John Gilmore

Do regular folks need to worry about encryption? John Gilmore, who helped found the crypto-advocacy group Cypherpunks, as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, believes they do. "Regular folks write love letters, regular folks talk to their kids." Regular folks, in other words, have a right to expect privacy in their electronic communications.

In this interview with John Borland, Gilmore discusses why and how he's working to keep encryption free. (Recorded Feb. 11, 1998.)

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Career
Software designer for Sun Microsystems. Co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Berkeley, Calif.-based Cypherpunk group, and the "alt" region of Usenet. Current EFF board member and member of the Council of Registrars (CORE).

Home
San Francisco, Calif.

Family
Single

First Computer
"Hard to say, maybe a programmable Wang calculator. I did my physics problems on it in high school. it's also possible it was a Cardiac, which was a cardboard computer made by Bell Labs and distributed to high schools to teach kids how computers worked. It had like 10 memory cells, 30 program steps and the memory was done by pencil and paper. It was great."

First Time On The Internet
"I was on the ARPA Net. I was working for a time-sharing company near Washington, D.C., and we were the first company to get on Telenet, which was kind of a spin-off from using the ARPA Net technology to build a commercial packet-switching network. One of the technicians who came to install the Telenet showed me the ARPA Net, and I started exploring it. This must have been about ’75 or ’76."

Optimistic Statement About The Internet
"I think the Net can really provide a new flowering of free expression for all of humanity. That has historically been a very positive thing for society, has tended to eliminate a lot of false beliefs, and get rid of all kinds of evils, from slavery through sexual repression and oppression. All these kinds of things have been worked out by free expression, by people expressing their opinions, arguing back and forth and convincing each other. The more of that we can have, the less bloodshed we’ll have over those kinds of big issues."

Pessimistic Statement About The Internet
"I think the Net is also the easiest medium of expression to automate totalitarianism in. Computers are very good at following policies that have been laid down for them by their designers, and at processing large amounts of communications, and checking