GUEST BLOG: Talk Liberation – PANQUAKE FOUNDER SUZIE DAWSON SPEAKS

These days, interviews with Panquake founder Suzie Dawson are rare events. She has largely kept her head down while toiling away at the creation and scaling of Talk Liberation, the independent software development house behind projects like the social network Panquake, privacy-focused digital marketing platform Lnqk Me and free link-shortening and archiving service Panquake Me. But once or twice a year she emerges to present at a tech conference or speak on a platform and the resulting content produced is always raw, honest and fascinating in scope and significance. Here in the below, the Panquake community is granted deep insight into the history and thinking behind the actions and organising efforts of this New Zealand former activist, journalist and technologist, responsible for creating ballsy and forward-thinking solutions with the potential to transform real outcomes for internet users worldwide.

From the groundbreaking Panquake social network being launched on a test net in May of 2025, to the announcement of its subsequent iteration Panquake Lite being in active use by real users as of September 2025, despite all odds and incredible establishment pushback Panquake is now hurtling towards the moment when its substantial community will be able to more widely access and enjoy the much-anticipated people powered, human rights-driven social media platform.

But Panquake is just one part – albeit a very significant one – of what is being delivered by founder Suzie Dawson and her international team. How this journey came about, what the roots of this tree are and from where these ideas formed and coalesced and ultimately manifested, has now been discussed by Dawson at more length than ever before.

Late in 2025, Talk Liberation founder Suzie Dawson spent two hours deep diving with SaltCube Analytics host Thomas Karat in a unique stream session digging deep into Suzie’s past, present and future – from her earliest foundations in technology and the internet to her activism and journalism adventures and the resulting persistent state targeting of her that ultimately resulted in her committing her life to relentlessly innovating solutions to protect the privacy and security of others.

A non-AI generated transcript of the interview is provided below. Key topics discussed in the interview include:

• The Pathway: how the FBI targeting of Kim Dotcom and the Occupy Movement on New Zealand soil set Suzie on a trajectory that changed her life forever
• The Genesis: how growing up in the eighties and nineties exposed Suzie to nascent internet technologies that gave her foundational skills that she has carried forward to the core of her modern architectural philosophies
• The Teamwork: “I am not an island” Suzie emphasises the collaborative teams she helped forge and worked shoulder to shoulder with in New Zealand and beyond and how they have spoken out about being similarly targeted and punished – often to extremes – for their ethics and activism, yet how their testimony is very conveniently ignored by detractors
• The Odyssey: how the impact of Suzie’s work in New Zealand both endangered and in some ways protected her and led to Suzie leaving New Zealand for Germany, seeking safety and normality – only for the targeting to continue unabated.
• The Real Russia: “Why do they hate us?” Russians routinely ask Suzie about the West. In this interview, she shares how she answers that question, and describes what Russia is really like, from her first impressions to her life in exile.

There is a real human-generated (not AI!) audio transcript provided below. Please share this post if these messages resonate with you!

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[Transcript begins]

THOMAS KARAT (T) – Suzie Dawson, what a pleasure having you. How are you?

SUZIE (S) – I’m good. Thank you so much for having me.

T – A little bit of context; I came across your name in regards to, I should say I am very much interested in decentralized social media, and I did some research and Talk Liberation came up again and again and again. And finally I was able to reach out to you, and I thought we talk about Talk Liberation, which we will. But then I did some research and I found out that the life of Suzie Dawson, is, I would say, extraordinary. And to give the viewers a little bit of context, I have a list here in front of me. It’s not a short list, but I think it’s important to kind of flesh out who you are. And please correct me if I’m wrong. Ok?

S – Sure.

T – So New Zealand born journalist, activist, and technologist in relation to Talk Liberation. You left New Zealand in 2015, and if my information is correct you went first to Berlin, and you are now in Russia in exile, self-imposed exile.

S – Self-imposed exile is a very interesting term. I take it actually as a compliment because it’s a term that has been used about Edward Snowden, about Julian Assange, and about myself. I find it to be a ridiculous term because it sounds like, ‘Oh, we just up one day and decided it would be great to become an exile, and off we went to become exiles.’ It’s ridiculous. It removes the other parties who are involved in the process, from it, and puts the focus just on the person who’s experiencing the persecution, rather than on those who are imposing the persecution which results in the exile. So that’s not a term I’m fond of. It’s one that was used by the New Zealand Herald, in an attempt to frame my situation in a way that, again, took the spotlight off those who were doing the persecuting, and put it on to the persecuted.

“New Zealand is a wonderful country. The land is incredible. The people are amazing. The food is great. But the politics are, the first word that comes to me, actually, is homicidal. The politics are psychotic, and largely because of the involvement of foreign countries like the United States, who have an out-sized role in the domestic affairs in our country.” – Talk Liberation founder Suzie Dawson

T – And we will come back to that because it’s a real persecution, I fully agree. Now a couple of key roles. Panquake founder, managing director, overseeing dozens of staff in ten different countries. Again, we are going to talk about Talk Liberation a little bit later. Internet Party Leader in 2017, youngest woman ever to lead a registered NZ political party – congratulations. Unity for J; my guess is Unity for J means something, J for Julian Assange, is this right? That’s my guess.

S – Correct.

T – Ok. Three thousand volunteers. Again, achievement; former party president, Internet Party New Zealand. Because I’m interested, what is or what was the Internet Party New Zealand?

S – Internet Party of New Zealand is a registered political party that was created by Kim Dotcom, the internet entrepreneur, who is German Finnish in origin, but moved to New Zealand. He also was persecuted for his support of Wikileaks, and was subjected to a U.S. Department Of Justice prosecution in the Eastern District Court of Virginia, which is the same court that was persecuting Julian Assange, and also still is persecuting Edward Snowden. And Kim Dotcom’s home was raided on the 20^th of January, 2012, by FBI agents who flew to NZ with a hundred police officers, an attack helicopter and dogs, raided his residence and threw him in jail. As a result of court hearings related to that case, we discovered New Zealand’s partnership with the NSA in the United States, the National Security Agency, and with New Zealand’s sister agency so to speak, the GCSB, and spying on at least eighty-eight New Zealand citizens. So Kim in 2014, founded the Internet Party, and I was a part of promoting that political campaign, and involved from an independent media aspect. And then in 2017, I was appointed party leader of Internet Party and stood for election, from Russia, in the general election in New Zealand.

“When push comes to shove, there is a transnational military structure which maintains power regardless of who sits in parliament; of who wins an election; of who you vote for. These things are irrelevant to the supremacy of that core power structure. In fact I’m hearing in my head from one of the Snowden files. It says, ‘We are impervious to political perturbations.’ Those are the words of an NSA executive. ‘We are impervious to political perturbations.’ So whether the left’s in, or whether the right is in, they are in. No matter what. And when you cross them, then you learn that lesson. You learn how real that is.” – Talk Liberation Founder, Suzie Dawson

T – The name Kim came up a couple of times in my research. I believe his story is also one worth telling. Where or what is he doing now? Is he arrested.

S – Kim has been under house arrest since 2012. Eventually he got bail in 2012, and he has been on daily reporting and house arrest ever since. He’s still fighting extradition to the United States. Unfortunately, recently he’s had some very serious health battles, and is doing his best to recover from that, while still being subjected to ongoing extradition proceedings.

T – Incredible. In a country like New Zealand, you know. Sometimes people ask me; ‘Thomas, what’s going on, where should we go,’ the first country that always comes up from others is ‘should we go to New Zealand?’ And then I heard your story, so I think people need to reconsider that first reflex.

S – New Zealand is a wonderful country. The land is incredible. The people are amazing. The food is great. But the politics are, the first word that comes to me, actually, is homicidal. The politics are psychotic, and largely because of the involvement of foreign countries like the United States, who have an out-sized role in the domestic affairs in our country. Quoting David Farrar, who’s very much on the political opposition from me, actually, but who’s a famous New Zealand media figure; he said “There is political espionage in New Zealand”. And that’s a well known fact amongst media and politicians, that countries from outside of NZ who are militarily powerful, such as the U.S. and UK, and others, do have an active and very physical presence in New Zealand, and they do engage in political repression of New Zealand citizens.

T – If I’m not mistaken, New Zealand is part of the Five Eyes.

S – Correct.

T – Together with Australia.

S – Correct.

T – That means intelligence sharing and these kinds of things, yeah. I heard you in an interview. The New Zealand Government is not only spying on its own people, but they’re also outsourcing the espionage. I think it was the FBI, you said. Or the NSA?

S – Well it would have been NSA in the context of GSCB. It would be the FBI in the context of NZSIS, which is the security intelligence services in New Zealand. The FBI has just openly opened its first field office in New Zealand in the last couple of months. So it now has physical offices on the land of our country. An intelligence agency of a foreign government.

“We learn about New Zealand, a sovereign independent entity. We’re told we have independent foreign policy. We’re told we have human rights. We’re taught that we have democratic freedoms and human rights, but when you start to scratch below the surface, you get a very different picture.” – Talk Liberation founder, Suzie Dawson

T – But do they have any jurisdiction in New Zealand?

S – They certainly shouldn’t. However, through these post-9/11 intelligence sharing agreements; international cooperation agreements; etc., etc.; look they’re all just spokes of the same wheel. That’s what it comes down to. I’m sorry to sound so jaded or so extreme, but my sense of national identity has been very much rocked by my experiences because I understand now that we are taught that we have a national identity. We are taught that we’re a sovereign entity, but when push comes to shove, there is a transnational military structure which maintains power regardless of who sits in parliament; of who wins an election; of who you vote for. These things are irrelevant to the supremacy of that core power structure. In fact I’m hearing in my head from one of the Snowden files. It says, ‘We are impervious to political perturbations.’ Those are the words of an NSA executive. ‘We are impervious to political perturbations.’ So whether the left’s in, or whether the right is in, they are in. No matter what. And when you cross them, then you learn that lesson. You learn how real that is.

T – That explains also why the, let’s say the geo-strategic position of the U.S. didn’t shift since the Second World War. It doesn’t matter, Democrats or Republicans in the power. Before we continue, I would like to go through a couple of your, let’s say, achievements. Then I would really like to hear what happened in a kind of step by step by step fashion if we can. Now about major campaigning achievements. So co-created viral hashtag in opposition to the (TPP) Trans Pacific Partnership. Trended number one in NZ, and second worldwide. Then campaigned, first social media influencer from 2012 to 2014 against New Zealand’s mass surveillance agency. So you picked your enemies so carefully. Activist and promoter on major events. Moment Of Truth event, involved in major 2014 event featuring Kim Dotcom, Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange. What what that about, this Moment Of Truth event in 2014?

“Some fantastic people took some really big risks to try and educate, first and foremost, the people of New Zealand, about what is really going on, and what was happening to us. And then to try to do something about it, which is the most important point. It’s not enough just to study and to learn. It’s not enough to know. You have to do. You have to act. You have to build.” – Talk Liberation founder Suzie Dawson

S – It was fifty percent in connection with Snowden revelations, particularly information relevant to New Zealand and New Zealanders that was derived from files in the Snowden leaks which Glenn Greenwald was reporting on, and which also tangentially impacted the Kim Dotcom situation; affected New Zealanders as a whole. Everybody in our country is affected by the things that we learned in those files. For example, at that event Ed talked about how there was NSA facilities, physical buildings and infrastructure on New Zealand soil that are registered assets of the State Department in the United States, but they’re on, as we would say in Maori in New Zealand, on the whenua, on the New Zealand whenua; on our land. We are physically occupied by intelligence agencies of foreign countries. And again, this is not what we’re taught about ourselves when we go to school, when we’re growing up. We learn about the Land of the Long White Cloud. We learn about New Zealand, a sovereign independent entity. We’re told we have independent foreign policy. We’re told we have human rights. We’re taught that we have democratic freedoms and human rights, but when you start to scratch below the surface, you get a very different picture. The other fifty percent of what the Moment Of Truth event was about was the September 2014 General Election, which was the first election the Internet Party stood in under the leadership of the honourable Laila Harre, who’s an absolutely amazing warrior for truth and activism in New Zealand. A long-standing wahine toa. Again, I keep wanting to use New Zealand terminology. Wahine toa – a woman warrior. She is a woman who has been fighting for human rights and social justice for a very long time in New Zealand. She was the first party leader, and if there’s one thing I’m really proud about in terms of Internet Party, it’s that I got to work with her and was supported by her, and was able to support her in return. So some fantastic people took some really big risks to try and educate, first and foremost, the people of New Zealand, about what is really going on, and what was happening to us. And then to try to do something about it, which is the most important point. It’s not enough just to study and to learn. It’s not enough to know. You have to do. You have to act. You have to build.

“My goal has been to create a social media company that will serve people, and serve users, and will put an end to the types of abuses that are going on against users.” – Talk Liberation founder, Suzie Dawson

T – Very true. One more chapter here, and that’s media and recognition. High reach journalism. Some of your articles apparently achieved more than 250,000 hits; not so bad. Wikileaks endorsement; you were consistently shared by Julian Assange between 2014 and 2019. I have a couple of media appearances from Sky News Australia, RT, NPR Australia, Radio New Zealand, and a number of publications in New Zealand Herald, Huffington Post, Consortium News, etc, etc. Now I do this very consciously. I really want to… I would like the viewers to understand who you really are. And lastly I fear, notable interviews conducted. It’s a funny one. Well, funny. NSA Whistleblower Bill Binney, then Ray McGovern and John Kiriakou, both of which I have interviewed; Daniel Ellsberg, Chris Hedges. Now I saw an interview that I think both Ray McGovern and John Kiriakou both endorsed Talk Liberation, right?

S – John Kiriakou is the Brand Ambassador for Talk Liberation [UPDATE: SEE FOOTNOTE AT BOTTOM OF TRANSCRIPT] and Ray McGovern is like my honorary Grandfather. I love him so much; he’s such a good person.

T – Amazing. Both of them, and very courageous. Now that was to give a little bit of context, and to introduce you to the viewers who have probably never heard about you. Same as me. A couple of months ago, about a year ago, I was not aware of you, which is a shame. Because of course you’re not in New Zealand. I guess in New Zealand the situation is different. But to the broader audience, probably your name, Suzie Dawson, but also Talk Liberation is relatively unknown. So if you feel comfortable, as far as you’re at liberty to tell, I would like you to talk us through what really happened to you in leading you to your, how shall I say, I no longer say self-imposed because you’re absolutely right it’s not self-imposed. Your exile. Where would you like to start?

“What you list as my achievements, to me are things that are almost incidental, that just happened to occur as a result of that motivation of just wanting to support people.” – Talk Liberation founder, Suzie Dawson

S – The first thing I would do is I’d kind of re-frame this a little bit because it’s interesting for me to have this conversation about the things that I’ve done and been involved in being framed as achievements. Because to me they weren’t something that I aspired to, or that I set out as a goal. Talk Liberation is a little bit different. I consciously, my goal has been to create a social media company that will serve people, and serve users, and will put an end to the types of abuses that are going on against users. That’s a conscious decision on my part. Something that I decided to get involved in and apply my skill set to, with an ambition to be able to effect change. Activism, I did not aspire to. I did not plan on getting into. It was completely accidental. I saw the Occupy Movement, it was actually kind of the nascent Occupy Movement forming online even before the physical occupation was on the ground. And I got involved first in an online capacity, and then I went to Occupy Auckland, and I met some amazing people. Beautiful, incredible people. And they thought like me, and they believed the things that I believed. And it comes back to what I was saying before, doing something; building something. Not just having the knowledge or talking about stuff, but taking real concrete actions to build something. And we had a media tent there, and all the other people who had computer skills of any type congregated there, and so that became my natural home away from home. And it started with just the tiniest basic little things, like we needed some ethernet cables. OK, I’ve got ethernet cables. I’ll run home and get some ethernet cables and bring them down to the Occupy and help network some computers together. It’s really small little things like this that led me down the pathway. It wasn’t because I wanted to become someone, or speak on panels. I didn’t want to, this was never in my head. I just wanted to help to provide what I could to contribute to something that I could see was real and concrete, and actually effecting some positive change. In NZ; I’m just going to keep using NZ terminology, I’m sorry. In NZ we talk about the kaupapa. The kaupapa, and these are indigenous Maori words that I’m using. The kaupapa is the foundational understanding between people, or when you’re embarking on something, when you’re gonna work on something together, you have this foundational understanding. For me, the kaupapa of my activism was to help people. To contribute, in a very physical way, contribute and help. It wasn’t because I wanted a career change, or I had some personal aspirations. So I just wanted to let you know. What you list as my achievements, to me are things that are almost incidental, that just happened to occur as a result of that motivation of just wanting to support people, we would say tautoko. To tautoko the people around us. To show support and solidarity with the people around us. And when I got involved at Occupy, I did not have the first clue in the world that we would have malevolent attention from police agencies. I was completely oblivious to the concept of really even what an intelligence agency was. I didn’t really understand what an activist was. When people first started describing me as an activist, I thought they were a bit loopy. I was like, I’m literally just a single Mom from the suburbs. I’m literally, like, dropping my kid at sports practice, and coming down here to help you do your computer stuff, and you’re calling me an activist. Why are you calling me an activist? So it took a long time for me to accumulate the knowledge and the understanding of what was really going on. And it was through that combination of direct experience on the ground, and then my own research. As weird things started to happen in the course of the Occupy, and I started to understand there was more going on than what the eye could see, then I started to learn. I started to learn from older activists, who had been through this in the eighties; been through this in the nineties. All the topics we’re discussing pre-date myself by generations, if not tens of generations. These things have been going on since time immemorial. People with power and money have wanted to maintain and grow their power and money, and have been unlimited in the scope of their imagination of ways that they could do that, and immoral in their practices. And the more that I started to discover that there was this hidden control mechanism to which any of us can be subjected, in which all of our human rights go out the window; our democratic freedoms go out the window, the more indignant I became. If I could describe myself through that whole period of the last ten year period from like 2011 on, it would be righteous indignation because I just got more and more pissed off. I was like, what do you mean you’re targeting, having a foreign power target our citizens and spy on them? What do you mean that that’s supposed to be OK? No it’s not OK, and we’re gonna tell everybody about it, and then we’re gonna try and do something about it. And I guess I had the foolhardiness that I didn’t let the fact that these people had billions of dollars, and thousands, or tens of thousands of staff versus, you know, me and six people on my media team. I didn’t let that, kind of, dissuade me, and arguably I should have. I mean I’ve had people say to me, what did you expect, you know? You go up against these people. You’re telling the truth loudly about these people. What did you expect? And at a certain point I did become aware, like, oh my god this actually could result in some permanent harm; and not just to me actually, but to other people connected to me. But at the same time, I really felt like sitting down and shutting up or giving into them; it’s kind of like an abuser. It really, there’s a lot of abuse dynamics in the relationship between citizen and State. And I really felt like if I just gave in, that I would be actually empowering them to go and target the next person, and target the next person because ‘look – it worked with Suzie,’ and that didn’t sit right with me at all. I didn’t want to feel like I was tacitly participating by giving them the net result that they wanted, and ultimately, yeah, that cost me a lot, you know. And it cost my kids more. I mean, my kids lost their friends. I never, ever talk about my children, so this is gonna be quite rare for you to have this. But my children lost their friends; they lost their schools; they lost their peer group; they lost their access to my family. We didn’t see anyone in my family for nine years. Nine years. Last year was the first time that we saw my parents and my family because they came here and stayed with us, finally. And we weren’t estranged from my family; they’ve actually been relentlessly supportive of me throughout, but they’re older, and asking them to up and come to Russia was not the easiest thing in the world to do. And I know I’m chopping and changing in the time frame here, but I just want to make the point that; yeah I was abused by my State because I exercised my democratic freedoms and my human rights, and I tried to extend those to others. I tried to work for the preservation of those rights for other people. And I’m still doing that. That’s not something I can say I will definitely achieve within my lifetime, I probably won’t. But as Ray McGovern and people like that will tell you, it doesn’t actually matter, we have to try. We have got to, we’ve got to try. Capitulation and surrender is not an option because when you surrender to an abuser, they just get a free ride to do it ten times worse. So we have to push back against the coming dystopia, you know, as Julian talked about in his book, “Cypherpunks.” OK, do you want me to cut back and give you a proper explanation of how I got from the media tent at Occupy to exile? If so, I’m happy to do it.

“People with power and money have wanted to maintain and grow their power and money, and have been unlimited in the scope of their imagination of ways that they could do that, and immoral in their practices. And the more that I started to discover that there was this hidden control mechanism to which any of us can be subjected, in which all of our human rights go out the window; our democratic freedoms go out the window, the more indignant I became.” – Talk Liberation founder, Suzie Dawson

T – It’s your show, Suzie. I’m happy with everything you give us. I think it’s very important for people to realize; I mean most people never leave their country; most people never leave their town even, yeah. So it’s really, really important to understand things that only someone who lives somewhere else, and not just for a year or two but permanently, experiences. Exactly like you said, old or young, you completely lose your personal network. And you only realize how important this personal and professional network is, is when you lose it. When you’re suddenly in a country, and you do not have access to your personal environment; to your friends; to your whole proximity. Not to talk about the culture change, the new start, etc., etc. And then you, as a single Mom, continue with your journey. Not only continue with your journey, but you also build on it. So maybe let’s go back to wherever entry point you want to reenter your story.

“I was abused by my State because I exercised my democratic freedoms and my human rights, and I tried to extend those to others. I tried to work for the preservation of those rights for other people. And I’m still doing that. That’s not something I can say I will definitely achieve within my lifetime, I probably won’t. But as Ray McGovern and people like that will tell you, it doesn’t actually matter, we have to try.” – Talk Liberation founder, Suzie Dawson

S – OK. So in 2016 it was the first time I ever put myself on camera, and talked into a camera, when I made a documentary called ‘Diary Of A Person Of Interest” because I needed people to understand – I had applied for asylum here in Russia, and I needed people to understand what I’d been through, and what was happening to me, and why it was happening. So I recommend that if you really want a blow by blow of everything I was involved in, and everything I did that led to exile, that you go ahead and watch that. It’s not an easy watch. I tried to re-watch it again recently for the first time in many years, and it was difficult for me to watch. It talks about a lot of dark things, but it is the God’s honest truth of what happened to me. And when I say it was the first time I put myself on camera, that’s because in all of my journalism from 2011 until 2016 I interviewed many well known political figures; many well known media figures; and I covered many, many live events in New Zealand, but I never put myself on camera. I always had my camera facing away from me, focused on whoever I was interviewing. If you’re an intuitive person, and if you look really carefully at… actually, you’re a behavioral expert, you should be able to do it better than anybody else. If you look at me in ‘Diary Of A Person Of Interest,’ in that 2016 documentary, you can actually see the combination of, like, it’s not really terror, it’s more like… there’s like a steely grit and a determination to go ahead and talk about these things, but at the same time I’m just hating the fact that I’m having to do it. And actually someone extremely cool commented to me recently that in that video you can actually hear me, every time before I say something, I do a little sigh. It’s like (sigh), ugh. And then I start talking. And the sigh is, ‘I can’t believe I have to talk about this’, ‘I can’t believe this is happening to me.’

T – I saw it yesterday, actually

S – So you know what I’m talking about.

T – I saw it yesterday, and what I took away from is you spend a larger part in the second half of the documentary outlining exactly the means that the State used in order to, how should I call it…

S – Terrify me.

T – Harass you.

S – Horrify me; terrify me. Petrify, that’s the word. To petrify me.

“I was following and supporting Wikileaks and Chelsea Manning, and all sorts of related people. So I started micro blogging, and aggregating news about all of these topics and then publishing that on the blog as well. So this is the tiny little beginning seeds of my independent journalism. Well, what I didn’t realize is that all of that was being taken notice of by some pretty nasty, nefarious and well-resourced figures, and that was being noticed internationally as well as domestically. That started to manifest itself in my life in nasty ways.” – Talk Liberation founder, Suzie Dawson

T- I will put the link to this documentary in the description. But for our viewers right now, give us a couple of things just to make the viewers understand, you know, it’s not a light decision that you take your kids; pack your kids and go first to Germany, then to Russia.

S – No. God no.

T – I’m not sure. Should we first follow the timeline, and then go there. Or shall we right away check into this?

S –We’re all over the place, but I kind of feel like that’s OK to be honest with you.

T – Fine with me.

S – So, in terms of the documentary. It very much takes a journalistic approach in the sense of, I really systematically lay out, like, here is all the techniques. Here is all the parties that are involved. Here is what they do and how they do it. And you’re right that you’ve noticed that there really is kind of two definitive halves. The first half is the story of me, and what I went though and what happened. The second half, I’m actually, in that second half, I’m not making it for a viewer, or for a member of the public. I’m actually making it for other targets of the State. I’m actually trying to help them to understand what’s happening to them, and how they can react to the targeting in ways that will be less harmful because it’s a very emotional thing. So we’re going back to the media tent at Occupy Auckland. Everything was fine. I was coming to General Assemblies. Everything seemed fine. The occupation was a good space. It was a healthy and positive space. We had a lot of homeless people. We looked after them. We cared for them. That was fine too. We had some criminals. We looked after them as well. Everybody got fed. Everyone got looked after. We had cool marches. We had cool protests. We had little teach ins and sit ins, and educational spaces. It was really, I felt, a very beautiful, transformational place. And in particular, I became very close with the other members of my media team. We had an independent media team. And one of the guys there, Redstar309Z, he was live streaming. It was the first time that I had ever heard of live streaming, and the first time I had ever seen anybody live stream. It was completely new. Nobody did it at all, but here’s this one guy. He’s live streaming. He and I got to be really good friends. He and others convinced me to get on Twitter. If you go back to my original Twitter account, which was @endarken, there’s actually a tool called, I think it’s called First Tweet or something. You can look it up online. And it shows you what’s the first ever tweet of a Twitter account. And if you put my handle into First Tweet, you’ll see that the very first tweet I ever sent on that Twitter account was a personal statement of solidarity in support of Occupy Oakland Port Shutdown, which was in the first week of November of 2012. I used Twitter for the sole reason of showing solidarity to other Occupies in the Occupy Movement. Hanging out with Redstar while he was live streaming, he got me to do what we called tweet jockeying. So I would be tweeting on Twitter what was happening on the ground that he was filming on his stream, and I would be sending his stream links out. We were literally the only people in NZ doing this. Literally, it was him and me, and no one else because at this time, I mean, it was cost prohibitive. We used to have to come up with a hundred and fifty dollars to buy data so that he could have enough data to even stream at all. From there we hooked up with Global Revolution Live, also known as @GlobalRevLive, and that was an independent media crew who were taking the live streams from all of the Occupations around the world, and putting them all into one dashboard where viewers could see on one webpage, you could watch Norway and Finland. You could watch Australia. You could watch New Zealand. You could watch Occupy Wall Street, New York City. You could watch Occupy Oakland. You could watch Occupy Denver. They’re all consolidated into one view. You could actually view and participate in all the Occupies in the world through a single website. So from that point we made a lot of friends with other independent media, people in media teams all around the world. Then they started saying, well Suzie can you blog something? Can you write something up? And so I learned to take my pictures and my tweets, and embed Redstar’s live streams, and write up a little synopsis of whatever had happened on any given day, and we created a website called Occupy Savvy Dot Com, which is now at OccupySavvy.wordpress.com. We started, each time we had an event, after the event we would publish all the materials from that event on this website. Then that got picked up and circulated all around the whole global Occupy Movement and became a very well known blog within the movement. So that’s the leap from, I’m just plugging in some ethernet cable, to, I’m now tweet jockeying for a live streamer, to I’m now in digital publishing and blogging. And of course at the same time, I was following and supporting Wikileaks and Chelsea Manning, and all sorts of related people. So I started micro blogging, and aggregating news about all of these topics and then publishing that on the blog as well. So this is the tiny little beginning seeds of my independent journalism. Well, what I didn’t realize is that all of that was being taken notice of by some pretty nasty, nefarious and well-resourced figures, and that was being noticed internationally as well as domestically. That started to manifest itself in my life in nasty ways. So in December… OK, so what’s the timeline. September, we’ve got the beginnings of Occupy Wall Street, and the beginning of the Occupy New Zealand group which I was a part of, and still probably am if I could ever access my Facebook account again. That was September 2011. October 15th – Occupy Auckland, first day of actually meeting other people and participating. November – port shutdown in Oakland. The first emergence of riot police and tear gas and that kind of stuff going on. December – my house got broken into for the first time. It unfortunately got broken into a lot of times after that, but that was the first time. And it was broken into in a very dodgy way. The glass had been smashed from the inside, not the outside. Things like this. And then I started getting followed everywhere. Followed by people in vehicles. Followed by people in the street. People photographing me everywhere I went. I’m just some chick from the suburbs. I’m not, I am not some award winning journalist. I’m nobody, and I’ve got these teams of people following me everywhere. And that’s when I started to go, hang on a second, something’s not right here. There’s something very dodgy about this, but I still was naive. I didn’t have a clue that it was intelligence agencies, or international agencies. None of that would ever occurred to me in a million years. Instead, I actually thought to myself, oh well, you know, maybe someone’s dealing drugs at the Occupy. I put it down to local cops. That was how I justified it to myself. I was like, yeah well maybe they’re just trying to catch someone who’s got a warrant for their arrest, or somehow I’ve gotten involved in something without realizing it. Until the following month, January of 2012, when all of a sudden there’s FBI helicopters flying into our country, and raiding Kim Dotcom’s mansion with his wife nine months pregnant with twins, and hauling him off to jail for a crime that isn’t actually a crime in New Zealand – copyright infringement. It’s a civil liability. It’s not a criminal liability. The 20th of January was when the raid happened. The 23rd of January, three days later, Occupy Auckland was raided by riot police. I was there on the day, as were all of my media team. I had to watch a whole bunch of people getting hauled off and arrested, including most of my friends. One of the guys on our media team was filming and taking photos, and he realized that the police had the same badge numbers on. They had Z557, the same badge numbers, and he’s like, what is this? For what possible reason would our police have fake badge numbers? We’ve come to believe now, which we didn’t realize on the day, that that’s because they weren’t our police. They were the same FBI team that had come in and raided Kim’s house; had stayed the weekend and then come and done the Occupy Auckland raid. And they had been given police uniforms and identical badges numbers. But we got that footage into the mainstream press in New Zealand. It became a whole national scandal. It was on the news. The fake Z557 badges, and they launched an official investigation, which took one year to do exactly nothing. Then at the end of the year said, ‘it was the actions of a few rogue police officers, and we’ve dealt with it as an internal matter.’ That’s the official explanation for the Z557 cops. At that point, something was really rotten in the State of Denmark. We had worked out that something really rotten was going on. And now, one thing I want to be really clear about because there’s been lots of smears and efforts to undermine me over the years. One big thing that they always ignore in their smears is the fact that I wasn’t the only one who was targeted. My entire media team was targeted. Every single person who was involved with me in promoting the Occupy movement was targeted. All of them. Targeted on the road. Same issues with the cars and vehicles. Some of them arrested. One of them thrown in a mental hospital and drugged. We’ve had horrific things across the board happen to us. Some of us beaten up by cops, repeatedly arrested for no reason. All manner of different methods of targeting were employed against my entire media team, three members of which have gone on public record and talked about their experiences with me, and at the Occupy, and the things that happened to them, as well as being aware of what happened to me. Other famous media figures, like Martyn Bradbury from the Daily Blog, have made public statements about knowing that I was being targeted when I was in New Zealand because Martin was working with me on the GCSB campaign. So it was never a secret. What was happening to me was not a secret. It was known in the public arena. New Zealand journalists knew about it. Political figures knew about it. They knew about it while I was still in New Zealand.

“There’s been lots of smears and efforts to undermine me over the years. One big thing that they always ignore in their smears is the fact that I wasn’t the only one who was targeted. My entire media team was targeted. Every single person who was involved with me in promoting the Occupy movement was targeted. All of them. Targeted on the road. Same issues with the cars and vehicles. Some of them arrested. One of them thrown in a mental hospital and drugged. We’ve had horrific things across the board happen to us. Some of us beaten up by cops, repeatedly arrested for no reason. All manner of different methods of targeting were employed against my entire media team, three members of which have gone on public record and talked about their experiences with me, and at the Occupy, and the things that happened to them, as well as being aware of what happened to me.” – Talk Liberation founder Suzie Dawson

The reason I’m hammering this in is because there’s this general impression that I just upped and left one day and then came up with this story. But if you go back and read my Twitter history, I was tweeting about it in real time from New Zealand. Literally, today this happened to me. Tomorrow, you know, the next thing happens to me. It’s all there, and not just on Twitter, on other platforms as well. I just wanted to explain that because I’m not like an island, at all. They like to reduce me to being an island because that’s how they can perpetuate the smears, but the reality is that I was just one part of a whole web of activists and independent media that this was happening to. This targeting was pervasive. Anybody, this is the other thing too, anyone that ever wants to say they don’t believe me. Do what I did. Do what I did. Campaign against a national intelligence agency, and see what happens to you. See what happens to you. You don’t actually have to believe me. You don’t have to decide whether or not to believe me. Just stand up in your chains and move around a bit, and then find out for yourself what happens. Assert your democratic rights. Assert your freedoms, and find out what happens to you. So the beginnings of 2012, the FBI show up in NZ and things start getting really really weird. That was 2012. I started to investigate a couple things. The first thing is, my blogging now became investigating the FBI presence in New Zealand. So now I’m not just aggregating news about the movement. Now I’m actually doing the, I mean, I look back on it now and I think, oh my God, I didn’t have very much skill, actually, at all. It was all heart and no skill. I started just putting all of the pieces of the puzzle together. Again, aggregating the official reporting plus the independent reporting, and then giving my own analysis and sharing the information that I was privy to because I was involved in the same circles that were all tied into this. Then later that year; I want to say it was August 2012, somewhere around there, the news broke about the NSA having, at the request of the GCSB, targeted eighty-eight NZ citizens. Now that’s a very misleading revelation because they don’t just target a person. They target everybody around that person that they communicate with in any capacity, and then everybody around them as well. So if you’re targeting eighty-eight people, you’re actually not. You’re probably targeting, OK let’s say eighty-eight people know fifty people, what’s that? Four thousand plus in the first concentric circle. What is it now in the second concentric circle? Now we’re talking about two hundred thousand people. And we’re talking about two hundred thousand people in a country of, at the time, four million, now five. I always get shit when I say that it’s three or four million people, but it was when I was growing up in the eighties. Two hundred thousand people are being spied on. Now that’s a significant percentage of the entire New Zealand population, is having their personal data and communications sucked into the NSA spy web, and it’s being delivered on a platter by our national spy agencies, who had no mandate whatsoever to spy on their own citizens, let alone hand over the data of our citizens to a foreign government. On what level is any of that OK? Where are the democratic freedoms and rights that we’re promised and taught that we have, and that that’s why we’re better than the other countries because these are the things we have that other countries don’t have? That’s why we should have this sense of superiority? No, it’s all hocus pocus nonsense. We don’t have those things. I’m just one example out of many to evidence that we don’t have those things. So somewhere around September of 2012 I had the brilliant idea, because now for the first time I had a bad guy, I had an understanding of who’s been doing this stuff to us. The bad guy was the GCSB, the Government Communications Security Bureau, New Zealand’s NSA. So me being me, I decided to start the hashtag #GCSB. Then I decided to tweet, all day every day, information about the crimes these people were committing against our citizenry. In the meantime, I leveraged every single personal relationship that I had to demand that we create a national campaign focused on this point. And Martyn Bradbury was one of the first who, I mentioned, he’s known as ‘Bomber,’ actually, ‘Citizen Bomber’ in New Zealand. A very, like, for decades, longstanding independent media political journalist, radio host, music/television host. Very, very, very, well known personality in NZ. And to his credit, he was like ‘fuck yeah, let’s get them. Let’s do it’. And I worked with him actually on the creation of The Daily Blog, which is something most people don’t know about, which was our vision to take the model that we had used for Occupy New Zealand, of bringing reps from all these different special interest groups together and creating a consolidated force that we could turn into a mass movement. That’s how The Daily Blog was started. Based on the same premise. And we started to get traction.

T – A little note. We were just interrupted, the connection. We re-started a little while later. As you can see the light situation, on my end at least, has completely changed. And the last thing that I still remember was you step into the footstep of giants. This is what still stuck in my memory, Suzie. So can you pick it up from there?

“Where are the democratic freedoms and rights that we’re promised and taught that we have, and that that’s why we’re better than the other countries because these are the things we have that other countries don’t have? That’s why we should have this sense of superiority? No, it’s all hocus pocus nonsense. We don’t have those things. I’m just one example out of many to evidence that we don’t have those things.” – Talk Liberation founder, Suzie Dawson

S – Sure, sure. So I just wanted to make it really clear that we are all part of a bigger community. It’s not about just one of us. What I was saying is that these achievements as you frame them, or experiences as I would frame them, are not just because I’m some genius or a fool, but because I was walking in the footsteps of giants. I was studying the actions of people who I admired, who believed in the same causes that I did, and I was trying to take actions in support of those out of, really it comes down to solidarity. Solidarity is lifeblood. Solidarity is what keeps us all going, and alive, and able to cope with the things that we go through. It’s the solidarity of other people. Actually you mentioned before how difficult it is to have your community ripped away from you when you’re going to a new country, a new place. What I found out is that the people in my life who I expected to support me often didn’t, and the ones who I never thought would support me, did. So you learn about the people around you when you face some serious adversity in your life. And you learn to lean on and work with those who emerge that may be the ones you don’t expect, but at the end of the day are the right ones. I was very, very lucky that going through what I was going through in New Zealand, people who knew more than me and had more resources than me worked out what was… I’m talking about Edward Snowden here. I’m talking about Julian Assange. They took note of what was happening to me, and they took actions to support me. They took actions to shine a spotlight on me because that spotlight helped to keep me safe. It really did. Even though I preferred to work anonymously, and our media team did work anonymously in the first few years. Eventually, the targeting of me was so pervasive and becoming so dangerous that it required having a spotlight on me, and people knowing who I am in order to raise the risk calculus for those who are targeting me. The more public I was, and the more support I had from significant people, the more difficult it was for those who were hurting me to keep hurting me. So I’m very lucky. I consider myself to be a very lucky person because without that support and without that solidarity things could’ve gone a much worse path. I was told when I was in NZ by someone who has been through exactly what I’ve been through and worse, to leave. To go, specifically, I was told to go to Berlin, ‘that’s where our people are’. At first I thought that suggestion was nuts, crazy. Of course I can’t go to Berlin. What are you talking about? But I was having physical attacks. I was having very scary… I never know what the terminology is… vehicular interference. I was having my oil cap removed on my car, and my car bursting into flames when driving down the road. I was being chased by vehicles. I was being… I had vehicles try to push me off the road. I had a series of really terrifying, horrible experiences, and at the same time I was getting a lot of death threats. I was getting death threats on social media and by email. And the ruling government, who had been persecuting journalists and activists in New Zealand, won re-election in September of 2014. That meant I was staring down the barrel of another three years minimum of those same people in power being able to continue doing those things to me and to others. That’s why I finally made the decision. I was like, I can’t keep going through this. I can’t stay here. It’s non-viable to live in a constant state of terror and persecution. So yeah, I sold my house. Packed everything up and moved to Berlin. And I did it under the cover of going on a holiday. I literally went to a travel agent and booked a holiday, and bunny-hopped our way across Asia into Europe, staying with friends along the way, and then settled down in Berlin. And really really hoped, genuinely hoped, that in Berlin we were gonna have a normal life again. Where the kids could go to school, and I could get a job and that we could return to some type of normalcy. But unfortunately, I wasn’t allowed a moment’s peace, and they continued to target us. To be fair, they didn’t target us as maliciously in Berlin as they did in New Zealand. I didn’t feel in Berlin that I could be killed at any moment. I didn’t feel that, which I certainly did feel in New Zealand. But they made life as difficult for me as they possibly could. After I came to Russia for a short visit at the end of 2015, once I came back to Germany then they got pretty nasty. And at that point I realized OK if I stay…

“These achievements as you frame them, or experiences as I would frame them, are not just because I’m some genius or a fool, but because I was walking in the footsteps of giants. I was studying the actions of people who I admired, who believed in the same causes that I did, and I was trying to take actions in support of those out of, really, it comes down to solidarity. Solidarity is lifeblood. Solidarity is what keeps us all going, and alive, and able to cope with the things that we go through.” – Talk Liberation founder, Suzie Dawson

T – If you say they, sorry. If you say they…

S – You want to know who the they is?

T – If you say, who are they?

S – So the very first day that I landed I

T – No, no, no, in Germany. I mean in Germany.

S – Yep, yep yep. The very first day I landed in Germany, I had what I assumed are police agencies or German intelligence agencies openly photographing me, following me, stalking me from day one. Literally from day one. In our hotel room. In our hotel lobby. In the vicinity of us always. I overheard they were on the phone actually talking about me, and things like this. It was very obvious. Now, I don’t know… I’ve never worked inside these agencies. I don’t know what their processes are. I don’t know what happens between New Zealand agencies and U.S. agencies that they go, OK, this woman’s going to Germany. Now we’re gonna… I don’t know what the handover process is, I guess is what I’m trying to say. But it’s clear that there is some kind of handover process, and it just became rather than being stalked by New Zealanders, now I’m being stalked by Germans. There was overt and covert targeting of me in Germany. Just like I had in New Zealand, I always had vans with blacked out windows parked outside my house. I had that also in Germany, literally twenty four hours a day outside my apartment that I rented there. I had that same type of physical surveillance, but I also had the photographers, literally me and my kids going to the markets, and photographers jumping out with big cameras taking photos right in my face. I still to this day, I can only speculate at what their rationale is because I don’t actually know. I don’t know if it’s that they want you to know that you’re under surveillance that they do that. I don’t know if it’s some kind of psychological warfare…

T – Intimidation.

S – Yeah, I don’t know what their motives are, but I can just tell you what it’s like to be on the receiving end of it, which is extremely unpleasant. Like I said, after we came to Russia for a short trip and we went back to Germany, they doubled down on all of it. They were obviously very unhappy that I’d gone to Russia. They did not like that. And in a very strange twist of events, when I decided to leave Germany and come back to Russia, they actually did stop me at the border when I was getting on the plane. It’s very odd because you would think that you would be questioned coming in. We got questioned leaving. All they wanted to know from me is, when are you coming back to the EU? I just showed them my return ticket and said, look, I have a return ticket. They’re like, when are you coming back to the EU? I’m like, I have a return ticket, it’s right here. When are you coming back to the EU? They just kept pushing me on the same question. When are you coming back? When are you coming back? When are you coming back? Because I think they were concerned. I think they were concerned that I would go to Russia and stay. And the more vehemently they pushed me on that point, the more I was thinking, oh my God, I don’t want anything to do with you people ever again. I don’t want to be near you or subjected to you ever again. I’m out. That’s it, finished. I’ve tried very hard to settle down and live a normal life. I haven’t been allowed to do it, and I’m not going to spend the rest of my life under your thumb. That’s it. So I came to Russia. And at the same time as coming to Russia, events in NZ were unfolding that led to a lot of revelations that put into context my experiences. For example, I had put in an OIA request to the office of the Prime Minister, trying to get to the bottom of some of what had been happening to me. Those OIA requests had been forwarded by the Prime Minister’s office to the GCSB. There was GCSB stamps on the documents when they came back. They refused to confirm or deny that I was a target. That’s the official status as it relates to me personally. They will not confirm or deny. They did admit having open source intelligence on me, but they won’t admit to anything that they obtained by other means. At the same time New Zealand was passing a series of extremely draconian security laws. In particular, laws which would allow them to revoke the passport of a New Zealand citizen arbitrarily, provided that that New Zealand citizen was deemed a threat to national security. At the same time as that, the #TPPANoWay movement, which I had been extremely involved in for many years, was deemed by New Zealand police to be a threat to national security, and they were raiding the homes of activists in New Zealand. So I was staring down, again, the barrel of the Prime Minister’s office referring my complaints to the GCSB, who would neither confirm nor deny, as they gave themselves the power to revoke New Zealand passports based on a definition that they themselves engineer and supply. They actually revoked the definition of the term “threat to national security,” and said that it was up to the Police Commissioner and Attorney General to determine whether or not somebody was a threat without any actual description of what constituted a threat. So as these things just piled up one on top of the other, I just got to the point where I realized it’s not safe for me to travel. I can’t just be hoping that I can get through the airport with my two kids. I just can’t do that. We need stability. We’re not criminals. We don’t commit crimes. I’ve been in Russia for ten years. I haven’t got a parking ticket. I haven’t got anything. I’m a law abiding person. But I could never know if I would still have a passport the next year. If I would be able to travel on the next flight that I took. That was why I applied for asylum in Russia. Yeah. That’s it in a nutshell. I mean I’ve skipped a half a dozen movements I was involved in there, but it doesn’t really matter. It was all the same thing, which is causes that we cared about that were impacting our country. The only way that we could fight back was to use our voices to circulate information, and to try and organize our fellow citizens to make a difference. Sometimes we got very close. Sometimes we really had impact, and sometimes we didn’t have impact. It’s a mixed bag. I would never say that it’s a success or a failure, but it’s really important… I still believe it’s extremely important to try. It’s extremely important to try.

“The #TPPANoWay movement, which I had been extremely involved in for many years, was deemed by New Zealand police to be a threat to national security, and they were raiding the homes of activists in New Zealand. So I was staring down, again, the barrel of the Prime Minister’s office referring my complaints to the GCSB, who would neither confirm nor deny, as they gave themselves the power to revoke New Zealand passports based on a definition that they themselves engineer and supply.” – Talk Liberation founder, Suzie Dawson

T – How did you… to which extent are you able to rebuild your life in Russia? I understand you are still, you are in the process for requesting asylum. How did that work out?

S – Well when I came to Russia, it was almost unheard of to be a westerner in Russia applying for asylum. Nobody could believe that I was there with a New Zealand passport asking for asylum and saying that I’m in fear of my life. Aside from Ed’s case, and I think there’s one other case I’m aware of which pre-dates mine by about twenty years, there hadn’t been anyone else. So the immigration service was baffled. All of the officials that I dealt with were completely baffled. I was lucky that I got a great attorney. A great asylum attorney, who was extremely supportive and really went the extra mile for us. I also faced systematic interference. The head of the UN Refugee Agency in Moscow, it was a woman called Svetlana Gannushkina, who’s actually an extremely famous human rights activist in Russia. Unbeknownst to me, she had been exposed in Wikileaks documents, in Wikileaks publications for her activities with the U.S. Ambassador here in Moscow. Unfortunately, when I went to apply for asylum, at the top of the form it says, ‘Have you been recognized by the UN refugee agency as a refugee?” I hadn’t, so off I went to the UN Refugee Agency here in Moscow, and found myself delivered to the desk of Svetlana Gannushkina. She sat there and she took every single, photocopies of every page of my passport. My kids passports. I had about 200 pages of documentation. That’s another thing people don’t realize, is actually how much evidence I compiled of what was happening to me. From mechanic reports to photographs to just everything. Like I said, a lot of it unfolded in real time on social media, but I had a lot of supplementary evidence as well. So I took all of it with me. She photocopied every single page. Literally, personally. Didn’t have her secretary do it. She sat there right in front of me. Photocopied every single page. Then she looked at me and she said, it’s a direct quote, she said, “I don’t like Julian Assange.” And I was like, what? She says, “He published me in the Wikileaks.” And I thought, oh shit. Oh shit, here I am literally begging for my life to this woman, and of course all through my file is Wikileaks and Ed Snowden and everything else. She hates my guts because she hates Julian’s guts. Sure enough, I was denied refugee status. And because I was denied refugee status that means that I couldn’t tick the box on my asylum application. That means that I couldn’t go though the internationally accepted UN asylum process. That means that I instead was put under a Russian State law asylum process, which is a whole completely different kettle of fish to what Ed and Julian went through. In both Ed and Julian’s cases, they were recognized by the UN Refugee Agency as being refugees. They got refugee status. They went through the UN asylum process and were processed that way. Now all of a sudden I find myself in a process in which none of them, no one had gone through before, of which I’m completely blind as to the ramifications or implications of. I’m just really lucky that Russia didn’t toss me to the wolves. They didn’t turf me out, but nor did they give me special treatment or consideration. I have had to be like any other migrant and go, you know, sit in the queues and in the lines and what not, and go through the processes on and off. For about eight years, eight years of that… of findings and appeals and findings and appeals and findings and appeals. So yeah, it was a really really lengthy process, but simultaneously I was able to rent an apartment and, you know, start to build a community of people around me. Build relationships around me. Make friends. I wanna say learn the language (laughing). I did study the language for a year, and I can speak enough Russian to get by, but I would be too embarrassed to say that I speak Russian because it would be disrespectful to the Russian people to claim that I’m a Russian speaker. Yes, I can get through the supermarket, and taxi ride, and the restaurants, etc. It was very, for a long time, it was very isolating, absolutely. But I was very honest with everybody around me about exactly what my situation was. Why we were in that situation. Most importantly, I was free to continue my work without being subjected to daily persecution. That means an enormous amount. It took me a long time to be able to become accustomed to that freedom actually. I think it took about my first six months here before I could really breathe and know that I was OK.

T – In what kind of world live we where someone from New Zealand has to go to Russia in order to be able to breathe freely? I mean, the global situation is so twisted at this moment.

S – Yeah.

T – And of course the images that we are fed from Russia is equally twisted. So if you can elaborate, how is life in Russia for you?

“I was very honest with everybody around me about exactly what my situation was. Why we were in that situation. Most importantly, I was free to continue my work without being subjected to daily persecution. That means an enormous amount. It took me a long time to be able to become accustomed to that freedom actually. I think it took about my first six months here before I could really breathe and know that I was OK.” – Talk Liberation founder, Suzie Dawson

S – When I first got here, I had a head full of the same propaganda that everybody else did. I expected it to be dangerous and dirty and scary, but I was just hoping that I wouldn’t be targeted in the same way I had been before. I got here and discovered this whole new world that I had never had any inkling of whatsoever. Where the streets are clean. Where as a woman, you could walk down the streets at anytime of day or night, and nobody will interfere with you. Nobody will catcall you. No one will approach you. No one will accost you. Coming from New Zealand, I couldn’t do that in Auckland. I couldn’t walk down Queen Street or K’Road in Auckland Central as a woman in the night time, and feel safe. But I can do that in Moscow. That was the first thing that I noticed. Well, the first thing I noticed was the cleanliness. Everything is spotless. You can eat off the streets. Where I come from there’s broken beer bottles and trash and, just, it’s dirty. It’s just a fact. The city is dirty. The countryside is beautiful, but the city is dirty. Moscow is not like that. Total opposite. Completely spotless. So clean and safe. And then the next thing I started to realize is that everybody loves Westerners, and they love Western culture. So all of a sudden I’m realizing, hang on, there’s hamburger joints and they’re playing Elvis Presley songs, and they’re sitting in Cadillacs. Their restaurant table is a Cadillac, and they’re sitting in the Cadillac eating their burger like it’s 1950’s USA. None of that.. I could never have imagined any of that.

And the food is just clean, organic food. No Monsanto chemicals. None of the stuff that we’re subjected to in the West. No GMO foods. No fake ingredients. No chemically lab produced meat or whatever. To be honest, my enduring impression was that it was like the New Zealand I grew up in the 1980’s because there was a New Zealand that was sovereign and independent. There was a New Zealand that was clean and green, and I grew up in that New Zealand. But that New Zealand got taken away from us in the 90’s through a series of political and trade deals. Then that got exacerbated through the first John Key national government in 2008. New Zealand in the 80’s actually left the Five Eyes alliance. The Five Eyes became The Four Eyes because the New Zealand people were fighting for a nuclear free New Zealand. They were refusing to allow U.S. nuclear warships into NZ waters. As well as they were fighting an extremely important anti-racist, anti-apartheid movement in support of Nelson Mandela and South Africa. That’s the heritage that we have, but that was lost. That’s part of the heritage that we’ve been fighting to try and get back. And in many ways, Russia now reminds me of that New Zealand. It has the local manufacturing that we used to have in New Zealand. It has the locally owned businesses. You go down to the dress shop down the road and it’s owned by, you know, the local dress maker. Things like this. That’s the New Zealand I grew up in, but it’s not the New Zealand that we ended up with. That’s probably my biggest fear for Russia, actually. And something I think Russian citizens don’t understand is how much they have to lose. They don’t tend to see so much what they have, because they’re always told that they’re less-than. So they think that they are less-than. But I look at them and I think oh my God, you still own your land. You still own your houses. You don’t have to fear that your kids will grow up renters for the rest of their life. Everybody here owns a house, and usually a house and an apartment. They still own their country. In all honesty, the thing Russians are always asking me, they say, why do they hate us? Why does the West hate us? The honest to God answer, based on the ten years living here and everything I‘ve come to know. My answer is because they don’t own you. That’s why they hate you. Because they don’t own you.

T – Spot on.

S – They don’t own your land. They don’t control your housing. They don’t own your medicine. They don’t own your science. They don’t own your intelligence agencies. They don’t own your police agencies. They don’t own your educational facilities. People here have Masters Degrees and no debt. You can’t have a Masters Degree and no debt in the West. Are you kidding me? People here go to the hospital because they’re sick, and then they walk out with no bill. You can’t do that in the West. In terms of the way that the society functions, and the services that it provides for the people, it is light years ahead. No, you know what, it’s not light years ahead of the West. What it is, is how the West used to be before the West cannibalized itself. That’s what Russia is. And that’s why it has to be protected. For exactly that reason.

“Something I think Russian citizens don’t understand is how much they have to lose. They don’t tend to see so much what they have, because they’re always told that they’re less-than. So they think that they are less-than. But I look at them and I think oh my God, you still own your land. You still own your houses. You don’t have to fear that your kids will grow up renters for the rest of their life. Everybody here owns a house, and usually a house and an apartment. They still own their country. In all honesty, the thing Russians are always asking me, they say, why do they hate us? Why does the West hate us? The honest to God answer, based on the ten years living here and everything I‘ve come to know. My answer is because they don’t own you. That’s why they hate you. Because they don’t own you.” – Talk Liberation founder, Suzie Dawson

T – I remember seeing Tucker Carlson was in Moscow. Of course he did the interview, but they also filmed him walking through Moscow. I was smiling at his kind of, I don’t know, surprise when he found, hey, the supermarkets are not empty. Exactly as you said. The streets are clean. There’s security. I mean it reminds me very much about what’s going on in China right now. This mass propaganda against China. China is really light years ahead. But it’s the same rhetoric. It’s the in (inaudible). The dehumanization of the enemy because both Russia and China are officially the West’s enemy. But coming back to you. Maybe now it’s a good segway into Talk Liberation. So how did this emerge? Your private life. Your life in Moscow. I don’t know when you started Talk Liberation. Was that already when you were in Germany or in New Zealand? Or did it start in Russia? So how did Talk Liberation enter your life, and at which stage?

S – Talk Liberation was formed as the entity, the business entity to underpin the registration of Panquake the social network. I came up with the idea of Panquake towards the end of 2020. Then in 2021, I and a group of friends volunteered for the project because we had nothing. We just had ourselves, our ideas, and our willingness to work. We didn’t have millions of dollars or backers or anything like that. We came together and we launched a crowdfunder at the end of January in 2021, to try and raise enough funds to be able to begin the Panquake project. We were very successful in raising those funds, actually much more quickly than we expected because there was widespread public support for there to be an alternative to Big Tech platforms. Because everybody feels so abused by Big Tech platforms, in which they are exploited at every level by Big Tech. So we researched what jurisdictions we could register in that had the best hope of being able to maintain a stable foundation for a business to operate in the social media sphere. We came up with Cook Islands, and from a data perspective with Iceland. So we registered companies in both and called it Talk Liberation for obvious reasons. It’s all about freedom of expression. It’s about liberating our ability to talk and have conversations with each other, but also the opportunity to talk about methods of liberation. To be able to collaborate on campaigns. To be able to do something. Take action. Build something. The same points that I was making earlier. It’s about trying to provide ways for people to reinstitute human rights that we had been promised for ourselves. That leads me into the technology side because I knew that human rights could be embedded into the architecture of an application. You can literally code respect for human rights into software. You can make software that functions in a way which reinforces human rights, and yet I’ve never seen anyone try to do it except for, you know, technological developments relating to Wikileaks would be a good example. That is where a few technologists tried to use technology and software, with web based applications, to provide channels for the reinforcement of human rights. Well I wanted to do that on an industrial scale. On a scale that millions of people could benefit from. With, like I said, nothing but that dream and some good friends, we have been working extremely hard on that ever since. Just to give you a little bit of background, I didn’t become a technologist. I have always been one by default because of my generation. I’m forty-five now. Growing up, I started using a computer when I was probably six years old. An Apple IIE in Primary school. My cousin’s Amiga 500, and playing on an Atari and learning to administrate systems myself because in those days you had to administrate your system yourself. This is the days before Microsoft operating systems. This is the days of DOS-Shell. This is where in order to make your computer operate in a way to allow you to play your computer game, you had to be able to administrate your file system within DOS itself. So I got foundational technological knowledge as a matter of course. Then the earliest stages of the internet as we know it, meaning the news groups and the bulletin board services and things like that, and IRC, and what became mIRC, which is internet relay chat. For those people who don’t know, this is the earliest days of internet messaging as we know it. That was when I was eleven, twelve, thirteen. That’s what my geek friends were doing, and so I was doing it too. Then my geek friends one day a few years later realized that they could build an internet service provider and did so. Then began providing internet service to other people. We used to network our computers together by sharing our MAC addresses because that was the only way we could create a network. Things like this. I just came about at a specific time that led me to accumulate what I would describe as foundational computing knowledge. Which as I went on through my career, because, like I said, I became an activist by accident not by ambition, and by that point I was already thirty-one. My whole career had been in computing and technology. Database Administrator. Software Development Manager. Working with devs. Working with coders on commercial platforms. On vacuous, for-profit platforms that automated functions and put people out of jobs. That was literally what I was doing in my normie career before becoming an activist or a journalist. So for me it’s about taking, again, taking that experience. Taking those skills and then applying them in a way that advances the cause of human rights in a modern day context. In my activism, in journalism, just as I described to you, tweet jockeying for the first live streamer in New Zealand. I knew social media because I had used social media as a tool to communicate information. So then taking my technological skills and experience and applying that to create solutions to address the issues with Big Tech in the realm of social media. That’s what gave birth to Panquake. It was also the result of years and years and years of conversations with extremely well known whistleblowers and technologists. We commiserated endlessly amongst ourselves about all of the problems with Big Tech. Again for the second time I would reference ‘Cypherpunks’ by Julian Assange. If you read that book. Even if you read the foreword to that book, there was a very real call to action there. There was a warning and a call to action. So I am just one of the people in this world who’s read that book, headed the warning and accepted the call to action. I’m lucky enough that that’s resonated with other people, and that they’ve lent their support to the effort. And voila, we have the Panquake project.

“[We] called it Talk Liberation for obvious reasons. It’s all about freedom of expression. It’s about liberating our ability to talk and have conversations with each other, but also the opportunity to talk about methods of liberation. To be able to collaborate on campaigns. To be able to do something. Take action. Build something. The same points that I was making earlier. It’s about trying to provide ways for people to reinstitute human rights that we had been promised for ourselves. That leads me into the technology side because I knew that human rights could be embedded into the architecture of an application. You can literally code respect for human rights into software. You can make software that functions in a way which reinforces human rights.” – Talk Liberation founder, Suzie Dawson

T – Now without going into too much technical detail. I have a list here. I don’t want to make it too technical for specific reasons. But we could on a future episode maybe dive more deeper into it. I have here a whole list of… I would like to step back here. First of all, I am absolutely convinced we need a decentralized Web3 based, blockchain based social media. So this is absolutely the future. Now there are attempts by different projects. On top of my list is BlueSky of course. It’s a bit fishy because it’s not really decentralized. Also, of course, the past of its founder. Then farcaster, then lens protocol, Mastodon, DeSo decentralized social. There’s more. Vtube Ether, Peep Path, Pixelfit, etc., etc. So in a nutshell. Try not to address a technical audience. In a nutshell, what’s the difference between, let’s say, Talk Liberation’s Panquake, I know you have multiple products, and that list of so called same decentralized social networks?

S – If you sent your mother or your grandmother or your neighbor, who doesn’t know anything about computers or technology, to the platforms on that list would they be able to use them? If you sent your mother to Mastodon, what’s the chances that she’s going to work out how to self host a Mastodon node and operate a decentralized social network?

T – Well what about BlueSky? It’s relatively similar to Twitter.

S – Is your mother on Twitter?

T – (laughing) My mother’s eighty something, no.

S – That’s exactly my point. My mother’s seventy five, and my mother does not use Twitter and can’t use Mastodon. Panquake was designed… Panquake has been designed for my mother; and for my daughter; and for my mother’s friends; and my daughter’s friends. In fact, both my mother, this is something no one knows, both my mother and my daughter work for Panquake. Both of them. In fact, they came up with the name Panquake together. My mother is a marketing manager. My daughter is a graphic designer. Together they came up with Panquake. See this is the problem. I saw a lot of this in Germany, actually because in Germany I spent a bit of time at the Chaos Communications Club. There are brilliant coders, open source technologists, and propriety, who build great functionality, and great tools and great solutions, but they have absolutely no ability to do proper interface design for a wide audience. So you get solutions like Pond is one I can think of off the top of my head. Highly technical, but really really critical. I mean Pond is an awesome thing, but no way could the average person use it. It’s almost like they create solutions in the image of themselves, right. They have a PhD or they’re like a super duper coder; super duper technologist. They create something that actually only they could use. They don’t make something that is widely accessible. This is a trend that you see across, particularly decentralized applications because decentralized applications tend to be independent projects. The incentive isn’t there for the big corporates to run decentralized networks in most cases. Not in all cases, but in the overwhelming majority of cases. Panquake is extremely intuitive. You don’t need to know how to use it. You don’t need to learn how to use it. It’s just all right there in front of you. Then the next thing you discover is that Panquake is a drag and drop interface. All of the elements that you look at on the screen can be moved, resized, opened in front of the others, closed. It becomes your application. You can actually make it look however you want. You can put the profile part wherever you want. You can put the timeline part wherever you want. It’s highly customizable. It becomes very personal to the user. In a way, they’re kind of creating their own social media application, but they’re just doing it by dragging boxes around on a page and making things bigger and smaller. It’s pretty cool. When you look at the graphical side of the user interface, it’s little cute anime characters and cute colors. It’s deliberately approachable to anyone of any age. You can feel at home straight away. There’s not hidden menus. You don’t have to click inside here and inside there and inside there. It’s just a super simplified version on the front end. But on the back end it’s protecting you every step of the way. That’s the real point of difference.

T – That was the front end, let’s say the user interface. But the technology behind it, that was what I was actually aiming for. So how is that different? Is it really decentralized? That’s my question.

S – There’s two major factors as relates to decentralization. One is that it’s a peer to peer network. You are connecting to other devices who are also active on the network. You are passing data to and through those devices, and then that data is shared within the network. You’re not connecting your device to a central server, which is the authority and the holder of the data in deciding who gets what data or doesn’t get what data. That’s the first aspect of decentralization. The second aspect of decentralization is as pertains to the blockchain. The users of the peer to peer network participate in the validation of the blocks that are published on the blockchain. They create what we call federations. In those federations they together agree upon the integrity of the data that then is published to the blockchain to create the shared public record of the activities of the users on the network.

“Panquake is extremely intuitive. You don’t need to know how to use it. You don’t need to learn how to use it. It’s just all right there in front of you. Then the next thing you discover is that Panquake is a drag and drop interface. All of the elements that you look at on the screen can be moved, resized, opened in front of the others, closed. It becomes your application. You can actually make it look however you want. You can put the profile part wherever you want. You can put the timeline part wherever you want. It’s highly customizable. It becomes very personal to the user.” – Talk Liberation founder, Suzie Dawson

T – Two questions if you allow me. First of all, can any entity shut you down? And number two, is it secure against external state spying, whatever?

S – Can any entity shut us down? Well, they’ve been trying.

T – For example, if they shut down Talk Liberation for example…the company Talk Liberation…

S – They’ve been trying, they’ve been trying…

T – That’s why I’m asking.

S – Look, the old is never going to be happy about the new. That’s why many times I say I don’t want people to put all their hopes and dreams in Panquake. I don’t want them to sit as passive audience members waiting to see if Panquake saves the world. I want them to get off their backsides and build their own projects so that we have a whole stable of solutions that together become a tide of change that’s unstoppable. That’s what I want. I don’t want, oh Suzie Dawson’s gonna save us. Suzie Dawson’s probably not gonna to save you. Suzie Dawson’s trying to save you, but probably can’t so you better participate in this process if you actually want success. That’s the first thing. Can I say anything as an absolute? No. I’m not arrogant enough to say, oh they definitely can’t stop us; oh we’re unstoppable. That’s just silly. Again, the resource imbalance is so huge that I definitely can’t say that. What I can tell you is that we have done absolutely every possible conceivable thing that we can think of, to the nth degree actually, at every layer of the business to protect the business. To make it sustainable, and to make sure it will still be around in three, five, seven, ten years. We’re four years in and we’re still here. That’s what I can tell you. I can’t say what, you know, institutions which are a hundred years old and have hundreds of billions of dollars – I can’t tell you what they can or can’t do.

“Look, the old is never going to be happy about the new. That’s why many times I say I don’t want people to put all their hopes and dreams in Panquake. I don’t want them to sit as passive audience members waiting to see if Panquake saves the world. I want them to get off their backsides and build their own projects so that we have a whole stable of solutions that together become a tide of change that’s unstoppable. That’s what I want. I don’t want, oh Suzie Dawson’s gonna save us. Suzie Dawson’s probably not gonna to save you. Suzie Dawson’s trying to save you, but probably can’t so you better participate in this process if you actually want success.” – Talk Liberation founder, Suzie Dawson

T – I’m asking because I’m aware of the banking freeze, which is one of the topics that I covered in my Substack articles. Tell us about your, how shall I say it, defense against this latest attack.

S – Well it just goes to show that even when you obey all the rules and you do everything right, the system which is supposed to respect that you have played the game and done the things you’re supposed to do, can arbitrarily decide that it actually doesn’t like you anyway and try to prevent you from having access to basic economic freedoms for example. We did everything right. We have had accountants and lawyers administrating everything. We ourselves, our executives, do not put our hands in the kitty. We do not access the bank accounts and make transactions ourselves. Everything is done properly by the books, and has been since day dot. We did everything right with the banks. We’ve done all of our compliance, documentation, etc, etc, etc. The bank still decided, once they realized that we were going to have incoming funds sufficient to complete our mission of building and integrating our blockchain. All of a sudden to, as we’d say put the kibosh on that, and to do so unceremoniously, and in an unforgiving fashion in the sense that we bent over backwards to try and work with them. We literally requested meetings. Offered up additional documentations and communications. We really tried to work things out directly with them and they just stonewalled. Just flat out stonewalled. We ended up having to go to drastic lengths to pay our existing bills ourselves without access to our funding. We should have been in a strong cash position, and we ended up in a negative cash position because of the actions of the bank. Our community suffered as a result of that, and that was unjust. Not only is it unjust for our business and our supporters and the people, our users, who stand to benefit the most from Panquake, it was actually unjust within the jurisdiction in which it was executed. Meaning for Iceland itself, we had documented hiring plans. That money was going to be spent to employ people in Iceland. To give them jobs doing fantastic stuff. That money was going to be pumped straight into the Icelandic economy. When the bank froze it that actually deprived Iceland, the Icelandic labor force, and the Icelandic economy of the benefit of that, as well as depriving us and our community. We fought a very very long battle before we eventually got the funds back, but by then they had caused all kinds of damage to us. We never once stopped working. That’s something people should know. We never once stopped working. We never stopped building. Actually Roger Ver told me, I think 2022, Roger Ver said to me, they can’t stop you building. That’s a direct quote. They can’t stop you building. They can stop you doing many things, but they can’t stop you building. That really stuck with me. That’s been a mantra for me that no matter what we face. No matter what opposition is thrown our way. We can, by shared determination and commitment, continue to build, and that’s exactly what we’ve done.

T – Suzie Dawson. I overstate my welcome. It was a pleasure talking to you. There would be quite some things still, I mean I have not even scratched on the surface on my list of topics here. I would be interested to pick this up. The Panquake, Talk Liberation, potentially in the future in another episode if you have time. For today, I really thank you for your time. I think it’s one of the more incredible stories that I’ve heard. I mean I have now, I don’t know, a hundred and fifty interviews. All with incredible people, some of which you know. I believe especially for a single mom in a different country being harassed to say it politely, picking up her life in Russia and making something out of it. I mean I can only say, congratulations. Many people in a much better situation would have utterly failed. So keep your head high. You absolutely deserve it.

“We never once stopped working. That’s something people should know. We never once stopped working. We never stopped building. Actually Roger Ver told me, I think 2022, Roger Ver said to me, they can’t stop you building. That’s a direct quote. They can’t stop you building. They can stop you doing many things, but they can’t stop you building. That really stuck with me. That’s been a mantra for me that no matter what we face. No matter what opposition is thrown our way. We can, by shared determination and commitment, continue to build, and that’s exactly what we’ve done.” – Talk Liberation founder, Suzie Dawson

S – Thank you. I’m not huge on compliments to be honest. As you said those things to me, all I was seeing in my head is all the people who are around me. All the people in my life who support me. Who participate in what I’m doing. Who I feel are the reason why I’m able to achieve anything at all. I’m grateful. I’m grateful to all the people who have had my back. Who have given me a firm foundation where there wasn’t one previously. So thank you to them. Thank you to everyone who helped to make this happen. I don’t think I’ve ever done a part two before, but if we get the chance sure I’m happy to give it a go. In the meantime, for all of my interesting life. The reality is I hang out at home with my kids and my dogs. I’m kind of boring. I actually really am kind of boring. That’s how I like it. That’s exactly how I like it. Thank you so much.

T – Thank you. All the best.

[TRANSCRIPT ENDS]

Editor’s note: On October 13th, 2025 Talk Liberation informed former CIA agent John Kiriakou that his commercial services as Brand Ambassador were no longer required and that the position would not continue to be funded. Talk Liberation did not receive any heads up from Kiriakou regarding his subsequent public statements and despite them having lacked context and in our opinion veracity, we respectfully and sincerely wish him all the best in his future endeavours.

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