In October 2017, a SWAT team showed up at Jameson Lopp's house in North Carolina, allegedly because of a fake complaint called in by someone angered by a tweet. So Lopp posted a video of himself firing an AR-15 and then embarked on a journey to disappear in the physical world—unreachable by his enemies and far from the prying eyes of the surveillance state.
Lopp had been obsessed with privacy long before the swatting. He's a throwback to the long-bearded mathematicians and cypherpunks of the 1990s who believed that recent breakthroughs in cryptography could enable levels of personal freedom and privacy beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Many ideas and technological breakthroughs from the cypherpunk movement were eventually folded into bitcoin. Lopp even calls himself a "professional cypherpunk," carrying on the movement's legacy.
