"Stopping leaks is a new form of censorship. And in the same manner that very significant resources spent on China's firewall, the result is that anyone who's motivated can work around it." — Julian Assange (Forbes, 2010) #censorship #leaks

"If everyone's every action were being monitored, and everyone technically violates some obscure law at some time, then punishment becomes purely selective. Those in power will essentially have what they need to punish anyone they'd like, whenever they choose, as if there were no rules at all." — Moxie Marlinspike (We Should All Have Something To Hide, 2013) #surveillance #selectiveenforcement #power #law

"Arise, You have nothing to lose but your barbed-wire fences." — Steven Levy (Crypto Rebels (WIRED), 1993) #cypherpunk #freedom #resistance

"Bitcoin is not a list of cryptographic features, it's a very complex system of interacting mathematics and protocols in pursuit of what was a very unpopular goal." — Nick Szabo (Bitcoin, what took ye so long?, 2011) #bitcoin #cryptography #protocols

"The people in this room hope for a world where an individual's informational footprints—everything from an opinion on abortion to the medical record of an actual abortion—can be traced only if the individual involved chooses to reveal them; a world where coherent messages shoot around the globe by network and microwave, but intruders and feds trying to pluck them out of the vapor find only gibberish." — Steven Levy (Crypto Rebels (WIRED), 1993) #privacy #cypherpunk #encryption #freedom

"The goal of electronic cash is to allow these same kinds of private transactions to take place electronically." — Hal Finney (Protecting privacy with electronic cash, 1993) #digitalcash #privacy #transactions

"The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration." — Tim May (The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, 1988) #government #regulation

"The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting." — Edward Snowden (The Guardian Interview, 2013) #nsa #surveillance #masssurveillance

"I would like to die peacefully in my sleep, knowing that I helped create a better world for those who come after me." — Hal Finney (BitcoinTalk Forum, 2013)

"The key question at the heart of the cypherpunk movement was not freedom, but the crisis of freedom in a situation of extensive social control of dominant institutions over private individuals." — Enrico Beltramini (Against technocratic authoritarianism, 2020) #cypherpunk #freedom #surveillance #control

"Building security from day one is much easier than adding it on as an afterthought." — Martin Hellman (Charles Babbage Institute Oral History, 2004) #security

"I even question Mike's point about the government's inability to ban books. Look at the difficulty in keeping PGP available in this country even though it is legal. Not only have FTP sites been steadily closed down, even the key servers have as well." — Hal Finney (Politics vs Technology, 1994) #government #censorship #politics #pgp

"The tech powers that be are nothing without our data." — Carissa Véliz (Privacy is power (Aeon), 2019) #data #power #resistance #techcompanies

"That's why our primary defense isn't law, but technology." — Julian Assange (Forbes, 2010) #law #defense #wikileaks

"'Swiss banks in cyberspace' will make economic transactions much more liquid and much less subject to local rules and regulations." — Tim May (Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities, 1994) #digitalcash #economics #regulation #freedom

"I am an engineer, not a mathematician. I try to find practical solutions to actual problems." — Philip Zimmermann (GrepLaw, 2003) #cryptography

"Google and Facebook are not really in the business of data – they are in the business of power." — Carissa Véliz (Privacy is power (Aeon), 2019) #surveillance #power #techcompanies #data

"Because cash is permissionless, it is censorship resistant." — Jerry Brito (The Case for Electronic Cash, 2019) #cash #censorship #permissionless #freedom

"I believed in the idea of giving people the freedom to buy and sell and connect with each other without the all-seeing eye of government watching every move." — Ross Ulbricht (Letter to Judge Forrest, 2015) #freedom #privacy

"Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live." — John Perry Barlow (A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, 1996) #cyberspace #philosophy #digitalworld