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“There computerization it is depriving individuals of the ability to monitor and control the ways in which information about them is used. The groundwork has been laid for one dossier companywhere computers can be used to infer it lifestyle of individualstheir habits, the places they hang out and their frequentations through the data collected in the course of trivial transactions between individuals“.
Immersed as we are in the concept, all in all new, of “Surveillance capitalism”it might surprise you to find that the lines you just read date back to almost 40 years ago. To be precise, they are taken from an article – entitled Security without identification: transaction systems to make Big Brother obsolete – written by the computer scientist David Chaum in 1985.
The beginnings
Already in the eighties, in fact, with the diffusion of the computer industryprivacy and data protection concerns also began to spread, criticizing the possibility of pervasively collect citizens’ data and to create archives and data centers that contain them. In addition to the risks of abuse, the fear, already expressed at the time by thinkers who are still very active today (such as David Lyon or Shoshana Zuboff), was that the population suffered the so-called chilling effect: the reduction of the freedom of expression of individuals in a society under surveillance.
Seen today, the foreboding capacity of these experts is impressive: almost a decade before, through the world wide web, the internet began to spread among the population, what were the dangers inherent in this new and revolutionary technology it was already clear to some. Also at that stage, despite the need for increasingly advanced and secure hardware and software, governments like the United States began their long and still active battle for oppose the systems that defend the confidentiality of communications.
And so, influenced by the ideas of David Chaum, in 1988 the computer engineer Timothy May (at the time employed at Intel) begins distributing flyers of what will become his celebrity Crypto Anarchist Manifesto: “[Gli sviluppi tecnologici] they will completely alter the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, our ability to keep information secret and even the nature of trust and reputation (…). The state will obviously try to slow down or block the spread of this technology, citing national security issues or the use of technology by drug traffickers or tax evaders. Many of these concerns are valid (…), but this will not stop the spread of crypto-anarchy “.
Cryptoanarchy is born
Officially published in 1992, this manifesto – where the term “Cryptoanarchy” basically reports one complete distrust of governments and the desire to create technologies that counteract their surveillance – was the basis from which Timothy May, in the company of his associates Eric Hughes and John Gilmore, began to organize, at the end of 1992, monthly gatherings in the San Francisco area for the purpose of discussing these issues.
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