In recent months and years I have steadily looked at the writings and works of the cypherpunks, mainly because I think it is the logical extension of the Hallaqian Problem I have yet to distil the Hallaqian Problem in a pithy statement and how it relates to the cypherpunks but the closets I have gotten is this:

The Hallaqian 20th-century State sought to control nature - nature was the raw material - the earth, the trees, the rivers - and this yielded particular byproducts that fashioned a new subject - the citizen. It was this imperative to mastery that created the 20th-century State. The 21st-century State no longer has such tame ambitions to control nature alone - it will now seek to control human nature directly, unmediated. This move from nature to humans captures the twilight age of the liberal hypothesis as we move towards the cybernetic hypothesis^[1]

The way the cypherpunk come in is through the idea that:

cryptographic/encryption based technologies are a way of reversing the Digital Panoptican by restoring digital and data sovereignty to the individual once more. I think cryptography is in part a compelling answer to algorithmic tyranny and overall a solution to the Hallaqian Problem as adapted to the 21st century State^[2]

Hallaq's focus on creating a reflective iterative self through a type of Sufi hermeneutics to shield the subject from the tyranny of the State is only really possible through the maximalist encryption and privacy rights ethic of the Cypherpunks. Without the Cypherpunks I would go so far as saying Hallaq's project becomes unfeasible.

For Muslims wanting to ground Cypherpunk ethics in a coherent project there are scarce resources. The Cypherpunks were fundamentally a practical movement that did not sustain much of a theoretical canon (which can be seen as a good thing, but the Wikileaks Bibliography offers a starting point^[3] and the BTC maximalist Breedlove is one of the few people who offers a contemporaneous exploration of the philosophical themes of the project^[4]). I find much persuasion in the core of the cypherpunk philosophy:

At the core of the cypherpunk philosophy was the belief that the great question of politics in the age of the internet was whether the state would strangle individual freedom and privacy through its capacity for electronic surveillance or whether autonomous individuals would eventually undermine and even destroy the state through their deployment of electronic weapons newly at hand.^[5]

There are also works focusing on tracing a "genealogy of cypherpunk philosophy", namely Patrick Anderson's scholarship^[6] which takes a more serious philosophical minded approach rather than pop-journalism approach of the likes of Greenwald^[7]which unfortunately has saturated the discourse. I think though there is a connection here between the burden traditional Islamic juristic authorities placed on the ruler - namely the unerring ideal of the early Muslim community with the likes of Umar RA who subjected himself to rigorous accountability and transparency. Is there a way where the transhistorical memory of caliphial transparency can act as the foundations that inform an Islamicate understanding of cypherpunk ethics? There has been to my knowledge only one Muslim commentary looking at things from a more fiqhi perspective here^[8]- I think this area deserves greater exploration.

There has been a search, looking for some sort of framework to curtail and rein in Islamicate executive power and for the longest time I think Muslim authors wrongly looked towards American Imperial forms of democratic rule that ironically are the site of the genesis of the greatest surveillance machine made in history - I think of the Mustafa Aykols of this world and the think-tank circuit of Muslim policy wonks parroting the dying gasps of American Imperial ideology.

Footnotes