Phil Karn
American engineer and radio ham who sued the State Department in 1994 for the right to export a floppy disk containing code that was already legal to export on paper.
Under his callsign KA9Q, Karn wrote KA9Q NOS, a TCP/IP stack for packet radio that put the internet on an ordinary PC in the late 1980s. With Craig Partridge he described Karn's algorithm in 1987: once a packet has been retransmitted you can't tell which attempt an acknowledgement belongs to, so those samples must not feed the round-trip estimate. He later spent many years at Qualcomm.
His most quoted contribution is legal, though. During the crypto wars, Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography could be exported as a book, but not the diskette with the very same source code. Karn requested rulings on both and got the absurd answer in writing. He lost at district court in 1996, but the case made the logic of export control look publicly ridiculous, which may have been the point.