NEWLY RELEASED INTERVIEW: Talk Liberation and Panquake founder Suzie Dawson goes on Redacted podcast to discuss how banks are now being weaponized against dissidents at a global level, as individuals and organizations are getting their assets frozen with little to no recourse—and not because of illegal activity, but due to political ideology. Suzie also discusses who Talk Liberation is, what we’re doing, where we’re going and why it’s unlike anything the world has seen.
Transcript of this video of Suzie’s Redacted interview with Clayton Morris, released on July 12, 2025 follows:
Clayton: Well, banks are now being used against dissidents. De-banking is a real phenomenon, and it’s been happening all over the world. Journalists that are covering stories are suddenly finding their banks have shut them down, no access to money. Funny story, I was literally in the middle of an interview with a journalist who was covering the Ukraine War when he received a notification that his bank wouldn’t allow him to transfer money anymore. Unbelievable. Individuals, organizations are getting their assets frozen with little or no recourse at all, and not because of illegal activity, but due to political ideology. Catherine Austin, Fitts just explained to Tucker how big this really is. Watch.
Plays video of Catherine Austin Fitts on Tucker Carlson:
“The litigation starts and literally you go from being very wealthy and very trusted and very respected to being an enemy of the state. No one will talk to you, nobody will answer your phone. And suddenly all your income stops. All your income stops, your credit stops. You’re just frozen.”
Clayton: Well, now this is happening to everyone across the political spectrum. Iceland, New Zealand recently froze the bank accounts of a new global privacy software development house called Talk Liberation. The creators behind Panquake, which is an incoming decentralized blockchain and online social media platform. Many supporters of Panquake believe it will emerge as a direct threat to X/Twitter, whatever you wanna call it, but without the data mining, without the algorithmic throttling that so many people experience and can’t stand about X. Now, founder Susie Dawson and the organization are fighting back against the Icelandic bank who de-banked them. Why exactly were they de-banked, and they’re teaming up with leading lawyers right now who won a similar case for WikiLeaks back in 2017. And Susie is a founder and she’s here today to talk to us about this. Susie, welcome to the show. Great to see you.
Suzie: Thank you so much for having me, Clayton.
Clayton: My pleasure. So let’s start with the big one. Why do you believe your organization was De-banked? Was there any official reason that they gave you, and then I want to talk more about what you guys do, but was there any reason given to you why you were de-banked?
Suzie: Not really. They invoke legislation, but don’t give particular reasons as to why they believe that that legislation applies in our particular case. Unfortunately, the AML legislation or what you may know as KYC, know your customer, anti-money laundering legislation, and in some cases, terrorism funding, countering legislation, provides banks with really—impunity. They can make reports about you that they don’t have to share the details of with you. So you have no ability to know what is being said about you or to correct that if it contains any type of misinformation. So a part of what we are fighting is the abuse of bank process that allows them to take actions veiled in secrecy for which the customer has no real recourse.
Clayton: And right, we can, we can’t fight back against these banks at all. I mean, they’re just protected. And so what then? We move our money somewhere else? I mean, we have no recourse at all to fight this.
Suzie: Well, what we’ve seen in our case is that elements of both the traditional political right and the political left seem to be being targeted by this de-banking. Which tells me that it’s only a matter of time before this closes in on the so-called middle or the center. Just as we’ve seen with surveillance and with censorship, private companies are making money out of flagging companies and individuals for their political affiliations or relationships or opinions or positions. And then that for-profit element drives an industry and creates growth in an industry.
What I mean is, if you look back 30 years ago at the first street cameras going up, it was all about safety and it was just in certain spaces. But now cameras have become ubiquitous because there are companies making money off of installing those cameras and building the software systems that spy on us. And so it becomes just absolutely pervasive. Now we see the same thing with the spread of censorship in the social media space, which is precisely what my company Talk Liberation is trying to combat. We’re trying to change the power dynamics between users and internet providers to be more in favor of the user and to provide more transparency to them. And that is an agenda that those who are driving censorship and political oppression are obviously not onboard with. So who knows, perhaps it’s a complete coincidence that we are taking decisive steps to bring real change to internet users around the world, and we just happen to be systematically targeted by the financial system. But I don’t think it is a coincidence. And we’re going to court to try and find out.
Clayton: Do you believe this banking attack was coordinated as sort of a preemptive strike against your software launch?
Suzie: Well, we look back at the history of this project. We’ve been in existence now for four years. We started out as a group of a ragtag group of activists and independent journalists who knew that the internet needed to fundamentally change and it needed to change in the benefit of users because corporations now have been in control of the public internet for about 25 years. And if we look around us, the results are not good. People are not happier and healthier and safer and doing better while the internet is being controlled. Our primary methods of communication now are being controlled by major corporations. So our project came together as a group of volunteers to try and just make a little corner of the internet where we could have software that doesn’t spy on us, and we could have a social media platform where users were able to see the actions being taken by us as, as net on the network. So when we moderate accounts, users can see that. Whereas in Facebook and Twitter and these types of other big tech platforms, users have no real visibility into what those platforms are doing behind the scenes. And those platforms are vacuuming up massive amount of user data, monetizing it, selling it in many cases to other corporations and to governments. And we knew that it doesn’t have to be that way. As technologists and as developers who make software, we know that software does not have to inherently by default spy on you or capture your data.
And one of the major innovations of our products is we came up with a way to store user data on the user device in an encrypted data storage instead of ourselves as a network provider capturing that data and holding that data in a centralized locations ourselves. When you send a tweet, that tweet isn’t going up to the world. That tweet is going to Twitter, who then may choose to let parts of the world see that tweet. But on the network that we are building on Panquake, it’s the complete opposite. When you make a quake, a message on our network, you are passing that directly to all the users in the network without coming through a centralized choke point or control point. And rather than us holding your data for you, you yourself are holding your data on your own device.
Now, I look at this from a human rights perspective because I’m a human rights activist. I look at this from freedom of communication, freedom of association, freedom of expression and political expression of opinion. And as a technologist, I know that I can make choices in the architecture of the software that I built that will bake your human rights into the base layer of that application. And I believe that software should be built in a way that respects and reinforces human rights.
Now the question is, in a world where human rights are quite often, frankly, out the window, along with international law, which exists to codify and to protect those human rights, does my company and myself and the 50 amazing people who work with me every day to build software like this for the user, are we then a target of those establishment systems that prefer the world where you are spied on and where your data is captured and monetized and held outside of your control?
Clayton: Well, it seems that, I mean, I don’t, wanna put words in your mouth, but you’re asking the very question that I’d be asking. This is a major threat to them, isn’t it? This is a major threat to these power hungry, the censorship industrial complex. I mean, you’re based in New Zealand, right? A country that’s often seen as peaceful and neutral. What does it say about even so-called like liberal democracies that they’re engaging in this sort of financial censorship of, you know, of companies like this who wanna get information out. I mean, it’s deeply troubling.
Suzie: It’s funny that you should mention that. I actually, I live in Russia. I’ve lived here for about 10 years, but I’m from New Zealand and most of the executives in my business are from New Zealand. Many of our staff are from New Zealand. I am a New Zealand company owner as well. And obviously the other most famous person that’s been here has been Edward Snowden now for what must be 12 years, I’d say it’s been here. And in terms of liberal democracies, it’s often said about America, that America likes to export freedom and democracy. But in the case of whistleblowers like Ed or myself and my situation coming out of New Zealand, we are literally being exported from democracies. You’re exporting freedom and democracy to Russia, and you may want to really have a think about why that is.
I think your audience knows full well that anybody who challenges power, who anybody who cares enough to actually make a change in the world, to take some risks, to put in the effort to see the bigger picture. That if we don’t take risks and if we don’t care enough, and if we don’t take action, we are gonna live in a surveillance dystopia. Our kids are gonna grow up in a surveillance dystopia. We have to take action. We have to band together and we have to make change.
And I know that there are members of your audience who will have skills, there may be technologists, there may be developers, and I would encourage them to not just throw your support behind us so that we can become an “everything app” like somebody has been talking about, but instead to create your own projects. Get out there. You guys know that you can make software which doesn’t spy on people. If you’re a developer, you know that you can, you don’t have to host on Amazon. You can self-host, you can design and build and bring other people into a community that creates solutions that do not violate human rights. You just have to look inside yourself and ask yourself, do I want to build something which reinforces human rights, or do I want to participate in the violations of it?
Clayton: Well said, well said. Now, if I understand correctly, so you’re in Russia, the bank that you were using was Icelandic, and am I right on that?
Suzie : So Iceland has a special constitution that really protects freedom of expression, freedom of communication, freedom of speech. That’s why we chose to host our software solutions primarily in Iceland, using a very special internet service provider there who has a long and storied history of standing up for and protecting the rights of activists and particularly information activists. So it was a natural home for us. Also, Iceland powers all of its data centers by geothermal and hydroelectric energy. And we are not wanting to be as, particularly as a company developing a blockchain based product, we’re not wanting to contribute to some of the issues that are being raised now with AI and with blockchain, as pertains to energy. So it’s been a great place for us to host and a great solution. But of course, we wanted to be able to pay our people, we wanted to be able to work with a multitude of suppliers, and we created an Icelandic business to do that.
Now everything was fine. We had no issues there. We had a local accountant, local lawyers, managing everything. We ourselves don’t put our hands in the kitty. We have professionals who actually manage and correctly account for everything. No issues with the bank at all until we crossed a Rubicon where we were able to achieve a significant amount of private investment into our company so that we could expand the number of developers we had working for us and our capacity to deliver additional software solutions. And it was at that point that out of the blue with no notice whatsoever, our investment funds were frozen and ultimately they were withheld for nine months from us. And then eventually the bank did actually back down, unfreeze the funds and return them to us, which obviously exonerates us from any wrongdoing because if we were money launderers or terrorists, they wouldn’t give us our money back would they?
So eventually we got it back, but stopping us in our tracks for nine months was particularly injurious to our public supporters, our personnel. And it really seems like they, they’ve just been doing everything they can to try and slow walk our business because they know that there is a public thirst for what we do. They know people are desperate for solutions, for alternatives to big tech. People are actually pretty aware and pretty educated by now about the ways in which their data is being captured and exploited. They understand that social media is not a digitally safe place for them in the sense of their personal data, their information. They understand that there are cookies that can track them around the internet or that their microphone can be used to listen in on them. And we are building software, which does not do that. We do not have cookies on our pages. We do not use your microphone to spy on you. We don’t capture and sell your data. Um, and that apparently makes us dangerous, even though to me, I just think it makes us ethical.
Clayton: Well, exactly. It makes you ethical, but it’s a big danger to them. Do you think this pressure to de-bank, I mean, where do you think this pressure came from? Did this bank just decide on its own that we’re done with you, we’re gonna hold your money for nine months? Or did, did you, or have you been able to figure out through this lawsuit process, through discovery or otherwise that this pressure came from somewhere else?
Suzie: I’ll give you one piece of information that I haven’t spoken about publicly before, but which is very, very curious. And that’s that as our lawyers were in back and forth with the bank trying to get our funding unfrozen, the bank, which is a Icelandic bank, talking to our Icelandic lawyers in the Icelandic language, about our Icelandic business with our Icelandic accountant. At one point the bank said, could you please supply all of your documents in English? Now, English is not an official language, it’s not even a legal language when we go to court, they don’t speak English. When they send us documents, they don’t come in English, they come in Icelandic. Now, why on earth is the Icelandic bank asking our Icelandic lawyers and Icelandic accountant about our Icelandic business to please supply everything in English? Somewhere in the English speaking world, there are other people reading those documents and calling the shots.
Now our Icelandic lawyer, Sveinn Sveinsson and who represented WikiLeaks in the case against an Icelandic payment processor, Valitor, which ultimately settled for 10 million US dollars, just prior to a Supreme Court hearing because they won up to that point. He’s just, he says it outright. He says, look, Suzie’s a a journalist and activist, she supported WikiLeaks. She’s a known supporter of WikiLeaks. He just said it’s straight up political repression. People who hold views that are contrary to what the status quo wants them to hold are going to have issues, using status quo systems, financial systems, business systems, banking systems, irrespective of the fact that we’ve never committed a crime, irrespective of the fact that we are not terrorists, we’re not violent, we don’t have weapons, we don’t do nasty things to people. In fact, what we’re actually trying to do is protect people. But none of that matters to them. What matters is they see something they don’t like, they wanna stop it in their tracks and they abuse the powers that they have. And in some cases that they’ve created for themselves, in order to affect the outcome that they want, which ultimately is not an outcome that serves anyone in the world, but particularly internet users. We need options. We need to not be pigeonholed into big tech systems.
Clayton: I guess I should ask you the obvious question, which is, you know, you’re in Russia, would a Russian bank be open to housing your business? I mean, or is that a bridge too far?
Suzie: I’m not sure is the answer. Me being a Kiwi and coming from New Zealand, it was very natural and easy for me to work with my compatriots in the West, and to work with those systems, because those are the systems I know. I don’t know Russian law, I don’t know Russian software industry at all. But I do know the New Zealand software industry. I have more than 20 years corporate experience in New Zealand working within the belly of these beasts that create these software packages that ultimately result in automation causing people to lose their job or in exploitation of user data or, I’ve seen from the inside how this works. And it’s not pleasant. It’s not pleasant for the staff who work in those companies. It’s not pleasant for the customers who they’re selling those solutions to. Everything is driven with a motive that doesn’t actually serve the end user.
And that’s why we say with Talk Liberation, our customers are not our product. Our customers are our bosses. They’re who we have to be responsive to and who we have to serve. And so we’re trying to just change, change this whole business dynamic where your customer is exploited as a tool for generating profit. Instead, the customers are the ones supporting the business and the business should exist to serve the customers.
Clayton: What’s the current status of your lawsuit and how can people support you or get involved in pushing back against this kind of censorship and this kind of control?
Suzie: So we’ve recently launched a campaign in support of our lawsuit, which you can find at badbanki.com. Banki with an i Banki, B-A-N-K-I is the Iceland word for bank. And at that website, you can learn about the background of our lawsuit, how this has come about, the steps that we’re taking to, to try and galvanize people into understanding that in together, enforce we actually can have a voice against these banks. As an individual customer, there’s a very skewed power dynamic, but together as a group, we can do something about it.
So particularly if you have been affected by de banking, if it’s happened to your business, to your friends, or to yourself, on that website you can tell us your story. You can tell us anonymously. You don’t have to identify yourself or the bank. And we will, help to raise awareness about your case as well. In general, if you want to support my amazing team of people around the world who work very hard every single day, you can do that at panquake.com/donate. We are now looking at fighting two banks on the opposite sides of the world, as well as continuing to release more and more products, which protect you on the internet. So your support is very welcome if you want to get behind making some real change.
Clayton: Wonderful. Again, that’s panquake.com. And you can go there and check out all of that. Suzie, thank you so much for sharing your story with us. We really appreciate it. And this is I think a cautionary tale. You know, we’ve heard from so many different journalists and individuals who’ve been de-banked on both sides of the political spectrum because of their political affiliations or what their businesses are trying to do, and it’s deeply disturbing. Suzie, thank you so much for joining us. We really appreciate it.
Suzie: Thank you Clayton, for the opportunity.
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