Jude Milhon


Judith Milhon, in Washington D.C., best known by her pseudonym St. Jude, was a hacker and author in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Milhon coined the term cypherpunk and was a founding member of the cypherpunks. On July 19, 2003, Milhon died of cancer.

Professional projects

Milhon taught herself programming in 1967 and landed her first job at the Horn and Hardart company of New York before she moved away to California to join the counterculture movement. Among the projects she contributed to were the Berkeley Software Distribution operating system and Community Memory. She was a member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and the author of several books. She was a senior editor at the magazine Mondo 2000 and frequent contributor to Boing Boing.

Activism and Vision

St. Jude had her hand in many different causes. She was active in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement helping to organize the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. Dedicated to protest, Milhon was also jailed for civil disobedience in Jackson, Mississippi.
Activism within the cyber community was important to Milhon as well. She frequently urged women toward the internet and hacking while encouraging them to have "tough skin" in the face of harassment. The creation of cypherpunks was also part of her politic: the goals of privacy through encryption.

Family Life

Judith Milhon was born in Washington D.C., raised in Indiana, to a military family of the Marine Corps. She married Robert Behling and later had a partner of 40 years, Efrem Lipkin, who had also worked on Community Memory. She had at least one child, Tresca Behling, and one grandchild, Emilio Zuniga who were alive at her 2003 death from cancer.