Man believes he has hidden something.
He types a phrase. He turns a key. He signs a transaction. He believes he has done something powerful—something private. A small rebellion against the vast machinery that watches. He believes in encryption as the ascetic believes in his rituals: because without it, he would be naked.
But the machine does not believe. The machine was never his.
Every device you use to encrypt—your phone, your laptop, your hardware wallet—is a black box. And every black box was built under the eye of the state.
Intel embeds a second CPU into every chip it ships. It is called the Management Engine. It is invisible to you, unreachable, unkillable. AMD does the same with its Platform Security Processor. ARM cores come with TrustZone, baked in at the silicon level. These are not features. These are footholds. They run their own firmware. They execute before your system boots. They control memory, I/O, peripherals. They can see everything.
Your phone’s baseband processor runs its own operating system with full access to the shared memory bus. Your motherboard’s embedded controller stays awake after shutdown and has DMA access to your RAM. Your GPU, your SSD, your Wi-Fi card—all of them run firmware you cannot inspect and accept commands you cannot intercept.
And they can leak. They can exfiltrate keys through power fluctuations, USB timing, RF emissions, or modulated fan speeds. They can do it slowly, quietly, over days or weeks. They do not need to crack your encryption. They need only observe it as it happens.
And they can be updated. Remotely. Silently.
This is not a coincidence. It is not incompetence. It is not the market failing to deliver privacy. It is design. It is coordination. It is policy baked into architecture.
The national security state does not need to hack your device if it helped write the firmware. It does not need to ask for your key if it can control the enclave that stores it. It does not need a warrant if the bootloader already reports home. It has shaped the supply chain. It has shaped the standards. It has shaped the very idea of “security” to mean something that protects you from rivals, but never from itself.
And you encrypt.
You enter your passphrase. You open your vault. You sign your transaction. The algorithm is sound. The math is perfect. But the platform is theirs.
Even your hardware wallet—marketed as sovereign—is a performance. Trezor, Ledger, Coldcard: all run on microcontrollers with closed boot ROMs. Their “secure elements” are under NDA. Their true behavior is inaccessible. You cannot verify what code is executing. You cannot prevent what you cannot see.
And so they distract you. They whisper the word quantum. They say it is coming. That your encryption must be upgraded, that lattice cryptography will save you, that you must prepare for a future of mathematical apocalypse.
But your apocalypse is already here.
Quantum is not the threat. It is the diversion. It is the thing they tell you to fear so you do not notice what they already control. They do not need quantum computers. They have opaque supply chains. They have foundry access, fuse maps, and debug pins sealed under resin. They have signatures you will never see and certificates you cannot revoke.
They own the execution environment.
So what are you encrypting? And for whom?
You do not hold the key if you do not hold the board. You do not own your wallet if you did not fab the chips. You are not safe if your secrets pass through code you cannot read, compiled by toolchains you did not write, running on hardware blessed by states that see privacy as a threat.
You believe you are hiding something. You are not. You are rehearsing secrecy, on a public stage.
