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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how cryptography is not relegated to the military but that actors including academics, cypherpunks, corporations, activists, and new groups like "CryptoMoms" have brought a variety of hybridized material and knowledge practices to a discipline historically ensconced in rigidity.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyzes "modern cryptography" through the lens of recursive, hybrid re-interpretations and re-inscriptions. Cryptographic technologies have historically been confined to military pursuits (Abelson et al, 2015). However, the development of information-theoretic cryptography coupled with the proliferation of easily accessible information technology has exposed these technologies to new publics, uses and interpretations (Narayanan, 2014).

While the academy is now a regular contributor and custodian of cryptography, the first forays of academic engineers, mathematicians and scientists into publishing about cryptography in the 1970's were themselves seen as a significant threat to a state monopoly on cryptography. However, academic intervention also served as an explicit politicization and re-inscription of the technologies by arguing for "New Directions in Cryptography" (Diffie and Hellman, 1976) at a conference for information theorists. Drawing on this moment of hybridity, this paper traces how actors from different social spheres, including cypherpunks, corporations, activists, and nascent entities like the "CryptoMoms" have in turn informed new knowledge practices around cryptography. The paper focuses on moments of gathering, including at academic conferences, hacker cons, political rallies, key signing parties and cryptoparties as catalysts for hybridity. This analysis focuses not only on human actors, but extends to other actants that come into contact with cryptography including the materiality of computing platforms (Blanchette, 2012) and intangible technologies like regulations that influence hybrid interpretations of cryptography (Riles, 2006).