Closer to the Edge

04/08/2025

Encrypted messaging apps like Signal—designed for secure communication—have become the de facto halls of power. Auto-deleting messages. No metadata. No logs. No trace. No trail. No democracy.

It’s not illegal. It’s not even secret. It’s just gone. And that’s the brilliance of it.

You can’t FOIA what never existed.

This isn’t paranoia. It’s policy. It’s not some rogue decision made in the dark—it’s in the training materials. It’s baked into Project 2025’s vision for governance. Schedule F, Trump’s bureaucratic guillotine, was revived to decapitate institutional memory and replace career officials with ideological loyalists who will follow orders and leave no record. They don’t just want to change how government works. They want to change how it remembers.

And the effects are already visible. More than 8,000 federal web pages have vanished since January. Public datasets—on climate, equity, public health—have been deleted. Archives broken. Search bars disabled. It’s not censorship in the traditional sense. It’s unpublishing. It’s the strategic erasure of history.

This isn’t incompetence. It’s design.

If watchdogs are blind, if journalists can’t verify, if citizens can’t audit what’s done in their name, then truth becomes a rumor. Accountability becomes impossible. Power becomes absolute.

And if someone tries to blow the whistle? Good luck proving it. Good luck tracing the call that never happened. Good luck retrieving the memo that was never written. Good luck FOIAing a Signal thread that vanished ten seconds after it was read.

This isn’t just the death of transparency. It’s the birth of a new authoritarianism—quiet, tech-savvy, and terrifyingly efficient. An authoritarianism where power doesn’t need to justify itself, because the evidence will no longer exist to demand justification.