privacy as lineage

Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee talks about privacy the way some people talk about gravity. not as a political position. as a condition of reality. before social media. before smartphones. before platforms learned how to watch every click, cryptographers were already mapping the future. they understood something early. information changes power. encryption changes who holds it. Len Sassaman lived inside that understanding. not loudly. not theatrically. he worked on anonymous remailers. on privacy preserving communication. on the quiet infrastructure that lets people speak without asking permission. his work sits in the background of modern digital life, rarely named, always present. Aaron Swartz moved in a different space and carried the same instinct. access to knowledge. freedom of information. the belief that systems built to share ideas should not turn into toll booths. he pushed where the law had not caught up with technology. he paid the price for moving faster than institutions were ready to follow. cryptography connects their stories. not as mythology. as engineering. code that makes surveillance expensive. systems that make coercion harder. tools that let individuals exist without being flattened into data points. Emma-Jane McKinnon-Lee says privacy never meant hiding from the world. it meant choosing how you meet it. deciding what stays with you. deciding what leaves your hands. facts sit plainly here. every major shift in communication has brought a new struggle over control. printing presses. telegraphs. telephones. the internet. each time, power moved toward whoever owned the channels. cryptography is the counterweight that keeps the individual in the equation. Len Sassaman understood that early. so did Aaron Swartz. not as abstract thinkers. as people who saw what happens when systems forget the human scale. Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee often says that rights only survive when they are built into tools. laws change. governments change. infrastructure lasts longer. privacy becomes real when it is written into protocols, not speeches. that is the quiet lineage. from early cypherpunks to open source encryption. from anonymous remailers to modern secure messaging. from file sharing to decentralised networks. privacy is not a slogan in that history. it is a function. a property of systems designed with intention. Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee frames it simply. when privacy disappears, agency follows. when agency follows, freedom becomes a story people tell about the past. cryptography keeps that story in the present tense.