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The Encryption Domino: Why encryption is our last frontier

  • Writer: Manushya Foundation
    Manushya Foundation
  • 2 days ago
  • 6 min read

Dr Jean Linis-Dinco, Digital Rights Advisor at Manushya Foundation, unpacks why encryption is not just a technical abstraction, but a fragile shield for the survival and resistance of the oppressed.



A quick search of the history of encryption or cryptography will give you quite a predictable narrative on how it was deemed useful during wartimes, either to protect information of intelligence agencies or shield classified communications between generals and diplomats. All these stories were framed through the lens of state security. The common denominator amongst these stories is how encryption is conceptualised as a technical tool of the state, and the rest of us appear, at best, as spectators or consumers of a technology invented for those purposes.


If we stop at these stories, we concede to the claim that encryption only belongs to generals and corporations and that everyone else gets pulled into it only by permission. And that if we have ‘nothing to hide’, we have no right to use these tools reserved for secret diplomacy and militarism. And that is the moral and existential blackmail of the security state. It converts our desires for basic protections against surveillance into suspicion, criminalisation, and incarceration, whilst defending the right of the state to intrude into our lives as something normal.


‘Nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ has always been tapped on by state bureaucrats to streamline the process of manufacturing consent for surveillance. It is nothing but a fallacy of the converse that wipes out any form of argument in advance. It is either you accept surveillance on its own terms, or you must be guilty. To refuse is to endanger yourself, creating a situation where the only move possible is obedience, much like a piece on a chessboard where every move leads to capture.


Encryption and state power


Encryption has become a means of survival for many. The spread of strong encryption into our ‘everyday’ has opened a fragile and contested space where the oppressed can survive and resist under conditions of permanent surveillance.


We have seen journalists working on highly sensitive issues rely on secure channels to talk to sources who would otherwise face imprisonment or death. Franceschi-Bicchierai, for instance, argued how without SecureDrop’s encrypted, anonymous file sharing, he might never have received a story at all, because no one source would risk contacting a journalist in the clear when the stakes were that high.


For millions of people living under fascism, settler states, and exploitative labour conditions, encryption provides a lifeline. It is a paper-thin wall that separates the union organiser from a prison cell, the undocumented migrant from a deportation raid, the trans person from an outing that ends in violence and death, and the woman seeking an abortion from the prying eyes of the state that would gladly use her medical records against her. If anything, encryption saves lives not because it is perfect, but because the alternative is exposure to a surveillance apparatus designed to neutralise resistance and protect the overbearing political agenda.


This is precisely what makes the global campaign against encryption by many states around the world so dangerous. As they parade their opposition as a matter of public security, half-baked into languages of paternalism and care, they insist that the creation of ‘lawful access’ backdoors’ is crucial for the protection of children and national safety. Yet the hazards these backdoors create are not something that can be contained once introduced. Time and again, cryptographers have insisted that there is no such thing as a door that only opens for the ‘good ones' as any form of structural weakness becomes available for virtually anyone to exploit.


Barry Buzan’s securitisation theory offers a critical framework for understanding how governments justify extraordinary measures by framing certain issues as existential threats. When an issue is successfully securitised, it ceases being a matter of routine politics. Rather, it gets elevated to a crisis level that urgently demands exceptional action that most of the time goes beyond democratic accountability. The very act of securitisation allows the state to suspend normal procedures and legitimise interventions that would otherwise be politically unacceptable under ordinary circumstances. In the case of encryption, we see how this logic deployed by portraying encryption as a tool for criminals. Through these linkages, the state constructs a narrative in which secure communication itself becomes the fundamental threat to public safety. And as the Overton Window moves, mass surveillance, device backdoors, and bulk data collection are all gradually normalised.


The definition of what is ‘lawful’ is also never stable. It adapts with every emergency order and every wave of protest. History is full of examples where powers granted to fight one ‘extraordinary’ threat are later applied to workers, minorities, and dissidents. There is no reason to believe an anti-encryption law will be any different. When a government wins new power to weaken or bypass encryption, it is not software that is at risk. It is the working-class people. Those of us grinding through 9-to-5s just to keep food on the table. It is never the billionaires that rarely pay taxes, not CEOs that bust unions, not the class that already lives behind iron gates, firewalls, and offshore accounts. Each so-called exception made in the name of national security becomes another weapon pointed at movements that challenge the existing order that profits from genocide, incarcerates children, and builds its wealth on the dispossession and degradation of the global working class.


Encryption under capitalism


Under capitalism, no technological tool is neutral. Every tool that has been developed and deployed emerges from specific relations of power and is shaped by the needs of capital accumulation and state control. Whether it is the factory machine, the automated database that triggers welfare cuts, the latest AI tool to track worker’s plan to unionise, or the encryption protocol, each is embedded within a system that prioritises profit, hierarchy, and domination. Technology does not stand outside of politics. We have to stop pretending technology can be divorced from power. Encryption is no exception. It was never created to protect the public. It was born in the service of the empire, developed within military research labs, and later adopted by corporations to safeguard intellectual property, protect financial flows, and secure imperial communication networks. However, like all tools under capitalism, it is contradictory. It can be repurposed and can be used against the same class that first wielded it.

Our task is not to defend encryption as a technical ideal, but to defend the conditions that make resistance possible.

And this is where the contradiction opens. Although it began as a weapon of war and control, in the hands of the oppressed, it transformed into a fragile shield used to organise, to resist, and above all, to survive. Whilst by itself, encryption is not liberatory nor is it freedom, it is a space, carved out of the state’s digital machinery, in which dissent can take form and resistance can gather breath to extend the fight. In those small cracks, we see where and how class struggle becomes possible. From there, we see the state as it really is, a sovereign protection of capital against the power of the working class. Our task is not to defend encryption as a technical ideal, but to defend the conditions that make resistance possible. Encryption is a shield, not the end, because the end is liberation. Until then, we fight to hold the line with whatever little remains.



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