On 8 October 2025, the Internet Society Nepal Chapter (Open Internet Nepal) marked Global Encryption Day with a dynamic half‑day event at Vivanta Kathmandu.

Against the backdrop of expanding surveillance powers, data breaches, and fast‑evolving digital services, the program asked a simple but urgent question:

Can people in Nepal truly be free and safe online without strong encryption?

With 55 participants from law, technology, academia, media, civil society, and the private sector, Global Encryption Day Nepal 2025 became a rare space where technical details, human rights, and public policy met in the same room.

Encryption and Digital Privacy: Securing Nepal’s Digital Future

This year’s theme, “Encryption and Digital Privacy: Securing Nepal’s Digital Future,” framed encryption not as a niche technical feature, but as infrastructure for democracy:

• It protects journalists and whistleblowers communicating with sources.
• It secures financial transactions and e‑commerce.
• It keeps families’ private conversations safe from interception and misuse.

Throughout the event, speakers and participants emphasized that end‑to‑end encryption (E2EE) is essential if Nepal is serious about digital transformation that respects rights.

What Happened at the Event?

The program was designed to be practical, participatory, and action‑oriented, combining expert insights with youth perspectives and live demonstrations.

1. Multi‑Stakeholder Panel: Why Encryption Matters

A cornerstone of the event was a multi‑stakeholder panel discussion featuring:

• Cybersecurity specialists, who broke down how E2EE protects data in transit and why weakening it exposes everyone—governments, businesses, and citizens—to greater risk.
• Legal experts, who examined how encryption intersects with constitutional rights, criminal investigations, and proposed digital laws in Nepal.
• Digital rights advocates, who spoke about the global trend of “exceptional access” demands and the chilling effect of surveillance on civic space.

The panel tackled tough questions around crime, security, and state power, ultimately converging on one message: backdoors do not make us safer; they make all of us vulnerable.

2. Youth‑Led Lightning Talks: Encryption in Everyday Life

To ground the conversation in lived experience, the event featured youth‑led lightning talks on “Encryption in Everyday Life.”

Young speakers showed how:

• Messaging apps, cloud services, and online banking quietly rely on encryption every day.
• Students, activists, and marginalized communities are especially at risk when privacy is weak.
• Digital literacy about encryption can empower youth to demand better protections and make safer choices online.

Their stories turned abstract concepts into relatable, human‑scale examples, proving that encryption isn’t just for “techies”—it’s for anyone who uses a phone.

3. Interactive Demo: How E2EE Works—and How Backdoors Break It

An interactive demonstration gave participants a hands‑on look at:

• How messages travel across networks
• What E2EE does to keep intermediaries from reading content
• What changes when a “backdoor” or special access mechanism is introduced

The demo made one point crystal clear: once you build a vulnerability into an encrypted system—no matter who it is “for”—you cannot control who eventually exploits it.

Participants left with a more intuitive understanding of why “just one access” is a myth and why strong, uncompromised encryption is the only reliable safeguard.

A Digital Right for All Nepalis

Throughout the half‑day, one theme resonated:

Encryption is not a luxury or a mere technical choice; it is a fundamental digital right.

By framing encryption as a right and a public good, Global Encryption Day Nepal 2025:

• Encouraged policymakers to resist calls for backdoors and blanket weakening of E2EE
• Helped journalists, lawyers, and activists see encryption as part of their professional duty of care
• Connected technologists and rights advocates in a shared effort to promote secure, rights‑respecting infrastructure

The conversations sparked at the event will feed into ongoing advocacy around cybersecurity, data protection, and platform regulation in Nepal.

What’s Next?

For the Internet Society Nepal Chapter, organizing Global Encryption Day Nepal 2025 is part of a broader commitment to:

• Promote strong encryption by default in services used across the country
• Build public literacy about privacy and security tools
• Engage with lawmakers and regulators to ensure future laws protect, not undermine, encryption

As Nepal’s digital ecosystem grows more complex, the choices we make today about encryption will shape whether the Internet becomes a space of freedom and trust—or fear and control.