We are glad to announce the publication of a new open-access book by our Global Fellow and Deputy Director of the Center for Internet and Society, Francesca Musini, and Ksenia Ermoshina, a tenured researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research.
Concealing for Freedom: The Making of Encryption, Secure Messaging and Digital Liberties explores the encryption of online communications and current battlegrounds of Internet governance around the issue. The authors analyze developers’ actions and their interactions with other stakeholders, as well as their interactions with the technical artifacts they develop. Laura DeNardis, our Faculty co-Director, had the pleasure to write the book’s foreword.
Concealing for Freedom provides two key empirical and theoretical contributions. Firstly, it enriches a social sciences-informed understanding of encryption. It does so by examining how different solutions of cryptography for secure communications are created, developed, enacted and governed, and what this diverse experience of encryption, operating across many different sites, means for online civil liberties. Secondly, it contributes to understanding the social and political implications of particular design choices when it comes to the technical architecture of digital networks, in particular their degree of (de-)centralization.
The book could not be more relevant. In light of the current war in Ukraine, Musiani and Ermoshina have written an update highlighting that the politics of technologies of encryption analyzed in the book, considering the on-going geopolitical situation, have proven to be a matter of not just freedom, but also life and death.