Sameer Parekh

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Sameer Parekh (Hindi: समीर परेख) is the founder of C2Net Software, Inc.

While in high school in Libertyville, Illinois,^[1] he published an underground newspaper called The Free Journal, promoting libertarian ideas.^[2]

In 1993 Parekh moved to Berkeley, California, to attend 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 and 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 focused on his views of the political and social impact of cryptography.^[1] Through C2Net, Parekh pioneered the offshore development of cryptography by U.S. companies to avoid U.S. regulation,^[11] and later helped organize the first global conference on financial cryptography in Anguilla.^[12] 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.^[13]

After selling C2Net to Red Hat,^[14] Parekh traveled around Central and Eastern Europe in 2001 on a DJ tour. He played in countries such as Poland, Serbia, Croatia, Latvia.^[15] He also produced a number of "renegade" events in the Port of Oakland.^[16]

Parekh was a 2007 Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute.^[17]

As of spring 2012, Parekh is the proprietor of Falkor Systems, a flying robot startup based in the New York area.^[18] In 2014, he was "Entrepreneur in Residence" at the Correll Robotics lab, University of Colorado at Boulder.