Dear Son...

I wrote to you once before , from this same rocking chair, about money and the war we fought to free it from the hands of central planners. I told you about how Bitcoin severed the tie between state and money, and it did. What I never told you was that winning that war didn’t end the war. It just moved the battlefield. The tyrants who lost their grip on your wallet had also turned their eyes to something they considered even more valuable: your very soul. This letter is about that fight, the one for your privacy, and the preservation of your human dignity online. I need you to understand it wasn’t given to you on a silver platter. It was clawed back, inch by inch, by people who refused to bow.

Let me start with a first principle, because everything I believe rests on it: you own yourself. Not the state, a corporation nor a “community standard” invented by a committee that has never met you. Self-ownership is the root of every right that matters, and privacy is simply self-ownership applied to information. If you own your body, then no one has the right to catalog it without your consent. If you own your labour, you own the data trail it leaves behind. If you own your mind, you own your speech, especially if the speech that makes the powerful uncomfortable. A right that only exists when it’s convenient for the government is not a right. It’s a permission slip that can be revoked at the drop of a hat.

As a young man, your mother and I found ourselves living  in a world sliding fast toward what the ghouls in charge called “safety.” Every camera on every corner was for safety, as well every backdoor slipped into our devices. Every law that made encryption a crime instead of a shield was for safety. Men do not build surveillance infrastructure and then simply forget it exists in a drawer. Every tool of control, once built, gets used. You must never forget that the state does not ask “should we use this,” it asks “how long until we can.” History was not short on examples, and yet each generation had to relearn the lesson as if it were novel, because the wolves were always patient enough to call themselves shepherds first. The people who were not used to taking responsibility for their own lives, were the ones to always fall for this deception.

The first lesson I would like you to learn my son, is that convenience is the currency tyranny uses to buy your rights, one small transaction at a time. Nobody hands you a form and asks you to sign away your privacy in one clean stroke because they wouldn’t get very far. Instead they offer you a slightly faster border crossing if you scan your iris. A slightly cheaper insurance premium if you wear their health tracker. A slightly smoother login if you hand over your face to unlock your phone. Each individual trade looks harmless in isolation, but the sum of a thousand harmless trades is a cage, and by the time you notice the bars, you’ve already helped weld half of them yourself. Be the man who asks “and then what happens to this data in ten years, in the hands of people I’ll never meet, under laws that haven’t been written yet.” If you can’t answer that question, don’t hand it over.

The second lesson follows the first; the moment privacy becomes conditional on having “nothing to hide,” you have already lost the argument.** That phrase was the surveillance state’s greatest trick, because it reframed a fundamental right as a favour owed only to the guilty. This absurdity is vile because privacy was never about hiding wrongdoing but it was about the space every free man needs to think, to speak, to worship, to organize, to simply exist without narration. A society under total observation does not become a society of angels. It becomes a society of actors, performing conformity for an audience they can’t see, terrified to think a heterodox thought because the thought itself might land them in the slammer. Chill a man’s speech long enough and you don’t need to jail him. He’ll jail himself. That is not safety but the quiet death of a free people, and it happens without a single shot fired.

The internet you inherited was not always free and open, my son, and it very nearly wasn’t. There was a stretch of decades where a handful of corporations and a handful of governments realized that whoever controlled the platforms controlled the population. They tried to choke encryption under the pretense of stopping criminals, as they were pretending to forget that code doesn’t care about intentions. A backdoor built for the “good guys” is a backdoor built for everyone, forever, the moment it exists. They tried to centralize identity into a single digital passport, tying your ability to buy, sell, speak, and travel to a government-issued key that could be revoked with a keystroke. This is the third lesson: centralization is never neutral. Every chokepoint you allow to exist will eventually be manned by someone you didn’t vote for and can’t remove. Decentralization is not a technical preference but tt’s a survival strategy. A network with no single point of failure is a network no tyrant can fully capture, and that is precisely why they fought so hard against it, and precisely why you must fight to keep it that way.

We did not win this quietly. Cryptographers who could have taken comfortable corporate jobs instead spent their lives building tools that let ordinary people whisper freely again. Private messaging that no server operator could read, mix networks that scattered a man’s digital footprint to the wind, self-custodied identity that answered to no central registry. They were called paranoid, called criminals, called enemies of “public safety” by the very people who most needed watching. History will remember them the way it remembers the small blockers in the Bitcoin wars; the intolerant minority who refused a comfortable, centralized shortcut because they understood what it would cost everyone downstream. Principles are cheap when they cost you nothing. They are only real when you hold them at a price.

So here is what I need you, son, more than anything else in this letter. Encrypt everything, always, as a discipline and not just a hobby. Run your own infrastructure where you can; your own node, your own server, your own keys. Never let convenience talk you into a single point of failure, whether that point is a company, a government, or a piece of software you don’t control. Speak plainly, even when the crowd hisses, because a right unused withers exactly like a muscle unused. And teach your own sons what I’m teaching you: that freedom of thought requires freedom from observation, that a surveilled man is a governed man whether or not he ever breaks a law, and that the architecture of a free society must be built so that no single actor, however well-intentioned today, can become the tyrant of tomorrow. Build the walls before the wolf arrives. That is the entire lesson of every liberty we ever managed to keep.

Let me tell you about a man named Julian Assange, because if you want to understand the true face of the surveillance state, you study what it does to the men who dare to surveil it back. Assange built something called WikiLeaks, a place where the powerless could hand the world proof of what the powerful were doing behind closed doors; the drone strikes, the diplomatic lies, the quiet cruelties of empire. For that, he paid with almost his entire adult life. Seven years trapped inside a single embassy building in London, unable to step outside without arrest. Then years more in a maximum-security prison, held not for violence, not for theft, but for publishing true information that embarrassed men with far more power than he ever had. In the end they didn’t even need a trial to break him; a plea deal did the job just fine.

A guilty plea to “espionage” for the crime of journalism, time served instead of a public reckoning, because a reckoning would have meant admitting in open court what he’d exposed was true. He walked free in 2024 only after more than five years in a cell and a decade before that under house arrest and embassy confinement, a broken man in body if not in spirit, having given the state exactly what it wanted most: silence in exchange for mercy. Make no mistake about it, he is a hero for daring to speak truth to power and exposing the state’s crimes. Most men aren’t that bold.

Now sit with the irony of that, my son, the very state that built a surveillance apparatus vast enough to read the private messages of ordinary citizens who committed no crime at all, could not tolerate one man showing the public what that same state was doing in their name. They will tell you they need your data “for your safety,” yet they will hunt a publisher across continents for exposing what safety actually costs. They will say a citizen has “nothing to hide” while they classify their own dirty laundry as a matter of national security. That is not a contradiction they stumbled into. That is the entire operating logic of unchecked power: total visibility for you, total opacity for them. A government that can watch everyone but be watched by no one is not a government anymore and neither is its authority legitimate. The fourth lesson, then, is this;  judge any institution not by what it says about transparency, but by how it treats the people who try to hold it to its own word.** When a state punishes truth-tellers more severely than it punishes the liars they expose, you are looking directly at what that state actually values, and it isn’t you.

I’ll leave you with words older than any of us, attributed to Benjamin Franklin, who understood this trade centuries before servers and satellites existed, those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. He was right then. He is “righter” now, when the trade is no longer your musket but your mind, no longer your gold but your ghost; the shadow of everywhere you’ve been and everything you’ve said, sitting in some server farm waiting for someone to decide you’re inconvenient.

We fought to keep the wires open and the keys in your hands, not ours to hold for you. Don’t let them close it. Don’t let them convince you that freedom and safety were ever really in tension, a free man who can encrypt his words, hold his own keys, and speak without asking permission is the safest man there has ever been, because no single failure point can take him down.

Always remember that the men who tell the truth about power will always be treated as more dangerous than the men who abuse it. Stand on principle, my son. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s yours.

Love,

Dad