Like many old guard Internet personalities, I found myself increasingly disgusted about how the Internet rapidly decayed from its initial promise of widespread information, freedom of speech and new ideas and thoughts - into a dystopian surveillance network. The tinfoil-hat communities were proven right with Snowden's leaks of how the US government really is: A dystopian nightmare. All their wonderful talk about freedom and democracy, the American dream and human rights were all lies. In reality, the US government is an insecure monster that wants to read everything you ever write, listen to everything you ever say out loud - to anyone, and judge you in silence and secrecy - without you ever knowing by whose authority or rules.
The US government is not only malevolent and insecure, they are also stunningly incompetent. They have mandated backdoors into telecom - so that they can wiretap everything - and those same backdoors have also been used by other nations' intelligence agencies and other criminal gangs - making every telephone conversation a group chat. The same goes for messaging services. US and EU politicians alike take money from lobbyists who want backdoors into encrypted messaging - and propose legislation again and again to end what shreds that are left of privacy.
In addition to this, we have the surveillance economy originally fuelled by Facebook. Interestingly, the first real investor in Facebook was Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and later associated with the CIA via his investments in Palantir. He also has strong ties to Zionism - which is linked to funding all kinds of bad shit. As we know, Palantir is in the center of worldwide mass surveillance and Israel's targeting (kill lists) in their genocidal wars right now. Facebook is not alone in this space - although they are involved in much controversy. There are credible claims that they sold access to private messages via their API to, among others, Netflix. They were also central in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. But today Google is probably a much more dangerous entity than Meta when it comes to privacy. And Microsoft tries hard to do everything badder than Meta and Google. Then there are thousands of data collection agencies, many linked to intelligence agencies, that collect anything they can find about anyone from any source.
DarkSpeak is born
This project began in April 2016. The idea that private conversations are no longer possible, and that we just have to accept that, provokes me. Originally I used the - now dead - Tor Chat project as a starting point for a protocol, and wrote my own client in C++, using QT and QML for GUI.
However, because the legacy Tor Chat client was bundling an obsolete Tor server, my program was unable to maintain reliable connections with actual "Tor Chat" users. So at some point I decided to learn from my experience with the original implementation and write a new one from scratch.
Pause
When the app was almost ready for release, I hesitated. I realized that creating an app like this is dangerous. Governments do want to know who people communicate with. If the app gained some popularity, intelligence agencies may try to convince me that adding a back door or a "bug" (that does the same thing) is a small price to pay for the privilege to breathe. At the time I worked for a startup in California that was vulnerable to any pressure from anyone. I felt like a coward - but at the time I decided that the risk for me, and for my client, was too big. So I paused the project.
Why I restarted the project
I restarted it in the summer of 2026 mainly because of EU Chat Control and the move to enforce Digital ID in the US, Canada, the EU, the UK, Australia, and other countries under the influence of someone. The western governments have lost their minds. They implement draconian laws that would make any fascist dictator of the past roll over in their graves with jealousy. They have absolutely no concern for human rights, or fundamental democratic preconditions like private conversations, even between friends and family.
Even VPNs are now a target for countries that desperately want to become authoritarian regimes. Don't they know that a VPN is a basic tool and requirement for secure IT systems? Without a VPN, people who do office work can't work outside the office. And I say "office" in singular form - because if a company has more than one office using the same internal or secure IT system, they are connected via a VPN. A VPN is also the first line of defense for cloud services. Without a VPN, it's much harder and more expensive to deploy software in the cloud. And even to connect components together in the cloud, like metrics and logging.
I don't know if they are uneducated fools who don't understand what they do, or if they are out to deliberately destroy society. At this point it doesn't matter. If good people do nothing, evil will prevail. I feel that I have to do what I can to resist this madness. Short of picking up a gun and joining the resistance, making this app is the best contribution I can make right now.
Underground Social Media app
With the recent crackdowns on social media with "Age verification" and just denial of use for users who don't want to provide some ID - I think we need real underground social media alternatives. Although it was not in the original plans for DarkSpeak - I think it's a good direction for the project. Apps like Session that operate on the normal Internet seem to suffer from lack of financing (they need money to run backend nodes) and governmental overreach (intelligence agencies operate most of the independent backend nodes). In order to totally shut down governments' - and big tech's - ability to oversee every private conversation and every community chat - we need software that operates independently, encrypts peer to peer and simply doesn't use central hubs or backend services that can be disrupted, tapped or shut down.
This is a short-term technical workaround for a gigantic political problem. The permanent solution is to flush out the corruption in government in all western countries and install a political system and/or politicians who work for the people. Politicians who respect all individuals right to privacy - even from them.