Sameer Parekh

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Sameer Parekh is best known for being the founder of C2Net Software, Inc.

Sameer Parekh went to high school in Libertyville, IL.^[1] He was an active participant on the Ripco BBS in Chicago when it was raided by the Secret Service during Operation Sundevil. This was at about the same time as the raid of Steve Jackson Games (where Parekh's friend and co-founder of C2Net Douglas Barnes was to eventually work) and the forming of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In his high school he published an underground newspaper called The Free Journal, which promoted free speech and other libertarian ideas.^[2]

Parekh moved to Berkeley, CA in 1993 to attend school at the University of California, Berkeley and joined the cypherpunks.^[3] In his second year at Cal, he started C2Net, a privacy-oriented ISP which provided anonymous accounts, an anonymous remailer, and was the first home of the Anonymizer web surfing proxy.^[4]^[5]^[6]

Through the mid- to late 1990s, Parekh was a frequently-cited critic of U.S. policy on encryption software.^[7]^[8]^[9]^[10] The cover story for the September, 1997 issue of Forbes magazine focused on his views of the political and social impact of cryptography.^[11] Through C2Net, Parekh pioneered the offshore development of cryptography by U.S. companies to avoid U.S. regulation,^[12] and later helped organize the first global conference on financial cryptography in Anguilla.^[13] He was also an advisor to and the chairman of HavenCo, a company that attempted to create a data haven in the Principality of Sealand.^[14]

After selling C2Net to Red Hat,^[15] Parekh traveled around Central and Eastern Europe in 2001 on a DJ tour. He played in countries such as Poland, Serbia, Croatia, Latvia. ^[16] He also produced a number of "renegade" events in the Port of Oakland.^[17]

Parekh was a 2007 Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute.^[18]

In 2007, Parekh attended Marine Officer Candidate School, but was sent home three weeks from completion due to a stress fracture.^[19]