This is part two of an ongoing series. If you’re starting here, Why Privacy Matters is part one.

The surveillance apparatus is invisible because it was engineered to feel like you.

Not like a cage. Not like a camera. Like a mirror. Like a friend who remembers everything. Like a feed that somehow always knows what you need, right now, at this exact moment, in this exact mood.

That’s not coincidence. That’s engineering.

Cryptography as a concept is one thing. Understanding why it matters, how the mathematics work, what makes a key a key, that’s the foundation, and I covered it in Cryptography: The Weapon They Couldn’t Ban. But theory only gets you to the door. What’s on the other side is a terminal, a handful of CLI commands, and the particular satisfaction of holding something the system cannot touch. This guide is how I actually use GPG. My setup, my choices, my keys.

In 1991, a programmer named Phil Zimmermann released a piece of software called Pretty Good Privacy. It let anyone encrypt a message so completely that no government, no corporation, no intelligence agency could read it without the key. He put it on the internet for free.

The United States government opened a criminal investigation.

The charge was arms trafficking.

Not metaphorically. Literally. The US State Department had classified strong encryption as a munition, in the same legal category as tanks, fighter jets, and missiles. Exporting it without a licence was a federal crime. Zimmermann had put PGP on a public server. People outside the US had downloaded it. As far as the government was concerned, he had shipped weapons across borders.

Privacy is like the immune system of freedom. We never truly understand its value until it’s gone, until the consequences of its absence become undeniable. By then, it’s often too late. The damage has metastasized into the very foundations of how we live, think, and relate to one another.

But privacy isn’t usually lost through force. It’s given away, willingly, in exchange for convenience. And that’s what makes the real danger so difficult to see.

The very first thing I remember about computers was how they smelled. Something new, completely alien, but welcoming. Inviting. Like a door I didn’t know existed had just swung open, and whatever was on the other side already knew my name. It was 1990. I walked through. I never came back out.

The room wasn’t much to look at. Cracked concrete walls, paint peeling in sheets, heavy wooden tables that had probably been there since before I was born. My mum worked at the national mining institute, the kind of place that sat at the very heart of what a communist country valued most. Metals. Output. The collective. But sitting on one of those wooden tables, humming quietly to itself, was something that didn’t belong there at all. A PC. The only one I’d ever seen. Possibly the only one anyone in my world had ever seen.