Abstract: One can paraphrase Penrose’s strong cosmic censorship conjecture as stating that general relativity is generically a deterministic theory. While the full conjecture remains wide open there has long been evidence pointing towards its validity at least for small perturbations of exact rotating Kerr black holes. In this talk I will give a brief historical account of this evidence, discuss the analytic as well as the geometric aspects of this conjecture, and conclude by presenting forthcoming work on the linear instability of the Kerr Cauchy horizon.