WJacob Appelbaum is an American independent journalist, computer security researcher, artist, and hacker. He studies at the Eindhoven University of Technology, and was formerly a core member of the Tor project, a free software network designed to provide online anonymity. Appelbaum is also known for representing WikiLeaks. He has displayed his art in a number of institutions across the world and has collaborated with artists such as Laura Poitras, Trevor Paglen, and Ai Weiwei. His journalistic work has been published in Der Spiegel and elsewhere. Appelbaum has repeatedly been targeted by U.S. law enforcement agencies, who obtained a court order for his Twitter account data, detained him at the U.S. border after trips abroad, and seized his laptop and several mobile phones.
WJulian Paul Assange is an Australian editor, publisher, and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks came to international attention in 2010 when it published a series of leaks provided by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. These leaks included the Baghdad airstrike Collateral Murder video, the Afghanistan war logs, the Iraq war logs, and Cablegate. After the 2010 leaks, the United States government launched a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks.
WSteven M. Bellovin is a researcher on computer networking and security. He has been a professor in the Computer Science department at Columbia University since 2005. Previously, Bellovin was a Fellow at AT&T Labs Research in Florham Park, New Jersey.
WMatt Blaze is a researcher in the areas of secure systems, cryptography, and trust management. He is currently the McDevitt Chair of Computer Science and Law at Georgetown University, and is on the board of directors of the Tor Project.
WJon Callas is an American computer security expert, software engineer, user experience designer, and technologist who is the co-founder and former CTO of the global encrypted communications service Silent Circle. He has held major positions at Digital Equipment Corporation, Apple, PGP, and Entrust, and is considered "one of the most respected and well-known names in the mobile security industry." Callas is credited with creating several Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standards, including OpenPGP, DKIM, and ZRTP, which he wrote. Prior to his work at Entrust, he was Chief Technical Officer and co-founder of PGP Corporation and the former Chief Technical Officer of Entrust.
WDuncan Campbell is a British freelance investigative journalist, author, and television producer. Since 1975, he has specialised in the subjects of intelligence and security services, defence, policing, civil liberties and, latterly, computer forensics. He was a staff writer at the New Statesman from 1978 to 1991 and associate editor (Investigations) from 1988 to 1991. He was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act in the ABC trial in 1978 and made the controversial series Secret Society for the BBC in 1987. In 1988, he revealed the existence of the ECHELON surveillance program.
WBram Cohen is an American computer programmer, best known as the author of the peer-to-peer (P2P) BitTorrent protocol, as well as the first file sharing program to use the protocol, also known as BitTorrent. He is also the co-founder of CodeCon and organizer of the San Francisco Bay Area P2P-hackers meeting, and was the co-author of Codeville.
WRoss Cohen is the cofounder of BitTorrent Inc. He started the company in 2004 along with his brother Bram Cohen, where among other things he was involved in the Codeville project. He attended Carnegie Mellon University and Stuyvesant High School. He was forced out of the company in 2006.
WCypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet is a 2012 book by Julian Assange, in discussion with Internet activists and cypherpunks Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann. Its primary topic is society's relationship with information security. In the book, the authors warn that the Internet has become a tool of the police state, and that the world is inadvertently heading toward a form of totalitarianism. They promote the use of cryptography to protect against state surveillance.
WHarold Thomas Finney II was a developer for PGP Corporation, and was the second developer hired after Phil Zimmermann. In his early career, he was credited as lead developer on several console games. He also was an early bitcoin contributor and received the first bitcoin transaction from bitcoin's creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
WEva Galperin is the Director of Cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and technical advisor for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. She is noted for her extensive work in protecting global privacy and free speech and for her research on malware and nation-state spyware.
WJohn Gilmore is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cypherpunks mailing list, and Cygnus Solutions. He created the alt.* hierarchy in Usenet and is a major contributor to the GNU Project.
WIan Avrum Goldberg is a cryptographer and cypherpunk. He is best known for breaking Netscape's implementation of SSL, and for his role as chief scientist of Radialpoint, a Canadian software company. Goldberg is currently a professor at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, within the University of Waterloo. He was formerly Tor Project board of directors chairman, and is one of the designers of off the record messaging.
WRobbert (Rop) Valentijn Gonggrijp is a Dutch hacker and one of the founders of XS4ALL.
WSean Hastings is an entrepreneur, cypherpunk author, and security expert. He is best known for being the founding CEO of HavenCo, the world's first formal data haven.
WWerner Koch is a German free software developer. He is best known as the principal author of the GNU Privacy Guard. He was also Head of Office and German Vice-Chancellor of the Free Software Foundation Europe. He is the winner of Award for the Advancement of Free Software in 2015 for founding GnuPG.
WIvan Krstić is a Croatian computer security expert, currently working on core security at Apple Inc. Krstić was previously the director of security architecture at One Laptop per Child. He is a co-author of The Official Ubuntu Book (ISBN 978-0-13-243594-9).
WBen Laurie is an English software engineer. He is a currently the Director of Security at The Bunker Secure Hosting.
WMatthew Rosenfeld, known as Moxie Marlinspike, is an American entrepreneur, cryptographer, and computer security researcher. Marlinspike is the creator of Signal, co-founder of the Signal Foundation, and currently serves as the CEO of Signal Messenger. He is also a co-author of the Signal Protocol encryption used by Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Skype.
WJudith [Jude] Milhon, in Washington D.C., best known by her pseudonym St. Jude, was a self-taught programmer, civil rights advocate, writer, editor, advocate for women in computing hacker and author in the San Francisco Bay Area.
WVincent Moscaritolo is an American computer security expert known for work in encryption applications for mobile devices. From 2012 to 2015, he was the Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Silent Circle, where he designed the original messaging technologies Silent Circle uses. In 2015, he left Silent Circle to co-found 4th-A Technologies, LLC with Robbie Hanson. 4th-A Technologies develops technologies that restore to restore to people their inalienable right to be “secure in their documents”. They designed ZeroDark.cloud a framework that simplifies the development of apps that interact with the cloud, and performs tasks such as syncing, messaging & collaboration. It uses zero-knowledge encryption, ensuring the data in the cloud cannot be compromised. They also produced the Storm4 secure cloud storage service.
WVipul Ved Prakash is a software engineer and Internet entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of anti-spam company Cloudmark and social-media search company Topsy.
WNiels Provos is a German-American researcher in security engineering, malware, and cryptography. He received a PhD in computer science from the University of Michigan. From 2003 to 2018, he worked at Google as a Distinguished Engineer on security for Google Cloud Platform. In 2018, he left Google to join Stripe as its new head of security.
WLeonard Harris Sassaman was an advocate for privacy, and the maintainer of the Mixmaster anonymous remailer code and operator of the randseed remailer.
WBruce Schneier is an American cryptographer, computer security professional, privacy specialist and writer. Schneier is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Fellow at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society. He is a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, AccessNow, and the Tor Project; and an advisory board member of EPIC and VerifiedVoting.org. Schneier is currently employed as the Chief of Security Architecture at Inrupt, Inc. in Boston, MA. He is the author of several books on general security topics, computer security and cryptography and a squid enthusiast.
WMark Richard Shuttleworth is a South African-British entrepreneur who is the founder and CEO of Canonical, the company behind the development of the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system. In 2002, Shuttleworth became the first South African to travel to space as a space tourist, and indeed the first African from an independent country to travel to space. He lives on the Isle of Man and holds dual citizenship from South Africa and the United Kingdom. According to the Sunday Times Rich List in 2020, Shuttleworth is worth an estimated £500 million.
WZooko Wilcox-O'Hearn, is an American Colorado-based computer security specialist, cypherpunk, and CEO of the Electric Coin Company (ECC), a for-profit company leading the development of Zcash.
WPhilip R. Zimmermann is an American computer scientist and cryptographer. He is the creator of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), the most widely used email encryption software in the world. He is also known for his work in VoIP encryption protocols, notably ZRTP and Zfone. Zimmermann is co-founder and Chief Scientist of the global encrypted communications firm Silent Circle.