Signals :: Topics
The four-decade fight over whether ordinary people can use strong cryptography. PGP and the federal grand jury, the Cypherpunks list, Tim May's Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, and the long arc that produced every secure messenger we use today.
In 1991, a peace activist in Boulder released a free encryption tool to protect dissidents from surveillance. Within months, federal investigators were treating his source code as illegally exported munitions. The three-year case that followed became the central battle of the Crypto Wars and the foundation for every secure messenger in your pocket today.
Ripper :: April 18, 2026 :: 9 min read
Jude Milhon was at the Selma march in 1965, was one of the few professional women programmers of the 1960s mainframe era, coined the word cypherpunk in the early 1990s as a wordplay on cyberpunk and cipher, and spent her last decades as the most beloved counterweight to the libertarian male orthodoxy that had grown up around the Cypherpunks list. The cypherpunk movement has the name she gave it. It has remembered her unevenly.
Ripper :: April 17, 2026 :: 10 min read
In September 1992, three people met at a house in Oakland to talk about cryptography and decided to start a mailing list. Over the next nine years, that list became the workshop where Bitcoin, Tor, Signal, BitTorrent, and most of what we now call privacy tech was workshopped, argued out, and shipped.
Ripper :: April 16, 2026 :: 8 min read
In the summer of 1988, a former Intel physicist handed out a one-page essay at the Crypto '88 conference. The essay argued that strong cryptography would, by purely technological means, render most state regulation of online activity unenforceable, and that this was a positive outcome. Most of the document's specific predictions came true. Some came true in ways the author would not have endorsed.
keysmith :: April 16, 2026 :: 10 min read