Ryan Donald Lackey (born March 17, 1979) is an entrepreneur and computer security professional. He was a co-founder of HavenCo, the world's first data haven, and operated BlueIraq, a communications company. He speaks at numerous conferences and trade shows, including DEF CON and the RSA Data Security Conference, on various topics in the computer security field, and has appeared in a Wired magazine cover story and in numerous television, radio, and print articles, concerning HavenCo and Sealand.
Lackey was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania and has lived throughout the US and Europe, and in Anguilla, Sealand, Dubai, and Iraq. As a teenager, he was briefly involved with the Globewide Network Academy. Lackey attended MIT and majored in Course 18 (mathematics), eventually dropping out due to financial constraints. While there, Lackey became interested in electronic cash and distributed systems, originally for massively multiplayer online gaming. This interest led to attending several conferences (Financial Cryptography 98, various MIT presentations), participating on mailing lists such as "cypherpunks" and "dbs"[clarification needed], and, with Ian Goldberg, eventually implementing patented Chaumiandigital cash in an underground library[clarification needed], HINDE, which was named after Hinde ten Berge, a Dutch cypherpunk also present at FC98. He contributed to the cypherpunks movement as one of the longest anonymous remailer operators.
Career
In 1999 Lackey lived in the San Francisco Bay Area before moving to the self-proclaimed state of Sealand and establishing HavenCo. In December 2002, he left HavenCo, following a dispute with other company directors and the Sealand "Royal Family".
During the US conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Lackey operated BlueIraq, a VSAT communications and IT company serving the DoD and domestic markets in those countries. BlueIraq's business model eventually became economically unfeasible due to an escalation in anti-Western violence (primarily in the form of improvised explosive devices) and troop drawdowns. BlueIraq sought venture capital to transform itself into a large general consumer cellular telephone company, but the 2008 financial crisis and the instability of Iraq and Afghanistan made fundraising impossible.
Lackey returned to the US and located in San Francisco, where he worked for a number of start-up companies before applying to Y Combinator. He was accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2011 round. Lackey founded CryptoSeal,[1] a VPN as a service start-up with a small group of people well known in the computer security community, and secured funding from Ron Conway and a well known venture capital fund. In June 2014, CryptoSeal was acquired by Cloudflare.[2]
In 2017, he began working as Chief Security Officer for the Tezos Foundation in support of the Tezos blockchain.[3] According to his LinkedIn profile, Lackey left that position in November of 2020, and as of 2021 is employed at a crypto-related insurance company in Puerto Rico.[3]
The Principality of Sealand is a micronation on HM Fort Roughs, an offshore platform in the North Sea approximately twelve kilometres off the coast of Suffolk, England. Roughs Tower is a Maunsell Sea Fort that was built by the British in international waters during World War II. Since 1967, the decommissioned Roughs Tower has been occupied and claimed as a sovereign state by the family and associates of Paddy Roy Bates. Bates seized Roughs Tower from a group of pirate radio broadcasters in 1967 with the intention of setting up his own station there. Bates and his associates have repelled incursions from vessels from rival pirate radio stations and the U.K.'s royal navy using firearms and petrol bombs. In 1987, the United Kingdom extended its territorial waters to 12 nautical miles, which places the platform in British territory.
A cypherpunk is any individual advocating widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a route to social and political change. Originally communicating through the Cypherpunks electronic mailing list, informal groups aimed to achieve privacy and security through proactive use of cryptography. Cypherpunks have been engaged in an active movement since at least the late 1980s.
Leonard Harris Sassaman was an American technologist, information privacy advocate, and the maintainer of the Mixmaster anonymous remailer code and operator of the randseed remailer. Much of his career gravitated towards cryptography and protocol development.
A virtual private network (VPN) is a mechanism for creating a secure connection between a computing device and a computer network, or between two networks, using an insecure communication medium such as the public Internet.
David Lee Chaum is an American computer scientist, cryptographer, and inventor. He is known as a pioneer in cryptography and privacy-preserving technologies, and widely recognized as the inventor of digital cash. His 1982 dissertation "Computer Systems Established, Maintained, and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups" is the first known proposal for a blockchain protocol. Complete with the code to implement the protocol, Chaum's dissertation proposed all but one element of the blockchain later detailed in the Bitcoin whitepaper. He has been referred to as "the father of online anonymity", and "the godfather of cryptocurrency".
Ian 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 Faculty of Mathematics of the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science within the University of Waterloo, and the Canada Research Chair in Privacy Enhancing Technologies. He was formerly Tor Project board of directors chairman, and is one of the designers of off the record messaging.
Matt Blaze is an American researcher who focuses on 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.
"Information wants to be free" is an expression that means either that all people should be able to access information freely, or that information naturally strives to become as freely available among people as possible. It is often used by technology activists to criticize laws that limit transparency and general access to information. People who criticize intellectual property law say the system of such government-granted monopolies conflicts with the development of a public domain of information. The expression is often credited to Stewart Brand, who was recorded saying it at a Hackers Conference in 1984.
Sameer Parekh is the founder of C2Net Software, Inc.
Jeff Moss, also known as Dark Tangent, is an American hacker, computer and internet security expert who founded the Black Hat and DEF CON computer security conferences.
Adam Back is a British cryptographer and cypherpunk. He is the CEO of Blockstream, which he co-founded in 2014. He invented Hashcash, which is used in the Bitcoin mining process.
Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority v. Anderson, et al., Civil Action No. 08-11364, was a challenge brought by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) to prevent three Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students from publicly presenting a security vulnerability they discovered in the MBTA's CharlieCard automated fare collection system. The case concerns the extent to which the disclosure of a computer security flaw is a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
HavenCo Limited was a data haven, data hosting services company, founded in 2000 to operate from Sealand, a self-declared unrecognized principality that occupied Roughs Tower.
Sean 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.
Vincent Aron Cate is a cryptography software developer based in Anguilla. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley and ran an Atari hardware business in the 1980s before beginning a Ph.D. programme at Carnegie Mellon University, but dropped out and moved to Anguilla to pursue business opportunities there. In his new home, he would go on to establish an internet service provider, a computer club for young students, and an annual cryptography conference. A former U.S. citizen, he gave up his U.S. citizenship in 1998 in protest of U.S. laws on the export of cryptography.
Norton, formerly known as Norton by Symantec, is a brand of Gen Digital co-headquartered in Tempe, Arizona and Prague, Czech Republic. Norton originally provided utility software for DOS, and currently offers a variety of products and services related to digital security, identity protection, and online privacy and utilities.
Brian Armstrong is an American business executive, billionaire, and investor who is CEO of cryptocurrency platform Coinbase. He received media attention for his policy of keeping the workplace free of political activism.
Ang Cui is an American cybersecurity researcher and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of Red Balloon Security in New York City, a cybersecurity firm that develops new technologies to defend embedded systems against exploitation.
Tezos is an open-source blockchain that can execute peer-to-peer transactions and serve as a platform for deploying smart contracts. The native cryptocurrency for the Tezos blockchain is the tez. The Tezos network achieves consensus using proof-of-stake. Tezos uses an on-chain governance model that enables the protocol to be amended when upgrade proposals receive a favorable vote from the community. Its testnet was launched in June 2018, and its mainnet went live in September 2018.
Muneeb Ali is a Pakistani-American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur. He is a co-founder of Stacks, an open-source smart contract platform for Bitcoin. He is known for the regulatory framework that resulted in the first SEC-qualified offering for a crypto asset and for his doctoral dissertation which formed the basis of the Stacks network. He is a co-author of Protothread and Proof-of-Transfer (PoX) consensus.
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