Zero-Knowledge Systems (also known as ZKS) was a Canadian privacy technology software and services company, best known for the Freedom Network, its privacy network. It was founded by brothers Austin Hill & Hamnett Hill and their father Hamnett Hill Sr. (aka Hammie Hill) in 1997. Its headquarters were in

Montreal, Quebec Montreal is the List of towns in Quebec, largest city in the Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Quebec, the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, second-largest in Canada, and the List of North American cit ...

. Early investors and board members were Mike Santer and Alex Hern co-founder

Inktomi Inktomi Corporation was an American Internet service provider (ISP) software developer based in Foster City, California. Customers included Microsoft, HotBot, Amazon.com, eBay, and Walmart. The company developed Traffic Server, a proxy se ...

. The company rebranded under the new name Radialpoint though was no longer a developer of privacy-enhancing technologies.A New Kind of Mafia in Montreal? How a Culture of Startup CEOs are Playing the Angel Game
BetaKit. September 3, 2013. Retrieved August 2, 2014 Most recently, it was acquired by AppDirect and rebranded as AppHelp. Zero-Knowledge Systems was one of the first large-scale commercial attempts to combine

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 ...

principles with a for-profit technology. During its heyday, ZKS captured the media's imagination and successfully drew attention to the privacy risks of unsuspecting internet users. Being based in Canada allowed it to circumvent the US ban on strong cryptography, considered "munitions" at the time. ZKS was featured in ''Wired'' magazine as early as 1999. The ZKS Freedom Network was a pioneer of anonymous networking technology, predating the

Tor Tor, TOR or ToR may refer to: Places * Toronto, Canada ** Toronto Raptors * Tor, Pallars, a village in Spain * Tor, former name of Sloviansk, Ukraine, a city * Mount Tor, Tasmania, Australia, an extinct volcano * Tor Bay, Devon, England * Tor ...

network. Some of the enterprise privacy research was also inherited by the IBM Tivoli digital rights management suite. Several of the company's employees were from an academic privacy-enhanced technology background:

Stefan Brands Stefan Brands is the designer of the core cryptographic protocols of Microsoft's U-Prove technology. Business career Following his academic research on these protocols during the nineties, they were implemented and marketed under the U-Pro ...

(senior cryptographer) and cypherpunk background

Ian Goldberg Ian Avrum Goldberg (born March 31, 1973) is a cryptographer and cypherpunk. He is best known for breaking Netscape's implementation of SSL (with David Wagner), and for his role as chief scientist of Radialpoint (formerly Zero Knowledge Syst ...

(chief scientist) and

Adam Back Adam Back (born July 1970) is a British cryptographer and cypherpunk. He is the CEO of Blockstream, which he co-founded in 2014. He invented Hashcash, which is used in the bitcoin mining process. Life Back was born in London, England, in July ...

(architect & cryptographer). Other employees included

Mike Shaver Mike Shaver (born February 17, 1977) is a former Engineering Director at Facebook. He is also known for his work on several open source projects. He has been involved in the development of many of the technologies that enable interactive web pages ...

(chief software officer), Adam Shostack, Anton Stiglic, Christian Paquin, Jonathan Wilkins and Ulf Moller.. CANADIAN CORPORATE NEWS. February 23, 2000. Retrieved February 4, 2014. Stephanie Perrin served as

Chief Privacy Officer The Chief Privacy Officer (CPO) is a senior level executive within a growing number of global corporations, public agencies and other organizations, responsible for managing risks related to information privacy laws and regulations. Variations on th ...

for the firm before she became Director of Research and Policy at the

Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada The privacy commissioner of Canada () is a non-partisan ombudsman and officer of the Parliament of Canada. The commissioner investigates complaints regarding violations of the federal ''Privacy Act'', which deals with personal information held ...

, and helped to draft

PIPEDA The ''Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act'' (PIPEDA; ) is a Canadian law relating to data privacy. It governs how private sector organizations collect, use and disclose personal information in the course of commercial bu ...

, the Canadian privacy law.

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Further reading