their self-strangulation for granted. But it was getting serious. He wasn’t yet my friend, but Phoenix of The Realm was someone I was aware of, another Melbourne hacker chased from the dim light of his bedroom to the harsh light of the courthouse.
Phoenix was arrogant – he had once telephoned a New York Times reporter, calling himself ‘Dave’, to boast about attacks Australian hackers were making on American systems. The reporter wrote about it, putting ‘Dave’ and the other hackers on the paper’s front page. Some hackers were more withdrawn, but Phoenix liked the attention. He ended up getting the wrong sort, facing forty criminal charges in a case that had a shadow of US pressure hanging over it. I went to the court that day and sat anonymously in the public gallery, watching the face of Judge Smith with a rising sense both of public threat and private honour. I thought the case might prove a pivotal day for our brand of explorer, and I wanted to witness it. As it turned out, Phoenix did not get a custodial sentence. I breathed freely, if breathing freely is ever something one can do in an Australian court. As Phoenix left the dock I went down to offer my congratulations.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Do I know you?’
‘Sort of,’ I said. ‘I’m Mendax. I’m about to go through what you did, only worse.’
When you’re a hacker, you live above, or beneath, or within, or beyond the scope of your everyday friends. That’s not a boast or a value statement: it’s just a fact. You live otherwise from the norm, not only using a nom de plume or a nom de guerre, but a series of masks within masks, until eventually, if you are any good at all, your activity is your identity and your knowledge is your face. After a long time with computers, there’s a measure of detachment that makes you homeless within your own home, and you find yourself only really yourself with others like you, people with cartoon names whom you’ve never met.
Even though most of my hacking friends lived in Melbourne or its suburbs, like me, I usually met them online on bulletin board systems – a bit like chat rooms – such as Electric Dreams or Megaworks. The first BBS I set up myself was called A Cute Paranoia – a further sign of my well-balanced nature – and I invited Trax and Prime Suspect onto it as much as they could manage. I was nineteen in 1990, and had never spoken to those guys, except modem to modem. You build up a picture of the reality of a person without ever really meeting them. It can give in to paranoia, and too much secrecy, and too much alienation, I suppose, and it would be fair to say I thought Trax and Prime Suspect were odd. I wasn’t in the least without oddness myself, as people would always be quick to tell me. But I trusted these guys’ instincts. My endless travels across the Australian landscape – and education system – made me something of a social outsider, but in Trax I found a kindred spirit. Like me, he came from a poor but intellectual family. Both of his parents were recent immigrants to Australia, still retaining the German accents that had embarrassed Trax as a child. Prime Suspect, on the other hand, came from an upper-middle-class background and on the surface was a studious grammar-school boy bound for university. But Prime Suspect was a damaged young man. The only thing that had saved his parents from an acrimonious divorce battle was his father’s death from cancer when Prime Suspect was eight. Widowed and stuck with two young children, his mother had retreated into bitterness and anger. And Prime Suspect in turn had retreated into his bedroom 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
