Books
- 1948 - Codes and Secret Writing by Herbert S. Zim - Children’s book on codes and ciphers which inspired Phil Zimmermann to pursue cryptography as an interest
- 1967 (and 1996) - The Codebreakers – The Story of Secret Writing by David Kahn - this book is a complete chronicle of codebreaking and code making since Ancient Egypt and assisted Whitfield Diffie in his quest to break the government’s monopoly on cryptographic information. (A PDF of the abridged first edition is available via google search, but as it’s not the full version, and doesn’t include infromation about Alan Turing’s work on Enigma, I’m not including it)
- Jul 1968 - The Broken Seal by Ladislas Farago - This details pre-Pearl Harbor cryptanalytic work against Japanese naval codes
- 19-Sep-1982 - The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America’s Most Secret Agency by James Bramford - An exposé on the workings of the US National Security Agency, which had traditionally sought to monopolise cryptographic information and talent within its own walls - scribd link
- 16-Apr-2001 - Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates, and Pirate Utopias - A colletion of essays from the same era as the cypherpunk mailing list; some of them from the list itself. A favourite book of Cody Wilson - pdf link
- 31-Dec-2001 - Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age by Steven Levy - I personally recommend this book as it provides a lot of contextual information about the world the cypherpunks of the 90s lived in
- 20-Mar-2012 - Cypherpunks, Freedom, and the Future of the Internet - An edited and contextualised transcript of a discussion between Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann about “whether the internet will emancipate or enslave all of us.” (The full text is available in multiple formats via the Internet Archive; a mostly uncut video recording of the dicussion was also published in June 2012: part 1 and part 2)
- 13-Sep-2012 - This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information by Andy Greenberg - A history of the cypherpunk movement, including interviews with WikiLeaks, whistleblowers, cryptographers, and other politically-motivated hackers. (This book is available for loan via the Open Library; note that the paperback edition has a slightly different title)
Please note that the information presented on this site was composed from publicly available materials in mainly 2017 and 2018 and has not been significantly updated since.
The information presented here may be significantly out of date or even inaccurate. In the case of inaccuracy, please file an Issue in the GitHub repo. The site should not be used as a source of truth.