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The NSO Group, for example, sells sophisticated surveillance technology it says is for fighting terrorism to governments around the world, several of which have turned around and deployed it against journalists. Its Pegasus spyware has been linked to government surveillance of journalists in India, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and the United States, including associates of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Now the company is reportedly testing in a dozen countries a new technology that matches location data collected by national telecoms with two weeks of mobile-phone tracking information from an infected person to identify those vulnerable to contagion who were in the patient’s vicinity for more than 15 minutes.

implementing sunset clauses on any new surveillance powers is essential if we don’t want coronavirus to undermine our rights as well as our health

The responsible agency treats the National Archives like a state archive, not a national archive owned by and serving the public.

The situation at the National Archives is reflected in all public institutions. Their mandate is not to serve the public, but to subject them to constant surveillance.

the security mentality in countries that respect the public is countered by a mentality that pushes back in the opposite direction, that respects the right to privacy, academic research and free expression. This mentality circumscribes the security mentality with numerous legal and administrative regulations.

In Egypt the security mentality runs amok. Just mentioning national security is enough to shut down a conversation instead of initiating it. Voices defending academic freedom and the freedom of research are few and far between (though brave and strong) — most importantly the March 9 Movement (a working group on university independence), the Association of Freedom of Thought and Expression, and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.

Field research is infinitely more difficult. If a researcher wants to conduct a field study or distribute a questionnaire or opinion survey, she needs the approval of the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS). Its very name shows the perceived intimacy of the association between knowledge and the war effort.

When I first saw Giulio Regeni’s photo on Facebook, when he was still missing, my heart skipped a beat. A foreign researcher who speaks Arabic fluently, living in Dokki and moving about the city at will, one who is working on the extremely sensitive topic of workers’ right to form independent unions, and one who is also a political activist who writes anti-regime articles for a communist paper under a pseudonym. If the security authorities knew of him, I thought, they would consider him a spy.But Giulio wasn’t a spy. He was a doctoral student. I never met or corresponded with him, but I know Giulio and know him well. He’s like the students I’ve taught for 20 years. Having now read and become familiar with his work, I can say that not only is he not a spy, he’s an exemplary student, one who loved Egypt and Egyptians and made efforts to help them.

we know that we’re living one of the worst moments of our modern history and that our rights, liberties and lives are under threat at all times by our own government.We know that our government, in the name of defending national security, has attacked universities and killed students demonstrating on campus. We know that our government, in the name of defending national security, has shut down the public sphere, appropriated political activity, and prevented people from expressing their opinion and peaceful demonstrating — unless the demonstration’s purpose is to give Abdel Fattah al-Sisi a mandate to do whatever he likes.

waging war on civil society organizations, accusing them of foreign collaboration, treason and getting rich off foreign funding. But it’s the government itself, specifically the army, that is the biggest beneficiary of foreign funding. No one dares make a peep about that.

arrested tens of thousands of members of Islamist groups and sentenced hundreds of them to death in trials lasting just a few minutes, trials that dealt a mortal blow to the integrity of the Egyptian judiciary and people’s faith in it

arrested hundreds of journalists, writers and political activists, and sentenced them to years in prison

we, the people, the true owners of this country, are insisting on knowing what happened to Guilio Regeni and are holding on to our right to be consulted about our own national security.

An Iranian filtering committee blocked Signal after it alleged the app hosted "criminal content". However, neither the government nor the judiciary, which both sit on the committee, are taking responsibility for the move. An Iranian judiciary spokesperson distanced himself from blocking Signal, saying it had not "blocked any media, news outlet or messaging service" since 2019.  The "Identifying the Criminal Content Working Group" consists of six government ministers and seven officials from other authorities.

Signal was previously blocked between 2016 and 2017. It joins Telegram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, which Iranian authorities have also blocked. 

An analyst close to the government told Middle East Eye the judiciary and hardliners were determined to make Iranians pessimistic about reformist candidates ahead of June's presidential elections.  "As Rouhani is close to the end of his tenure, the judiciary and hardliners are determined to make sure Rouhani has no encouraging legacy to make people totally pessimistic about reformists and moderates," said the analyst.  Rouhani has two legacies, according to the analyst: "One is the 2015 nuclear deal, which is somehow in intensive care, and the other is his striving to keep social networks open and unblocked."

The use of a surveillance system developed for counterterrorism purposes stirred opposition within Israel, not so much because of privacy concerns, but because it was conducted without proper parliamentary oversight and by a caretaker government

After the Israeli Supreme Court on April 26 struck down that system because of the lack of oversight and the invocation of emergency powers without supporting legislation, the government and Knesset worked to adjust the legal requirements to allow for the Shin Bet to continue pandemic-related surveillance  but allow for more oversight by the relevant Knesset committee.

Shin Bet developed the database, especially to monitor the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza, and before it was deployed to track COVID-19, its existence had not been publicly reported. Israeli cellphone carriers are required by law to provide information to the security services. According to reports, the data allows authorities to see the location of a cellphone within a radius of dozens or hundreds of meters

perpetual near-war experience has ingrained in Israelis a level of comfort with emergency law, akin to the American acceptance of extreme measures following September 2001

Democracies should not be in the habit of using intelligence services as police. A global pandemic represents an extraordinary crisis, but extreme experiences can be habit-forming, creating precedent that may be hard to break.

a legal state of emergency with some variation has been in place since the country’s first week of existence in May 1948

Like the United States in the post-September 11 era, Israel is seeing surveillance tools developed for national-security priorities repurposed toward other uses. Israelis, though, are generally less opposed than Americans to such surveillance. Cultural norms, along with bureaucratic structures, mean surveillance faces less resistance in Israel.

Within communities in Israel, everyone knows everyone’s grandmother, and she surveils them effectively. Israelis are used to the idea that someone is watching and voicing robust opinions on their choices and actions. Israel’s smallness is also a structural matter: Its government is not federal. So while the national leadership’s authority is not “total” on the local affairs of its citizenry, it is far greater than that of the federal government in the United States.

as the latest revelations also show, the Shin Bet has capabilities wielded in the United States by the NSA or in the United Kingdom by GCHQ. While Israel has a large and famous military unit (“8200”) performing signal intelligence outside Israel’s borders, the Shin Bet’s responsibility for the Palestinian territories leaves it straddling the line between domestic and foreign intelligence

Palestinians who are not Israeli citizens are nonetheless partly subject to its control, especially in matters of security. This creates space for the regular use of tools that in many settings apply to non-citizens—the tools of foreign espionage—by domestic bodies such as the Shin Bet.

With Israeli democracy already weakened by political crisis, legislative dysfunction, and an ongoing campaign against the judicial system, however, these tools pose a more fundamental challenge to the long-term health of Israel’s democratic institutions.

There are more than 6.5 million internet and social media users in Jordan, the majority of whom are youth, out of a population of roughly 11 million. Jordanians are avid social media users, and over the years have used Facebook, WhatsApp, and other platforms to share news not broadcast on state-controlled channels, jokes targeting the regime, and rumors about the myriad political and corruption scandals circulating across the country on a regular basis

Cybercrimes Law No. 27/2015 is a popular regime tool used to control expression online. Article 11 regulates expression on online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. In April 2019, parliament introduced amendments to the law to criminalize the act of spreading “rumors” and “hate speech,” extending to the use of private messaging apps such as WhatsApp. The latest amendments define hate speech as “every writing and every speech or action intended to provoke sectarian or racial sedition, advocate for violence, or foster conflict between followers of different religions and various components of the nation.” And under the cybercrime law, Jordanians will face a criminal penalty if they are convicted of “sending or resending or disseminating information through the Internet or website or any information system that includes defamation, slander or libel against any person.” Between 2019 and 2020, the cases brought under the cybercrime law exceeded two thousand, more than double the number from the year before. In 2022, there have been more arrests under charges of “spreading false news,” including the detentions of several high-profile journalists.

Even the Jordanian National Center for Human Rights, a semi-governmental organization, wrote in its own recent annual report that “the detention of individuals for what they express is continuing.” Alarmingly, a recent Citizen Lab and Front Line Defenders joint report confirmed that two operators, “likely agencies of the Jordanian government,” used the NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware to hack the phones of at least four Jordanians, including a human rights defender, a lawyer, and a journalist. 

Loosely formed groups of youth activists, often described with the term hirak (“movement”), organize in various neighborhoods and towns across Jordan around shared issues. In 2019, a workshop looking at youth activism across the Middle East and North Africa found that youth activism does not adhere to formalized structures of organizing, such as political parties, professional associations, and civil society organizations.

we have seen youth movements in the past decade break the generations-old divisions of urban versus rural and West Bank versus East Bank

organizing around their shared frustrations over unchecked levels of corruption, perpetual over-education combined with underemployment, and restrictions on what they can write on social media or when they can gather.

the attitudes of ruling elites and public officials toward youth are dismissive

the many initiatives launched over the years have not ever been driven by local youth demands, but rather have been top-down, buzzword-filled projects, centralized within the newly created Ministry of Youth, with little to no popular support or participation