John 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.
An outspoken civil libertarian, Gilmore has sued the Federal Aviation Administration, Department of Justice, and others. He was the plaintiff in the prominent case Gilmore v. Gonzales, challenging secret travel-restriction laws. He is also an advocate for drug policy reform.
He co-authored the Bootstrap Protocol in 1985, which evolved into Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol , the primary way local networks assign an IP address to devices.
Wikipedia
“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
As quoted in TIME magazine (6 December 1993) http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/outerspace/internet-article.html
Unsourced variant:
The Net treats censorship as a defect and routes around it.
“If you're watching everybody, you're watching nobody.”
As quoted in Subject: <nowiki>[IP http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200303/msg00427.html</nowiki> John Gilmore on government trustworthiness and spy gear]
“When the X500 revolution comes, your name will be lined against the wall and shot.”
As quoted in Peter Gutmann's X509 style guide http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/x509guide.txt
“How many of you have broken no laws this month?”
As quoted in a speech http://www.toad.com/gnu/cfp.talk.txt to the First Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy in 1991
