John Gilmore

John Gilmore is an American programmer and civil-liberties activist. He was the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems and later co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989, one of the first companies to build a business on free software support. He created the alt.* Usenet hierarchy and is often quoted for the observation that "the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

EFF and cypherpunks

In 1990 Gilmore co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation with John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor. In 1992 he co-founded the cypherpunks mailing list, hosting it on his toad.com server. In 1998 he led the EFF project that built Deep Crack, a machine that recovered a DES key in 56 hours for under US$250,000, demonstrating the inadequacy of the 56-bit standard.

Litigation

Gilmore has repeatedly challenged government secrecy and identification requirements, including Gilmore v. Gonzales, which contested the unpublished rules requiring identification for domestic air travel.

Timeline

• 1955Born in York, Pennsylvania.
• 1989Co-founds Cygnus Solutions.
• 1990-07Co-founds the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
• 1992-09Co-founds the cypherpunks mailing list.
• 1998-07EFF's Deep Crack recovers a DES key in 56 hours.