Cypherpunks Quotes

“The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia. This development has not been properly recognized outside of national security circles. It has been hidden by secrecy, complexity and scale. The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.

These transformations have come about silently, because those who know what is going on work in the global surveillance industry and have no incentives to speak out. Left to its own trajectory, within a few years, global civilization will be a postmodern surveillance dystopia, from which escape for all but the most skilled individuals will be impossible. In fact, we may already be there.

While many writers have considered what the internet means for global civilization, they are wrong. They are wrong because they do not have the sense of perspective that direct experience brings. They are wrong because they have never met the enemy.”
― Julian Assange, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet

“The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization.”
― Julian Assange, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet

“One must acknowledge with cryptography no amount of violence will ever solve a math problem.”
― Jacob Appelbaum, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet

“So when Putin goes out to buy a Coke, thirty seconds later it is known in Washington DC.”
― Julian Assange, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet

“Similarly, the universe, our physical universe, has that property that makes it possible for an individual or a group of individuals to reliably, automatically, even without knowing, encipher something, so that all the resources and all the political will of the strongest superpower on earth may not decipher it. And the paths of encipherment between people can mesh together to create regions free from the coercive force of the outer state. Free from mass interception. Free from state control.”
― Julian Assange, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet

“If you take away the state’s monopoly over the means of economic interaction, then you take away one of the three principal ingredients of the state. In the model of the state as a mafia, where the state is a protection racket, the state shakes people down for money in every possible way. Controlling currency flows is important for revenue-raising by the state, but it is also important for simply controlling what people do...”
― Julian Assange, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet

“Actually I'm reminded of a time when I smuggled myself into Sydney Opera House to see Faust. Sydney Opera House is very beautiful at night, its grand interiors and lights beaming out over the water and into the night sky. Afterwards I came out and I heard three women talking together, leaning on the railing overlooking the darkened bay. The older woman was describing how she was having problems with her job, which turned out to be working for the CIA as an intelligence agent, and she had previously complained to the Senate Select Committee for Intelligence and so on, and she was telling this in hushed tones to her niece and another woman. I thought, "So it is true then. CIA agents really do hang out at the Sydney opera!" And then I looked inside the Opera House through the massive glass panels at the front, and there in all this lonely palatial refinement was a water rat that had crawled up in to the Opera House interior, and was scurrying back and forth, leaping on to the fine linen-covered tables and eating the Opera House food, jumping on to the counter with all the tickets and having a really great time. And actually I think that is the most probable scenario for the future: an extremely confining, homogenized, postmodern transnational totalitarian structure with incredible complexity, absurdities and debasements, and within that incredible complexity a space where only the smart rats can go.”
― Julian Assange, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet

“...technical security and the security of governmental affairs are two things that are totally detached. You can have a totally secure technical system and the government will think it’s no good, because they think security is when they can look into it, when they can control it, when they can breach the technical security.”
― Andy Müller-Maguhn, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet

“We all speak about the privacy of communication and the right to publish. That’s something that’s quite easy to understand—it has a long history—and, in fact, journalists love to talk about it because they’re protecting their own interests. But if we compare that value to the value of the privacy and freedom of economic interaction, actually every time the CIA sees an economic interaction they can see that it’s this party from this location to this party in this location, and they have a figure to the value and importance of the interaction. So isn’t the freedom, or privacy, of economic interactions actually more important than the freedom of speech, because economic interactions really underpin the whole structure of society?”
― Julian Assange, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet

“Amesys were caught with their own internal documents in The Spy Files. If we’re going to talk about it in terms of weapons, we have to remember it is not like selling a country a truck. It’s like selling a country a truck, a mechanic and a team that goes in the truck that selectively targets people and then shoots them.”
― Jacob Appelbaum, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet

“Son kullanıcının son cihazı, iki kulağının arasında duran şeydir. Filtreleme orada yapılmalı, insanlar adına hükümet tarafından değil. Eğer kişilerin görmek istemedikleri şeyler varsa, görmek zorunda değiller, kaldı ki bugün zaten pek çok şeyi filtrelemek gibi bir zaruretle karşı karşıyayız.”
― Julian Assange, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet

“...we made some calculations in the Chaos Computer Club: you get decent voice-quality storage of all German telephone calls in a year for about 30 million euros including administrative overheads, so the pure storage is about 8 million euros.”
― Andy Müller-Maguhn, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet