Governments and tech companies have long been engaged in both surveillance and censorship. Read my article on how governments in the Middle East have been using such tech to target journalists.
When I began working as a Senior Program Officer at Freedom House in 2007, I worked closely with the Internet Freedom team to provide activists across the Middle East (and beyond) with training and access to communication technologies such as Skype, social media networks like Facebook, and open-source platform such as U-shahidi. Local activists used these platforms for a range of purposes–from exposing election fraud to combatting sexual harassment to street organizing. The following year, I wrote an op-ed in the LA Times raising attention about the potential of such technologies for activists in my native Egypt. Over the next few years, I provided training on the use of social media to activists and human rights defenders throughout Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, Kenya, and East Asia (including Hong Kong).
Three years later, activists across the Middle East expanded their use of such technologies to help mobilize against their repressive governments during the historic 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. Drawing on their experiences, I published a study and several op-eds on the transformative role of social media technologies in the Arab Spring, though I also urged caution; arguing that these same tools were also being used to repress and surveil activists, journalists, and other civil society actors.
In making these warnings I drew on two important experiences. First, during the crucial early days of the uprisings, I worked closely with my counterparts at Google and Facebook to stop their collaboration with regional governments in censoring and surveilling activists. On several occasions, I restored the social media accounts and pages of key revolutionary figures through such advocacy. Second, when I returned to Egypt in 2011 to help open the local Freedom House office after Mubarak’s ouster, I found my own security files, which revealed the extent to which the Egyptian government had been using a London-based spyware company to monitor my communications–particularly in terms of using my status as a religious minority as a means to defame and discredit me. Other activists reported similar surveillance upon finding their files. Both experiences strengthened my resolve to address the dangers of surveillance technologies.
My move to the Committee to Protect Journalists in 2012 allowed me to focus extensively on this issue alongside broader concerns around freedom of expression, surveillance, and censorship. I documented dozens of cases of spyware targeting journalists and joined broad-based advocacy campaigns to demand greater corporate and government accountability around the sale and use of such software. My biggest case involved the NSO Group. Their spyware had been implicated in multiple, egregious human rights violations, including the targeting of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. For this case, I conducted research and reached out to policymakers in the U.S., EU, and UN to impose sanctions on such companies. I also offered expert testimony on the topic to relevant government agencies.