Suzie Dawson is the chief executive of Talk Liberation, the company developing the Panquake platform. John Kiriakou, who has known her for years and serves as the platform’s brand ambassador, offers an unqualified assessment: “I don’t think I have ever known someone as dogged as Suzie — whether it was defending Julian Assange even before he was dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, or whether it was Panquake or anything else that Suzie’s been involved in. When she sets her mind to doing something, she’s going to do it, and it gets done.”[1]
Kiriakou credits that persistence with the company’s survival through the Icelandic bank freeze. Acknowledging that the project has no satellites and no friendly billionaires with rocket ships, he says her method is incremental: “she takes it one day at a time and one step at a time, and every time an issue pops up that needs to be dealt with, she deals with it — and that’s why the company was not killed when bad Banky froze the accounts.”[2]
Dawson approached Kiriakou with the brand-ambassador role approximately five years before this March 2025 interview, and the detail from that first conversation he says has stayed with him is that the platform’s servers run on Icelandic geothermal steam.[3]
Bringing Kiriakou in
Kiriakou dates his involvement to an approach from Dawson “about a year” before May 2022, in which she set out the premise of the project: no corporate or government money, no advertising, fully open-source code, and no algorithm standing between a user and the people following them. He credits the team”s planning to experience rather than caution — “I”m confident that Suzie and Sean and the team have foreseen a lot of what we ought to be expecting” — and singles out the decision to base both the servers and the corporate headquarters offshore as “a stroke of genius … very, very forward thinking.”[4][5]