Tim May (1951–2018) was an Intel physicist who retired young after his stock options made him wealthy, then became one of the founding figures of the cypherpunk movement. His 1988 "Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" — distributed at a hacker conference before the internet made such distribution trivial — predicted that public-key cryptography would fundamentally transform how people interacted with states and corporations, enabling untraceable transactions, anonymous communication, and the eventual dissolution of nation-state authority over economic and informational life.
The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto
May's 1988 manifesto opened: "A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy." Written in the style of Marx's Communist Manifesto, it argued that public-key cryptography — the whitfield-diffie breakthrough — would enable a world in which states could no longer tax, regulate, or surveil digital transactions. The manifesto was explicitly revolutionary and libertarian: May was not asking for legal reforms or policy changes, but announcing the technical inevitability of a cryptographic revolution that would make state power irrelevant.
This framing was influential and polarizing. It positioned strong encryption as inherently subversive of state authority — exactly the framing that made the NSA and the FBI most hostile to civilian cryptography. The government's fear underlying the clipper-chip-announcement and the crypto-wars-export-controls was precisely what May was advertising: that strong crypto would undermine state control. The cypherpunk movement that May co-founded, alongside eric-hughes and john-gilmore, embodied this revolutionary framing.
The Cypherpunks and Their Mailing List
In 1992, May, Hughes, and Gilmore founded the Cypherpunks mailing list — initially a meeting of technically sophisticated cryptographers and activists in the San Francisco Bay Area, rapidly expanding to thousands of participants online. The list was the intellectual hub of 1990s crypto-politics, where phil-zimmermann distributed PGP, where the debates over the Clipper Chip were most intensely argued, and where the culture of "cypherpunk writes code" was established.
May's contribution to the list was ideological: he wrote extensively about crypto-anarchy, digital cash, information markets, and the use of cryptographic tools to build structures that would resist state and corporate capture. His "BlackNet" thought experiment — a hypothetical anonymous information market where state secrets could be bought and sold — was deliberately provocative, intended to force people to think through the implications of strong cryptography. The NSA found it threatening enough to investigate.
Relationship to Schneier's Intellectual World
May and Schneier represent adjacent but distinct positions in the crypto politics of the 1990s. May was a revolutionary; Schneier was a practitioner and analyst. May believed cryptography would transform society regardless of what states did; Schneier argued that cryptography was a tool whose effects depended on how it was deployed, governed, and integrated into social systems. secrets-and-lies represents Schneier's most direct engagement with this gap: the book argues that cryptography does not automatically produce security, and that the utopian framing of cypherpunk ideology missed the institutional and human dimensions of how security actually works.
This is not hostility — Schneier shared the cypherpunks' commitment to civilian access to strong cryptography and opposed key escrow for many of the same reasons May did. But Schneier's arguments were pragmatic and policy-oriented where May's were ideological and revolutionary. The distinction matters because Schneier's approach ultimately proved more influential with policymakers: the policy community could engage with arguments about technical security properties more readily than with crypto-anarchist manifestos.
May's later years included increasingly dark commentary on what he saw as the failure of crypto-anarchy to materialize as predicted — the internet had become more surveilled, more centralized, and more controlled than his 1988 manifesto anticipated. The concerns that Schneier developed in data-and-goliath about surveillance and power were, in a sense, a diagnosis of exactly the problem May had been hoping cryptography would prevent.