"Even more than monetary gain, personal data bestows power on those who collect and analyse it, and that is what makes it so coveted." — Carissa Véliz (Privacy is power (Aeon), 2019) #data #power #surveillance #privacy

"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

"Cryptography was a technique that did not require your trusting other people." — Whitfield Diffie (ITAS Interview, 1992) #cryptography #trust #privacy

"Every action I took was out of a desire to enable people to have freedom and control over their own lives." — Ross Ulbricht (Letter to Judge Forrest, 2015) #freedom #autonomy

"Somebody had to be the first one to start banging on the Berlin Wall, with a sledgehammer, in 1989. Somebody had to be the first to walk through. Somebody had to be the first to stand up and say, 'Enough!'" — Jim Bell (Assassination Politics, 1997) #resistance #freedom

"End-to-end encryption should be the default for all communication." — Moxie Marlinspike (Signal blog, 2016) #encryption #privacy

"If you encrypted your files, then if a court wanted your files they would have to come and threaten you and you would have the control to make the choice as to whether you would surrender your files or not." — Whitfield Diffie (ITAS Interview, 1992) #encryption #privacy

"The supply of leaks is very large. It's helpful for us to have more people in this industry. It's protective to us." — Julian Assange (Forbes, 2010) #whistleblowing #transparency #leaks

"Money, like written language, was one of the most important inventions of civilization." — Nick Szabo (Shelling Out: The Origins of Money, 2002) #money #civilization #history

"The real value in encryption and the real threat to intelligence operations, both law enforcement and national security, is integrated, automatic encryption." — Martin Hellman (Charles Babbage Institute Oral History, 2004) #encryption #intelligence #surveillance

"There has never been a government that didn't sooner or later try to reduce the freedom of its subjects and gain more control over them, and there probably never will be one." — Wei Dai (Cypherpunks mailing list, 1995) #freedom #cypherpunk

"That cryptographic work is deeply tied to politics is a claim so obvious that only a cryptographer could fail to see it." — Phillip Rogaway (The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work, 2015) #cryptography #politics

"Withdrawing into technology is like pulling the blankets over your head. It feels good for a while, until reality catches up. The next Clipper or Digital Telephony proposal will provide a rude awakening." — Hal Finney (Politics vs Technology, 1994) #politics #warning

"Advances in information technology have made possible the rise of a truly international currency that does not depend on a central bank." — Nick Szabo (Bit Gold, 2005) #digitalcurrency #centralbank #international

"When you expose your privacy, you put us all at risk." — Carissa Véliz (Privacy is power (Aeon), 2019) #privacy #collective #warning #surveillance

"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

"Again, we need to win political, not technological, victories in order to protect our privacy." — Hal Finney (Politics vs Technology, 1994) #politics #privacy

"When a company goes to develop a product, that has only two options, secure or insecure, they should, from day one, define the product as either secure or insecure." — Martin Hellman (Charles Babbage Institute Oral History, 2004) #security #transparency

"Mathematics is not the law." — Tim May (CoinDesk, 2018) #mathematics #law #cryptography #philosophy

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