wrote PGP, 1991)
#surveillance #government #privacy
"We need to make cryptography the solution to the problem: 'how do you make surveillance more expensive?'"
— Phillip Rogaway (The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work, 2015)
#cryptography #surveillance #resistance
"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."
— Eric Hughes (A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, 1993)
#privacy #secrecy
"You use envelopes for postal mail. You use it for love letters, business letters and your medical records. The only way to create the digital equivalent of an envelope is to encrypt."
— Philip Zimmermann (GrepLaw, 2003)
#encryption #privacy #email #envelopes
"Cash is more than a method of payment. It is a fundamental tool for individual privacy and autonomy, and it is necessary for an open society."
— Jerry Brito (The Case for Electronic Cash, 2019)
#cash #privacy #autonomy #opensociety
"User-controlled privacy is not a niche; it's a fundamental building block of a healthy and stable society."
— Zooko Wilcox (Cypherpunk Technologies Press Release, 2023)
#privacy
"I have argued that the Internet should have had security built into it from the very beginning, where every email message was authenticated with a signature, and that there was an adequate public key infrastructure in place."
— Martin Hellman (Charles Babbage Institute Oral History, 2004)
#internet #security #email #publickey
"In view of the serious implications of such a law, I abandoned my plans to charge for PGP in the hopes of achieving wider distribution."
— Philip Zimmermann (GrepLaw, 2003)
#pgp #encryption #government #backdoors
"Cryptography is the last defense of liberty in a world of total surveillance."
— Bruce Schneier (Data and Goliath, 2015)
#cryptography #liberty #surveillance
"I had this view of cryptography in which the critical value of cryptography was that you didn't have to trust other people."
— Whitfield Diffie (ITAS Interview, 1992)
#cryptography #trust #autonomy
"Talk is cheap. Show me the code."
— Linus Torvalds (Linux Kernel Mailing List, 2000)
#code #opensource
"Arise, You have nothing to lose but your barbed-wire fences."
— Steven Levy (Crypto Rebels (WIRED), 1993)
#cypherpunk #freedom #resistance
"Governments see their powers eroded by these technologies, and are taking various well-known steps to try to limit the use of strong crypto by their subjects."
— Tim May (Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities, 1994)
#government #cryptography #regulation
"We live in a golden age for surveillance. Everything you do can be captured."
— Jacob Appelbaum (30C3 Congress, 2013)
#surveillance #privacy
