An exhaustive anarchist overview and guide to various apps and tech that utilize peer-to-peer and encryption.
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Secure encryption chat apps are essential infrastructure for anarchists, so they should be closely scrutinized. Signal is the dominant secure encryption tool used by anarchists today. Conspiracy theories notwithstanding, the fundamental architecture and development goals of Signal have potential security implications for anarchists. Signal is a centralized communication service, and centralization results in potential security implications, especially when contextualized within the current threat landscape. Alternative secure chat apps like Briar and Cwtch are Peer-to-peer communication tools that, in addition to being Encrypted like Signal, route all traffic through Tor (PET). This approach to secure communication offers great advantages for security, anonymity and privacy over more common services like Signal, but with caveats. However, anarchists should seriously consider trying and using Briar and/or Cwtch, in the interest of developing more resilient and more secure communication infrastructure.
Despite all that, the best way to communicate anything securely is still face-to-face.
Shhh…
This is a discussion about digital tools for communicating securely and privately. To begin, it must be stressed that a face-to-face meeting, out of sight of cameras and out of earshot from other people and devices, is the most secure way to communicate. Anarchists were going for walks to chat long before encrypted texting existed, and they should still do so now, whenever possible.
to the potential for any revolutionary hypothesis today must, sooner or later, formulate the entire set of problems with clarity, in order to be able to face them. Tracing the thread of radical and revolutionary critique back to the recent past, but also looking at the generalized uprisings and revolts of the last few years here and internationally, could enable us to take a step in this direction. Not with the intention of finding ready-made answers and especially not “solutions”, but to modestly start asking questions, without waiting for the next insurrection.
