# Cicada 3301: notes from a cypherpunk, ten years on Published: 2026-05-28 Author: Gab Virebent > Let me start here: I remember where I was when I saw the first image. Black background, white text, a cicada at the bottom. January 5, 2012, /b/ on 4chan. A board where every five minutes someone posts porn or a throwaway meme, and in the middle of that noise appears a line of text that reads like it was written by someone watching you from the other side of the screen: We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. The first thing curious lurkers do i --- Let me start here: I remember where I was when I saw the first image. Black background, white text, a cicada at the bottom. January 5, 2012, /b/ on 4chan. A board where every five minutes someone posts porn or a throwaway meme, and in the middle of that noise appears a line of text that reads like it was written by someone watching you from the other side of the screen: We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. The first thing curious lurkers do is obvious — open the image in a text editor. Right there you already understand that whoever wrote this knows what they're doing. Inside the JPEG there's a string citing Tiberius Claudius Caesar, the fourth Roman emperor, and the puzzle reveals itself: Caesar cipher, shift 4. The first layer is already a small lesson in humility — the message is telling you "I hid this behind the picture, try to find it." And you hadn't. From there it's a chain: OutGuess steganography, references to the Mabinogion (the medieval Welsh tales), Vigenère ciphers keyed off poetry, musical clues (BWV 1033, attributed to Bach but probably composed by Christoph Förster — Cicada wasn't just testing you, it was also reminding you that academic attributions aren't gospel). And then, just when you thought you were one of a thousand random tinkerers, a Dallas phone number: +1 (214) 390-9608. The voicemail, synthesized voice, gives you GPS coordinates. This is where Cicada does the thing that fractures your conviction that this is "just the internet." Coordinates in Paris, Warsaw, Seoul, Sydney, Seattle, Miami, Hawaii — and in every one of those cities somebody physically went out and taped a poster of the cicada with a QR code to a lamp post. Simultaneously. Across four continents. When the first solvers posted the photos, I remember the feeling: you weren't playing against an anonymous troll anymore, you were playing against something that had infrastructure, real people, logistical reach. Marcus Wanner — one of the very few solvers who ever spoke publicly, interviewed by David Kushner for Rolling Stone, fifteen years old at the time — described the key moment: the people who won were contacted by private email. The group described itself as a collective of volunteers united by the belief that tyranny must end, censorship is wrong, and privacy is an inalienable right. The project they claimed to be building was called CAKES, Cicada Anonymous Key Escrow System: a dead-man switch for whistleblowers. If they silenced you or jailed you, your documents would come out anyway. It's the most cypherpunk thing I can think of from the 2010s. And then there's the Liber Primus. Fifty-eight pages in Anglo-Saxon runes, some decoded, most not, all signed with the same PGP key that authenticated 3301's official messages. The readable portions pull from Zen, from Nietzsche, from mysticism, and they repeat the same refrain: reality is simulation, mathematics is the only objective truth, free your mind by killing the ego. Under the mystical varnish there's a precise political position — the same one held by anyone who thinks the only defense against control is to stop being legible. You decide whether it convinces you or strikes you as a pose. I lean toward the first, but I admit to having skin in the game. The institutional side is funny and unsettling at once. When John Greenewald, of The Black Vault, filed FOIA requests with the NSA about Cicada 3301, the agency confirmed the existence of documents — case 85764B — but issued a Glomar response: neither confirm nor deny, citing Public Law 86-36. Translation: we won't tell you whether we're working on this. Internal documents that surfaced elsewhere (an NSA forum called Tapioca: Pebble) show their analysts followed the puzzles, comparing them to Kryptos and WebDriver Torso, with someone noting they made good practice for staff. Years later, the US Navy launched Project Architeuthis, a cryptographic puzzle openly inspired by Cicada to recruit cryptanalysts. When an arm of the state copies your format, the target deserves some credit. The real ending is that since 2014 Cicada hasn't posted official puzzles signed with the authentic PGP key (apart from a short message in April 2017 that many consider apocryphal, or at best a sign-off). More than ten years of silence. For some that's proof the project wrapped up and its few recruits are quietly working. For others it's proof it's still active, but operational, no longer needing to recruit in the open. Honestly? Nobody knows, and whoever claims to is selling a book or a documentary. What remains, for anyone who passed through those puzzles even out of curiosity, is something much more sober than the conspiracy theories: an aesthetic. The idea that privacy deserves this level of craftsmanship. That it's worth encrypting an entire book in runes just to tell you that mental freedom takes effort. That behind every message sent in the clear over a surveilled channel there's a small betrayal of yourself. If that image reappeared on your screen tomorrow — black background, white cicada, "we are looking for highly intelligent individuals" — the question wouldn't be whether you're good enough to solve the puzzle. It would be whether you're still willing to spend weeks on a riddle that might have no answer, at a moment when everything, even your curiosity, is optimized to make you more productive. That would be the real natural selection. --- => gemini://archives.virebent.art/en/ <- Index => gemini://archives.virebent.art/ <- Home => https://archives.virebent.art/en/cicada-3301-notes-from-a-cypherpunk-ten-years-on/ Read on clearnet (HTTPS)