In the end, the Justice Department dropped its investigation into PGP, with no explanation. Zimmermann never found out whether it was his public support, Karn’s export trick, or simply a lack of political will behind his prosecution that saved him.
The government’s crypto fearmongers were busy, anyway, trying to rescue their failing Clipper Chip scheme. Public opinion had swung violently against the plan, with 80 percent of Americans opposing it in one CNN poll. Silicon Valley didn’t want to touch it. And to add to the Clinton administration’s perfect storm, an encryption researcher at Bell Labs named Matt Blaze had found a vulnerability in the scheme that made it trivial to crack. By 1996, Clipper was sunk. Zimmermann and the cypherpunks had taken on the government and won the first great battle of the Crypto Wars. Cryptography, in all its applications from grassroots activism to child pornography to terrorism to untraceable whistleblowing, belonged to the people.
As I wrap up my interview with Zimmermann and he puts his PGP source-code book back on the shelf, I ask, almost out of a sense of obligation more than hope, whether he has any idea of how I can get in touch with Tim May, or whether he’s truly become the well-armed and misanthropic mountain hermit he’s described to be.
“Let me see,” Zimmermann says. He picks up his iPhone and in a few seconds, he and May are discussing the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan and the potential of thorium reactors to replace uranium reactors in future generators. Then Zimmermann passes the phone to me.
May apologizes for not getting back to me earlier, and as we talk, he checks his e-mail’s draft folder to find that he somehow forgot to push send on his response to my message to him. In fact he’s less than a mile away, at a bookstore in downtown Santa Cruz. “Everyone always calls me the ‘elusive Tim May,’” he says into the phone, sounding flabbergasted. “I’ll talk to any reporter who calls me!”
When I find May in the Bookshop Santa Cruz, he’s just finished flipping disinterestedly through a copy of a book by former WikiLeaks staffer Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a tell-all memoir of his time at the secret-spilling group. May’s beard has expanded in the years since the 1990s, and his arched eyebrows have spiked upward like coarse dark feathers. He’s wearing a leather brimmed hat and a pink shirt with white studs, and generally looks much like the mad-scientist frontiersman recluse that Die Zeit described. But as we walk down the street to a café, he’s practically rupturing with ideas he’s ready to share: He quizzes me excitedly about a lattice-based scheme for fully homomorphic cryptography that I barely understand, and then tells me about his own ideas for lattice-based data structures, which I don’t understand at all. But when we sit down, he settles into the matter at hand, the idea that was, to many, the most influential and controversial thought he produced in his role as what John Gilmore calls “the Thomas Jefferson of the cypherpunks.” That idea was BlackNet.
BlackNet was a thought experiment, the fruit of Chaum’s anonymity ideas applied to Phil Salin’s online data market, and it aimed to prove that combination’s full potential in a wholly imaginary setting. It was also the primordial, evolutionary ancestor to WikiLeaks.
In 1993, May had learned about the Democracy Wall, a brick wall in the Xidan neighborhood of Beijing where late 1970s democracy dissidents had left poetry and antigovernment messages for each other and for the public. The government eventually cracked down on that wall-based messaging system, moving it to a park where visitors had to show identification papers to enter.
May fantasized about a true Democracy Wall online, one without restrictions, where public key cryptography would defeat the government’s identification efforts and let anyone post a message that only the recipient could retrieve. “When you licked that envelope and sent it to this site, no one in the whole fucking world would know who had sent it or who retrieved it,” May says, his voice perceptibly shaking with excitement.
In the summer of that year, May wove together his untraceable message board ideas with Phil Salin’s dream of an online information market. And he sent the following unattributed statement to the Cypherpunk Mailing List, routing it through anonymous remailers to shroud it in mystery.
Your name has come to our attention. We have reason to believe you may be interested in the products and services our new organization, BlackNet, has to offer.
BlackNet is in the business of buying, selling, trading, and otherwise dealing with information in all its many forms.
We buy and sell information using public key cryptosystems with essentially perfect security for our customers. Unless you tell us who you are (please don’t!) or inadvertently reveal information which provides clues, we have no way of identifying you, nor you us.
Our location in physical space is unimportant. Our location in cyberspace is all that matters. . . . We can be contacted (preferably through a chain of anonymous remailers) by encrypting a message to our public key (contained below) and depositing this message in one of the several locations in cyberspace we monitor.
The message went on to list types of information in which BlackNet was particularly interested, including buyout or merger rumors, trade secrets, and confidential product designs ranging from “children’s toys to cruise missiles.” And it offered to pay for them with CryptoCredits, an untraceable digital currency.
BlackNet spread through the cypherpunks and on to other mailing lists and Usenet groups like a nuclear chain reaction. May says he later learned that it reached several labs working on confidential projects, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories even issued a warning to staff to report any contact with the shadowy organization.
Just a couple of weeks after his first anonymous message, he sent out another e-mail, this time taking credit for the scheme and declaring the game over. Of course, CryptoCredits never existed. Neither did the underground cabal behind the purported digital black market. But with technologies that existed even then, they could have.
BlackNet, May wrote, was a demonstration of
“Classified classifieds,” so to speak. “No More Secrets.” At least, no more secrets that you don’t keep yourself! (A subtle point: crypto-anarchy doesn’t mean a “no secrets” society; it means a society in which individuals must protect their own secrets and not count on governments or corporations to do it for them. It also means “public secrets,” like troop movements and stealth production plans, or the tricks of implanting wafers, will not remain secret for long.)
To the governments of the world, facing these and other threats to their continued ways of doing business, the existence of strong encryption in the hands of the population is indeed a mortal threat.
In any case, it’s too late. The genie’s nearly completely out of the bottle. National borders are just speed bumps on the information highway.
Even in the short time before May called off his BlackNet experiment, it proved its purpose. Just before he sent his e-mail taking credit for the ruse, a message encrypted with BlackNet’s PGP key appeared on one of the Usenet groups that May had said BlackNet would monitor. It promised to offer evidence that the CIA was spying on ambassadors in Washington from a Central African country and to expose internal corruption in the country’s government.
As May tells it, he decrypted the message with BlackNet’s private key. He read it. Then he put it in an archive folder and never responded.
Why? May says that he had shown that BlackNet could serve its intended purpose. But he argues, a little defensively, that trying to set up a WikiLeaks-like system to distribute or publish black market information required operational security he couldn’t handle. Even if he had kept BlackNet’s source secret, he was clearly the cypherpunks’ prime suspect for enacting such a scheme. And he points out that the message may have also been a honey trap designed to ensnare him and put him in prison.
But more frankly, May says, he simply didn’t care. He was, and remains, a h
ard-core libertarian looking out for his own Randian self-interest, not a whistleblower advocate trying to expose corruption. “I’m not concerned about things like that. Let the Africans kill each other,” he says flatly. “I don’t have those kinds of political interests.”
When I later ask Jacob Appelbaum, one of the only Americans to associate openly with WikiLeaks, about his thoughts on BlackNet, he sees things more simply. “Tim May is a fucking racist,” he says. “And it’s really a shame. Because if he weren’t, he could have created WikiLeaks himself and made a real difference in the world.”
When I repeat Appelbaum’s comment to May, he chuckles. “I call ’em as I see ’em,” he says. “If I see blacks driving themselves into the gutter, I call it as it is.”
May pauses for a moment. “I had the opportunity to either light a candle or teach people how to make candles,” he says. “I had the ideas. But the idea of trying to be Julian Assange gives me the creeps.”
John Gilmore and I are looking out onto the shiny wet streets of San Francisco’s Mission District as the entire Cypherpunk Mailing List archive, all 345 megabytes spanning nearly a decade of hacker rants, attacks, critiques, and announcements that once lived on his server, is siphoned onto my thumb drive. When the bits have finished flowing from his tiny laptop to my stick of solid-state memory, Gilmore opens up the first folder.
Since the days of the cypherpunks, his long wispy beard has shifted to the whitish gray of a caricatured martial-arts master, and his manifold brow has extended to cover his eyes with hoods that wrinkle as he cracks open the cypherpunks’ dusty archives.
The first messages are introductions from Tim May, Eric Hughes, and John Gilmore, along with Eric Hughes’s declaration of the first cypherpunk remailer, built on Gilmore’s dare. And then comes another message containing only an article from The Sydney Morning Herald in August 1992.
It seems to have been sent, strangely, by the list itself. In fact, Hughes explains bemusedly, the sender used a fast and dirty trick to protect his or her anonymity, one that didn’t require any remailers or other fancy methods. The message’s header was spoofed to resemble the cypherpunk list’s, and then ricocheted off a random nonexistent address so that it would bounce back with an error message to its fake return address.
The news article details how corporations in Australia, including National Australia Bank and Citicorp, bought proprietary information about citizens from government agencies for millions of dollars, often using it to track down debtors. Gilmore looks over the text thoughtfully and turns to me.
“It seems some anonymous person has posted an article from an Australian newspaper about the government leaking information,” he says, with a smile. “I wonder who that could have been?”
CHAPTER 3
THE CYPHERPUNKS
The forty-first issue of the Melbourne University Mathematics and Statistics Society’s quarterly magazine, Paradox, contains a short but telling anecdote about the society’s most well-known former vice president.
One day during his three-year career as an undergraduate student of math and physics, Julian Assange was walking through Melbourne University’s campus when he spotted a mysterious valve protruding from the University Chemistry Building’s brick wall. He decided, spontaneously, to open it. When he did, the metal sphincter let out a deafening noise and a cloud of smoke. And for a few delightfully chaotic moments, as Assange told a fellow student later that day, the man who would advance the evolution of leaking more than anyone in the twenty-first century “was in heaven.”
A lanky, six-foot-two-inch, very pale, white-haired thirty-two-year-old, Assange cut a strange figure among the tanned teens and twentysomethings at the University of Melbourne. He was known to work at his computer for days on end with no sleep and little food. He spent much of his time camped out in the university’s Mathematics Society meeting room, usually wearing a dark gray trench coat over a T-shirt and his corn-silk hair in a ponytail. Sometimes he would stand up from his computer and perform a set of twenty or so jumping jacks, explaining to anyone present that short bouts of physical activity served a certain neurobiological function that made stimulant drugs unnecessary.
He spoke rarely about his past, and few asked. He was often accompanied by an entourage of strangers whom he declined to introduce to anyone in the room. And he mysteriously refused to let the society put his photo on its website, citing “security” reasons and insisting that it be replaced with an image of an alien.
Assange no doubt felt like an extraterrestrial among the university’s more traditional students. He described the academic physicists at one conference as “snivelling fearful conformists of woefully, woefully inferior character” and wrote that “for every Feynman or Lorentz, [there are] 100 pen-pushing wretches scratching each other’s eyes out in academic committees or building better bombs for the DSTO (Defence Science & Technology Organisation), who had provided everyone with a bag, embossed with their logo, which most physicists pathetically lugged about with pride and ignorance.”
At the time, as Assange later recounted to The Age, the Applied Maths program at the university had received funding from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (known as DARPA). Assange believed (inaccurately, according to the department’s staff) that money would ultimately go toward improving the design of the Grizzly Plow, a military bulldozer used in the first Iraq War and designed to sweep away barbed wire and sand at more than thirty-five miles per hour. The plow, as Assange described it, filled the trenches inhabited by enemy troops, rolling over them and burying them alive like an accelerated version of Tim May’s father’s bunker-burying bulldozer from World War II.
Assange was disgusted by what he saw as the military’s influence on campus and bored by formal education. If his classmates had asked about his past, they would have realized how little he had in common with them: In his three decades, he had already gone toe-to-toe with major corporations and the Pentagon as one of the world’s top pseudonymous hackers, been convicted of digital felonies, wandered Australia as a homeless vagrant, traveled to dozens of countries, run a business on the early Internet, cowritten a memoir, devised an innovative crypto-system, and, perhaps most significantly, received an education as valuable as any degree: nearly a decade of close reading, writing, and debate on the Cypherpunks Mailing List.
So, perhaps chiefly to entertain himself during his time in college, Assange invented a game: The Puzzle Hunt. Following a model invented by MIT for its venerable Mystery Hunt, the Puzzle Hunt was an elaborate campus-wide scavenger hunt punctuated with dozens of math and logic problems that drew in hundreds of students and still takes place annually on the University of Melbourne’s campus.
One of the puzzles Assange generated for that competition—and he created more of them in his first year than any other student—involved a long quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, with each letter written backward. Seemingly random gaps appeared throughout the chunk of text, and collecting the letters following those anomalies revealed a clue for the next puzzle. Another conundrum involved factoring large numbers into primes—a procedure that would have seemed natural for anyone familiar with RSA’s public key encryption tricks.
Each set of puzzles in the hunt began with a quote. One, from the Koranic figure Ja’far as-Sadiq, captured Assange’s playful love of obscurity: “Our cause is a secret within a secret, a secret that only another secret can explain; it is a secret about a secret that is veiled by a secret.”
A year after Assange left the university—he’s described quitting as a “forced move,” as in chess, “when you have to do something or you’ll lose the game”—he sent an e-mail to many of his former colleagues in the Melbourne University Math and Statistics Society asking for their participation in a new project as exciting and intellectually challenging as the Puzzle Hunt.
It was called WikiLeaks.
“Are you
interested in being involved with a courageous project to reform every political system on earth—and through that reform move the world to a more humane state?” he wrote to his old classmates. “We have only 22 people trying to usher in the start of a world-wide movement. We don’t have time to reply to most reporters’ emails, let alone the interview requests—and I leave for Africa in under a week! We need help in every area, admining, coding, sys admining, legal research, analysis, writing, proofing, manning the phone, standing around looking pretty, even making tea.”
A year later, he would write to his university math colleagues again, this time posing his project directly as an offshoot of the Puzzle Hunt’s whimsical mind games.
Hello Puzzle Hunters.
I am looking for good people, courageous people, intelligent people to help develop and run an international leaked document analysis & essay competition.
Wikileaks is only new, but we have already broken major stories in the international press that have achieved significant reforms likely to save tens of thousands of lives. Our problem? We’re drowning in leaked documents.
Across the world there are other notable analytical, mooting and essay competitions. Competition in most of these cases is what we might describe as ‘mere competition’; the motivational elements extend to social and professional standing, competition camaraderie and the pleasure of discovery and creation, but together we can create a much more interesting competition; a competition where teams of bright people form an engine for justice, a competition where:
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