Word: cypherpunk
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Offshore "data havens" are another piece of classic cypherpunk vaporware. Here's the pitch: just subvert one little Internet-hooked island country, say Tuvalu (.tv) or Tonga (.to), let it pass a bunch of pirate-friendly laws, and you can store anything there that American computer cops disapprove of. This might yet become a real business opportunity if the Internet gets better policed...
However, public-key encryption created a headache for the NSA by giving ordinary citizens -- and savvy criminals -- a way to exchange coded messages that could not be easily cracked. That headache became a nightmare in 1991, when a cypherpunk programmer named Phil Zimmermann combined public-key encryption with some conventional algorithms in a piece of software he called PGP -- pretty good privacy -- and proceeded to give it away, free of charge, on the Internet...
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