and into his computer.
We were all misfits in our different ways, but our differences equalised in the strange impersonal universe of the hacker. Under our own and each other’s tutelage, we had graduated from being funsters to being cryptographers. And in company with a whole international subculture, we had become aware of how cryptography could lead to political change. We were cypherpunks. The movement started around 1992 and was held together by a mailing list, a meeting point for our discussions of computer science, politics, philosophy and mathematics. There were never more than about 1,000 subscribers, but those people laid the foundations of where cryptography was going: they showed the way for all the modern battles over privacy.
We were engaged in establishing a system for the new information age, the Internet age, that would allow individuals, rather than merely corporations, to protect their privacy. We could write code and would use that ability to give people jurisdiction over their rights. The whole movement tapped into a part of my mind, or you could say my soul: I realised through the cypherpunk movement that justice in the future might depend on us working for a balance, via the Internet, of what corporations consider secrets and what individuals consider private. As it used to stand, before we seized the tools, privacy was only a matter of advantage for corporations, banks and governments: but we saw a new frontline, in which people’s power could be enhanced with information.
The Internet, as you can see if you look at China today, was always capable of being a zone of selective censorship, and so was every area of computer culture. The cypherpunks get too little credit for breaking the whole thing open and keeping the tools from becoming weapons, exclusively, in the hands of commercial opportunists and political oppressors. The media was so busy warbling about hackers they missed, right under their noses, how the best of them had become cryptographers busy fighting for the freedoms of information that they themselves claimed to be built on. It was a lesson on the moral infirmity of the media: by and large, they took what power was offered to them, and did not, at the dawn of the Internet era, fight to establish freedom of access or freedom from censorship. To this day, they take the technology for granted and miss how it materialised. It was the cypherpunks, or the ‘code rebels’ as Steven Levy called us, who prevented the new technology from merely becoming a tool used by big business and government agencies to spy on populations, or sell to them. Computers could have come preloaded with commercials. Smartphones could have come embedded with surveillance devices. The Internet could have been repressive in a great number of its facets. Emails could have been generally interceptable and lacking in privacy. But a turf war went on, invisibly to most commentators, a battle that guaranteed certain freedoms. It is the basis of today’s understanding – a cypherpunk commonplace – that computer technology can be a major tool in the fight for social change.
At one time, governments wanted to make cryptography illegal, except for themselves in support of their own activities. And this was preparation for how certain governments now view WikiLeaks: they wish to keep control of technology so that it might only serve itself. But this misunderstands the freedoms inscribed into the technology. We fought for it, so that powerful bodies could not merely use data to suit themselves. The whole struggle was about that and still is about that. For some in the libertarian movement, this was essentially about privacy as capitalist freedom, the right to be free of big government, to have your data kept back; but this is my book and I’ll tell you what it meant to me.
The cypherpunk ethos allowed me to think about how best to oppose the efforts of oppressive bodies – governments, corporations, surveillance agencies – to extract data from vulnerable individuals. Regimes often rely on having control of the data, and they can hurt people or oppress them or silence them by means of such control. My sense of the cypherpunk ethos was that it could protect people against this: it could turn their knowledge into an unreachable possession of theirs, protecting them in the classic Tom Paine way of securing liberty as a bulwark against harm or aggression. We aimed to turn the tools of oppression into the instruments of liberty and that was a straightforward goal. Eventually, in 1997, this would lead to my developing a new tool called Rubberhose, in which encrypted data can be hidden beneath layers of fake data, such that no single password will ever provide a gateway to a person’s sensitive information. The data is essentially unreachable, unless the person to whom the data refers wishes to make an effort to reveal it. It was a way of keeping important information secret not just by encrypting it, but by hiding it, and it was an application of game theory. For the general good, I wished to break the power of interrogators, who could never be sure that the last of the keys had been exhausted. WikiLeaks, I should say, was founded on the notion that the very presence of sources would be infinitely deniable. One day, I imagined, this technology would enable people to speak, even when powerful forces threatened to punish all speakers. The cypherpunks made this possible by arguing, from day one, against all treaties and laws that opposed the right to encrypt.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Our problems at this time included constitutional issues. At one point, in the early ’90s, the US government tried to argue that a floppy disk containing code must be considered a munition. We scarcely knew, as we went about what felt like world-changing business, but on a small scale, that we would be tied up so quickly in freedom-of-speech issues. But we were. Sending certain strips of code or going on a plane with a bit of code tattooed on your arm essentially made you an arms trafficker. Government absurdity has always stalked the effort to make freedoms clear.
I was finding these things out for myself, in Melbourne, in the company of my friends Prime Suspect and Trax. They were the ones who spoke most directly to me in my happy submersion, because they were submerged, too. Prime Suspect said that when he first got his Apple II, at the age of thirteen, he found it to be better company than any of his relatives. Strangely, our bedrooms were more connected to the world than our classrooms, because of one very crucial and amazing thing: the modem. None of us aced our exams or was top of the class. None of us shone in the halls of academe. It just wasn’t in our natures. Something in us rebelled against rote-learning and exam-fixation. In short, we felt we had bigger fish to fry and the private means to do it. This lays down another plank in the house of correction for computer hackers: we are arrogant. Compared to policemen, lawyers, army generals and politicians, of course, the computer hacker, you might argue, is a paragon of self-doubt. But we were young and we felt we knew things. That’s for sure. We did feel certain and we did feel abundant in our small way. And arrogance in youth might be counted the budding flower of self-defensiveness.
From early on, the International Subversives wanted to attack military systems, and I invented a program called Sycophant that would run through a computer system harvesting passwords. Each night, through the summer of 1991, we wandered through the corridors of the US Airforce 8th Group Command Headquarters in the Pentagon. We tramped through Motorola in Illinois, padded through Panasonic in New Jersey, tiptoed through Xerox in Palo Alto, and swam down into the twilight lakes of the US Naval Undersea Warfare Engineering Station. There would come a day when people would run revolutions out of their Twitter accounts, and it would feel entirely natural and democratic, but, back then, it was new and totally subversive to feel the pulse of history through a flashing cursor. The journey between the two has been a story of our times.
In the book Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier, my friend, the author Suelette Dreyfus, captures perfectly the scale of ambition that was expressed by our new breed of nerd cognoscenti. And our group, the International Subversives, was going further than any of the others in Australia, further than Phoenix and the other members of The Realm. By the time I was twenty we were attempting to enter the Xanadu of computer networks, the US Department of Defense’s Network Information Centre (NIC) computer. Under my handle, Mendax, I was working most closely with Prime Suspect. Here’s Suelette:
As both hackers chatted amiably on-line one night, on a Melbourne University computer, Prime Suspect worked quietly in another screen to penetrate ns.nic.ddn.mil, a US Department of Defense system closely linked to NIC. He believed the sister system and NIC might ‘trust’ each other – a trust he could exploit to get into NIC. And NIC did everything.
NIC assigned domain names – the ‘.com’ or ‘.net’ at the end of an email address – for the entire Internet. NIC also controlled the US military’s own internal defence data network, known as MILNET.