John Gilmore

In his author biography on the Internet Society website he writes that he has spent most of his life programming and that in 1973 he wrote commercial email software for mainframes.⁠[1]

He was an early employee of Sun Microsystems. In the same biography he writes that at Sun he worked as a hardware/software interface engineer, writing boot ROMs and maintaining Sun’s sendmail. In a 2007 interview with Giganews he said that he had been in computers for a decade before joining Sun but had no experience with Unix, and that he learned much of what he knew about Unix and C from Usenet, where he could follow discussions and ask questions and so got up to speed quickly without burdening colleagues with basic questions.⁠[2][1][3]

The Register wrote in 2021 that he was hired as employee number five at Sun; an IEEE Spectrum article of 2014, by contrast, describes John Gage as Sun employee number five.⁠[4][5]

The introduction to the Giganews interview states that he co-authored the Bootstrap Protocol of 1985.⁠[3]

The Giganews introduction states that he, Brian Reid and Gordon Moffett are credited with founding Usenet’s alt.* hierarchy; the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) profile and The Register also name him as a co-creator of the Internet’s “alt” newsgroups.⁠[3][2][4]

In the 2007 interview he said that they designed “alt” as an “escape hatch” from the restraints imposed on the other newsgroups; he believed that alt would have gained less traction had the rest of newsgroup administration been more open, and that by the point alt.sex was created it was clear that many more alt groups would follow.⁠[3]

In the interview he said that Brian Reid and other San Francisco Bay Area Usenet administrators brought home to him that everyone who uses computer communications, or even phones, needs to relearn the lessons of physical human contact once in a while; the Bay Area administrators met in person and built a human community, not just a computer network. He later applied this to meetings of the remote employees Cygnus hired and to the BayFF meetings he ran in San Francisco for EFF members. He also said that Usenet was the support community of the GNU project, through which large numbers of bug reports, patches and new contributions passed; that he strongly suspected most people who did computer science in the 1980s and early 1990s were first exposed to free software and the GNU project via Usenet; and that FAQs were invented on Usenet.⁠[3]

He said in 2007 that he had stopped using Usenet about a decade earlier and that his attention now went to email, paper mail, personal and work projects, IRC channels and friendships; he remembered the Usenet of fewer users as more of a community and compared it to a childhood hometown he no longer lived in.⁠[3]

In his account “Future of Cygnus Solutions: An Entrepreneur’s Account,” published by O’Reilly, Michael Tiemann writes that Cygnus Solutions was founded in 1989 and that on November 13, 1989, the company received the letter from the California Department of Corporations informing it that its application had been approved, which allowed it to deposit its $6,000 of startup capital and begin doing business as “Cygnus Support.” Tiemann writes that in Richard Stallman’s GNU Manifesto he saw a business plan in disguise, and that he later dropped out of the Ph.D. program at Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry to start a company.⁠[6]

Tiemann writes that the company had three founders, none of whom had any experience in running a business; he calls David Henkel-Wallace (Gumby) the second Cygnus founder and John Gilmore the third. The company wrote its first contract in February 1990, had written over $150,000 worth of contracts by the end of April, and by the end of its first year had written $725,000 worth of support and development contracts; in 1990 it had only five people: one salesperson, one part-time graduate student and the three founders.⁠[6]

Tiemann writes that Gilmore took on GDB, the GNU Debugger: he posted a message to the Net announcing that he would be the new GDB maintainer and asking developers to send him their GDB sources, collected 137 versions of GDB in six weeks and began designing the architecture of GDB 4.0. Tiemann also records a slogan attributed to Gilmore: “Cygnus--We Make Free Software Affordable.”⁠[6]

In the 2007 interview Gilmore said that he co-led Cygnus Support and hired remote employees, and that when the Web took off he was deep in the early years of Cygnus Support.⁠[3]

EFF’s executive director Cindy Cohn wrote in 2021 that he co-founded EFF in 1990 with John Perry Barlow, Steve WozniakSteve WozniakSteve Wozniak (born 1950), widely known as “Woz,” is an American engineer, entrepreneur and philanthropist. He designed the Apple I and Apple II personal computers, co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne in 1976, and received the National Medal of Technology with Jobs in 1985. He later founded or co-founded companies including CL 9, Woz U, Efforce and Privateer, and has long supported computer education in schools and sponsored technology museums.Open the full entry and Mitch Kapor and that his significant financial support over many years was critical to the organization’s survival and growth; he also recruited key people to the organization, including former executive director Shari Steele, Cohn herself, the current executive director, and Lee Tien, senior staff attorney and Adams Chair for Internet Rights.⁠[7]

An Associated PressAssociated PressThe Associated Press is a cooperative news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it is the oldest and largest news agency in the United States.Open the full entry report of 1998 described him as a director of EFF and stated that he co-founded it in 1990.⁠[8]

Elon University’s Imagining the Internet database states that Timothy C. MayTimothy C. MayTimothy C. May (1951–2018) was a physicist and writer who, while at Intel, identified alpha particles as the cause of soft errors in dynamic memory chips; he wrote “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto” in 1988, co-founded the Cypherpunks mailing list with Eric Hughes and others in 1992, and wrote “The Cyphernomicon,” a document in FAQ form.Open the full entry co-founded the Cypherpunks with Eric HughesEric HughesEric Hughes is a co-founder of the Cypherpunks, the author of “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto” (1993), and the writer of remailer software, programs that forward email anonymously, used by members of the Cypherpunks mailing list.Open the full entry and John Gilmore; the profiles published by EFF and by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) also name him as a co-creator of the Cypherpunks.⁠[9][2][10]

The Register wrote in 2001 that Gilmore co-founded the Cypherpunks mailing list, a forum on computer security and privacy, in the early 1990s and that the list’s original home was toad.com; Quote Investigator states that Gilmore operates the domain toad.com and calls his website “Toad Hall.”⁠[11][12]

WIRED’s second issue, published in May 1993, carried Steven LevySteven LevySteven Levy is an American technology journalist and author, editor at large at Wired, who has written about the digital revolution and the people behind it for almost four decades; his books include Hackers, Crypto and In the Plex.Open the full entry’s “Crypto Rebels” as its cover story, with Timothy C. May, Eric Hughes and John Gilmore on the cover. Reason’s 2018 obituary of Timothy C. May states that May and Hughes, along with the free-speech activist John Gilmore, wore masks on the cover of the second issue of Wired, which accompanied a profile by the journalist Steven Levy.⁠[13][14]

A Blockworks article marking the 32nd anniversary of that cover states that “to say that there might be no BitcoinBitcoinBitcoin (common symbol BTC) is an open peer-to-peer electronic cash protocol, network, and native digital asset. Full nodes independently verify transactions and blocks according to the consensus rules; transactions are recorded as UTXOs, and blocks are organized into a public ledger through proof of work. Bitcoin is not issued or managed by any single institution, but using, holding in custody, and trading it still involve key, privacy, market, and legal risks.Open the full entry without the Cypherpunks is a severe understatement,” and that public-key cryptography went on to become a cornerstone of the modern internet and of “everyone’s bitcoin.”⁠[13]

Quote Investigator’s research of 2021 states that Howard Rheingold, in The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, published in September 1993, attributed to him the saying “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it,” calling him a “CMC telecom pioneer”; Philip Elmer-DeWitt’s article “First Nation in Cyberspace” in the December 6, 1993, issue of TIMETIMETIME is an American newsmagazine and media brand founded by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, which published its first issue on March 3, 1923; it is headquartered in New York and known for its Person of the Year selection and the TIME100 list. Since 2018 it has been personally owned by Marc and Lynne Benioff; its current Chief Executive Officer is Jessica Sibley, and its Editor-in-Chief is Sam Jacobs.Open the full entry also attributed the saying to him, as “Internet pioneer John Gilmore.”⁠[12]

John Perry Barlow repeated the saying in his article “Thinking locally, acting globally” in TIME of January 15, 1996, again calling him an “Internet pioneer.”⁠[15]

Quote Investigator states that in the section “Things I’ve Said (That People Sometimes Remember)” of his website he explains that the saying originally meant that the Usenet software was resistant to censorship, because if a node drops certain messages because it does not like their subject, the messages find their way by some other route, and that the meaning of the phrase has grown through the years. In the 2007 Giganews interview he said that the saying came directly out of his Usenet experience and that he was talking about Usenet when he first said it: with redundant feeds, censored information automatically comes in from the other feeds; he pointed readers to Paul Baran’s seminal 1964 work at RAND.⁠[12][3]

EFF’s DES Cracker project page states that on July 17, 1998, the EFF DES Cracker, built for less than $250,000, easily won RSA Laboratory’s “DES Challenge II” contest and a $10,000 cash prize, taking less than three days and shattering the previous record of 39 days set by a massive network of tens of thousands of computers. The page names Paul Kocher as the designer and Advanced Wireless Technologies as the builder of the hardware; the research results are fully documented in the book Cracking DES: Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics, and Chip Design, published that week by EFF and O’Reilly and Associates, with a foreword by Whitfield DiffieWhitfield DiffieWhitfield Diffie (born 1944) is an American cryptographer who, with Martin Hellman, published the paper “New Directions in Cryptography” in 1976, introducing the ideas of public-key cryptography and digital signatures and the method of key exchange later named after the two, Diffie–Hellman key exchange, for which they received the 2015 A.M. Turing Award; he was chief security officer of Sun Microsystems and has long advocated the right of individuals and businesses to use encryption.Open the full entry.⁠[16]

The Associated Press report states that the computer consisted of 27 circuit boards each holding 64 chips, tested 88 billion possible combinations every second for 56 hours, and that the contest was sponsored by RSA Data Security Inc. of San Mateo, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry.⁠[8]

Speaking as EFF co-founder and project leader, he said that the team “searched more than 88 billion keys every second, for 56 hours, before we found the right 56-bit key” to decrypt the answer to the RSA challenge, which was “It's time for those 128-, 192-, and 256-bit keys.” He said that EFF had proved what scientists had argued for twenty years, that DES can be cracked quickly and inexpensively, and that when the government will not reveal relevant facts the private sector must independently conduct the research and publish the results so that everyone can see the social trade-offs involved in policy choices.⁠[17][8]

Cohn wrote in 2021 that the machine whose construction Gilmore led publicly showed that DES, the Data Encryption Standard of the 1970s, was so weak that it could be broken in one week for an investment of less than $350,000, and that this catalyzed the international creation and adoption of the much stronger Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).⁠[7]

Cohn wrote in 2021 that in the 1990s Gilmore found the government documents that confirmed the First Amendment problem with the government’s export controls over encryption and helped initiate the filing of Bernstein v. DOJ, which resulted in a court ruling that software source code was speech protected by the First Amendment and that the government’s regulations preventing its publication were unconstitutional; the decision, Cohn wrote, made it legal in 1999 for web browsers, websites and software such as PGP and Signal to use the encryption of their choice.⁠[7]

In his Internet Society author biography he writes that he is advising and cheerleading an EFF lawsuit designed to eliminate the export controls on cryptographic software, that he is inspiring the creation of free software for automatic packet encryption using the IETF’s IPSEC, and that he is working on securing the Domain Name System (DNS).⁠[1]

In January 1999 he received a 1999 RSA Award; EFF’s DES Cracker project page lists the press release of January 18, 1999, on the award and names him as EFF co-founder and DES Cracker project leader.⁠[16]

On January 19, 1999, an EFF press release announced that Distributed.Net and EFF had again won RSA’s code-breaking contest: EFF’s DES Cracker, working with nearly 100,000 PCs around the world, had broken DES Challenge III in 22 hours and 15 minutes, beating the previous record of 56 hours; at the moment the key was found they were testing 245 billion keys per second, the decrypted message read “See you in Rome (second AES Conference, March 22-23, 1999),” and the winners received a $10,000 prize.⁠[18]

Speaking again as EFF co-founder and project leader, Gilmore said that the team “searched more than 240 billion keys every second for nearly 23 hours,” and added: “The government’s current encryption policies favoring DES risk the security of the national and world infrastructure.”⁠[18]

On November 15, 1999, Red Hat announced a stock-for-stock acquisition of Cygnus Solutions valued at $674 million on the basis of Red Hat’s closing price on November 12; Red Hat would issue up to 6,624,344 shares for all of Cygnus’s outstanding securities, the deal was to be accounted for as a pooling of interests, subject to Cygnus shareholder approval and expected to close by January 27, 2000, and Red Hat president Matthew Szulik was to become president and chief executive of the combined company. The press release describes Cygnus as a privately held company founded in 1989 and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, providing open-source software development platforms and tools covering more than 125 host-target combinations, with Alex Daly as its president and chief executive.⁠[19]

The Register wrote on November 30, 2001, that the Cypherpunks mailing list had been “booted unceremoniously” from its birthplace, toad.com, earlier that week and would continue to be hosted on other sites. The article states that in an open posting to several mailing lists Gilmore all but dismissed the forum, writing that it had “degenerated a long time ago” and that he had no idea why more than 500 people were still receiving it every day.⁠[11]

The later opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit states that on July 4, 2002, he attempted to fly from Oakland International Airport to Baltimore-Washington International Airport on a Southwest Airlines flight, with paper tickets he had already purchased, but refused to show identification to the airline’s staff; when a clerk said that he could opt to be screened at the gate in lieu of presenting identification, he left without being searched at the gate. Later that day at San Francisco International Airport he attempted to buy a ticket for a United AirlinesUnited AirlinesUnited Airlines is an airline based in Chicago, Illinois, United States. It is wholly owned by the Nasdaq-listed United Airlines Holdings, Inc. and is a member of Star Alliance. One of its founding carriers, Varney Air Lines, made its first flight in 1926, and the company merged with Continental Airlines in 2010.Open the full entry flight to Washington, D.C., again refused to show identification, was informed by United’s ground security chief that he could fly without presenting identification by undergoing a more intensive “selectee” search, refused to allow his bag to be searched by hand and was therefore barred from flying.⁠[20]

The opinion states that he intended to travel to Washington, D.C., to “petition the government for redress of grievances and to associate with others for that purpose,” and that he had not flown since September 11, 2001. The federal government’s 2006 brief to the U.S. Supreme CourtSupreme Court of the United StatesThe Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court of the U.S. federal judiciary. Established under the Constitution and the Judiciary Act of 1789, it has consisted since 1869 of a Chief Justice and eight Associate Justices and sits in Washington, D.C.Open the full entry states that he went to San Francisco International Airport to buy a ticket to Washington from United Air Lines and saw a sign reading “PASSENGERS MUST PRESENT IDENTIFICATION UPON INITIAL CHECK-IN,” and that he was not punished for refusing to show identification or submit to a search. The report published by Aviation Pros states that both airlines said they were following federal directives.⁠[20][21][22]

On July 18, 2002, he sued in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (styled on appeal John Gilmore v. Alberto R. Gonzales, et al.), challenging a set of aviation security measures he called “the Scheme”; the claims at issue on appeal concerned due process (vagueness and unbridled discretion), the right to travel, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to associate and the right to petition the government. District Judge Susan Yvonne Illston dismissed the complaint with prejudice, dismissing the due process claim for lack of jurisdiction and rejecting the other claims on the merits.⁠[21][20]

On January 26, 2006, a Ninth Circuit panel of Stephen S. Trott, Thomas G. Nelson and Richard A. Paez, in an opinion by Paez (435 F.3d 1125), held that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Security Directive underlying the identification policy was an “order” under 49 U.S.United StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entryC. § 46110(a), so that the district court lacked jurisdiction over challenges to the policy; it transferred the case to itself under 28 U.S.C. § 1631 as a petition for review and held that he had standing to challenge only the identification policy. On the merits it held that the policy gave adequate notice and articulated clear standards, that the Constitution does not guarantee travel by any particular mode, that a request for identification is not a seizure, that the search was reasonable because passengers could decline it and leave, that he had a meaningful choice among showing identification, submitting to a search or leaving, and that the policy neither directly and substantially impaired association nor prevented him from petitioning the government. The disposition reads “TRANSFERRED, PETITION DENIED.”⁠[20]

The Aviation Pros report of January 27, 2006, states that the court reviewed the policy privately, the government having withheld it in court for security reasons, and that Paez wrote that “the Constitution does not guarantee the right to travel by any particular form of transportation.” It states that Justice Department lawyer Joshua Waldman argued that demanding identification “promotes the right to travel by protecting everyone’s safety.” His lawyer, William Simpich, said that if the government wanted to enforce the regulations it should disclose them to the public in writing, that it did not because “they don’t want scrutiny,” and: “We think this is designed as a charade and doesn’t make anybody safer.” Simpich said he was weighing whether to appeal.⁠[22]

He then petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for review (No. 06-211). In November 2006 the federal government filed its brief in opposition, arguing that he had received the notice that due process requires because he had actual notice of the identification requirement through oral instructions.⁠[21]

On October 22, 2021, EFF executive director Cindy Cohn announced on EFF’s website that, because the two sides “have not seen eye-to-eye on how to best communicate and work together” in recent years, the EFF Board had made the difficult decision to vote to remove Gilmore from the Board and had then made him Board Member Emeritus. Cohn wrote that EFF valued his opinions even when they disagreed: “It is no overstatement to say that EFF would not exist without him.” Gilmore’s statement was: “My departure will leave a strong board and an even stronger staff who care deeply about these issues.”⁠[7][4]

The Register wrote on October 25, 2021, that as Board Member Emeritus he has no vote, that Cohn’s post did not describe the dispute and that EFF does not appear to publish board minutes or its constitution, so that the reasons for the removal and the governance powers behind it were unclear. An update to the report states that Cohn called it “essentially a personnel matter,” that EFF would keep the details confidential and that it was pleased that he was staying on in the emeritus role.⁠[4]

In his Internet Society author biography he writes that he wrote pdtar, which became GNU tar, and GNU UUCP, and that he maintained GDB and Kerberos for several years; the Giganews introduction states that he contributed to free software, including the GNU project. EFF’s profile calls him an early open-source author.⁠[1][3][2]

In his Internet Society author biography he writes that he now calls himself an entrepreneur, meaning that he starts things, and lists ventures he was involved in starting: EFF, Sun Microsystems, the “alt” newsgroups, the Cypherpunks, the Internet service provider The Little Garden and Cygnus Support; he also writes that he has served on the boards of EFF, Cygnus and the Sun User Group.⁠[1]

EFF’s profile describes him as an entrepreneur and civil libertarian with some thirty years in programming, hardware and software design, management, philosophy, philanthropy and investing, and as a board member of the USENIX Association, CodeWeavers and ReQuest; it adds that he wants people to think more about the society they are building.⁠[2]

EFF’s profile states that his advocacy on encryption policy aims to improve public understanding of this fundamental technology for privacy and accountability in open societies, and that his advocacy on drug policy aims to reduce the immense harm caused by current attempts to control the mental states of free citizens. The Giganews introduction describes him as an avid political and social activist with interests in U.S. security policy, freedom of information, drug policy reform and the One Laptop Per Child project.⁠[2][3]

The website of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) lists him as an independent voting member of its board, serving as vice chair and secretary of the board and head of its audit committee. The biography on that page describes him as an entrepreneur and civil libertarian who has spent 40 years in programming, hardware and software design, management, advocacy, philosophy, philanthropy and investment and who, besides MAPS, sits on the boards of EFF and the Marijuana Policy Project.⁠[10]

The Ninth Circuit’s 2006 opinion describes him as a California resident and a U.S. citizen; the Aviation Pros report of the same year calls him “Gilmore, of San Francisco” and an active member of the Libertarian Party.⁠[20][22]

Personal website: https://www.toad.com/gnu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[12]

Electronic Frontier Foundation: Official website: https://www.eff.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies: Official website: https://maps.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[10]