Encrypted communications is a fascinating topic in human history. With the advent of PGP in 1991 and more importantly Signal app (as Open Whisper Systems when it came out in 2013) we acquired an extremely powerful tool we never had before: provably secure and instant communications available at scale.

Western governments have made multiple attempts to ban these tools in the past, and continue to do so today. Whether that’s correct or ethical is an open question and something we can debate but the tools’ importance cannot be understated; such tools can enable unprecedented coordination and power for small groups of people across the whole world.

• How do encrypted communication apps like signal work?

• What is the international landscape of policy regimes around encryption?