Meet Moxie Marlinspike, the Anarchist Bringing Encryption to All of Us
On the first day of the sprawling RSA security industry conference in San Francisco, a giant screen covering the wall of the Moscone Center’s cavernous lobby cycles through the names and headshots of keynote speakers: steely-eyed National Security Agency director Michael Rogers in a crisp military uniform; bearded and besuited Whitfield Diffie and Ron Rivest, legendary inventors of seminal encryption protocols that made the Internet safe for communication and commerce. And then there’s Moxie Marlinspike, peering somberly into the distance wearing a bicycle jersey and an 18-inch-tall helmet shaped like a giant spear of asparagus. “It was the only picture I could find,” Marlinspike deadpans as we walk into the building.
Even without the vegetable headwear, Marlinspike’s wire-thin 6'2" frame and topknot of blond dreadlocks doesn’t fit the usual profile of the crypto world’s spooks and academics, nor RSA’s corporate types. Walking toward the ballroom where he’s set to speak on the annual Cryptographers’ Panel, however, he tells me it’s not his first time at the conference.
