More than that, the discoveries of the cypherpunks are changing the world in a serious way.

That being so, I'd like to briefly recap what the cypherpunks discovered, because what these people found was a new world… a terra nova.

Land Ho
Our new territory was created by a combination of the Internet and encryption. The Internet gave us unlimited community, and encryption became our "city walls," allowing us to separate ourselves from the rest of the world.

The first cypherpunks, being clever lads and lasses, began using the Internet and encryption because they were interesting and fun. Shortly, however, they realized that they were actually building a terra nova, and were instantly confronted with a huge question: How should we arrange our new world? That cranked everything into high gear.

I didn't know this passage from Tom Paine's Common Sense (1776) at the time, but it captures the astonishing realization that sprang from the discovery of terra nova:

We have it in our power to begin the world over again.

The First Crypto War
Not all was sweetness and light, however. Encryption was considered a munition, and exporting it was highly illegal. But it was easy to see that public key encryption (actually key exchange, published by Diffie and Hellman in 1976) was the perfect technology for the Internet… and the Internet was not limited to the USA.

So, a group of the clever lads and lasses hatched a plan in 1991: They'd write a nice little encryption program and send it around the world. An anti-nuke advocate named Philip Zimmerman drove the project but everyone involved wanted to avoid the jail sentence that would come from exporting their new program. They did have one trick available to them, however, and that was the First Amendment.