Can you arrest a protocol?
This interactive theater play draws inspiration from three real-life court cases where people were judged for developing, maintaining or using encryption technologies. The cases happened in Russia, between 2017 and 2024, and featured Tor, PGP and Delta Chat. It was a fascinating precedent where lawyers, judges, witnesses and persecutors had to discuss technical details of those protocols in court and based accusations or defense strategies on the properties and architectures of those tools. The protocols became the actors in the process.
Our immersive play transforms the Community stage into a courtroom. Inspired by the tradition of “forum theater” developed by Augusto Boal in Brazil in 1960s, we make the audience become "spect-actors", with the power to stop and change the performance, participating in the court hearings on the sides of defense or accusation, and helping the actors to explain how the three different tools and protocols really work.