Eric Hughes is a mathematician and one of the three co-founders of the Cypherpunks mailing list, alongside tim-may and john-gilmore. He is best known for "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto" (1993), a concise statement of the cypherpunk position on privacy, cryptography, and political action that remains one of the most influential documents of the digital rights movement.
A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
Hughes's 1993 manifesto — short, precise, and rhetorically careful — opens with the statement: "Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age." Where tim-may's Crypto Anarchist Manifesto was revolutionary and provocative, Hughes's manifesto was philosophical and constructive. It distinguished privacy from secrecy, argued that privacy required the ability to be selectively disclosing rather than involuntarily transparent, and grounded the case for cryptography in a positive account of what privacy enables rather than just what surveillance threatens.
The manifesto's most quoted line — "Cypherpunks write code" — established the movement's ethos of direct technical action: rather than lobbying governments or waiting for legal change, cypherpunks would build the privacy-preserving tools themselves and release them. This philosophy produced PGP (phil-zimmermann), anonymous remailers, digital cash experiments, and eventually the infrastructure underlying Tor and Signal.
This philosophy of technical action as political action is one Hughes shares with the broader cypherpunk milieu and that distinguishes the movement from traditional civil liberties advocacy. It aligns with Schneier's own practitioner orientation, though Schneier has increasingly argued — especially in secrets-and-lies and subsequent work — that technical tools are necessary but insufficient for security and privacy.
The Cypherpunks Mailing List
Hughes, tim-may, and john-gilmore organized the first Cypherpunks meeting in September 1992 in the Bay Area. Hughes ran the technical infrastructure of the mailing list for its early years, including operating some of the first anonymous remailer systems (which allowed email to be sent without revealing the sender's identity). The list attracted cryptographers, programmers, activists, and policy thinkers and became the primary intellectual community for working out the implications of strong civilian cryptography.
The mailing list was the environment in which the technical and political arguments that shaped the crypto-wars-export-controls debates were developed. Schneier, while not a founding member of the cypherpunks, was deeply engaged with the community and its output throughout the 1990s — applied-cryptography was partly a technical synthesis of what the cypherpunk community was working with.
Privacy as Infrastructure
Hughes's contribution to Schneier's intellectual world is primarily philosophical: he articulated a framework for privacy as a positive value and a social infrastructure, not merely the absence of surveillance. This framing — privacy as something you build and maintain, not just something you protect — prefigures the arguments Schneier makes in data-and-goliath about the social costs of mass surveillance and the importance of structural privacy protection.
The manifesto's influence also runs through Schneier's thinking about the relationship between technical mechanisms and social values. Hughes argued that "open society" required privacy, and that electronic infrastructure needed to be built with privacy as a design goal rather than an afterthought. This is exactly the argument Schneier has made repeatedly about security: that it must be built in, not bolted on, and that systems designed without security will be exploited by those who understand them better than their builders do — a core principle of the security-mindset.
Hughes largely withdrew from public intellectual life in the late 1990s and 2000s, but his 1993 manifesto continues to be read as the cleanest statement of the cypherpunk philosophical position.