Most users — a single parent in Cleveland, an NGO accountant in Caracas, a small business owner in Lagos, a journalist in Tehran — should not be expected to defeat a government, a billion-dollar SaaS vendor, or a state-sponsored attacker through legal process and good intentions alone.

The legal system was not designed for a world where a single subpoena produces a million customer records and a single misconfigured cloud bucket leaks them. Architecture should give the little guy a chance.

That is what zero-knowledge architecture provides: structural protection that does not depend on a vendor's good faith, a regulator's competence, or a court's correct ruling — even though all three of those still matter and we still want them.

This software is not designed for, and we do not encourage:

• Concealing criminal activity
• Evading lawful, narrowly-tailored court orders served on the user
• Defeating sanctions screening at regulated counterparties
• Hiding from legitimate journalism, public oversight, or accountability

If a court has a lawful warrant, it can serve it on the user — who has rights, due process, and the option of legal counsel. The operator does not have those protections, and zero-knowledge architecture means the operator does not have the data either.

What we object to is the asymmetric default: that every operator becomes a surveillance target before any specific case exists, and that hundreds of millions of records sit in plaintext as a permanent target waiting for a subpoena, a breach, an acquisition, or a regime change.