Ten years ago, the NSA launched a spy satellite into orbit that came with a mission patch dominated by the image of a massive octopus enveloping the Earth in its tentacles, emblazoned with the slogan, “Nothing is beyond our reach.” This satellite had been sent to the heavens in December, but the patch itself had been made available to the public in one of the slides leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden earlier that year.

One of the most affecting books I’ve ever read was written by Wikileaks founder and political prisoner Julian Assange called “Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet.” The book is a repackaged transcript of discussions between Assange other crypto activists as they charted the course for society to overcome the tyrannical potential within the “internet of things.”

Described by its author as “not a manifesto…[but] a warning,” the book articulates the precarious position that privacy, independent intellectual thought, and freedom were being put in by the “security guards of the world, the people who control physical reality.”

The imprisoned Assange lived out the cypherpunk ethos through his website Wikileaks, which was the forerunner of what would come to be called “The Fifth Estate.” While the fabled Fourth Estate was ossifying into an organ of the very State it was supposed to be keeping in check, the Fifth embraced decentralization, citizen journalism, and the fluidity afforded by social media platforms and blogging networks. Another key aspect of the Fifth is the use of cryptography and secured lines of communication, which allowed sources and leakers to share information with some semblance of protection from retaliation for illuminating the dark corners of the American Experiment.

Wikileaks’ finest hour was the dumping of thousands of emails from the Hillary Clinton Presidential Campaign, providing voters an unvarnished look at the “private views” of the candidate and her cronies. To this day we still don’t know who bamboozled John Podesta into giving up the keys to his email account and subsequently handed them off to Wikileaks, but if we did you could bet their head would be on a pike rotting on the Capitol steps by now.

The Fifth Estate has taken some stumbles in recent years, with many of the platforms its constituents depended on being captured by the same institutional rot that claimed the Fourth. Platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter that had previously championed their use by subversives, protest movements and revolutionaries in the Middle East and Eastern European nations like Ukraine, suddenly decided that Americans shouldn’t be afforded the same.

Even journalist Glenn Greenwald found himself pushed out of “The Intercept,” an outlet he founded, after his Trump Deranged editors demanded he remove critical coverage of then candidate Joe Biden during the 2020 election. But don’t you dare accuse anyone in the press of election interference, that’s something only the Ruskies do right?

Greenwald, a gay leftist journo iconoclast, has been a dogged warrior for the Fifth Estate ever since he began blogging in the wake of the Iraq War, reporting not only on the leaks provided by whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning but also the lengths that our government will go to destroy people like them.

While a majority of the Fifth Estate do what they do out a sense of altruism or principal, a recent leak has been dominating headlines, and seems to be the result of nothing more than a young man showing off to his friends on Discord chat. This trove of secret Department of Defense documents revealing the truth about the state of the war in Ukraine and the degree of our nation’s involvement began circulating online, percolating up from the bowels of that Discord chat server into the wider Internet.

With the recent arrest of 21-year-old National Guardsman Jack Teixeira, we now know who was likely responsible for the spread of the secrets. Operating under the moniker “Jackthedripper,” Teixeria has joined the likes of Daniel Elsberg, Snowden, and Manning as an individual who can claim to have forced transparency upon our government at a critical juncture in our nation’s history. Teixeira should be hailed as a hero no matter how petty and childish his motivations might prove to be. However, as per usual, the loudest voices in the room are focusing more on his punishment rather than what the man revealed.

The information he put out into the world undermines the carefully cultivated construct that Ukraine is winning the war, that their government is pure as the driven snow, and Americans should consent to escalating this proxy conflict with Putin’s Russia. Based on the documents the reality is that Ukraine’s losses are not sustainable, especially with the admission that their leadership are skimming off the top from the billions in taxpayer dollars our thoughtless gremlins in D.C. have signed off to them.

Not only that, but we also now know that the United States has special forces units in the country. We are assured by national security hack John Kirby they are only there to monitor military aid, which is laughable considering our intelligence agencies internally acknowledge the large-scale embezzlement being perpetuated by Ukranian military leadership. No wonder it was being kept secret, and why Kirby himself pounded his fist on a podium while demanding that newspapers avoid reporting on the leaks.

I’ve spoken about the Biden Administration’s allergy to transparency before and given these revelations such secrets will be kept closer to the chest going forward. The government now seems poised to turn the Eye of Sauron on the Fifth Estate in retaliation by tightening its already vicelike grip on discourse.

The RESTRICT Act is the ultimate example of these efforts, as it would give the President the unilateral power to criminalize the sharing of certain information and the use of obfuscation tools like virtual private networks or encrypted communication apps, the lifeblood of the cypherpunk movement.

Anyone denying the imminent danger this law poses to the future of freedom in the United States has either been asleep for the last 20 years or have convinced themselves that the party in power won’t turn out to be evil once given absolute control over what anyone can say and know.

That’s the power of the Fifth Estate, an amorphous decentralized blob that has been cultivated by capital and technology into the perfect mechanism for transmitting and receiving every aspect of human experience. Technically every single human being with an Internet connection is an active member of the Fifth Estate, whether they realize it or not, which is precisely why the powerful fear it. They’d sooner slit the nation’s throat than concede power to anyone, and we are first in line. If you dare to have the conviction to step out of it.