“Cypherpunks wouldn’t just critique the surveillance state—they’d also call out us technologists for enabling it. We were supposed to resist, not retrofit.”
Christopher Allen recently talked with Tereza Bízková in an interview that was published to the front page of Hackernoon. It was headlined “The Co-Writer of TLS Says We’ve Lost the Privacy Plot”. In it, Christopher talks about what privacy means to him, what he thinks about recent privacy efforts, how centralization has become a problem, and how all of this connects to work done by the cypherpunks in the ’90s.
Perhaps most importantly, Christopher answers the question: what would be non-negotiable for a new privacy-first system today? His answer unsurprisingly reflects our vision here at Blockchain Commons, built on data minimization, progressive trust, and limited scale.
Privacy is one of the fundamental Gordian Principles, but probably the one we talk about the least, as so much of our focus is on resilience (such as #SmartCustody) or on independence and openness (as reflected in our attention to interoperability). Read “The Co-Writer of TLS Says We’ve Lost the Privacy Plot” for much more on why privacy is important and what exactly it is!
The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity Links
Christopher Allen is a long-term advocate for self-sovereign identity. He popularized the term and laid out an initial set of principles in his foundational article, “The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity”, coauthored the DID spec for W3c, and founded the Rebooting the Web of Trust workshops that advanced the technology for a decade. Following are articles by him and interviews with him on the topic.
- The Co-Writer of TLS Says We’ve Lost the Privacy Plot (4/24/25): An interview with Tereza Bízková for Hackernoon on how things have gone wrong.
- SSI Orbit Podcast: Christopher Allen Interview (1/31/25): Following up the “Has Our SSI Ecosystem Become Morally Bankrupt?” article, a discussion of the problems with the current SSI ecosystem.
- Echoes from History (11/15/23): How identity went horribly wrong during WWII and the warnings that offers for the future of self-sovereign identity.
- The Origins of Self-Sovereign Identity (8/9/23): Living Systems Theory, Ostrom’s Principles, and other foudndational ideas that led to SSI, and what they say about its intent.
- Private Key Disclosure (8/16/22): Digital identities are secured by private keys, but are private keys secure from the government?
- Principal Authority: A New Perspective on Self-Sovereign Identity (9/15/21): A new lens for looking at Self-Sovereign Identity, based on successes in the Wyoming legislature.
- Self-Sovereign Identity: Five Years On (4/26/21): Five years after “The Path to Self Sovereign Identity”, the successes and challenges of SSI to date.
- The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity (4/26/16): The initial article on SSI, including the ten principles for Self-Sovereign Identity.