"We need to make cryptography the solution to the problem: 'how do you make surveillance more expensive?'" — Phillip Rogaway (The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work, 2015) #cryptography #surveillance #resistance

"If you go into a store today and make a purchase with cash, no records are left tying you personally to the transaction. With no records, there is nothing to go into a computer database. 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

"Public key cryptography is a revolution that puts control of privacy into the hands of the individual." — Whitfield Diffie (New Directions in Cryptography, 1976) #cryptography #publickey #privacy

"Power over others' privacy is the quintessential kind of power in the digital age" — Carissa Véliz (Privacy is power (Aeon), 2019) #privacy #power #digitalage #surveillance

"There is nothing quite so disempowering as a government that can read all your most intimate thoughts and correspondence." — Philip Zimmermann (Why I Wrote PGP, 1991) #surveillance #government #privacy

"A smart contract is a set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on these promises." — Nick Szabo (Smart Contracts: Building Blocks for Digital Markets, 1996) #smartcontracts #digital #protocols

"Capable, generous men do not create victims, they nurture them." — Julian Assange (Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, 2012)

"'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

"When Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list, he got a skeptical reception at best. Cryptographers have seen too many grand schemes by clueless noobs." — Hal Finney (BitcoinTalk Forum, 2013) #bitcoin #satoshi #history

"By the 1990s, at the NSA at least, they figured out that it was impossible to totally snuff the stuff, and that there was a need for some form of crypto for citizens. So the idea was to keep the strong stuff out of general usage, by banning its export." — Steven Levy (The WELL - Crypto Discussion, 2001) #nsa #cryptography #exportlaws #government

"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

"Bulk collection, which should become one of the dirtiest phrases in the language if we have any kind of decency." — Edward Snowden (Joe Rogan Experience, 2019) #surveillance #masssurveillance

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

"Privacy gives each of us more control over his own life—which on average, if not in every case, is likely to lead to a freer world." — David D. Friedman (The Case for Privacy, 2005) #privacy #freedom

"User-controlled privacy is not a niche; it's a fundamental building block of a healthy and stable society." — Zooko Wilcox (Cypherpunk Technologies Press Release, 2023) #privacy

"Governments see their powers eroded by these technologies, and are taking various well-known steps to try to limit the use of strong crypto by their subjects." — Tim May (Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities, 1994) #government #cryptography #regulation

"Remember, there are a lot tyrants out there." — Tim May (CoinDesk, 2018) #tyranny #warning #freedom

"Most people are unaware of how visible email is. Email could be intercepted by a lot of parties along the way, it could be captured and logged, scanned and then used years later." — Philip Zimmermann (GrepLaw, 2003) #email #surveillance #privacy #interception

"I wanted to empower people to make their own choices, to pursue their own happiness." — Ross Ulbricht (Letter to Judge Forrest, 2015) #freedom #empowerment

"Cash is also pretty good for privacy because there's no camera that can capture every movement of a dollar bill every time it moves; it just wouldn't work." — Peter Valkenburgh (Your Secret Right to Cash, 2017) #cash #privacy #surveillance #technology