featuring
Alice in Wonderland imagery.|right As a successor to the
Cypherpunks of the 1990s, CryptoParty was conceived in late August 2012 by the Australian journalist Asher Wolf in a
Twitter post following the passing of the Cybercrime Legislation Amendment Bill 2011 and the proposal of a
two-year data retention law in that country, the Cybercrime Legislation Amendment Bill 2011. The
DIY,
self-organizing movement immediately went
viral, with a dozen autonomous CryptoParties being organized within hours in cities throughout Australia, the US, the UK, and Germany. Many more parties were soon organized or held in Chile, The Netherlands, Hawaii, Asia, etc. Tor usage in Australia itself spiked, and CryptoParty London with 130 attendees—some of whom were veterans of the
Occupy London movement—had to be moved from
London Hackspace to the Google campus in east London's
Tech City. As of mid-October 2012 some 30 CryptoParties have been held globally, some on a continuing basis, and CryptoParties were held on the same day in Reykjavik, Brussels, and Manila. The first draft of the 442-page
CryptoParty Handbook (the hard copy of which is available at cost) was pulled together in three days using the
book sprint approach, and was released 2012-10-04 under a
CC BY-SA license.
Edward Snowden involvement In May 2014,
Wired reported that
Edward Snowden, while employed by
Dell as an
NSA contractor, organized a local CryptoParty at a small
hackerspace in
Honolulu,
Hawaii on December 11, six months before becoming well known for leaking tens of thousands of secret U.S. government documents. During the CryptoParty, Snowden taught 20 Hawaii residents how to encrypt their hard drives and use the Internet anonymously. The event was filmed by Snowden's then-girlfriend, but the video has never been released online. In a follow-up post to the CryptoParty wiki, Snowden pronounced the event a "huge success." ==Media response==