India, Dec. 24 -- As millions around the world geared up for holiday cheer, Russians were met with a slower, and in some cases, inaccessible WhatsApp. Thousands took to online forums reporting sudden outages, call failures, and suspicious delays. The culprit? A chilling standoff between Meta-owned WhatsApp and Russia's communications watchdog, Roskomnadzor.

While the technical issues appeared random, the motive behind them wasn't. WhatsApp directly accused the Russian government of trying to "deprive over 100 million people of the right to private communication," right before one of the country's most celebrated times of year.

But this isn't just a tech story. It is a proxy war between encryption and state surveillance, between open pla...