Meet Moxie Marlinspike: The Anarchist Sailor Who Built Signal and Encrypted Billions of Chats
The contradictions are the man. An anarchist who ran the world's most important privacy infrastructure like an autocrat. A cryptographer who distrusts tech.
Moxie Marlinspike, a 20-year-old man from Georgia, built Signal and the encryption protecting billions of WhatsApp and Messenger chats, then persuaded major tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft to incorporate his code. Born Matthew Rosenfeld, he declined to discuss his past. In the late 1990s, Moxie lived in San Francisco, working at WebLogic during the dot-com boom before moving to squats, hacker collectives, and hitchhiking across America.
He co-authored "An Anarchist Critique of Democracy" in 2005, advocating for unmediated relations between free individuals. Moxie's philosophy led him to sail a $1,000 wreck named Pestilence, rebuilding it with scavenged materials. This experience sparked his interest in sailboats, leading him to found the Blue Anarchy collective, which operated on his anarchist principles.
His work on the Signal Protocol, designed with Trevor Perrin, ensures privacy in Signal, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Google Messages.
Written by urgent.news from HackerNoon's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
