Julian Assange was an active participant on the Cypherpunks Mailing List, where many of the ideas for WikiLeaks, with its anonymity protections for its sources, were born. The first developers of so-called proxy servers, which offered encrypted and anonymized internet connections—and which would evolve into virtual private networks, or VPNs, in common use today—were core cypherpunk contributors. The creators of the anonymity software Tor, too, were deeply influenced by the discussions they read in the list’s archives.
