| This is John Gilmore, one of the greatest rebels of our time.
In the early 1990s, Gilmore started a small discussion group that met at his company's Cygnus Solutions office in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Formally, the topic was digital privacy. Informally, their mission was to defeat the government.
This clandestine gathering of minds, including the radical geniuses Eric Hughes and Timothy C. May, saw that the Internet would change the world and that there were two likely outcomes.
In the first scenario, the government would have the ability to spy on anyone, anytime: a kind of Orwellian dystopia where citizens would have zero privacy on the Internet, and free speech would gradually be extinguished.
In the second scenario, citizen privacy would be protected, allowing free speech to thrive and secure online financial transactions, which would be good for business and the economy.
Two options: dystopia or utopia. The key to it all was public cryptography. | 