This Hacker Group Wants to Put the Cypher Back into Cypherpunks

The cypherpunks are broken. That's according to at least one disillusioned member of the infamous Cypherpunks mailing list, which is a vibrant place of discussion for technologists and activists interested in privacy, encryption and freedom of information.

The original Cypherpunks mailing list was launched back in 1992, and included Wikileaks editor Julian Assange and Cryptome founders John Young and Deborah Natsios among its contributors. The ideology of the list's members is encapsulated in the "Cypherpunk's Manifesto," a document published by Eric Hughes, a mathematician at University of California, Berkeley and one of the founders of the list. He stated that, "Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can't get privacy unless we all do, we're going to write it."

But a new group calling itself the Secret Admirers says that the Cypherpunks have lost their way and are not churning out enough actual code. The group has announced a new mailing list that is only hosted on the dark web and that strictly requires all members to create or maintain privacy-enhancing software. The Cypherpunks list is publicly accessible on the surface web, and anyone can join.

"Just as software and hardware can be developed for surveillance purposes, so can it be for better privacy and a truly free cyberspace," a user going by the name Trent posted to the Cypherpunks mailing list last week. "Technology itself is neutral, we choose what to build with it. The reason so little has been achieved lately is because we lost track of a fundamental point from the manifesto."

"It seems that the original Cypherpunks mailing list degraded into a debating society and very little new code is written," Trent writes. "The signal-to-noise ratio has become abysmal. Intellectual masturbation won't give us more privacy—deployed code does."

In an ironically verbose response, Cryptome's Young replied that some Cypherpunks "have become mules unable to offspring so bray at one another neuteredly."

Although Trent may feel that not much new code has come out of the mailing list recently, technological discussion does still take place there. That said, it sits along less serious conversation; a particularly popular thread last month was "Snowden on the Twitters."

The Secret Admirers' mailing list claims it will require all potential contributors to fill out an application and describe a software project they intend to work on. The "existing full members" will vote on whether to let someone else in or not. It is not clear how many people are members of the group so far.

"Secret Admirers is a community of doers. To be a member, you have to code/maintain privacy enhancing software and/or be the admin of privacy enhancing systems/services. This includes digital OPSEC tools and open-source hardware which is privacy/security related," Trent's post explains.

When asked to provide more details on his motivation, Trent told Motherboard in an encrypted email that, "What really is going to come out of this is up to the members that join and make the place their place."

Not everyone is enthused by the project, however. "I call bullshit," replied one Cypherpunk, apparently annoyed at the number of rules and regulations that the group intends to enforce.