Freedom of the press is under attack in the United States. Journalists are being assaulted, arrested, and targeted by FBI raids. Media moguls are being silenced or sued by the president. Satirists are being canceled. We’ve seen this sort of censorship before. We have a blueprint for how to fight it.
State control dominated official media in the USSR. In response, samizdat (self-publishing) emerged. Samizdat periodicals like Bulletin V circulated censored human rights information through a grassroots system. This wasn’t just alternative publishing — it shaped the voice of dissent, which is exactly what we need in the face of fascist assaults.
For the past decade, many have insisted that journalism is dead. My friends, it has never been more alive.
Samizdat originally published literary texts, which, under censorship, had been altered. Because printing presses in the USSR were inventoried, texts were written on smuggled typewriters, passed along by hand, and rewritten. This was not a perfect system. It was, however, a lesson for the future.
According to Reporters Without Borders, the U.S. is experiencing its first significant and prolonged decline in press freedom in modern history. When we see the weapons of fascism being relentlessly deployed against the pillars of democracy, we mustn’t close our eyes.
Today, tracking journalists is too easy. I cross my fingers every time I enter customs. According to the ACLU of Northern California, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has recently embarked on a “surveillance tech spending spree,” cross-referencing social media posts with addresses and other records, to develop profiles of arrest targets.
The samizdat of today will need to modernize. There’s much in our favor. We are not yet the USSR. Yes, the Trump administration is pummeling democracy on several fronts, but it is not winning. We each owe gratitude for the bravery and strategy of the Minnesotans who pushed ICE agents out of Minneapolis. Although thousands of agents remain, we can take a great lesson from the Twin Cities— resistance works.
There are today, hundreds of newly unemployed journalists, great minds with free time. That can be a win for democracy, if we do it right. First, we’ll need to let go of our egos. Whereas tracing journalists is easy, tracing a digital publication with hundreds of contributors and no bylines is more difficult. It’s not a new idea; The Economist famously doesn’t use bylines.
Second, become less findable. Disable location services on your phone. Invest in a good VPN. Stop tagging yourself at brunch. It’s not 2016.
Third, protect your sources and fellow journalists. Separate identities from materials; use different formats and security measures. Use end-to-end encrypted apps: Signal collects minimal metadata, whereas Telegram stores it. Prioritize the apps developed in countries with strong privacy laws, like Switzerland. Threema uses a random ID rather than a phone number. Another Swiss app, Proton, encrypts emails.
Fourth, add an extra layer of anonymity. Tools like Tails create a more private operating system that runs from a USB and routes traffic through Tor Browser, which masks your IP address — good for anonymous publishing.
Fifth. Make use of decentralized publishing. I grew up idolizing legacy media, but it’s the content and the talent that I admired, not the packaging. TikTok. Instagram. Substack. LinkedIn. BlueSky. These are platforms with massive reach, weak gatekeeping, and the ability to outpace centralized control. It’s time for social networks to do more good than harm.
Samizdat was anonymous, decentralized, collective, and resilient. When history repeats, we innovate. Imagine hundreds of newly unemployed journalists, anonymously reporting for a decentralized network of publications, bound by a single principle: freedom of the press.
Lutz is a freelance writer focusing on international affairs, travel, climate change, development, and health.
