Pan Quake is an open-source, nonprofit, advertising-free social media platform conceived as an alternative to Twitter, hosted in Iceland and built on a content blockchain. John Kiriakou served as one of its public advocates from 2021 and described it, in the months around its beta launch, as the first such project he had seen that was serious about the transparency the industry claims.[1][2]
How Kiriakou came to it
Kiriakou says he had not really heard of Pan Quake until Suzie Dawson introduced him to it about a year before the April 2022 beta.[3] His first reaction was that it was one more entrant in a crowded field — “pan quake, rumble, whatever, parlor, there are a whole bunch of them” — until Dawson and the platform’s chief security officer, Sean O’Brien, showed him a demonstration. He describes himself as a non-technical person and says the demo “just blew my socks off.”[3] What Dawson put to him was a set of negative commitments rather than features: “no corporate money, no government money, no advertising, completely open source code so that everything is transparent.”[2] Before agreeing to serve as a brand ambassador he had tech-savvy friends, including NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, review the platform and vouch for its legitimacy.[4]
His framing of the problem it was meant to solve is a general one about the incumbents, which he pointedly declines to name — “I don’t want people to go to them” — and which he says are unchanged by rebranding: “even when they change their names to things that are supposed to sound futuristic, they are not free, they are not fair, they are not transparent.”[5] The specific mechanism he objects to is editorial control exercised invisibly: on the corporate platforms there is a “big brother” going through users’ posts and imposing “an algorithm on us that’s going to decide what our friends and followers can see and what they can’t see.” American lip service to free speech and transparency, he says, is not serious “nine times out of ten” on corporate-run sites.[6]
What it was
The code, in Kiriakou’s description, is “totally open, anybody can see it” — a competitor to Twitter whose entire stack could be audited.[1] The servers are hosted in Iceland and run only on geothermal energy — “powered by, you know, a geyser” — so the platform carries no environmental footprint, which he offers as a selling point in its own right: “if the environment is your thing, it’s not just hosted in Iceland, but they use only geothermal energy to power the servers.”[7][4] Ownership sits with the people who built it, and there is no advertising at all.[7] Kiriakou states the funding rule in absolute terms: the project takes “not one single cent from corporations, the military-industrial people, the government, think tanks — nothing, zero, nothing.”[8] Nothing is pushed at the user, either: no paid advertisements, and the experience is customizable — “it’s transparent, it’s real.”[9]
The underlying architecture is blockchain-based, which Kiriakou identifies as “the most important” aspect, for a reason of infrastructure rather than finance: with non-blockchain services “they can just shut your servers off if they don’t like you,” and distributing the record makes that harder.[8][10] He signed up for the beta himself within days of it opening, in April 2022, and reported adding to his existing web presence a Pan Quake account alongside his site, Facebook and Twitter.[8][11] The platform was incorporated with lawyers in Luxembourg.[4]
Designed against the attack he expected
The most developed thing Kiriakou has said about Pan Quake is not a description of the product but a threat assessment, offered when asked what the state would do to shut it down. He credits the team with having foreseen most of it. Basing the servers in Iceland he calls “a stroke of genius,” and notes that the corporate headquarters is also offshore, “in a place that’s very secure for this kind of thing” — “very, very forward thinking.”[12][13] He reads the subscription model the same way, as a defence rather than a revenue plan: it “makes it almost impossible to create bots to attack the system unless the bots pay the five dollars a month,” which he calls “brilliant.”[13]
He then splits the expected attack by agency, using his own career as the basis. “If I were still at the CIA or NSA, I would be looking for a technical way in.” From the NSA he would expect technical attacks — and observes that Bill Binney, the agency’s former technical director, is on the Pan Quake team and can address that side in detail.[13][14] From the CIA he would expect “a different kind of underhandedness”: personal attacks on the platform’s leadership, and articles condemning everyone involved. He supplies the article himself, in the voice of the people who write it — “oh, John Kiriakou, he’s a convicted felon; you want to be in business with a convicted felon?” — and says he gets that “all the time from people who can’t debate on the issues.”[14][15]
The frame he puts around all of it is the destruction of WikiLeaks, treated as a completed experiment whose results were available to be designed against: “what they did to WikiLeaks allowed us to learn lessons, and we’ve been able to safeguard ourselves.” His conclusion is comparative — “it’s going to be much, much harder to attack Pan Quake than it is to attack WikiLeaks.”[15] He was, in April 2022, optimistic about the timing as much as the design: the platform was still small enough that “we largely haven’t come to their attention yet,” and by the time it was “big enough or important enough to be worth attacking” it would “be so ready for them that there won’t be anything that they can do.”[16]
What happened
Pan Quake was permanently suspended from Twitter without explanation. Its Icelandic bank account was then frozen, with the bank informing the platform this had been done at the request of the FBI, reportedly because Pan Quake’s user base included supporters of Julian Assange.[17] The account freeze is the financial attack Kiriakou’s 2022 threat assessment did not anticipate: asked directly in April 2022 what he expected the agencies to try, he named technical intrusion by the NSA and reputational smearing by the CIA, and nothing about banking.[14][17]