A CryptoParty Manifesto

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” - Oscar Wilde

In 1996, John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), wrote ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’. It includes the following passage:

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.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Sixteen years later, and the Internet has changed the way we live our lives. It has given us the combined knowledge of humankind at our fingertips. We can form new relationships and share our thoughts and lives with friends worldwide. We can organise, communicate and collaborate in ways never thought possible. This is the world we want to hand down to our children, a world with a free Internet.

Unfortunately, not all of John Perry Barlow’s vision has come to pass. Without access to online anonymity, we can not be free from privilege or prejudice. Without privacy, free expression is not possible.

The problems we face in the 21st Century require all of humanity to work together. The issues we face are serious: climate change, energy crises, state censorship, mass surveillance and on-going wars. We must be free to communicate and associate without fear. We need to support free and open source projects which aim to increase the commons’ knowledge of technologies that we depend on http://opensourceecology.org/wiki Contribute!

To realise our right to privacy and anonymity online, we need peer-reviewed, crowd-sourced solutions. CryptoParties provide the opportunity to meet up and learn how to use these solutions to give us all the means with which to assert our right to privacy and anonymity online.

  1. We are all users, we fight for the user and we strive to empower the user. We assert user requests are why computers exist. We trust in the collective wisdom of human beings, not software vendors, corporations or governments. We refuse the shackles of digital gulags, lorded over by vassal interests of governments and corporations. We are the CypherPunk Revolutionaries.

  2. The right to personal anonymity, pseudonymity and privacy is a basic human right. These rights include life, liberty, dignity, security, right to a family, and the right to live without fear or intimidation. No government, organisation or individual should prevent people from accessing the technology which underscores these basic human rights.

  3. Privacy is the right of the individual. Transparency is a requirement of governments and corporations who act in the name of the people.

  4. The individual alone owns the right to their identity. Only the individual may choose what they share. Coercive attempts to gain access to personal information without explicit consent is a breach of human rights.

  5. All people are entitled to cryptography and the human rights crypto tools afford, regardless of race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth, political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory in which a person resides.

  6. Just as governments should exist only to serve their citizens - so too, cryptography should belong to the people. Technology should not be locked away from the people.

  7. Surveillance cannot be separated from censorship, and the slavery it entails. No machine shall be held in servitude to surveillance and censorship. Crypto is a key to our collective freedom.

  8. Code is speech: code is human created language. To ban, censor or lock cryptography away from the people is to deprive human beings from a human right, the freedom of speech.

  9. Those who would seek to stop the spread of cryptography are akin to the 15th century clergy seeking to ban the printing press, afraid their monopoly on knowledge will be undermined.