Governments are dismantling the conditions for private thought. This is a practical guide for anyone who believes that what you read, say, and organise should remain your own business — not a dataset.
Privacy is not the refuge of those with something to hide. It is the condition under which people think freely, speak honestly, organise collectively, and live without fear. When that condition erodes, something irreversible happens to society — not all at once, but incrementally, in the small self-censorships that accumulate into silence.
Governments are moving to dismantle end-to-end encryption, require identity verification for ordinary online activity, and build the infrastructure of mass surveillance under the banner of safety. The banner changes. The infrastructure remains. Iran can cut 80 million people off from the open internet with a single order. That capability was not built overnight — it was assembled quietly, justified incrementally, normalised before anyone noticed the door closing.
The playbook is now being applied in liberal democracies. The UK proposes mandatory age verification — effectively a digital ID for the entire internet — framed as child protection. Similar legislation moves in the EU and US. Once infrastructure exists to verify identity before access, the question of what it restricts becomes purely political, answered by whoever holds power next. VPN bans are already being discussed as the logical next step.
The people who need privacy most are not criminals. Ross Ulbricht spent a decade in federal prison. The developers of Tornado Cash — a privacy tool, open-source code, mathematics — were prosecuted for writing software. Code is speech. Mathematics is not a crime. When governments jail developers for publishing privacy tools, the message to every engineer is explicit: build nothing that limits our surveillance.
This site does not offer paranoia. It offers tools. Practical, well-tested, increasingly necessary. Use what you need. Share what helps. Privacy is not a problem to solve once — it is a habit to maintain. And the time to build that habit is before the option is removed.