I've just received an internet privacy milestone artifact in the post. I'd spent the last week delving into the politics of crypto-anarchism and the cypherpunks. The "crypto" does not refer to a covert political position as it does in the term, "crypto-fascism", but instead refers to politics concerned with privacy in the digital age.
Pictured below is the second EVER issue of WIRED, published in May of 1993. The masked gents holding the flag on the cover are the early cypherpunks, including the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and fathers of Bitcoin.
Their core philosophy (back in 1996!) was that government can never be trusted to protect civilian privacy on the internet and that it was up to private citizens to develop technology to protect it.
John Perry Barlow is among those featured - the man who published A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in 1996. (The archival record album of which I featured
on my member journal.)
These men had incredible foresight of that which has come to pass in the 20 years since the issue's publication!
