By the way, in present days Russian blogosphere/tech circles we tend to value freedom of thinking. Meaning that if somebody (Kaspersky) wants to think that the only way for Internet to work is control and user real IDs, we kind of let him to.

This leads to the fact that the range of opinions expressed on my livejournal friends feed will probably make your head explode.

But it does not mean that any of the radical views is the mainstream thinking.

Cypherpunk culture is pretty deeply intertwined with programmer culture in the US, it's easy to forget that it's not true everywhere.

It's also easy to forget that the situation we have here, where even the biggest criminal organizations are pretty weak (and deeply local), and the State is the scariest actor around, is neither natural nor normal.

I think when you say that you pretty well reduce the vision of programmer culture in the US. How much cypherpunk influence is there in the wide swaths of programming culture that came out of Web 2.0? And how many cypherpunks have gone on to work for the NSA, DARPA, etc.? I'm not sure the landscape is so very different, and certainly one could tease out a cypherpunk influence in Russia that's much more obvious and profound than that in the United States.

There are many programmer cultures, and even cypherpunk culture is very complicated. There are some very different strains of cypherpunk thought, i.e. the divide between those whose primary mode of action as being exposing the scariest actor around and those whose effort is centered in hiding from the scariest actor around.