**IN PROGRESS** Masters Thesis: Enabling Encryption in a Surveillance State

In modern digital authoritarian regimes, the freedom to send private messages is restricted. In these cases, dictators may force citizens to disclose their private keys, giving the government full visibility of all communications. Here we aim to investigate how anamorphic encryption, a technique that embeds a hidden communication channel into existing public-key cipher texts, can be deployed in a surveillance state. To do this we aim to bridge the gap between theoretical anamorphic cryptography and the legal, political, and operational impact of deployment under an authoritarian regime. To do this we will discuss the relevant cryptographic foundations and their limitations, evaluate legal and political case studies for countries with different regime types, and discuss how these elements impact the operational viability of deploying this encryption scheme.