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A few years ago, you may remember this, massive demonstrations broke out in Iran.
A young Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amani died in police custody after she was arrested for allegedly not wearing her headscarf properly.
And people took to the streets in protest.
Women in Iran set their headscarves on fire in fury.
Iranian authorities responded to all of this with massive force.
They killed hundreds of demonstrators, arrested tens of thousands of others.
The government had already blocked Signal, the encrypted messaging app, but then it took aim at another messaging favorite, WhatsApp.
People had been using it to organize protests and just to stay in touch, to make sure friends and family were safe, which is where this scrappy little startup app came in, something called Session.
And so we saw a huge wave of people who were organizing in country, or even also people who just needed to talk to their families and friends and check in on them.
This is Alex Linton, and he's one of the people behind the Session app, which was created in Australia, where Alex is from.
And while at first blush Session seemed a lot like Signal or WhatsApp, Alex and the team that built it added an ingenious little tweak, one that makes Session fundamentally different from other encrypted messaging apps.
We'll get to that in a minute.
Foreign started his career as a journalist, which is what made him passionate about encrypted messaging.
Journalists need to keep sources safe, and encrypted messaging protects the privacy of activists, protesters, and just average people, too.
Session launched about four years before the Iran protests began.
Though the response to it had been.
While a little underwhelming, I have to say.
I mean, somewhat disappointingly, I think we only have around 20 or 30,000 users in Australia.