Sameer Parekh () is the founder of C2Net Software, Inc. While in high school in

Libertyville, Illinois Libertyville is a village in Libertyville Township, Lake County, Illinois, Libertyville Township, Lake County, Illinois, United States. It is located west of Lake Michigan, approximately 40 miles north of the Chicago Loop. As such, it is part o ...

, he published an

underground newspaper The terms underground press or clandestine press refer to periodicals and publications that are produced without official approval, illegally or against the wishes of a dominant (governmental, religious, or institutional) group. In specific rece ...

called ''The Free Journal'', promoting libertarian ideas. In 1993 Parekh moved to

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...

, to attend the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, and joined the

cypherpunk A cypherpunk is one who advocates the widespread use of strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as a means of effecting social and political change. The cypherpunk movement originated in the late 1980s and gained traction with th ...

s. In his second year at Cal, he started C2Net, a privacy-oriented ISP which provided anonymous accounts and an

anonymous remailer An anonymous remailer is a server that receives messages with embedded instructions on where to send them next, and that forwards them without revealing where they originally came from. There are cypherpunk anonymous remailers, mixmaster anony ...

, and was the first home of the

Anonymizer An anonymizer or an anonymous proxy is a tool that attempts to make activity on the Internet untraceable. It is a proxy server computer that acts as an intermediary and privacy shield between a client computer and the rest of the Internet. It acc ...

web surfing proxy. Through the mid- to late 1990s, Parekh was a frequently cited critic of U.S. policy on encryption software. The cover story for the September 1997 issue of ''

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine founded by B. C. Forbes in 1917. It has been owned by the Hong Kong–based investment group Integrated Whale Media Investments since 2014. Its chairman and editor-in-chief is Steve Forbes. The co ...

'' focused on his views of the political and social impact of cryptography. Through C2Net, Parekh pioneered the offshore development of cryptography by U.S. companies to avoid U.S. regulation, and later helped organize the first global conference on

financial cryptography Financial cryptography is the use of cryptography in applications in which financial loss could result from subversion of the message system. Financial cryptography is distinguished from traditional cryptography in that for most of recorded history, ...

in Anguilla. He was also an advisor to and the chairman of

HavenCo HavenCo Limited was a data haven, data hosting services company, founded in 2000 to operate from Sealand, a unrecognised self-declared principality that occupies HM Fort Roughs off the coast of England. In November 2008, operations of Haven ...

, a company that attempted to create a data haven in the

Principality of Sealand The Principality of Sealand () is a micronation on HM Fort Roughs (also known as Roughs Tower), an offshore platform in the North Sea. It is situated on Rough Sands, a sandbar located approximately from the coast of Suffolk and from the c ...

. After selling C2Net to

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. (formerly Red Hat Software, Inc.) is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North ...

, Parekh traveled around Central and Eastern Europe in 2001 on a DJ tour. He played in countries such as Poland,

Serbia , image_flag = Flag of Serbia.svg , national_motto = , image_coat = Coat of arms of Serbia.svg , national_anthem = () , image_map = , map_caption = Location of Serbia (gree ...

Croatia Croatia, officially the Republic of Croatia, is a country in Central Europe, Central and Southeast Europe, on the coast of the Adriatic Sea. It borders Slovenia to the northwest, Hungary to the northeast, Serbia to the east, Bosnia and Herze ...

Latvia Latvia, officially the Republic of Latvia, is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is one of the three Baltic states, along with Estonia to the north and Lithuania to the south. It borders Russia to the east and Belarus to t ...

. He also produced a number of "renegade" events in the Port of Oakland. Parekh was a 2007 Lincoln Fellow of the

Claremont Institute The Claremont Institute is an American conservative think tank based in Upland, California, founded in 1979 by four students of Harry V. Jaffa. It produces the ''Claremont Review of Books'', '' The American Mind'', and other publications. Th ...

. As of spring 2012, Parekh is the proprietor of Falkor Systems, a flying robot startup based in the New York area. In 2014, he was "Entrepreneur in Residence" at the Correll Robotics lab,

University of Colorado The University of Colorado (CU) is a system of public universities in Colorado. It consists of four institutions: the University of Colorado Boulder, the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, the University of Colorado Denver, and the U ...

Boulder In geology, a boulder (or rarely bowlder) is a rock fragment with size greater than in diameter. Smaller pieces are called cobbles and pebbles. While a boulder may be small enough to move or roll manually, others are extremely massive. In ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Parekh, Sameer Year of birth missing (living people) Living people University of California, Berkeley alumni American computer businesspeople American people of Indian descent Cypherpunks

See also

References