Cypherpunks Mailing List Archive 1993-2000 [Venona] [CRYPTOME]

The Cypherpunks mailing list was started in 1992, and by 1994 had 700 subscribers. At its peak, it was a very active forum with technical discussion ranging over mathematics, cryptography, computer science, political and philosophical discussion, personal arguments and attacks, etc., with some spam thrown in. An email from John Gilmore reports an average of 30 messages a day from December 1, 1996 to March 1, 1999, and suggests that the number was probably higher earlier. The number of subscribers is estimated to have reached 2000 in the year 1997.

In early 1997, Jim Choate and Igor Chudov set up the Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer, a network of independent mailing list nodes intended to eliminate the single point of failure inherent in a centralized list architecture. At its peak, the Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer included at least 7 nodes. By mid-2005, al-qaeda.net ran the only remaining node. In mid 2013, following a brief outage, the al-qaeda.net node's list software was changed from Majordomo to GNU Mailman and subsequently the node was renamed to cpunks.org.

The cypherpunks mailing list had extensive discussions of the public policy issues related to cryptography and on the politics and philosophy of concepts such as anonymity, pseudonyms, reputation, and privacy. These discussions continue both on the remaining node and elsewhere as the list has become increasingly moribund.

Notable cypherpunks include:

Jacob Appelbaum: Tor developer, political advocate.
Julian Assange: WikiLeaks founder, deniable cryptography inventor, journalist, co-author of Underground, author of Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, member of the International Subversives. Assange has stated that he joined the list in late 1993 or early 1994. An archive of his cypherpunks mailing list posts is at Cryptome
Adam Back: inventor of Hashcash and of NNTP-based Eternity networks.
Jim Bell: author of the Assassination Politics paper.
Steven Bellovin: Bell Labs researcher, later Columbia professor. Chief Technologist for the US Federal Trade Commission in 2012.
Matt Blaze: Bell Labs researcher, later professor at University of Pennsylvania; found flaws in the Clipper Chip.
Eric Blossom: designer of the Starium cryptographically secured mobile phone, founder of the GNU Radio project.
Jon Callas: technical lead on OpenPGP specification, co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of PGP Corporation, co-founder with Philip Zimmermann Silent Circle.
Bram Cohen: creator of BitTorrent.
Lance Cottrell: the original author of the Mixmaster Remailer software, and founder of Anonymizer Inc.
Matt Curtin: founder of Interhack Corporation, first faculty advisor of The Ohio State University Open Source Club, and lecturer at The Ohio State University.
Hugh Daniel (deceased): former Sun Microsystems employee, manager of the FreeS/WAN project (an early and important freeware IPsec implementation).
Dave Del Torto: PGPv3 volunteer, founding PGP Inc employee, longtime Cypherpunks physical meeting organizer, co-author of RFC3156 (PGP/MIME) standard, co-founder of IETF OpenPGP Working Group and the CryptoRights Foundation human rights non-profit, HighFire project principal architect.
Roger Dingledine: Tor project leader and developer
Hal Finney (deceased): cryptographer, main author of PGP 2.0 and the core crypto libraries of later versions of PGP; designer of RPOW
Randy French (pseudonym of Sandy Sandfort): producer of the first Cypherpunk genre pornographic film, Cryptic Seduction.
Michael Froomkin: Distinguished Professor of Law University of Miami School of Law.
Alex Fowler: entrepreneur, advocate, executive, AAAS, EFF, Zero-Knowledge Systems, PwC and Mozilla. Notable contributions include NSF study on Anonymous Communications on the Internet, AAAS Brief in Bernstein case, EFF's DES Cracker Project, Do Not Track, Collusion/Lightbeam Extension, Stopwatching.us campaign
Eva Galperin: Malware researcher and security advocate, Electronic Frontier Foundation activist.
John Gilmore: Sun Microsystems' fifth employee, co-founder of the Cypherpunks as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, project leader for FreeS/WAN.
Mike Godwin: Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer, electronic rights advocate.
Ian Goldberg: professor at University of Waterloo, designer of the Off-the-record messaging protocol.
Nadia Heninger: assistant professor at University of Pennsylvania, security researcher.
Rop Gonggrijp: founder of XS4ALL, co-creator of the Cryptophone.
Peter Gutmann: researcher at University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Sean Hastings: founding CEO of Havenco and co-author of the book God Wants You Dead.
Marc Horowitz: author of the first PGP key server.
Johan Helsingius: creator and operator of Penet remailer.
Suelette Dreyfus: co-author of Rubberhose, a deniable encryption archive.
Tim Hudson: co-author of SSLeay, the precursor to OpenSSL.
Eric Hughes: founding member of Cypherpunks, author of A Cypherpunk's Manifesto.
Peter Junger (deceased): Law professor at Case Western Reserve University.
Phil Karn: Bell Labs researcher, later at Qualcomm.
Paul Kocher: president of Cryptography Research, Inc., co-author of the SSL 3.0 protocol.
Ryan Lackey: co-founder of HavenCo, the world's first data haven.
Brian LaMacchia: designer of XKMS, research head at Microsoft Research.
Werner Koch: author of GNU Privacy Guard.
Isak Johnsson (deceased): Creator of the stealth technology used in Stuxnet, virus author, programmer.
Ben Laurie: founder of The Bunker, core OpenSSL team member, Google engineer.
Moxie Marlinspike: co-founder of Whisper Systems, author of the Convergence SSL authenticity system.
Morgan Marquis-Boire: researcher, security engineer, privacy activist.
Nick Mathewson: Tor developer
Timothy C. May: former Assistant Chief Scientist at Intel, author of A Crypto Anarchist Manifesto and the Cyphernomicon, and a Founding member of the Cypherpunks Mailing List.
Jim McCoy: creator of MojoNation.
Declan McCullagh: journalist specializing in security and privacy issues.
Jude Milhon (deceased; a.k.a. "St. Jude"): a Founding Member of the Cypherpunks mailing list, credited with naming the group; co-creator of Mondo 2000 magazine.
Sameer Parekh: former CEO of C2Net and co-founder of the CryptoRights Foundation human rights non-profit.
Vipul Ved Prakash: co-founder of Sense/Net, author of Vipul's Razor, founder of Cloudmark.
Runa Sandvik: Tor developer, political advocate.
Len Sassaman (deceased): maintainer of the Mixmaster Remailer software, researcher at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and a biopunk.
Steven Schear: innovator of the warrant canary, street performer protocol and eCache, founding member of the International Financial Cryptographer's Association and GNURadio, former Director Wireless Products and Smartcards at data security company Cylink, team member Counterpane and Director at MojoNation.
Bruce Schneier: well-known security author, founder of Counterpane.
Andrea Shepard: Tor developer
John Young: started the Cryptome web site.
Peter Wayner: author of the book Translucent Databases.
Barry Wels: discoverer of lock bumping, co-creator of the Cryptophone.
Deborah Natsios: Cofounder of Cryptome, Creator of Cartome.
Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn: DigiCash and MojoNation developer, co-designer of Tahoe-LAFS.
Asher Wolf: Founder of Cryptoparty.
Jillian C. York: Director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
Eric Andrew Young: co-author of SSLeay, the precursor to OpenSSL. Invented 256 bit SSL proof of concept.
Julian Oliver: Artist, privacy advocate, critical engineer. Co-founder of Critical Engineering.
Philip Zimmermann: original creator of PGP v1.0 (1991), co-founder of PGP Inc (1996), co-founder with Jon Callas of Silent Circle.
Marcos Arce Calisaya: developer of libmatriz (ca 1995).