For their eyes only

In the late 1990s in a central Auckland warehouse, I ran New Zealand's first cypherpunk anonymous remailer together with some friends. Anonymous remailers made it possible to send encrypted, anonymous e-mails; the idea was that this would guard free speech from the chilling effects of surveillance. In our more optimistic moments, we felt that the Internet would operate as a "Liberation Technology," facilitating free and open discourse in a manner that could naturally ... only be positive. Of course, this type of technology would need to be nurtured, and people would need secure communications in order to empower the type of discussion which was essential to freedom and transparency in the Information Age. At the time this technology was not widely used, however, the views of the nascent cypherpunk scene were in some ways highly prescient.