Surveillance and Control - Coda Story

Exiled at Midnight

Matthew Janney — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:55:00 +0000

On the night of January 16, 2024, Egana Djabbarova was awoken by her wife and told that she needed to leave the country immediately. Djabbarova, her wife said, had been denounced by pro-war activists and framed as an enemy of the country. She had recently published her novel, “My Dreadful Body,” with a small, indie press that had been praised by mainstream critics, unexpectedly propelling her into the public eye. One of the book's central themes is surveillance: growing up in a community with strict behavioural codes, the protagonist's every move is under scrutiny.

In a dark echo of her work, Djabbarova was now under online surveillance herself. “I was just the perfect enemy,” she tells me, “because I’m queer, I’m not Slavic, I worked on decolonial and feminist projects… So boom, it happened.”

She is speaking to me from Hamburg, where she now lives. Djabbarova is part of the so-called fifth wave of writers exiled from Russia, alongside Maria Stepanova, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, and Maxim Osipov to name a few. Her upbeat tone during our call gives little indication of the arduous journey she has endured since fleeing Russia. Upon receiving a humanitarian visa from Germany, she spent months in a refugee camp. She lived, she says, “in a container house, literally a shipping container. You feel like you're not a subject, not a human being.”

More permanent accommodation has provided a degree of safety and stability, but a sense of precariousness lingers. She describes her position as an exile as “strange” — on the one hand she has been welcomed into Germany’s cultural elite in winning the Hamburger Literaturpreis; on the other, she feels like a “ghost,” unable to express herself in German and often bewildered by the unfamiliarity of everyday tasks in a new country, and in a new city which, she tells me jokingly, is quaint and polite like the well-behaved boy next door.

But there’s a deeper, historical layer to Djabbarova’s story of exile. Her father was a refugee from the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, while her mother was forced out of her family home. “Homelessness and exile — this is my heritage,” she says. Being othered became a common theme of Djabbarova’s childhood, as a child of Azeri parents living in Yekaterinburg. “In Russia you are constantly reminded that you're not Russian,” she says. “Then during the summer you visit your relatives in Azerbaijan and they laugh because you cannot speak Azerbaijani properly.”

This sense of double estrangement is mirrored in “My Dreadful Body” (published in Russian in 2023 and recently translated into English by Lisa Hayden). At only a touch over 100 pages, it is a slim but powerful account of the pressures on one woman growing up among the strict codes of an Azerbaijani family living in Russia. A sense of surveillance and conditional belonging defines the narrator’s upbringing: “In the world where I grew up,” she writes, “gazes penetrated every little corner. The evil eye, the neighbors’ eyes, the relatives’ eyes, the random pedestrian’s eyes, the unscrupulous men’s eyes, the women’s unhappy eyes. Life in the community was reminiscent of a reality show with constant video surveillance: no action, word, or undertaking went unnoticed.”

The story is based on Djabbarova’s own life. “Maybe 70-80% of this story is absolutely true”, she confirms. The narrator is named Egana, she grows up in an Azerbaijani family in Russia, too Russian for the family, not Russian enough for her friends at school. She also, like Djabbarova, suffers from a debilitating autoimmune disorder that is eventually diagnosed as dystonia, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary muscle contractions. During one episode, she describes her body as resembling “willow branches gone mad from a strong wind” — a potent image of struggle against external forces. Djabbarova describes the book as a way to reclaim her body through language. “I was trying to tell this story in a poetic way. I wanted to change my body into poetry.”

Each chapter of “My Dreadful Body” begins with a different body part (“Eyebrows,” “Eyes,” “Hair” and so on), like the poetic blazons spun by Renaissance poets. Where those poems encouraged an idealized, sensationalized reading of each body part, Djabbarova’s chapters are more sober explorations of the physical limits — and personal and cultural stories — these body parts contain.

In one of many poignant scenes, the narrator’s head is shaved in preparation for a procedure. She cries on seeing her “shorn scalp,” but the sadness is not aesthetic, it’s ancestral; the act marks a symbolic rupture with her lineage. “My past,” she writes, “the past of all the women in my family, the memory of my ancestors, the history of a single body — all that now lay on the cold floor.” After this scene, her grandmother’s dictum that only long hair was considered beautiful, rings even more sharply.

Illness then emerges as another form of exile, from one’s sense of self, from what’s perceived as “normal” in society, from the culture and community one belongs to. “They do not see you as a subject, as a human being, and they do not recognize your existence… I realized if I wanted to be seen as a subject, I needed to do it myself.” Djabbarova is talking about the plight to be believed about her symptoms here, but she could easily be talking about the often dehumanizing experience of exile. In both instances there is something fundamental under question, or as Djabbarova puts it, “You’re trying to prove that you have the right of being. You’re trying not to be erased.”

We often talk about exile in the context of loss, but how might exile liberate? Paradoxically, Djabbarova tells me, her diagnosis became a form of liberation. “I always felt I had so many expectations on me as a girl, as a woman, so when I was finally diagnosed it was a liberation because my parents realized I would never be this type of girl.” Exile breeds a particular creative liberation, too, evidenced by the fact Djabbrova wrote the novel from Taiwan where she was briefly teaching Russian. “Here I had enough distance from my own life and my own experience,” she says. “Maybe it’s easier to write about your story being on an island in the Pacific Ocean.”

Writing is arguably the real heroine of Djabbarova's novel. For the narrator Egana, it is a place free from surveillance and a source of protection, “like an invisible amulet.” Poetry, she told me “was the only safe space for me because nobody was asking anything of me. It's the only place where I don't feel judged. I don’t feel ashamed. I don’t feel questioned.”

The chapter “Hands” opens: “The most important parts of a woman’s body were her hands: they prepared food, rocked children, did laundry, ironed men’s shirts, sewed clothes, swept, washed the floor, and dusted.… Any woman in our family knew that her hands were not given to her for writing.” To use her hands, then, to write becomes both a symbolic and quite literal form of resistance against such gendered codes.

Notably, Djabbarova is not alone in invoking the body as a space to explore the upheavals of exile. In Maria Stepanova’s autofictional work “The Disappearing Act” — recently translated into English by Sasha Dugdale — the narrator attempts to purge herself by volunteering to be cut in half as part of a circus trick. Djabbarova’s approach to reclaim identity and agency through the body is less literal, and more personal, but through this specificity she has landed somewhere indisputably universal.

“I realized the only way I can write this novel is through my body,” she says. “Because the only way I can rehabilitate my being, my agency, my subjectivity is through my body. And that's why I wanted every reader to feel my body… It's really important for all of us not to forget that this right of being is basic. It's not given. It's something you have from birth."

At the end of our conversation, Djabbarova (who has been speaking in English) struggles to recall a word and jokes that learning German is slowly pushing her English out. “Certain words I only remember in German!” she laughs. Is this the beginnings of a kind of homemaking for Djabbarova, a sign that the seeds she has scattered in her new country are taking root? Like her protagonist, who finds solace and safety in words, it seems that Djabbarova’s most trusted tool for survival, for managing the condition of exile, is language.

The Age of Exile

This story is part of our Age of Exile series, which explores how displacement has evolved from historical punishment into a defining condition of our time—one that reveals profound transformations in how we construct identity, maintain community, and exercise power across borders. In an era where digital connection enables presence without physical proximity, exile has become more complex, more global, and more central to understanding our world. Explore The Age of Exile series

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Georgian nightmare: did a government knowingly poison its people?

Masho Lomashvili — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 14:00:00 +0000

On December 1, I, and thousands of my fellow Georgians, found out we might have been poisoned by our own government. The toxin was likely a chemical introduced in World War I and supposedly phased out by the 1930s: ‘bromobenzyl cyanide’, also known as ‘camite’.

We learned this from a BBC documentary. The government didn't admit any wrongdoing, let alone apologize. It didn't even launch a credible investigation. Instead, it followed a playbook now familiar across the world's democracies-in-decline: deny everything, attack the messenger, and punish the truth-tellers. Within days, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze threatened to sue the BBC — citing Donald Trump's recent lawsuit as precedent and calling the documentary “a cheap provocation orchestrated by foreign intelligence services.”

The State Security Service summoned Georgian doctors, protesters, and NGO workers who had spoken to the BBC, interrogating them under procedures typically reserved for serious crimes. The charge: assisting a foreign organization in activities harmful to Georgia's “national interests.” This kind of aggressive denial isn’t unique to Georgia. In 2023, for instance, the Indian government banned a two-part BBC documentary which explored the rise of Narendra Modi, including accusations that when he was chief minister of Gujarat, he enabled the slaughter of hundreds of Muslims in statewide riots. The Indian government described the documentary, in language strikingly similar to that used by the Georgian government, as “a propaganda piece designed to push a particular discredited narrative.” Just last month, the White House said the BBC was a “leftist propaganda machine.”

But the inconvenient truth is that I was there when the Georgian government sprayed us with chemicals. And I know how it felt.

Let’s rewind. Over a year ago, in November 2024, when the Georgian government announced that it was halting the constitutionally-promised integration process with the European Union, hundreds of thousands Georgians spontaneously flooded the main avenue in the capital Tbilisi. The government's announcement had taken the protesters by surprise. But, in turn, the ruling party, the Georgian Dream, clearly did not anticipate the size of the protests or the mood of the protesters.

I had left my house expecting another midsize protest. For a month, Georgians had been protesting against an election that had brought Georgian Dream back to power and that the country’s president at the time, Salomé Zourabichvili, said was a “Russian special operation.” I got there early and the crowd was nowhere near its peak, but as soon as I arrived, I knew this was something different. There were no speakers on platforms, no pre-planned messages brandished on placards. Instead, thousands of people stood together, some banging on metal barricades around the parliament building, and chanted ‘revolution’. You could feel the anger and frustration in the atmosphere.

I called a friend at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. “They are mobilizing all of us,” he warned me. “Even from other cities. Everyone’s been told it’s a red alert.”

What followed was a long, relentless night.

Police officers using water cannons on demonstrators on Dec. 1, 2024. Photo by Giorgi Arjevanidze/AFP via Getty Images

Crowd control quickly became punishment — an endless rain of teargas, watercanon and pepper spray, a storm of police beatings and fractured bones. On the first night of the protests alone, 207 people were taken to hospitals around the city. The protesters, most of whom had no protection, would scatter but gather again. Over and over for more than a week.

My friends, acquaintances, and protesters I have interviewed, often recall these days as a fever dream. Almost all of them have a dramatic story of what it felt like to be on the receiving end of the government crackdown. It was, agrees everyone, unprecedented. See, Georgians are no strangers to protests and neither to government crackdowns. But this time, everything was on steroids. Beatings by the Special Forces were savage and aided by uniformless, government-hired thugs. Rustaveli Avenue, the main drag, was covered in a thick fog of tear gas, the water canons seemed to have an endless supply of liquid that burned your skin as soon as it made contact with it. The smell of chemicals lingered in the air.

Protesters who managed to avoid being physically beaten, but couldn’t avoid the teargas and other measures, talked about experiencing violent coughing fits, spells of lightheadedness and nausea. In more severe cases, protesters passed out, vomited, had nose bleeds and a persistent skin irritation. Many people described these symptoms on social media, even as they kept going out each night to protest. “We were soaked, it was freezing, and I couldn’t breathe,” Tata Khundadze told me about being hit by sprays from the police water cannons. “My skin felt like it was on fire. It became too much — I lost consciousness.”

In the days that followed, Khundadze shared photographs online that showed a severe red rash on her hands and face. She developed open wounds on her skin that began to bleed. For several weeks after the incident, she continued to vomit, sometimes throwing up traces of blood. She thought maybe her capillaries had burst. “But in reality,” she says now, “who knows what happened, what we inhaled, what went into our lungs and what did not.”

Many protesters, including Khundadze, speculated that the government was using an unknown teargas spray. Local news outlets started asking questions. Doctors called on the government to ease the measures, some even signed a petition demanding the disclosure of the chemicals used during the crackdown. The government denied any wrongdoing. But public speculation continued. More people spoke about suffering prolonged effects, but without access to police records or chemical analyses, their suspicions remained unprovable.

The story stalled.

Then, this month BBC Eye released its hour-long documentary. After harrowing accounts from protesters about police brutality, the documentary turns its attention to what was in those water cannons. We hear from protesters, activists, lawyers and doctors who tried to sound the alarm. The viewer is introduced to Dr. Konstantine Chakhunashvili who, along with his brother, surveyed nearly 350 affected protesters. “Last year, on the 11th of December, after I left administrative detention, I found out that many of my friends were still experiencing nose bleeds,” he told me. “I wondered why.” Konstantine and his brother’s study found several irregularities compared to the effects of conventional riot control agents. But they couldn’t pinpoint what caused the irregularities.

The documentary-makers spoke to Lasha Shergelashvili, the former head of weaponry for Georgia's riot police. Shergelashvili, who left the ministry in protest after the brutal crackdowns, claimed that he tested a mysterious compound in 2009, before Georgian Dream came to power three years later. He described its effects as "probably 10 times" stronger than regular teargas and recommended against its use. Anonymous current officers confirmed that the same compound Shergelashvili tested in 2009 was used during the 2024 crackdown.

And then a key document surfaced. The BBC obtained a copy of the inventory of the Special Tasks Department, from 2019, listing two unnamed substances: “Chemical liquid UN1710” and “Chemical powder UN3439,” with instructions for mixing them. UN1710 is identified as a solvent. UN3439 takes longer. It’s a hazmat classification, not a chemical name. Experts are consulted, options eliminated. Eventually, only one substance fits the description: bromobenzyl cyanide — a WWI–era chemical agent.

While watching the documentary, I felt a strange mixture of emotions. I was angry but not in any way shocked or surprised. We discussed the documentary among friends and family, agreeing how disturbing the whole thing was. Then, in true Georgian spirit, we made jokes about it.

Tellingly, though, no one around me, including supporters of Georgian Dream, questioned whether the ruling party was capable of such evil.

"The Regime is poisoning us with chemical weapons" — similar stencils have started appearing in Tbilisi and other cities across Georgia. Illustration by Anna Jibladze

The government’s response was fast and furious. Officials and government-affiliated media dismissed the documentary as fake news spread by some shadowy global “deep state.” But their denials were inconsistent. The current minister of internal affairs denied the existence of ‘camite’ in their arsenal. But the minister at the time of the protests admitted that the government had had access to camite since 2009, though it did not use it. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Kobakhidze confirmed that there was indeed something in the water but refused to share what it was, before calling on the UK government to apologize on behalf of the BBC.

The Georgian government did launch an investigation into the “abuse of official authority.” It took barely a week for the investigation to conclude that the water was laced with a standard teargas agent. Even discounting the speed, the investigation was farcical — why did the government need an investigation to “find out” what chemicals it was spraying on protesters?

Meanwhile, a separate investigation was initiated into the people who had taken part in the BBC documentary. Konstantine Chakhunashvili, the doctor, was one of the main targets. Government spin doctors said the BBC’s conclusions around the use of camite rested entirely on his findings and were therefore not valid. But Chakhunashvili’s study never attempted to narrow down which chemicals caused the effects he had observed. With the government’s insistence that the documentary is the product of a foreign plot, it will likely be used to further limit the access of foreign journalists to Georgia, while tightening domestic media laws. And Chakhunashvili fears that academia won’t go unpunished either.

For me, the main thing the documentary gave me was some validation. As a journalist, I spent every day of the protests standing right on the dividing line between protesters and special forces. I inhaled absolutely every single chemical released onto Rustaveli Avenue that week and was directly hit by the spray from water cannons twice. On one of those nights, when I got back home at seven in the morning, my whole body was burning. I stood in the shower for an hour pouring water, a saline solution and even milk over myself, only to go to bed with my \ body still on fire. I coughed for months onward and still, a year later, I don’t feel like my breathing is back to normal. But now I know, I am just one of the people who suffered prolonged and mysterious after-effects, many of whom are now dealing with much more serious lung and heart ailments.

Two weeks after the revelations, it’s clear — whether specifically camite or some other hazardous compound — chemicals were used that caused injuries far beyond approved riot-control standards. Our speculations have been justified. Yet, with little hope for a proper international investigation, we are left in limbo, still wondering if the symptoms we felt were caused by sheer exhaustion and overwhelming amounts of gas and pepper spray, or if indeed, a World War 1-era chemical is, or was at some point, inside our bodies.

For people whose lives and health have been drastically altered by the events, it means that they will have to continue spending endless days and money, looking for medical answers on their own.

I am still unsure whether Georgian Dream understood exactly what they were doing. I think they were aware of at least the immediate effects of the mixture, but I cannot be certain that they fully planned to poison protesters with a chemical weapon. When a government is driven solely by its desire to hold onto power, its judgement becomes clouded. When you see fellow citizens with different, opposing views as enemies, limits dissolve. When there is no check on your actions and your power, you take reckless decisions. And one day, when you endanger the lives of your compatriots, your lucky streak, your immunity, might run out.

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The global battle to age-gate the internet

Lydia Morrish — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 14:00:00 +0000

Lise wasn’t surprised when Britain introduced age verification for porn websites. “As people working in the sex space, you’re right on the margins of societal acceptability,” says Lise (not her real name, remaining anonymous to protect her business.) She owns and runs an independent platform and is used to navigating internet rules and obscenity laws that limit and shape the production of adult content.

Built over ten years, Lise’s small business making films that span sexualities and fuse sex and cinema, has gained a loyal community of performers and creative collaborators. They’ve weathered attempted changes, including bans on depictions of certain sexual acts, such as squirting, and initial proposals to introduce age checks in 2017. But new UK online safety rules mandated that all websites potentially containing adult content to confirm users’ ages from July, to avoid under-18s accessing digital smut and what the act deems “harmful” content for children. Platforms that don’t comply face hefty fines of up to £18 million, or 10% of their revenue.

The UK has been at the vanguard of enforcing age verification policies, mandating that platforms check users’ ages through methods that include facial recognition software, government-issued IDs, and credit card information. The age verification checks are part of the broader implementation of the UK’s Online Safety Act, which Elon Musk’s platform X claimed was “overreach” that had the effect of “stifling open discourse and individual liberties worldwide.”

More recently, Musk accused the Australian government of creating “a backdoor way to control access to the Internet by all Australians,” as it announced its law banning social media for children under the age of 16. In the United States, where 25 states currently have age verification policies, Big Tech is arguing that the restrictions violate free speech principles and create privacy and surveillance concerns.

But, even as politicians characterize age verification rules as a means of, in the words of the Australian prime minister, “taking back power from the Big Tech companies,” it’s not only Silicon Valley giants that are affected. Much of the media coverage and public debate around ‘age-gating’ has taken little notice of small companies and independent producers that are scrambling to keep up with regulatory demands while losing customers and incomes.

“We’re not bad people, we just want to comply,” says Helena Whittingham, who represents porn producers across the UK, U.S., and Europe. With less reach, fewer resources and a smaller pool of punters to rely on for business, age ID has a disproportionate impact on independent platform owners and creators, she says. The costs feel particularly onerous. Platforms are free to choose their own age verification method, including photo ID, credit card checks or facial recognition. But many sites — unable to fund their own software — seek solutions from third parties that charge as much as £1 (about $1.3) per verification. For smaller platforms, this adds up, says Whittingham. “It really penalizes the indie porn houses… that want to do these things correctly.”

“The government,” says Lise, the independent producer, “really needs to answer for the fact that essentially what they’ve done is implemented an incredibly confusing and complicated, ineffective age verification service.”

Ofcom, the UK's regulator for communications industries, says it has taken steps to assist service providers to comply, including publishing a “quick guide and a dedicated page which sets out what porn providers must do.” Currently, Ofcom adds, “we have opened formal investigations into 83 porn sites” that have been ignoring the rules. On December 4, the regulator announced that it was fining a single company running 18 adult websites “£1 million for not having robust age checks.”

Pornhub, the most visited porn site in the world, says its UK traffic has dropped by 77% since the age verification rules came into effect in July. Last month, in the U.S., Pornhub’s parent company Aylo sent letters to major tech companies, including Apple, Google and Microsoft, calling for age verification to be linked directly to devices. “We have found,” Aylo said, “site-based age assurance approaches to be fundamentally flawed and counterproductive.”

For smaller porn producers, age-gating is yet another financial and logistical strain on an already-pressurised environment, from bans on online advertising, a lack of mainstream payment processors facilitating adult sites, and tech platforms limiting sex-related content.

“We never get to work with best in class of anything, business partner-wise, and we never get to work with best value anything, because we're not in a position to negotiate,” says Cindy Gallop, the founder of MakeLoveNotPorn (MLNP), a “social sex platform” where couples upload clips as an alternative to hardcore porn. Given its paywall, the site has always required age verification. Still, “it’s appalling” Gallop says of rules that don’t distinguish between platforms publishing consensual and ethical sexual content, and those publishing potentially exploitative material. “Everyone gets lumped in, everyone’s reduced to the lowest common denominator.”

Marcus Quillan, an independent filmmaker producing alternative porn under the name “Thousand Faces,” was already struggling to make his money back when he made all his public content non-explicit ahead of age verification. “Sales already didn't break even, with how expensive it is to set up and run a website, let alone the cost of film production,” he says. “The cost of age verification would have made it even worse.”

Quillan posts his paid-for content on third-party platform PinkLabel, a “white label” site that hosts adult content for independent creators. This way, he can potentially drive more traffic, with the site fronting the costs and burden of age ID, he says.

Small creators and independent platforms that don’t go through large tech platforms may “disappear,” says Dr Carolina Are, a social media research fellow at Northumbria University’s Centre for Digital Citizens. “That’s a problem because a lot of the smaller, more ethical porn companies do a lot in terms of education and even representation, and creating trends that counteract the more harmful and kind of stereotypical tropes of porn.”

Evidence so far also indicates customers will go elsewhere or find ways to avoid producing their papers. As traffic to porn sites declined alongside the implementation of age checks, VPN usage shot up, according to Ofcom’s annual Online Nation report, published on December 10.

Viewers have also reported easily bypassing age checks with new email addresses and even video game characters. Despite its positive intent, the law is not “fit for purpose,” says Are. It promotes “unaccountable and not necessarily effective [systems] that are dangerous for privacy and freedom of speech.”The law is also affecting other corners of the adult industry, she adds. Websites used by sex workers to advertise their services anonymously also now require ID checks, potentially driving them into offline — often more risky — spaces.

The inclusion of any platform that could host adult content in the rules also means mainstream social media sites and dating apps now have age gates. Users have flagged that pages that aren’t pornographic at all are now restricted, such as subreddits about war crimes, quitting smoking and sexual assault. In Australia, which became the first country to ban under-16s from social media altogether in December, campaigners have warned that the rules prevent young people from seeing sexuality and gender content that is educational and disconnects them from wider local and global conversations.

Abhilash Nair, an internet law and pornography regulation expert, says the UK’s age verification should not jeopardize children’s rights. “We’ve got to make sure age assurance doesn’t restrict children from accessing content they have a right to access,” he says. “That includes sex education, health and relationships education.” But, he maintains, legislation is needed to keep children away from porn.

For now, those on the frontlines of sexual expression say the collateral damage done by age verification is significant. Lise, the independent UK porn producer says we “are at an exponential rate losing these independent niche sites, queer content, fetish content — stuff that’s less likely to be mainstream.” As the authorities crack down on sites failing to comply with complex, fast-changing regulations, she argues, “our depictions of sexuality are becoming increasingly minimized, limiting and homogeneous in a way that does a real disservice to the breadth of sexuality.”

But a spokesperson for the U.K.’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said: “Claims of widespread censorship are wrong and misleading. This is about creating a safer internet — not censoring it — where children can explore, learn and connect without fear of what’s behind the next swipe. The Online Safety Act’s focus is, and will always be, on protecting children from the most harmful content such as pornography —requiring proportionate, privacy-safe age checks, while also ensuring robust protections for free speech.”

As countries like the UK and Australia lead the way on age limits, such questions are largely ignored. Instead, what might prevent governments seeking to regulate technology or cause them to rethink is the increasingly aggressive posture of a White House that opposes such regulation. Donald Trump has signed an executive order to stop individual states seeking to regulate AI and set up a federal task force “whose sole responsibility shall be to challenge State AI laws.” This month, the U.S. has also told the UK government it would not be immediately implementing the $40 billion “Technology Prosperity Deal” agreed during Trump’s visit in September. Among the stumbling blocks was the “frustration” expressed by American officials with Britain’s online safety rules.

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Comrades in arms: Putin and Modi meet in Delhi

Shougat Dasgupta — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 13:51:18 +0000

Indian prime minister Narendra Modi was at the airport on Thursday. In a move heavily trailed by the Indian media (thus defeating the purpose somewhat), Modi intended to surprise his good friend, the Russian president Vladimir Putin. Back in September, at a summit in China, Modi had been photographed with Putin as they rode chummily together towards the venue, where they would meet and share an equally chummy rapport with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. At the time, the overt friendliness was read as a rebuke of U.S. president Donald Trump, who had announced a 25% penalty tariff on Indian exports as a punishment for India buying Russian oil in unprecedented quantities, thus helping to finance the continued war in Ukraine.

Similarly, Putin’s two-day visit—his 10th trip to India but his first since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine—is less about a bilateral relationship than it is a message to the world. Russia retains support, Putin is saying, even as it is being accused of stalling and derailing any meaningful peace negotiations. Just before Putin arrived in Delhi, the Times of India published an op-ed by the ambassadors to India of France, Germany and the U.K. that accused Putin of having a “total disregard for human life.” It embarrassed India’s Ministry of External Affairs which said the article was “unacceptable and unusual” and accused the ambassadors of trying to interfere in India’s sovereign right to conduct foreign policy as it sees fit.

For Modi too, Putin’s visit is an opportunity to send a message to the U.S. that India will not be bullied by tariffs, even as the value of its trade with Washington dwarfs that of its trade with Moscow. Keeping Russia close is also vital to India to balance out Russia’s growing reliance on China. India shares a long, volatile border with China, and the growing power disparity between the two countries means Delhi needs all the support (from Moscow and Washington) that it can get.

Despite their need for mutual support, India and Russia’s relationship is not without its tensions. At a demonstration in Delhi, ahead of Putin’s visit, the families of Indians stranded in Russia held up placards that read "Our Sons Are Not Soldiers of Russia." At least 12 Indians have died while fighting in the war and 127 have joined the Russian army. And India remains, despite Modi’s authoritarian tendencies, a democracy, with an influential civil society and a public that believes in its right to change governments at the ballot box.

It might explain both why Modi increasingly borrows from Putin’s playbook as he seeks to build India into a surveillance state and why he remains vulnerable to being stymied by committed opposition. A recent controversy over a cybersecurity app that the Modi government tried to mandate be pre-installed on every new smartphone sold in India – a country with a billion smartphone users – exemplified this tension.

Modi and Putin’s parallel surveillance states

“Today, your phone is like your house in your pocket,” says Apar Gupta, a lawyer and founder of the Delhi-based advocacy group Internet Freedom Foundation. He was responding to news this week that the Indian government had directed companies such as Apple, Samsung and Xiaomi to pre-install Sanchar Saathi (literally, Communication Partner), a state-owned cybersecurity app on all new smartphones. Effectively, Gupta said, the “government is putting its own lock on your house.” And it gets to keep the key. The Indian government’s directive is very similar to one from the Kremlin in August to pre-install its Max messenger app on all smartphones. Max, the Kremlin said, was a necessary anti-fraud measure to protect vulnerable Russian citizens. On September 1, it became mandatory for the Kremlin's Max messenger app to be pre-installed on all smartphones. Now officials warn they might ban WhatsApp altogether for failing to prevent "crime and fraud."

Just as Max gives Russia the tools to effectively spy on all of the people all of the time, opposition politician Priyanka Gandhi described the Modi government’s Sanchar Saathi as a “snooping” app. “It’s ridiculous,” she said. “Citizens have a right to privacy.” Criticism has focused on the mandatory nature of the app and a secretive process in which no prior public discussion was had before companies were ordered to install the app. The government has rejected the idea that Sanchar Saathi can be used for surveillance purposes. In 2024, it pointed out, Indians lost over $2.5 billion to cyber scams that take advantage of the widespread adoption of digital services in India and the abundance of data available online. Internet freedom advocate Nikhil Pahwa says that the Indian government has been notoriously lax about protecting citizens’ data and is responsible in large part for creating the problems it claims to be fixing with the mandatory state-owned cybersecurity app.

Even as it gave itself carte blanche to access citizens’ data, the Indian authorities this month also implemented stricter rules governing data privacy. The rules demand more accountability from Big Tech, for companies to minimize the collection of personal data and to give users a clearly-marked option to not share data. Its language about consent and individual privacy borrows heavily from Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation. The GDPR is the basis for much of the regulation around the world, from Brazil to South Korea and Canada. Currently, some 144 countries have national data privacy and protection guidelines in place.

Among the few holdouts is the U.S., where individual states have been setting up rules that sometimes clash with federal priorities. One of those priorities is to weaken GDPR. Last week, in Brussels, Howard Lutnick, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, said that if the EU “take their foot off this regulatory framework” it might lead to increased investment. “Let’s settle the outstanding cases against Google, and against Microsoft, and against Amazon. Let’s put them behind us,” Lutnick said as he also dangled the carrot of reduced tariffs. The EU has already proposed a ‘Digital Omnibus’ package that waters down the GDPR’s rules on individual data privacy and freezes AI regulation.

An argument the Indian government’s supporters, including many in the media, used to defend the mandatory pre-installation of a state cybersecurity app was Big Tech’s vast, revenue-generating data crawls. It is an argument that strikes at the heart of digital sovereignty, an increasingly popular phrase in the Global South, where countries are now insisting that tech giants store local data locally and share some of the profits. In May, Meta said it might have to cut Nigerian users off from their Facebook and Instagram accounts after the government fined parent company Meta nearly $300 million for violating data protection laws. It’s the kind of action that is now leading the U.S. government to negotiate trade deals with countries—most recently with Malaysia and Indonesia—that require them to refrain from taxing Silicon Valley profits or requiring them to invest in the local digital ecosystem.

Defending the need for digital sovereignty, the Indian politician Shashi Tharoor wrote recently that “self-respecting and self-reliant” countries must insist on “unhindered rights to regulate the national digital space” or risk “cementing digital vassalage.” In October, the California governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill that requires companies to make it easy for Californians to opt out of data sharing, a right that Californians retain even when traveling thus forcing tech companies to consider making it a national option in order to comply with the law. But, as digital rights campaigner Nikhil Pahwa says, while India’s Data Protection Law “will make private companies more accountable, it makes the Indian government less accountable.”

India is the first country to attempt to follow the Russian lead in having a state-run app pre-installed on all smartphones. The next steps, the Russian example suggests, are significantly more alarming. In Russia, schoolchildren will now have their faces scanned as they enter school buildings. Their data will be added to the national 'Unified Biometric System,' which already holds the details of over 50 million Russians. The project, which authorities have said is "voluntary," is expected to cost over $600 million. And by 2030, the Ministry of Digital Development estimates that there will be five million government-run surveillance cameras across the country, all hooked up to an AI system with facial recognition capabilities. By 2021, some reports already ranked Delhi as the most surveilled city in the world. And the Indian government has a history of using spyware to keep tabs on opposition politicians, civil society organizations and journalists.

So even as the Indian government backpedals on Sanchar Saathi, its very existence was a warning that digital privacy and sovereignty doesn’t necessarily mean more rights for people. It could just mean a power grab by a national government, particularly one that takes its cues from Putin’s Russia.

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The digital exiles: Why people are abandoning their smartphones

Isobel Cockerell — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 10:00:32 +0000

There was no specific tipping point that made Logan Lane get rid of her smartphone. One day, the thought just arrived. “I was like, I just can’t fucking do this anymore.” And she put away the device that had dominated her life since she was 11. “I spent about five of my developmental years just tied to my smartphone,” she says. Logan, 20, bought a basic flip phone, and re-learned to navigate the world, without social media, GPS, and without the constant, nagging cry for attention from her smartphone that had punctuated her days.

She grieves the early adolescence she lost to her phone. “In the years when you’re supposed to be reading and playing, we were on our phones and computers,” she says. “We had those years of play stolen from us.”

Lane is the founder of the Luddite Club, a solidarity network of “former screenagers” growing a movement across America. Together, they’re pledging to give up their devices, choosing instead a life of voluntary exile from the digital world.

To speak to Lane, I placed an international call to her flip-phone — an act that already felt anachronistic. The line crackled as we talked and her train rattled through New York City. For a moment, the world felt analog again.

Lane is part of the first generation with no memory of life before smartphones — a generation that became addicted to their phones before anyone truly understood the cost. “There’s no one person to blame,” she said. “Even though I was only 11 or 12 years old when I got a phone, I was responsible for facilitating this addiction in my life. But at the same time, I was a child.”

All around Lane on the subway, all along the train — and along every train in New York City; every train in every major city in the world — people stared into their smart devices. The smartphone penetration rate for the world is about 60%; in the U.S. it’s at 91%. Just a decade ago, global penetration was 10%, but now many of us can’t leave a room, let alone the house, without our phones.

Rising in response is a resilient counterculture; a growing group of people who have had enough. People who long for a simpler, more three-dimensional life in which they have control over their digital existence, and their thoughts and data are not harvested, nudged, monitored. So they check out. Power off their smartphone; lock it in a drawer; give it away; throw it in the trash. Hope they’ll never have to use one again. The Luddite Club now has local chapters all over the U.S., and young people are flocking to the myriad offline events where they talk about reclaiming their lives from tech capture.

“I’m excited to read on the train in peace, to not look at social media, post or check up on exes, looking for validation or a small dopamine hit. I’ll get dopamine the right way,” a young woman recently wrote on Reddit. “It will be difficult at first,” someone responded, “but it will become more freeing after you break your chains.” Another young man wrote that he had “just wasted ten years of my life living in an alternate reality.” Having made the switch, he called on others to “come back to the real world and enjoy the struggles and solutions of analog life.”

These conversations unfold in a radical corner of the internet where thousands of people a day come to discuss getting rid of their smartphone. The “dumbphones” subreddit has the intimacy of an addiction support group. The page is full of pictures of what people call their “everyday carry” gear, the tech they bring with them on a typical day. For people of a certain age, the pictures are transfixing, nostalgic: Motorola Razr flip phones, old Nokias, candy-colored iPod minis, notebooks, A to Z maps, point-and-shoot cameras, MP3 players. The photos hark back to a moment in time before everything — as the Luddites see it — started to go wrong.

It was, if you want to put a specific year to it, 2006. Facebook had just opened up its usership beyond students, and tens of thousands of users were signing up every day. Back then, Facebook reunited long lost schoolfriends, lovers, even relatives. Independent musicians blew up overnight on Myspace. Social media felt like something that would make people more open and connected. The first iPhone was still a year away. We still knew how to navigate our world without Google maps. We still read books on commutes, took pictures on cameras and uploaded them in their joyful hundreds to Facebook for fun. The 2008 crash hadn’t happened. Attention algorithms didn’t yet exist. The tech companies still felt like harbingers of a better, more connected future.

Daisy Krigbaum, a dumbphone advocate who now runs a business around it, calls that era “the sweet spot.” It was a time, she says, “when online social platforms were there to facilitate in-person correspondence. They just filled the gap between when you could see somebody in person. You could talk to your friend while they’re abroad. You could talk to a family member who's bedridden. But then it evolved into a monster.”

The “sweet spot” is something Judy Estrin remembers well. One of the internet’s early architects, Estrin is a Silicon Valley veteran who helped build the foundations of the web in the 1970s. When I spoke to her at a sunny cafe in Palo Alto last year, she described the last days before technology stopped being built to cater to our needs. “It was human-centred,” she said of the internet back then. “It wasn’t until we got into the Cloud, mobile, social, that the dynamic shifted and it became more about humans adapting to the technology.”

One thing that had kept tech companies in check, Estrin explained, was limitations on computing power. “There were constraints on the technology. We kept moving up against processing, bandwidth, storage.” But once computing power got cheaper, those constraints disappeared. “The culture changed,” she said. Instead of designing carefully, companies could just keep adding features. “The design aesthetic was these continuous scrolling feeds. The design of mobile became more and more massively online.”

She remembered how computer scientists started designing for mobile first. “We stopped having to think in terms of constraints. We just started brute-forcing everything.” And then tech began not to respond to our lives but to shape them. “It was in 2010, 2011, 2012,” Estrin said, “you could see the incentives of the system and the ad-driven markets just completely starting to shift things.” She said she felt guilty for not noticing this switch sooner — and for playing some role in the world Silicon Valley created; the world we all live in today. “ I did and do feel increasingly disappointed. Just disappointed with the technologies that we created,” she said. “ I think that I was so heads down and focused for so many years, between building companies and raising my son. And I think that I, then at some point, picked up my head. And it's like, well, why wasn't I paying attention to this stuff? What was I doing?”

For dumbphone business-owner Daisy Krigbaum and her partner Will Stults, the wake-up moment came on a transformative night in 2022. One night, after hours of scrolling beside each other on the couch, they finally looked up.

After basking in blue light and “looking at mindless stuff” for “an unreal amount of time,” Krigbaum said, they turned to each other and admitted they had a problem.

They decided to forgo the tech that had been dominating their existence. First, like Lane, they had to come to terms with the time they had lost, and why. “ I think we both feel really grateful to have been born kind of on the cusp of the post-information age where we still had some foundational social skills,” said Krigbaum, who is 28. “I already feel impoverished by how much of my adolescence took place online.”

“Society's relationship with tech has at least migrated to the point where we're willing to admit that most or all of us have some sort of problem,” added Stults. “None of us have a completely healthy relationship with technology.” They started to look at flip phones and old-style cellphones to switch over to but found the experience of detangling their life from smartphones filled with knotty inconveniences, workarounds and sacrifices.

Contemporary life is full of small dependencies that keep people tethered to their phones — apps for work, school portals, two-factor authentication, maps, music, messaging. One tiny function you rely on can hold you hostage to the whole device. “It’s such a confusing world to get off a smartphone,” Stults said. So he and Krigbaum founded an online store called dumbwireless selling dumbphones, and running a hotline to help people through the process. “We thought if we could streamline it a little bit, then people might be more inclined to follow their better instinct in those moments when they are like, ‘I can't do this anymore,’” said Krigbaum.

Light Phone II. Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0) Jordan Mansfield.

Krigbaum herself uses a Lightphone: it’s a new type of device built for digital exiles. Alongside another phone called the Kompakt, these phones are intentionally boring. The screens are e-ink. They have maps, messages, a calculator, an alarm clock, and of course a telephone. The Kompakt can “sideload” any other apps you need, like Slack, Spotify and WhatsApp. But they don’t pull and nag at your attention.

At upwards of $200, these hybrid, dull phones are the ultimate connoisseur's choice for someone who wants to live in the modern world without being dependent on an attention-demanding device. But the true radicals go further, returning to the flip phones and Nokias of the “sweet spot” era, saying the joy of going back to the dumbphone is reclaiming parts of your brain — like your sense of direction — that have atrophied from smartphone use.

On Reddit’s dumbphones forum, people talk about the bigger aim of doing without the conveniences their phones provide and regaining control over their thought patterns. “Everything is a fucking struggle without a smartphone. The whole world is set up around them,” one Redditor wrote last month. “But I am focussed, I feel capable, I am so much more compassionate and understanding of others. I have more patience. I am less angry and more in control of my emotions. My anxiety is practically gone.”

Every so often, the author Zadie Smith — perhaps the world’s most famous flip-phone user — is reminded of the horrors of analog life, she told Ezra Klein on his podcast. “ Disaster. We're at a party at three in the morning, there's no way to get home, forget about it, walk five miles, disaster. Once a year. And every time it happened, I would think that was bad, but is it as bad as having my very consciousness colonized every moment of the day? And I'd be like, no. Definitely no competition.” It’s a trade-off dumb phone users are happy to make – lose their phone but regain their consciousness.

The other thing dumb phone users cherish is the solitude they get back. True solitude – where there’s no constant companion in your pocket that can listen to the sound of your voice, feel the pads of your fingertips, track your expressions, and follow you through your home city.

Someone who knows the importance of such solitude is Issa Amro, a Palestinian activist living in Hebron, on the West Bank. Hebron is one of the most intensely surveilled places on Earth, where the Israeli military uses facial recognition programs called Blue Wolf, Red Wolf, and White Wolf to track Palestinians. “I feel that I live in a lab and I’m a simulation object,” Amro told me, describing how the systems rely heavily on smartphones for data collection and enforcement.

In 2022, Amro filmed an Israeli soldier beating an Israeli-Jewish activist. The video was much-shared in Israel, and Amro knew it would only be a matter of time before he was arrested. So he gave his smartphone to a friend who drove a taxi around the city. When the police came for him, they were intent on getting hold of it. “The Israeli police were crazy to get my phone. And I refused to give it to them,” he remembers. Meanwhile, the phone’s location was moving all over Hebron, hidden in the taxicab. “My friends moved it from one car to another, trying to hide it. The phone was going all around the city until I was released,” he said with a laugh.

After that, he traveled to Jordan and bought an analog phone with buttons — the first he’d owned in years. “Buy it from a random place, when you travel somewhere, go and buy one,” he advised. He swaps out his smartphone for the analog phone “to feel better,” when he wants to have a moment of respite from the suffocating surveillance of life in the occupied West Bank.

“It’s a very bad feeling to know all your life is being watched. Not just your political activities, but your [personal] life too. If you want to have a date, or something for yourself, the occupation will use it against you.” Once Amro started using the analog phone, the Israeli forces took notice. They didn’t like it. Just last month, as he was crossing the border from Jordan into Palestine, the customs officer rifled through his bag, looking for his smartphone. When the officer found the small analog phone, he took a picture of it and sent it to his superiors.

“I was waiting, waiting, waiting,” Amro said. “Then the interrogators came.”

They grilled him about the phone. “ What’s wrong with you?” they said. “Why do you carry an analog phone? What do you do with it, who did you contact, and where is your smartphone?”

“I told them, ‘I’m not doing anything illegal. I live in Hebron. My house has one camera in the front and one in the back. Whenever I get in or get out, you know about it. Wherever I go, you know. My life has no privacy. Why do you care if I have an analog phone or a smartphone?’”

The border police questioned him solidly for two hours about the phone. “Everything is built on surveillance now and digitalization,” Amro said. “So if you go analog, you really make it hard for them. In the past, intelligence systems depended on analog tactics — on people. Now they depend on machines.”

They wanted him to have a smartphone because, as Amro put it, “The phone documents everything.”

He feels solidarity with other analog phone users around the world. “Whenever I see someone else with one, I feel — Here’s a friend. We are the same family.”

Sometimes, with his analog phone, Amro does nothing more than go to the forest for a moment of peace. “We’re skimming nature from our life, and it’s really important to understand the threat of digitalization. Going back to nature is really important.”

It’s a sentiment New York-based writer August Lamm, who has made a zine about dumbphones, shares. She can palpably feel the outside world re-entering her life since she got rid of her phone. “I feel more present and attuned to my surroundings, and I can feel my life changing,” she said. “My days feel long and rich and open, and I can trust my thoughts more because I don't feel they've been fed to me.”

She talked about how the physical realm opened up to her when she got rid of her smartphone, with its Instagram account and its tens of thousands of followers. She regained a sense of her surroundings. “If you live for fifty years and you’re aware every day of what’s going on around you, and you’re listening to people, and you’re present, that is more valuable than living into your nineties and when you flash back through your life it’s just screens.”

Lamm wants to push to maintain a critical minority of society who isn’t captured by smartphone use, who don’t own them and will never own them. “I would love to live in a world where people say, ‘Wait, do you have a smartphone?’ as a matter of courtesy.”

It feels like an impossible dream, as big tech companies move to capture even more areas of our lives. From the moment the scans of our unborn bodies are uploaded by our parents to Instagram, to our school days dominated by Google classroom, to our first phone, to every thought we commit to a search term or AI model, to every beat of our heart recorded by our smart watch, to the steady decline of our health, to our hospital appointments booked on our phones, to the day we die and condolences are posted on our page, the phone is ever-present. “ Our brains are captured. The industry is captured. Our politics is captured. We're captured in so many different ways,” Judy Estrin said. “Our leadership is captured. In every industry, we’re captured by this mentality and worship of growth and innovation.”

And if tech leaders have their way, there’ll be a time when the smartphone is no longer an external device — but part of our bodies. Kyle Morris, a young AI builder I met in San Francisco last year, called the smartphone a “better prefrontal cortex. It tells you how to get places, tells you how to plan. It gives you answers. It gives you a better memory. I see in the next 50 years, that it's going to enter us. That it's going to become part of us.” He held up his phone in front of me: “It's weird that we have these like external things that we're using. People are going to start retrofitting themselves with improved memory, improved vision.”

As companies like Neuralink push towards merging technology with the body, and AI seeps into every corner of our world, Lamm says she still has days where she feels powerless and alone.

When Google rolled out AI search, with no way to turn it off, she broke down. “I googled how to undo an AI overview, and there wasn't a way to do it. And I had a total meltdown… I was like, this is evil. Like, I can't even do a Google search without being confronted by AI.”

I ask Lamm and Lane what they’ll do in the future in the face of this capture. With each passing year, it gets more difficult to live without a smartphone. The pandemic — which saw countries around the world rolling out QR code greenpasses — cemented this, as restaurants spurned paper menus, airlines stopped issuing paper tickets, health services made it so hospital appointments could only be booked on apps. Recently, Lamm couldn’t apply for a UK Visa because she needed a smartphone to do it. She can’t get an electric car because you can only pay for electricity with a QR code. So what then — when the drawbridge finally rises and modern life necessitates a smartphone?

Lamm has thought about this, and once she gets to her conclusion, it becomes as sci-fi as the imaginings of the tech workers who want to put chips in our heads. “There needs to be another option,” she reflected. “In the worst case scenario, people just defect from society and say, ‘Ok, there’s at least a few thousand of us that want to just live a normal life and we’ll go off and continue living a normal life somewhere else,’” she said. She quoted from Dave Eggers’s cult novel “The Every,” where a small tribe of tech-skeptics calling themselves the “Trogs” try to live outside a world where surveillance capitalism and tech have become all-encompassing.

“It wouldn’t be a commune situation because ideally through this activism, it would kind of be more of a split in society, rather than founding a new society,” Lamm said. “It would be like enough people that it would feel like normal life, and you just wouldn't interact with the tech.”

As my line with Logan Lane, the Luddite Club founder, crackled again, I asked her the same question — what will she do when life becomes impossible without a smartphone, when tech capture becomes complete? “I’m just like, fuck it. I’ll get to it when I get to it. But I am not OK with it. I am going to do everything I can before then to try to prevent that.” She paused. “I'm not so worried about what people in Silicon Valley think people want.” As her train went into a tunnel, the line went dead, and she continued with her journey — in exile from the digital world; fully present in the physical world.

Drop in image 1: Teona Tsintsadze. Motion by Anna Jibladze . Drop in image 3: Teona Tsintsadze/Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) Reinhold Möller, Motion by Anna Jibladze. Drop in image4 : Teona Tsintsadze/ Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0)Ermell/Reinhold Möller.

PART OF THE BIG IDEAS

Captured

This Big Idea explores how this new technology is not just intended to redefine the way we work, but what it means to be human.

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The Age of Exile

This Big Idea explores how displacement has evolved from historical punishment into a defining condition of our time.

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The tool Donald Trump might use to crush dissent

Shougat Dasgupta — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 14:46:51 +0000

So-called “anti terror” laws intended to control civil society groups and civic freedoms are a feature of autocracies such as Russia, or countries with growing autocratic pretensions like India. There are plenty of examples of how such laws can be used. In June, a Delhi legislator sanctioned the prosecution of the Booker Prize-winning writer Arundhati Roy, under draconian anti-terror legislation that permits imprisonment without charge, for a speech she gave in 2010.

Now the United States could become the latest nation to pass an anti-terror law that will effectively stifle dissent.

Undeterred by a failed attempt earlier this month, the U.S. House of Representatives tried again last week to pass H.R. 9495, a bill that gives the treasury secretary the authority to designate non-profits as “terrorist supporting organizations.” This time, with Donald Trump poised to take office and retribution on his mind, the bill passed. It gives, noted Human Rights Watch, “the executive branch broad and easily abused authority.”

Gravely titled the “Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act,” the bill enjoys broad bipartisan support. No one objects to the parts of the bill that seek to alleviate tax burdens and deadlines on “U.S. nationals who are unlawfully or wrongfully detained abroad or held hostage abroad and their spouses.” Or the “refund and abatement of tax penalties and fines paid by hostages, detained individuals, and their spouses or dependents.”

But, bundled together with its uncontroversial sections, the bill also announces its intent to “terminate the tax-exempt status of terrorist supporting organizations.” How such organizations are designated appears to be entirely up to the treasury secretary who is appointed by the president. According to Human Rights Watch, the bill does not “clearly define” criteria by which organizations can be deemed to be enabling terrorists, nor does it “require the government to provide evidence to support such a decision.” Instead, it requires the nonprofit to prove to the government that it does not support terrorism.

In a letter to the House of Representatives, civil society groups asked why such legislation was necessary when it is already a federal crime for nonprofits to provide “material support to terrorist organizations.” Such a law, the letter argued, would hand the U.S. executive “a tool it could use to curb free speech, censor nonprofit media outlets, target political opponents, and punish disfavored groups across the political spectrum.”

Shoved off the news agenda by the intense speculation and reporting over President-elect Trump’s cabinet picks, the bill has received scanty mainstream media coverage. Its impact, however, could be outsized, particularly on free speech. “A sixth grader would know this is unconstitutional,” said the Democrat Congressman Jamie Raskin as the bill was debated on the House floor. It is, he said, “a werewolf in sheep’s clothing” giving the American president “Orwellian powers and the American not-for-profit sector Kafkaesque nightmares.”

Democrat Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib said the bill was “part of a broader assault on our civil liberties.” Introduced in the wake of protests on American campuses over the war in Gaza, the bill, Tlaib warned, is not “just about Palestinian human rights advocacy organizations, this is about the NAACP, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood.” It criminalizes social justice organizations, she added, the “folks that have been trying to make it safe for our kids to go to school away from gun crisis and violence.”

Less than 10 days before the House passed the bill on November 21, it had been voted down, failing to secure the necessary two-thirds majority. Earlier this year in April, a version of the bill gained overwhelming support in the House only to be stalled in the Senate. Now in its third iteration, the bill may yet languish in the upper house of Congress, though most analysts expect it to be brought before Congress again next year if necessary when the Republicans will have a majority in both houses.

Across the globe, legislation aimed at the funding of civil society has had an inevitable chilling effect on dissent. “The misuse of anti-terrorism legislation,” observed the European commissioner for human rights in April, “has become one of the most widespread threats to freedom of expression, including media freedom, in Europe.” Why would the United States, even with its much vaunted protection of free speech, be any different?

Why Did We Write This Story?

We’re committed to tracking the global drift towards autocratic governance. Here, we show how a wide-ranging, vaguely worded bill in the United States could become a law similar to those in authoritarian countries around the world that are used to stifle civil society and dissent.

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I’m a neurology ICU nurse. The creep of AI in our hospitals terrifies me

Michael Kennedy — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 12:56:45 +0000

The healthcare landscape is changing fast thanks to the introduction of artificial intelligence. These technologies have shifted decision-making power away from nurses and on to the robots. Michael Kennedy, who works as a neuro-intensive care nurse in San Diego and is a member of California Nurses Association and National Nurses United, believes AI could destroy nurses’ intuition, skills, and training. The result being that patients are left watched by more machines and fewer pairs of eyes. Here is Michael’s story, as told to Coda’s Isobel Cockerell. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Every morning at about 6:30am I catch the trolley car from my home in downtown San Diego up to the hospital where I work — a place called La Jolla. Southern California isn't known for its public transportation, but I'm the weirdo that takes it — and I like it. It's quick, it's easy, I don't have to pay for parking, it's wonderful. A typical shift is 12 hours and it ends up being 13 by the time you do your report and get all your charting done, so you're there for a very long time.

Most of the time, I don’t go to work expecting catastrophe — of course it happens once in a while, but usually I’m just going into a normal job, where you do routine stuff.

I work in the neuro-intensive care unit. The majority of our patients have just had neurosurgery for tumors or strokes. It’s not a happy place most of the time. I see a lot of people with long recoveries ahead of them who need to relearn basic skills — how to hold a pencil, how to walk. After a brain injury, you lose those abilities, and it's a long process to get them back. It's not like we do a procedure, fix them, and they go home the next day. We see patients at their worst, but we don't get to see the progress. If we're lucky, we might hear months later that they've made a full recovery. It's an environment where there's not much instant gratification.

As a nurse, you end up relying on intuition a lot. It's in the way a patient says something, or just a feeling you get from how they look. It’s not something I think machines can do — and yet, in recent years, we’ve seen more and more artificial intelligence creep into our hospitals.

I get to work at 7am. The hospital I work at looks futuristic from the outside — it’s this high-rise building, all glass and curved lines. It’s won a bunch of architectural awards. The building was financed by Irwin Jacobs, who’s the billionaire owner of Qualcomm, a big San Diego tech company. I think the hospital being owned by a tech billionaire really has a huge amount to do with the way they see technology and the way they dive headfirst into it.

They always want to be on the cutting edge of everything. And so when something new comes out, they're going to jump right on it. I think that's part of why they dive headfirst into this AI thing.

We didn't call it AI at first. The first thing that happened was these new innovations just crept into our electronic medical record system. They were tools that monitored whether specific steps in patient treatment were being followed. If something was missed or hadn’t been done, the AI would send an alert. It was very primitive, and it was there to stop patients falling through the cracks.

Then in 2018, the hospital bought a new program from Epic, the electronic medical record company. It predicted something called “patient acuity” — basically the workload each patient requires from their nursing care. It’s a really important measurement we have in nursing, to determine how sick a person is and how many resources they will need. At its most basic level, we just classify patients as low, medium or high need. Before the AI came in, we basically filled in this questionnaire — which would ask things like how many meds a patient needed. Are they IV meds? Are they crushed? Do you have a central line versus a peripheral? That sort of thing.

This determines whether a patient was low, medium or high-need. And we’d figure out staffing based on that. If you had lots of high-need patients, you needed more staffing. If you had mostly low-need patients, you could get away with fewer.

We used to answer the questions ourselves and we felt like we had control over it. We felt like we had agency. But one day, it was taken away from us. Instead, they bought this AI-powered program without notifying the unions, nurses, or representatives. They just started using it and sent out an email saying, 'Hey, we're using this now.'

The new program used AI to pull from a patient’s notes, from the charts, and then gave them a special score. It was suddenly just running in the background at the hospital.

The problem was, we had no idea where these numbers were coming from. It felt like magic, but not in a good way. It would spit out a score, like 240, but we didn't know what that meant. There was no clear cutoff for low, medium, or high need, making it functionally useless.

The upshot was, it took away our ability to advocate for patients. We couldn’t point to a score and say, 'This patient is too sick, I need to focus on them alone,' because the numbers didn’t help us make that case anymore. They didn’t tell us if a patient was low, medium, or high need. They just gave patients a seemingly random score that nobody understood, on a scale of one to infinity.

We felt the system was designed to take decision-making power away from nurses at the bedside. Deny us the power to have a say in how much staffing we need.

That was the first thing.

Then, earlier this year, the hospital got a huge donation from the Jacobs family, and they hired a chief AI officer. When we heard that, alarm bells went off — “they're going all in on AI,” we said to each other. We found out about this Scribe technology that they were rolling out. It’s called Ambient Documentation. They announced they were going to pilot this program with the physicians at our hospital.

It basically records your encounter with your patient. And then it's like chat GPT or a large language model — it takes everything and just auto populates a note. Or your “documentation.”

There were obvious concerns with this, and the number one thing that people said was, "Oh my god — it's like mass surveillance. They're gonna listen to everything our patients say, everything we do. They're gonna track us.”

This isn't the first time they've tried to track nurses. My hospital hasn’t done this, but there are hospitals around the US that use tracking tags to monitor how many times you go into a room to make sure you're meeting these metrics. It’s as if they don’t trust us to actually care for our patients.

We leafletted our colleagues to try to educate them on what “Ambient Documentation” actually means. We demanded to meet with the chief AI officer. He downplayed a lot of it, saying, 'No, no, no, we hear you. We're right there with you. We're starting; it’s just a pilot.' A lot of us rolled our eyes.

He said they were adopting the program because of physician burnout. It’s true, documentation is one of the most mundane aspects of a physician's job, and they hate doing it.

The reasoning for bringing in AI tools to monitor patients is always that it will make life easier for us, but in my experience, technology in healthcare rarely makes things better. It usually just speeds up the factory floor, squeezing more out of us, so they can ultimately hire fewer of us.

“Efficiency” is a buzzword in Silicon Valley, but get it out of your mind when it comes to healthcare. When you're optimizing for efficiency, you're getting rid of redundancies. But when patients' lives are at stake, you actually want redundancy. You want extra slack in the system. You want multiple sets of eyes on a patient in a hospital.

When you try to reduce everything down to a machine that one person relies on to carry out decisions, then there's only one set of eyes on that patient. That may be efficient, but by creating efficiency, you're also creating a lot of potential points of failure. So, efficiency isn't as efficient as tech bros think it is.

In an ideal world, they believe technology would take away mundane tasks, allowing us to focus on patient encounters instead of spending our time typing behind a computer.

But who thinks recording everything a patient says and storing it on a third-party server is a good idea? That’s crazy. I’d need assurance that the system is 100 percent secure — though nothing ever is. We’d all love to be freed from documentation requirements and be more present with our patients.

There’s a proper way to do this. AI isn’t inevitable, but it’s come at us fast. One day, ChatGPT was a novelty, and now everything is AI. We’re being bombarded with it.

The other thing that’s burst into our hospitals in recent years is an AI-powered alert system. They’re these alerts that ping us to make sure we’ve done certain things — like checked for sepsis, for example. They’re usually not that helpful, or not timed very well. The goal is to stop patients falling through the cracks — that’s obviously a nightmare scenario in healthcare. But I don’t think the system is working as intended.

I don’t think the goal is really to provide a safety net for everyone — I think it’s actually to speed us up, so we can see more patients, reduce visits down from 15 minutes to 12 minutes to 10. Efficiency, again.

I believe the goal is for these alerts to eventually take over healthcare. To tell us how to do our jobs rather than have hospitals spend money training nurses and have them develop critical thinking skills, experience, and intuition. So we basically just become operators of the machines.

As a seasoned nurse, I’ve learned to recognize patterns and anticipate potential outcomes based on what I see. New nurses don’t have that intuition or forethought yet; developing critical thinking is part of their training. When they experience different situations, they start to understand that instinctively.

In the future, with AI, and alerts pinging them all day reminding them how to do their job, new cohorts of nurses might not develop that same intuition. Critical thinking is being shifted elsewhere — to the machine. I believe the tech leaders envision a world where they can crack the code of human illness and automate everything based on algorithms. They just see us as machines that can be figured out.

The artwork for this piece was developed during a Rhode Island School of Design course taught by Marisa Mazria Katz, in collaboration with the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting.

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Texas State Police Gear Up for Massive Expansion of Surveillance Tech

Francesca D'Annunzio — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 13:01:03 +0000

Everything is bigger in Texas—including state police contracts for surveillance tech.

In June, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) signed an acquisition plan for a 5-year, nearly $5.3 million contract for a controversial surveillance tool called Tangles from tech firm PenLink, according to records obtained by the Texas Observer through a public information request. The deal is nearly twice as large as the company’s $2.7 million two-year contract with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Tangles is an artificial intelligence-powered web platform that scrapes information from the open, deep, and dark web. Tangles’ premier add-on feature, WebLoc, is controversial among digital privacy advocates. Any client who purchases access to WebLoc can track different mobile devices’ movements in a specific, virtual area selected by the user, through a capability called “geofencing.” Users of software like Tangles can do this without a search warrant or subpoena. (In a high-profile ruling, the Fifth Circuit recently held that police cannot compel companies like Google to hand over data obtained through geofencing.) Device-tracking services rely on location pings and other personal data pulled from smartphones, usually via in-app advertisers. Surveillance tech companies then buy this information from data brokers and sell access to it as part of their products.

WebLoc can even be used to access a device’s mobile ad ID, a string of numbers and letters that acts as a unique identifier for mobile devices in the ad marketing ecosystem, according to a US Office of Naval Intelligence procurement notice.

Wolfie Christl, a public interest researcher and digital rights activist based in Vienna, Austria, argues that data collected for a specific purpose, such as navigation or dating apps, should not be used by different parties for unrelated reasons. “It’s a disaster,” Christl told the Observer. “It’s the largest possible imaginable decontextualization of data. … This cannot be how our future digital society looks like.”

While a device’s mobile ad ID is technically an anonymous piece of information, it is easy to cross reference other data points to determine the owner, according to Beryl Lipton, an investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “If there is another data point—like the address of the person who lives at the place where your phone seems to be all of the time—it can be very easy to quickly identify and build a profile of people using this supposedly anonymous information,” Lipton said.

In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States that police must have a warrant to obtain cell phone location data from service providers like AT&T and Verizon. But Nate Wessler, the attorney who argued the Carpenter case and the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, told the Observer that companies have justified selling phone location information through data brokers by arguing that mobile ad IDs are anonymous.

“These companies absolutely trot that out as one of their defenses, and it is pure poppycock. … It’s transparently a ridiculous defense, because the entire thing that they’re selling is the ability to track phones and to be able to figure out where particular phones are going,” Wessler said.

The privacy implications of police using services—like Tangles—that provide location data are “identical” to the issues raised in the Carpenter case, Wessler said. That’s because location data harvested from apps, as opposed to that obtained from service providers, can be even more invasive, he said. “You can tell just as much about somebody’s GPS history from their apps as you can from their cell phone location data from their phone provider. And in some cases, you can tell more,” Wessler said.

Tangles is a product offered by the cybersecurity company Cobwebs Technologies, which was founded in Israel in 2014 by three former members of Israeli military special units. The company has said their products, which are marketed as open source intelligence (OSINT) tools, have been used to combat terrorism, drug smuggling, and money laundering, but Meta has accused the company of operating as a surveillance-for-hire outfit. In 2023, Cobwebs Technologies was acquired by the Nebraska-based tech firm PenLink Ltd.

Christl, the Austria-based digital rights researcher, said that companies selling software that incorporates data harvested from mobile phone apps have greatly expanded the definition of OSINT tools. If a company has to buy personal data from third-party brokers to incorporate into a software that they sell to police, he said, then that isn’t really an open source tool.

Lipton, the investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that’s troubling for the public. “People don’t realize that some of this stuff comes with a high cost,” she said. “Both price-wise and privacy-wise.”

In a written statement, a PenLink spokesperson told the Observer their “open-source intelligence (OSINT) solutions are used to protect our communities from crime, threats, and cyber-attacks by providing seamless access to data that is publicly available. From a technology perspective, we want to note that we operate only according to the law, adhering to strict standards and regulations.” The spokesperson did not answer other specific questions.

Cobwebs Technologies, now part of PenLink, has scored contracts through its Delaware-based subsidiary Cobwebs America Inc. with various federal agencies, including ICE, the Internal Revenue Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of Indian Education, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. ICE holds Cobwebs America’s highest-dollar federal contract so far, according to usaspending.gov.

DPS’ Intelligence and Counterterrorism division has used Tangles since 2021, as first reported by The Intercept. The agency first purchased the software as part of Governor Greg Abbott’s multi-billion dollar Operation Lone Star border crackdown, doling out an initial $200,000 contract as an “emergency award” with no public solicitation. Each year since, DPS has expanded the contract: In 2022, it paid $300,000, and in 2023, more than $400,000, according to contracting records on DPS’ website. The agency’s new plan for a 5-year Tangles license, from 2024 through 2029, will cost about $1 million per year.

“You can tell just as much about somebody’s GPS history from their apps as you can from their cell phone location data from their phone provider. And in some cases, you can tell more.”

In its acquisition plan, DPS states that Intelligence and Counterterrorism division personnel need the tool to “identify and disrupt potential domestic terrorism and other mass casualty threats.” The plan references two Texas mass shootings. In August 2019, a racist white man from Allen killed 23 at a Walmart in El Paso. A few weeks later, a different perpetrator went on a deadly shooting in Midland and Odessa. The plan does not mention the 2022 Uvalde school shooting, when 91 DPS officers formed part of a massive botched law enforcement response.

“Following the attacks in El Paso and Midland-Odessa Governor Abbott issued several executive orders designed to prevent similar events,” the acquisition plan obtained by the Observer states. “In response to these orders, DPS [Intelligence and Counterterrorism division] dedicated staff to identify potential mass attackers and terrorist threats.”

It is unclear how DPS has used Tangles or whether the software has helped stop any potential mass shootings. DPS did not respond to written questions or an interview request for this story.

Following initial publication of this story, Republican state Representative Brian Harrison said on social media that he would be requesting more information from DPS about its use of the surveillance software. Reached by phone, Harrison told the Observer: “I want to make sure that we don’t have Fourth Amendment violations going on here, whether it’s intentional or not. … Government should be protecting our civil liberties, not violating them.”

After DPS purchased the initial license for Cobwebs’ software in 2021, local Texas law enforcement agencies followed suit. Operation Lone Star spending records from the Goliad County Sheriff’s Office, obtained by the Observer, show that the Goliad sheriff obtained a “cooperative use of [Cobwebs] software” in fall 2023 along with the sheriffs of Refugio and Brooks counties to “identify, link, and track the movements of cartel operatives throughout the region.”

Other Texas clients that have purchased Cobwebs’ software include the Dallas and Houston police departments and the sheriff’s office in Jackson County, which shares access with the Matagorda County Sheriff’s Office, according to local government meeting minutes and DPS emails.

It is unclear how DPS has used Tangles or whether the software has helped stop any potential mass shootings.

Prior to its acquisition by PenLink, Cobwebs Technologies received backlash for how clients used its products. In 2021, Meta banned seven companies—including Cobwebs—that it had identified as participating in an online surveillance-for-hire ecosystem. As part of its sanctions, Meta removed 200 accounts operated by Cobwebs and its customers. In a company report, Meta investigators wrote that they identified Cobwebs customers in Bangladesh, Hong Kong, the United States, New Zealand, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Poland, and other countries.

Cobwebs’ customers were not solely focused on public safety activities, Meta’s report said. “We also observed frequent targeting of activists, opposition politicians and government officials in Hong Kong and Mexico,” the report stated.

Agencies across the globe have used Tangles. From at least 2021 to 2022, Salvadoran police used it, according to the investigative outlet El Faro. Police in Mexico have also purchased the software, according to Excelsior, a Mexico City newspaper.

In 2022, a Cobwebs Technologies sales rep asked a DPS employee if the state agency could serve as a customer referral for a police agency in Israel, according to an email obtained by the Observer. In the email, the sales rep stated that DPS had at least 20 Tangles users at the time. DPS’ new acquisition plan allows for 230 named users.

Wessler, the ACLU attorney, said the sale of mobile device data to third-party data brokers and surveillance tech firms remains a legal gray area. “There are some legal frameworks that get at the edges of this, but there’s a whole kind of core of issues that the law just hasn’t caught up to,” Wessler said.

But he said other government agencies already have moved away from purchasing products that use massive amounts of cell phone location data. The services can be expensive, the use of data is invasive, and there isn’t much evidence that these services have substantially helped investigations or solved a lot of cases, he added.

“It’s just like the juice isn’t worth the squeeze,” Wessler said. “We shouldn’t be spending taxpayer money for this kind of haystack of data that they then are trying to pick needles out of, right?”

This story was originally published in The Texas Observer.

The artwork for this piece was developed during a Rhode Island School of Design course taught by Marisa Mazria Katz, in collaboration with the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting.

Why This Story?

In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States that police must have a warrant to obtain cell phone location data from service providers like AT&T and Verizon. But a $5.3 million state police contract for an AI-powered surveillance tool called Tangles enables police to track cell phones without a court order. The Texas Department of Public Safety's contract for Tangles is nearly twice the amount of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s contract. Francesca D'Annunzio’s investigation of Tangles was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet and magazine. We are including it here as part of our Authoritarian Tech coverage.

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In Russia, the ‘worst is happening in the present’

Marina Bocharova — Fri, 15 Mar 2024 09:06:34 +0000

Russia is not democratic. But it holds elections anyway. This year, the presidential election feels particularly farcical because it follows barely a month after the death of Alexei Navalny. As a Russian journalist in exile, Navalny’s death felt to me like the most cruel, if not final, nail in the coffin of the opposition.

One of my last stories before I left Russia was an exploration of how the state had weaponized Big Tech to persecute Navalny’s followers, ordinary Russians who had registered their personal details on his website because they were fed up with the status quo. Among the dozens of people I spoke to were Liza, Dmitry, Kirill and Magda, whose compelling stories I wanted to tell.

I was reporting for Coda’s podcast series, “Undercurrents: Tech, Tyrants and Us,” which featured the experiences of individuals around the world who had been caught up in the struggle between tech, democracy and dictatorship. In Russia, Navalny used social media to build a following. Many Navalny supporters gravitated towards him on Big Tech platforms — for instance, following his investigations into Kremlin corruption on his YouTube channel.

Inspired by Navalny, Russians took to the streets to protest and donated to his Anti-Corruption Foundation, or FBK in Russian. They signed up to use his “smart voting” app intended to consolidate protest votes around candidates in all of Russia’s electoral districts who could take on the ruling party. But both Apple and Google, caving to pressure from the Kremlin, removed the app from stores shortly before the 2021 election. Russia had completed the transition from authoritarian state to digitally savvy dictatorship.

The police used Navalny’s database to knock on doors, to seek out people who had registered on the “Free Navalny” website. On the podcast, I found myself breaking the news to Liza, an old friend from school, that her name was on a list, including details such as her tax ID number, home address and employment status. It explained, Liza told me, why the police had come looking for her, asking her parents questions “as if I were a terrorist.”

I reached out to Liza again, as I did to other people I interviewed for the podcast, in the days after Navalny’s death. “Navalny’s death became for me the death of all hope that the Russia I remember could be saved,” she told me. A Ukrainian-born citizen of Russia, Liza now lives in Uzbekistan. Navalny, she said, was “like a key that you hide under a stone near your old house, just in case you have a chance to go back. Now there is no key, there is no stone, and there is no house.”

The police, Liza told me, still visit her parents in Moscow. The Kremlin, she said, “is still investigating the people who donated to FBK.” Five months pregnant now, Liza has lost hope that Russia will change. She is expecting a girl; her daughter, she told me, will be a citizen of Uzbekistan, not Russia.

I also followed up with Dmitry. He was a musician who registered on Navalny’s website and then suddenly found himself out of work, no longer welcome to perform at concerts. When he was not playing music, he drove around the city rescuing stray cats. He had, I said on the podcast, a “sweet round face and blond, hipster haircut.” Dmitry is still in Moscow, still singing in a choir and still rescuing stray cats. But like Liza, he too has lost hope that change is possible. “The feeling that you get living in Russia is that people are keeping a low profile,” he said. “They just wait.”

The people I interviewed on the podcast were among thousands, if not millions, of Russians who genuinely believed Navalny offered a democratic alternative to Putin’s increasingly Stalinist regime. That belief has been stamped out. Kirill, a train driver for the Moscow metro, told me he had registered on the “Free Navalny” website out of curiosity. At the time, he had begun to date Magda, a liberal with little patience for the Russian establishment. His curiosity cost Kirill his job. “You fucking registered on his website,” his boss shouted at him, denouncing Navalny as an enemy of the state. Kirill was sacked for being “insufficiently loyal to President Putin.”

Now in Sochi, a town on the Black Sea about a thousand miles from Moscow, Kirill and Magda await visas that will enable them to leave Russia. “I can’t speak freely right now, I’m in a public place” Kirill told me when I called him after Navalny’s death. Magda said she “had a feeling of deja vu.” The shock of Navalny’s death echoed the shock she felt when Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. Two years ago, on February 24, she told me, “I received a message from a friend: ‘Are you awake? The war started.’” On February 16 of this year, the same friend sent Magda another message: “Are you awake? Navalny was killed.” Both events strengthened Putin’s regime, representing a decisive turn away from the country that Magda still hoped Russia could be.

For a quarter of a century, Putin has controlled Russia. This weekend, he will extend his reign, with any serious opposition either dead or imprisoned. “The future is no longer frightening,” Liza told me, “because the worst is happening in the present.”

Listen to this episode of “Undercurrents: Tech, Tyrants and Us” to hear the full story of how Navalny’s supporters were persecuted by Russian police.

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A tragedy in Nigeria shows the risks of cheap drone warfare

Olatunji Olaigbe — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 11:29:17 +0000

In Tudun Biri, meetings happen under a large mango tree in a clearing in the center of the village. The bark on its trunk has peeled back in places, leaking sap — it has become a place of mourning.

Nearby is a shallow ditch where, on December 3, a bomb struck the ground while the villagers were celebrating the Maolud, an Islamic festival commemorating the birth of the Prophet Muhammad.

Solomon John, 28, was in a nearby building when the first bomb dropped. After the blast, John rushed outside to find dismembered bodies strewn across the ground. The bomb had struck next to the tree, where mostly women and children were gathered at the time for the festival.

“We were crying and crying,” John said, “when after about 30 minutes the second bomb came down.”

The bombs were dropped by a Nigerian army drone, which struck the village, which is in Kaduna state, in error after what the army has admitted was an intelligence failure. Reportedly, soldiers had called for air support during a confrontation with militants operating in the area, but the drone operator was given the wrong grid reference. At least 85 people have been confirmed dead by the government’s official count. The human rights group Amnesty International says the number is closer to 120 people, with more than 80 hospitalized.

It’s not the first deadly mistake of its kind. In January 2023, a drone strike killed 27 people in Nasarawa, in the north of Nigeria. In April 2023, six children were killed by an airstrike in Niger state, also in the north of the country. In December 2022, 64 civilians were killed by an air strike in Zamfara, in northwestern Nigeria.

Behind these catastrophes, analysts say, is the rapid expansion of drone warfare without enough investment in intelligence and operational safeguards. Unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly known as drones, have become cheap and accessible thanks to Chinese and Turkish manufacturers, bringing them into the reach of militaries all over the world. When this proliferation of drones intersects with structural flaws in intelligence gathering and the lack of regulation, disasters like that in Tudun Biri are inevitable.

“Drones cause disasters when there’s a fault in the intelligence pipeline,” said Murtala Abdullahi, an independent intelligence consultant based in northern Nigeria.

Tudun Biri translates as the hill of monkeys, named for the animals that brought the first hunters to the area 400 years ago. To reach it today means a 25-minute motorbike ride from the edge of the state capital of Kaduna. The village is one of many scattered across the state, and made up of only around 40 houses, most of them at least partly built with clay.

Kaduna state has been riven with conflict for decades. Today, a patchwork of bandit groups — some of them the remnants of the militant organizations Boko Haram and the Islamic State group in West Africa — operate across the region, terrorizing, robbing and extorting communities, and kidnapping people for ransom.

Tudun Biri and its neighboring villages have often been targeted by bandits. To defend themselves, they have formed an informal security force to fight off attackers. Most of the population of Tudun Biri and its neighbors are Muslims, but there’s a small local church that hosts a congregation of less than a hundred serving Tudun Biri and three surrounding villages. During Muslim festivals, Christians stand guard, and vice versa.

John is one of the few Christians in Tudun Biri village. He’s 6-foot tall, lean and muscular from manual labor. He keeps a neat high-top (called “punk” by Nigerians) for which he braves the long motorbike journey into Kaduna city to get trimmed. “I was there [at the Maolud celebration] providing security because, during our celebrations, the community also provides security for us,” John said.

When the second blast happened, John and other young men were working to help the victims of the first strike. Women and the elderly were instructed to stay inside to prevent them from witnessing the horrific scene — a usual practice in the village during bandit attacks. When the second bomb landed, “everyone ran away,” John said. And they stayed away, afraid they might be hit again. It wasn’t until the police arrived the following day that people returned to sort through the carnage.

“We gathered the bodies of men in one heap and women in another,” said a farmer, who lost his wife and three brothers in the strike. He spoke on condition of anonymity as villagers were instructed by the army not to talk to journalists.

Ahmed, a 45-year-old blacksmith, lost his wife and three children in the strike. He recalled leaving the mango tree just moments before the first bomb dropped. When he came back, he found his wife’s lifeless body with their 8-month-old son still tied — alive — on her back. “I untied him from her back and cradled him, nothing had happened to him,” Ahmed, who asked to be identified using a pseudonym, said.

People gathered all the remains they could find and buried the dead in two mass graves — one for men and boys, one for women and girls.

Villagers stand at the gravesite of civilians killed by a Nigerian army drone strike in Tudun Biri, Kaduna. Olatunji Olaigbe.

The Christian church in Tudun Biri, Kaduna, Nigeria. Christian villagers typically stand guard over Muslim festivals, and vice versa. Olatunji Olaigbe.

The Tuesday after the blasts, the army’s chief of staff, Lieutenant General Taoreed Lagbaja, visited Tudun Biri in person to pay his condolences and apologize for the “mistake.” He said the troops were carrying out aerial patrols and wrongly analyzed the celebrations as bandit activity.

In some regards, the theater of conflict in Kaduna lends itself to drone warfare. The area presents a challenge that’s typical across West Africa. The terrain is difficult, distances are long and under-resourced militaries can’t afford to operate traditional air forces. Drones can solve both problems. “They stay active for longer and cannot fatigue,” Abdullahi, the intelligence consultant, said.

Chinese-made Wing Loong drones reportedly cost around a million dollars per unit. Bayraktars, from Turkey, sell for $5-6 million. Unlike more expensive U.S.-made Reaper or Predator drones, Chinese or Turkish manufacturers face fewer export restrictions. “Drones like Wing Loong and Bayraktar cost a very small fraction of their U.S and Israeli counterparts,” said Abdullahi. “Unlike the U.S, these countries do not have any regulations that the buyers meet certain metrics or have a credible history.”

Nigeria’s military has acquired Wing Loong and Bayraktar drones. It’s not alone: A study by Stellenbosch University’s Security Institute for Governance and Leadership in Africa says over a third of African governments have acquired some form of military drones.

These drones aren’t just cheap — they’re effective and increasingly advanced. “HD cameras, bigger memory spaces, powerful processing cores and proliferation of faster bandwidth like 4G and 5G have led to drones that can send, receive and process more data than was possible,” Nate Allen, associate professor at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a think tank funded by the U.S government, said. “Most of these drones are produced from off-shelf spare parts and custom software.”

The conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated how effective these tools can be. Drones controlled via virtual reality headsets have been widely used by both sides with devastating impact.

But relying on drones in areas like Tudun Biri presents enormous risks as well. Bandits and insurgent groups occupy spaces that are near to and sometimes overlapping with civilian areas. Moreover, insurgents in rural northern Nigeria often come from the same communities that they terrorize. From the air, it’s not obvious who is a combatant and who isn’t.

Almost anywhere in the world where drones have been deployed, civilians have died. The U.S. in particular has come under fire for a long history of botched drone strikes that have killed ordinary people. American drones have been responsible for hundreds of civilian deaths across Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. As recently as August 2021, a strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, killed three adults and seven children.

In Libya, where drones have become a feature of a long-running conflict, rebel forces supported by the United Arab Emirates have used Wing Loong drones, while the U.N.-backed Government of National Accord have deployed Bayraktar drones. In 2019, a Wing Loong drone belonging to the UAE fired guided missiles that killed eight civilians and injured many more in Tripoli, Libya’s capital.

And in November, drone strikes by the Malian armed forces killed at least 12 civilians in Mali.

“It’s not just Africa. There’s currently little to no conversation on how intel pipelines can be made better to prevent issues like this,” Allen said. “To the best of my knowledge, there’s no consensus or policy around drone production, sales or use. It’s a new tech and like others [it] just needs all these regulations and ethical considerations to work better.”

After the strikes in Tudun Biri, the Nigerian military took the unusual step of admitting it had made a mistake. The president of Nigeria, Bola Tinubu, has also condemned the incident and ordered an investigation. That, Allen said, would be a step in the right direction if it results in the military changing its policies.

Since the bombing, Tudun Biri has received financial aid and been promised much more. The governor of Kaduna and the vice president of Nigeria have both visited to pay their condolences and give money, along with former presidential candidate and businessman Peter Obi. Villagers said that politicians have promised to build a tarred road from the airport to the village, a large mosque where the villagers can hold Friday prayers, houses and even a modern school.

But for now, the village is still in mourning. Relics of all that has happened are scattered across the village. Shrapnel is embedded in the walls of a mudhouse. Scraps of victims’ clothing hang on the mango tree like tiny flags. There’s the crater and the mass grave. Everyone lost someone, and that is unusual for Tudun Biri. “We lose our crops and cattle to the bandits, we don’t lose people,” said Garba, an old man who lost his son and four grandchildren. “They came inside and said, ‘Baba, your son is among the dead,’ and said I cannot see him because elders were not permitted to come outside.”

After an eternity of arguing, they allowed Garba to see his dead son’s body. “When I came out I saw him lying on the ground, dead. He was my breadwinner and they killed him,” Garba said. “These people have wronged us and they are asking us to keep quiet about it.”

Why did we write this story?

The proliferation of cheap and effective drones has made aerial warfare accessible to militaries around the world. But the checks and balances aren’t there to prevent civilian casualties.

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Year in review: Digitization and the apparatus of control

Ellery Roberts Biddle — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 14:16:50 +0000

About a year ago, it became popular for Western media commentators to sound the death knell for the social web. Elon Musk “sunk in” as the new owner of Twitter, and the mainstream social media platform that had come closest to approximating a digital public square began its spectacular decline.

Social media was once a place to hear and express opinions, to get and report the news, to decide what might or might not be true. All these things beckoned us to interact with each other and also to understand, and sometimes challenge, the underlying technology. When content got censored or harassment got unbearable, users spoke up and pressured the companies to respond. Even if it was all happening in a privately owned “quasi-public sphere,” users behaved as if they had some rights. And every once in a while, the companies gave that idea some credence.

Watching artificial intelligence’s biggest purveyors soar to prominence in the global political imagination this year, I’ve found myself wondering: What will happen to all that democratic energy around Big Tech? What will happen to the idea of digital rights?

Unlike some of the mammoth social platforms that dominated the industry for the past decade and a half, the shiny new things we see on our screens now, like ChatGPT, reveal very little about their inner workings. The biggest and most consequential types of AI at this moment are being built inside black boxes, and it isn’t predicated on any of the ideas about human connection that were used to underwrite the social media industry. There is no illusion of democracy here, no signs of cohesion among users pushing companies to change in any particular way. The reason is simple: We really don’t know what’s going on behind the screen.

For tech elites and tech-inclined media, AI’s meteoric rise has made for great theater. But for most of us, much of what is going on is shrouded in mystery and obfuscation. Alongside it all, though, far less magical kinds of tech have continued to change the way we live, work and understand the world around us. This has been the core focus of our tech coverage at Coda this year.

1. Some of our strongest tech stories helped show how the digitization of public systems and widespread real-time surveillance are changing urban life. Drawing on research from the Edgelands Institute, we paired writers in Medellín, Nairobi and Geneva with photographers from the Magnum network to build a rich narrative and visual tapestry that wrestled with the social and psychological effects of these systems, alongside their technical components.

2. One of our top-performing features, from Bruno Fellow Anna-Cat Brigida, dove deep into how police surveillance systems in Honduras have bolstered a state determined to “protect its own power and preserve its status as Central America’s largest drug corridor.”

3. In 2023, we also took a hard look at the ever-expanding role of technology in migration. Coda’s Isobel Cockerell traveled to Kukes, Albania, where she reported on how digital platforms like TikTok and Instagram have played a pivotal part in driving thousands of young men to leave Albania for England, often on small boats and without proper paperwork, only to find themselves indebted to smugglers and criminal gangs.

4. Surveillance and digitization have become part and parcel of apparatuses of control on national borders. In May, Zach Campbell and Lorenzo D’Agostino introduced us to Fabrice Ngo, a Cameroonian car mechanic who nearly lost his life on a small boat heading for Italy from Tunisia, after Tunisian coast guard officials tracked the vessel and seized its motor. In an exclusive investigation for Coda, Zach and Lorenzo were able to link Ngo’s experience to the dealings of the International Centre for Migration Policy Development, a Vienna-based agency that has received hundreds of millions of euros in contracts from the European Union to supply tools and tactics — including surveillance tech — to countries bordering the EU bloc in exchange for their cooperation in preventing people from migrating to Europe. With more than 2,500 migrants having died trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea this year, the consequences of these agreements, and the technologies they deploy, couldn’t be more stark.

5. The dangers and shortcomings of tech are evident on the U.S.-Mexico border too. Former Coda reporter Erica Hellerstein told us the story of Kat, a woman who had fled gang violence in Honduras, only to find herself unable to seek asylum in the U.S. because of a faulty smartphone app. This spring feature took a long look at the Biden administration’s decision to outsource some of the most critical steps in the asylum-seeking process to the app, called CBP One. But that story also found a glimmer of hope on the horizon for 2024. In August, an immigrants’ rights coalition filed a class-action lawsuit against the Biden administration over its use of the app, setting the stage for a showdown over the digitization of immigration and the principles underlying the modern asylum system.

6. This year, we also set our sights on understanding more deeply what kinds of labor go into the technologies that are changing our lives. In the fall, Erica introduced us to the world of social media content moderation in Nairobi’s “Silicon Savanna.” Moderators spoke of reviewing hundreds of posts each day, from videos of racist diatribes to beheadings and sexual abuse. On low wages and minimal benefits, these workers ensure that the worst stuff posted online never reaches our screens. But the toll this takes on their lives and mental health has brought the labor force to a breaking point. As Wabe, a moderator from Ethiopia, told Erica: “We have been ruined. We were the ones protecting the whole continent of Africa. That’s why we were treated like slaves.”

It sounds grim, but what drew us to this story was what Wabe and nearly 200 other moderators have decided to do about their situation. In March, they brought a lawsuit against Meta that took the company to task over poor working conditions, low pay and several cases of unfair dismissal. They’ve also voted to form a new trade union that they hope will force tech companies to change their ways. These developments could mark a turning point for the industry, and for the way we understand labor in the context of Big Tech. It sheds a not entirely flattering light on the massive human labor force that powers all of the technology we use, AI included. The work of people like Wabe to hold these platforms to account is helping all this to become more visible to the rest of us, something that we have to grapple with as more and more aspects of our lives become digitized. And that gives me some hope for the future.

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In India, Big Brother is watching

Alishan Jafri — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 09:53:22 +0000

Last month, journalist Anand Mangnale woke to find a disturbing notification from Apple on his mobile phone: “State-sponsored attackers may be targeting your iPhone.” He was one of at least a dozen journalists and Indian opposition politicians who said they had received the same message. “These attackers are likely targeting you individually because of who you are and what you do,” the warning read. “While it’s possible this is a false alarm, please take it seriously.”

Mangnale is an editor at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a global non-profit media outlet. In August, he and his co-authors Ravi Nair and NBR Arcadio published a detailed inquiry into labyrinthine offshore investment structures through which the Adani Group — an India-based multibillion-dollar conglomerate with interests in everything from ports, infrastructure and cement to green energy, cooking oil and apples — might have been manipulating its stock price. The documents were shared with both Financial Times and The Guardian, which also published lengthy stories alleging that the Adani Group appeared to be using funds from shell companies in Mauritius to break Indian stock market rules.

Mangnale’s phone was attacked with spyware just hours after reporters had submitted questions to the Adani Group in August for their investigation, according to an OCCRP press release. Mangnale hadn’t sent the questions, but as the regional editor, his name was easy to find on the OCCRP website.

OCCRP stated in a press release that Mangnale's phone was attacked with spyware just hours after it submitted questions to the Adani Group in August for its report. Mangnale hadn’t sent the questions, but as the regional editor, his name was easy to find on the OCCRP website.

Gautam Adani, the Adani Group’s chairman and the second richest person in India, has been close to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for decades. When Modi was campaigning in the 2014 general elections, which brought him to power with a sweeping majority, he used a jet and two helicopters owned by the Adani Group to crisscross the country. Modi’s perceived bond with Adani as well as with Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man — all three come from the prosperous western Indian state of Gujarat — has for years given rise to accusations of crony capitalism and suggestions that India now has its own set of Russian-style oligarchs.

The Adani Group’s supposed influence on Modi is a major campaign issue for opposition parties, many of which are coming together in a coalition to take on the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in the 2024 general election. According to Rahul Gandhi — leader of the opposition Congress party and scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, which has provided three Indian prime ministers — the Adani Group is so close to power it is practically synonymous with the government. He said Apple’s threat notifications showed that the government was hacking the phones of politicians who sought to expose Adani and his hold over Modi.

Mahua Moitra, a prominent opposition politician and outspoken critic of Adani, reported that she had also received the warning from Apple to her phone. She posted on X: “Adani and PMO bullies — your fear makes me pity you.” PMO stands for the prime minister’s office.

Mangnale, referring to the opposition’s allegations, told me that there was only circumstantial evidence to suggest that the Apple notification could be tied to the Indian government. As for his own phone, a forensic analysis commissioned by OCCRP did not indicate which government or government agency was behind the attack, nor did it surface any evidence that the Adani Group was involved. But the timing raised eyebrows, as the Modi government has been accused in the past of using spyware on political opponents, critical journalists, scholars and lawyers.

In 2019, the messaging service WhatsApp, owned by Meta, filed a lawsuit in a U.S. federal court against the Israel-based NSO Group, developers of a spyware called Pegasus, in which it was revealed that the software had been used to target Indian journalists and activists. A year later, The Pegasus Project, an international journalistic investigation, reported that the phone numbers of at least 300 Indian individuals — Rahul Gandhi among them — had been slated for targeting with the eponymous weapons-grade spyware. And last year, The New York Times reported that Pegasus spyware was included in a $2 billion defense deal that Modi signed in 2017, on the first ever visit made by an Indian prime minister to Israel. In November 2021, Apple sued NSO too, arguing that in a “free society, it is unacceptable to weaponize powerful state-sponsored spyware against those who seek to make the world a better place.”

What is happening to Mangnale is the most recent iteration of a script that has been playing out for the last nine years. India’s democratic regression is evident in its declining scores in a variety of international indices. In the latest World Press Freedom Index, compiled by Reporters Without Borders, India ranks 161 out of 180 countries, and its score has been declining sharply since 2017. According to RSF, “violence against journalists, the politically partisan media and the concentration of media ownership all demonstrate that press freedom is in crisis.”

By May next year, India will hold general elections, in which Modi is expected to win a third consecutive five-year term as prime minister and further entrench a Hindu nationalist agenda. Since 2014, as India has become a strategic potential counterweight to runaway Chinese power and influence in the Indo-Pacific region, Modi has reveled in being increasingly visible on the global stage. Abroad, he has brandished India’s credentials as a pluralist democracy. The mounting criticism in the Western media of his authoritarian tendencies and Hindu chauvinism has seemingly had little effect on India’s diplomatic standing. Meanwhile at home, Modi has arguably been using — perhaps misusing — the full authority of the prime minister’s office to stifle opposition critics.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and billionaire businessman Gautam Adani (left) have long had a mutually beneficial relationship that critics allege crosses the line into crony capitalism. Vijay Soneji/Mint via Getty Images.

The morning after Apple sent out its warning, there was an outpouring of anger on social media, with leading opposition figures accusing the government of spying. Apple, as a matter of course, says it is “unable to provide information about what causes us to issue threat notifications.” The logic is that such information “may help state-sponsored attackers adapt their behavior to evade detection in the future.” But the lack of information leaves a gap that is then filled by speculation and conspiracies. Apple’s circumspect message, containing within it the possibility that the threat notification might be false altogether, also gives governments plausible deniability.

Right on cue, Ashwini Vaishnaw, India’s minister of information and technology, managed in a single statement to claim that the government was concerned about Apple’s notification and would “get to the bottom of it” while also dismissing surveillance concerns as just bellyaching. “There are many compulsive critics in our country,” Vaishnaw said about the allegations from opposition politicians. “Their only job is to criticize the government.” Lawyer Apar Gupta, founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation, described Vaishnaw's statements as an attempt to “trivialize or misdirect public attention.”

Finding that his phone had been attacked by spyware was not the only example of Mangnale being targeted after OCCRP published its investigation into the Adani Group's possibly illegal stock manipulation. In October, the Gujarat police summoned Mangnale and his co-author Ravi Nair to the state capital Ahmedabad to question them about the OCCRP report. Neither journalist lives in the state, which made the police summons, based on a single complaint by an investor in Adani stocks, seem like intimidation. It took the intervention of India's Supreme Court to grant both journalists temporary protection from arrest.

Before the Supreme Court, the well-known lawyer Indira Jaising had argued that the Gujarat police had no jurisdiction to arbitrarily summon Mangnale and Nair to the state without informing them in what capacity they were being questioned. It seemed, she told the court, like a “prelude to arrest” and thus a violation of their constitutional right to personal liberty. A week later, the Supreme Court made a similar ruling to protect two Financial Times correspondents based in India from arrest. The journalists, in Mumbai and Delhi, had not even written the article based on documents shared by the OCCRP, but were still summoned by police to Gujarat. On December 1, the police are expected to explain to the Supreme Court why they are seemingly so eager to question the reporters.

While the mainstream television news networks in India frequently and loudly debate news topics on air, there is little coverage of the pressure that the Indian government puts on individuals who try to hold the government to account. Ravish Kumar, an esteemed Hindi-language journalist, told me that few people in India were aware of the threat to journalists and opposition voices in Modi's India. “When people hear allegations made by political figures such as Rahul Gandhi, they can be dismissed as politics rather than fact. There is no serious discussion of surveillance in the press,” he said.

Kumar once had a substantial platform on NDTV, a respected news network that had built its reputation over decades. In March this year, the Adani Group completed a hostile takeover of NDTV, leading to a series of resignations by the network's most recognizable anchors and editors, including Kumar. NDTV is now yet another of India's television news networks owned by corporations that are either openly friendly to the Modi government or unwilling to jeopardize their other businesses by being duly critical.

Nowadays, Kumar reports for his personal YouTube channel, albeit one with about 7.8 million subscribers. A documentary about his lonely fight to keep reporting from India both accurately and skeptically was screened in cinemas across the U.K. and U.S. in July.

According to Kumar, journalists and critics are naturally fearful about the Indian government's punitive measures because some have ended up in prison on the basis of dubious evidence found on their phones and laptops. Most notoriously, a group of reputed academics, writers and human rights activists were accused of inciting riots in 2018 and plotting to assassinate the prime minister. Independent analysts hired by The Washington Post reported that the electronic evidence in the case was likely planted.

Some of this possibly planted evidence was found on the computer of Stan Swamy, an octogenarian Jesuit priest who was charged with crimes under India’s anti-terror law and died in 2021 as he awaited trial. Swamy suffered from Parkinson's disease, which can make everyday actions like eating and drinking difficult. While in custody, he was treated so poorly by the authorities that he had to appeal for a month before he was given a straw to make it easier for him to drink.

The threat of arrest hangs like a Damoclean sword above the heads of journalists like Mangnale who dare to ask questions of power and investigate institutional corruption. Despite the interim stay on his arrest, Mangnale still faces further court proceedings and the possibility of interrogation by the Gujarat police. In the words of Drew Sullivan, OCCRP’s publisher: “The police hauling in reporters for vague reasons seems to represent state-sanctioned harassment of journalists and is a direct assault on freedom of expression in the world's largest democracy.”

Why This Story?

India, the world’s most populous democracy, goes to the polls next year and is likely to reelect Narendra Modi for a third consecutive five-year term. But evidence is mounting that India’s democratic freedoms are in regression.

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The smart city where everybody knows your name

Bradley Jardine — Thu, 26 Oct 2023 10:05:13 +0000

At first glance, Aqkol looks like most other villages in Kazakhstan today: shoddy construction, rusting metal gates and drab apartment blocks recall its Soviet past and lay bare the country’s uncertain economic future. But on the village’s outskirts, on a hill surrounded by pine trees, sits a large gray and white cube: a central nervous system connecting thousands of miles of fiber optic cables, sensors and data terminals that keeps tabs on the daily comings and goings of the village’s 13,000 inhabitants.

This is the command center of Smart Aqkol, a pilot study in digitized urban infrastructure for Kazakhstan. When I visited, Andrey Kirpichnikov, the deputy director of Smart Aqkol, welcomed me inside. Donning a black Fila tracksuit and sneakers, the middle-aged Aqkol native scanned his face at a console that bore the logo for Hikvision, the Chinese surveillance camera manufacturer. A turnstyle gave a green glow of approval and opened, allowing us to walk through.

“All of our staff can access the building using their unique face IDs,” Kirpichnikov told me.

He led me into a room with a large monitor displaying a schematic of the village. The data inputs and connected elements that make up Smart Aqkol draw on everything from solar panels and gas meters to GPS trackers on public service vehicles and surveillance cameras, he explained. Analysts at the command center report their findings to the mayor’s office, highlighting data on energy use, school attendance rates and evidence for police investigations.

“I see a huge future in what we’re doing here,” Kirpichnikov told me, gesturing at a heat map of the village on the big screen. “Our analytics keep improving and they are only going to get better as we expand the number of sensory inputs.”

“We’re trying to make life better, more efficient and safer,” he explained. “Who would be opposed to such a project?”

Much of Aqkol's housing and infrastructure is from the Soviet-era.

Smart Aqkol presents an experimental vision of Kazakhstan’s economic prospects and its technocratic leadership’s governing ambitions. In January 2019, when then-President Nursultan Nazarbayev spoke at the project’s launch, he waxed about a future in which public officials could use networked municipal systems to run Kazakhstan “like a company.” The smart city model is appealing for leaders of the oil-rich nation, which has struggled to modernize its economy and shed its reputation for rampant government corruption. But analysts I spoke with say it also marks a turn toward Chinese-style public surveillance systems. Amid the war in Ukraine, Kazakhstan’s engagement with China has deepened as a way to hedge against dependence on Russia, its former colonial patron.

Kazakhstan’s smart city initiatives aren’t starting from a digital zero. The country has made strides in digitizing public services, and now ranks second among countries of the former Soviet Union in the United Nations’ e-governance development index. (Estonia is number one.) The capital Astana also has established itself as a regional hub for fintech innovation.

And it’s not only government officials who want these systems. “There is a lot of domestic demand, not just from the state but also from Kazakhstan’s middle class,” said Erica Marat, a professor at the U.S. National Defense University. There’s an allure about smart city systems, which in China and other Asian cities are thought to have improved living standards and reduced crime.

They also hold some promise of increasing transparency around the work of public officials. “The government hopes that digital platforms can overcome cases of petty corruption,” said Oyuna Baldakova, a technology researcher at King’s College London. This would be a welcome shift for Kazakhstan, which currently ranks 101st out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.

Beyond the town's main street, many roads remain unpaved in Aqkol.

But the pilot in Aqkol doesn’t quite align with these grander ambitions, at least not yet. Back at the command center, Kirpichnikov described how Aqkol saw a drop in violent crime and alcohol-related offenses after the system’s debut. But in a town of this size, where crime rates rarely exceed single digits, these kinds of shifts don’t say a whole lot.

As if to better prove the point, the team showed me videos of crime dramatizations that they recorded using the Smart Aqkol surveillance camera system. In the first video, one man lifted another off the ground in what was meant to mimic a violent assault, but looked much more like the iconic scene where Patrick Swayze lifts Jennifer Grey overhead at the end of “Dirty Dancing.” Another featured a man brandishing a Kalashnikov in one hand, while using the other to hold his cellphone to his ear. In each case, brightly colored circles and arrows appeared on the screen, highlighting “evidence” of wrongdoing that the cameras captured, like the lift and the Kalashnikov.

Kirpichnikov then led me into Smart Aqkol’s “situation room,” where 14 analysts sat facing a giant LED screen while they tracked various signals around town. Contrary to the high-stakes energy that one might expect in a smart city situation room, the atmosphere here felt more like that of a local pub, with the analysts trading gossip about neighbors as they watched them walk by on monitors for street-level cameras.

Inside Smart Aqkol's "situation room." Photos courtesy of the author.

Kirpichnikov explained that residents can connect their gas meters to their bank accounts and set up automatic gas payments. This aspect of Smart Aqkol has been a boon for the village. Residents I spoke with praised the new payment system — for decades, the only option was to stand in line to pay for their bills, an exercise that could easily take half a day’s time.

And there was more. To highlight the benefits of Smart Aqkol’s analytics work, Kirpichnikov told me about recent finding: “We were able to determine that school attendance is lower among children from poorly insulated households.” He pointed to a gradation of purple squares showing variance in heating levels across the village. “We could improve school grades, health and the living standards of residents just by updating our old heating systems,” he said.

Kirpichnikov might be right, but step away from the clean digital interface and any Aqkol resident could tell you that poor insulation is a serious problem in the apartment blocks where most people live, especially in winter when temperatures dip below freezing most nights. Broken windows covered with only a thin sheet of cellophane are a common sight.

Walking around Aqkol, I was struck by the absence of paved roads and infrastructure beyond the village’s main street. Some street lamps work, but others don’t. And the public Wi-Fi that the village prides itself on offering only appeared to function near government buildings.

Informational signs for free Wi-Fi hang across the village despite the network's limited reach.

The village also has two so-called warm bus shelters — enclosed spaces with heat lamps to shelter waiting passengers during the harsh Kazakh winters. The stops are supposed to have Wi-Fi, charging ports for phones and single-channel TVs. When I passed by one of the shelters, I met an elderly Aqkol resident named Vera. “All of these things are gone,” she told me, waving her hand at evidence of vandalism. “Now all that’s left is the camera at the back.”

“I don’t know why we need all this nonsense here when we barely have roads and running water,” she added with a sigh. “Technology doesn’t make better people.”

Vera isn’t alone in her critique. Smart Aqkol has brought the village an elaborate overlay of digitization, but it’s plain to see that Aqkol still lags far behind modern Kazakh cities like Astana and Almaty when it comes to basic infrastructure. A local resident named Lyubov Gnativa runs a YouTube channel where she talks about Aqkol’s lack of public services and officials’ failures to address these needs. The local government has filed police reports against Gnativa over the years, accusing her of misleading the public.

And a recent documentary made by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — titled “I Love My Town, But There’s Nothing Smart About It” — corroborates many of Gnativa’s observations and includes interviews with with dozens of locals drawing attention to water issues and the lack of insulation in many of the village’s homes.

But some residents say they are grateful for how the system has contributed to public safety. Surveillance cameras now monitor the village’s main thoroughfare from lampposts, as well as inside public schools, hospitals and municipal buildings.

“These cameras change the way people behave and I think that’s a good thing,” said Kirpichnikov. He told a story about a local woman who was recently harassed on a public bench, noting that this kind of interaction would often escalate in the past. “The woman pointed at the camera and the man looked up, got scared and began to walk away.”

A middle-aged schoolteacher named Irina told me she feels much safer since the project was implemented in 2019. “I have to walk through a public park at night and it can be intimidating because a lot of young men gather there,” she said. “After the cameras were installed they never troubled me again."

A resident of Aqkol.

The Smart Aqkol project was the result of a deal between Kazakhtelecom, Kazakhstan’s national telecommunications company; the Eurasian Resources Group, a state-backed mining company; and Tengri Lab, a tech startup based in Astana. But the hardware came through an agreement under China’s Digital Silk Road initiative, which seeks to wire the world in a way that tends to reflect China’s priorities when it comes to public infrastructure and social control. Smart Aqkol uses surveillance cameras made by Chinese firms Dahua and Hikvision, which in China have been used — and touted, even — for their ability to track “suspicious” people and groups. Both companies are sanctioned by the U.S. due to their involvement in surveilling and aiding in the repression of ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang, an autonomous region in western China.

Critics are wary of these kinds of systems in Kazakhstan, where skepticism of China’s intentions in Central Asia has been growing. The country is home to a large Uyghur diaspora of more than 300,000 people, many of whom have deep ties to Xinjiang, where both ethnic Uyghurs and ethnic Kazakhs have been systematically targeted and placed in “re-education” camps. Protests across Kazakhstan in response to China’s mass internment campaign have forced the government to negotiate the release of thousands of ethnic Kazakhs from China, but state authorities have walked this line carefully, in an effort to continue expanding economic ties with Beijing.

Although Kazakhstan requires people to get state permission if they want to hold a protest — and permission is regularly denied — demonstrations nevertheless have become increasingly common in Kazakhstan since 2018. With Chinese-made surveillance tech in hand, it’s become easier than ever for Kazakh authorities to pinpoint unauthorized concentrations of people. Hikvision announced in December 2022 that its software is used by Chinese police to set up “alarms” that are triggered when cameras detect “unlawful gatherings” in public spaces. The company also has claimed that its cameras can detect ethnic minorities based on their unique facial features.

Much of Aqkol's digitized infrastructure shows its age.

Marat of U.S. National Defense University noted the broader challenges posed by surveillance tech. “We saw during the Covid-19 pandemic how quickly such tech can be adapted to other purposes such as enforcing lockdowns and tracing people’s whereabouts.”

“Such technology could easily be used against protest leaders too,” she added.

In January 2022, instability triggered by rising energy prices resulted in the government issuing “shoot to kill” orders against protesters — more than 200 people were killed in the ensuing clashes. The human rights news and advocacy outlet Bitter Winter wrote at the time that China had sent a video analytics team to Kazakhstan to use cameras it had supplied to identify and arrest protesters. Anonymous sources in their report alleged that the facial profiles of slain protesters were later compared with the facial data of individuals who appeared in surveillance video footage of riots, in an effort to justify government killings of “terrorists.”

With security forming a central promise of the smart city model, broad public surveillance is all but guaranteed. The head of Tengri Lab, the company leading the development of Smart Aqkol, has said in past interviews that school security was a key motivation behind the company’s decision to spearhead the use of artificial intelligence-powered cameras.

“After the high-profile incident in Kerch, we added the ability to automatically detect weapons,” he said, referencing a mass shooting at a college in Russian-occupied Crimea that left more than 20 people dead in October 2018. In that same speech he made an additional claim: “All video cameras in the city automatically detect massive clusters of people,” a veiled reference to the potential for this technology to be used against protesters.

Soon, there will be more smart city systems across Kazakhstan. Smart Aqkol and Kazakhtelecom have signed memorandums of understanding with Almaty, home to almost 2 million people, and Karaganda, with half a million, to develop similar systems. “The mayor of Karaganda was impressed by our technology and capabilities, but he was mainly interested in the surveillance cameras,” Kirpichnikov told me.

As to the question of whether these systems share data with Chinese officials, “we simply don’t have a clear answer on who has the data and how it is used,” Marat told me. “We can’t say definitively whether China has access but we know its companies are extremely dependent on the Chinese state.”

When I reached out to Tengri Lab to ask whether there are concerns regarding the safety of private data connected to the project, the company declined to comment.

Residents of Aqkol.

What does all this mean for Aqkol? The village is so small that the faces captured on camera are rarely those of strangers. The analysts told me they recognize most of the town’s 13,000 inhabitants between them. I asked whether this makes people uncomfortable, knowing their neighbors are watching them at all times.

Danir, a born-and-raised Aqkol analyst in the situation room, told me he doesn’t believe the platform will be abused. “All my friends and family know I am watching from this room and keeping them safe,” he said. “I don’t think anybody feels threatened — we are their friends, their neighbors.”

“People fear what they don’t understand and people complain about the cameras until they need them,” said Kirpichnikov. “There was a woman once who spoke publicly against the project but after we returned her lost handbag — after we spotted it on a camera — she started to see the benefits of what we are building here.”

After a few years with the system up and running, “it’s normal,” said Danir with a shrug. “Nobody has complained to me.”

For regular people, it doesn’t mean a whole lot. And that may be OK, at least for now. As Irina, the young school teacher whom I met on the village’s main thoroughfare, put it: “I don’t really know what a smart city is, but I like living here. They say we’re safer and my bills are lower than they used to be, and I’m happy.”

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Indian journalists are being treated like terrorists for doing their jobs

Alishan Jafri — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 11:23:01 +0000

When India hosted the G20 summit last month, it presented itself as the “mother of democracy” to the parade of leaders and delegations from the world’s largest economies. But at home, when the world is not watching as closely, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is systematically clamping down on free speech.

In a dramatic operation that began as the sun rose on Delhi on October 3, police raided the homes of journalists across the city. Police seized laptops and mobile phones, and interrogated reporters about stories they had written and any money they might have received from foreign bank accounts. The journalists targeted by the police work for NewsClick, a small but influential website founded in 2009 by Prabir Purkayastha, an engineer by training who is also a prominent advocate for left-wing causes and ideas.

At the time of publication, Purkayastha and a senior NewsClick executive had been held in judicial custody for 10 days. The allegations they face are classified under India’s 2019 Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, legislation that gives the government sweeping powers to combat terrorist activity.

Purkayastha, a journalist of considerable standing, is effectively being likened to a terrorist.

Reporters surround NewsClick’s founder and editor Prabir Purkayastha as he is led away by the Delhi police. NewsClick is accused of accepting funds to spread Chinese propaganda. Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times via Getty Images.

The day after the raids on the more than 40 NewsClick employees and contributors, a meeting was called at the Press Club of India. Among the many writers and journalists in attendance was the internationally celebrated, Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy. A longtime critic of Indian government policies, regardless of the political party in power, Roy told me that India was in “an especially dangerous moment.”

She argued that the Modi government was deliberately conflating terrorism and journalism, that they were cracking down on what they described as “intellectual terrorism and narrative terrorism.” It has to do, she told me, “with changing the very nature of the Indian constitution and the very understanding of checks and balances.” She said the targeting of NewsClick, which has about four million YouTube subscribers, was intended as a warning against digital publications.

The Indian government had targeted NewsClick before, investigating what it said were illegal sources of foreign funding from China. For these latest raids, the catalyst appears to have been, at least in part, an investigation published in The New York Times in August that connected NewsClick to Neville Roy Singham, an Indian-American tech billionaire who, the story alleges, has funded the spread of Chinese propaganda through a “tangle of nonprofit groups and shell companies.”

In the lengthy article, The New York Times reporters made only brief mention of NewsClick, claiming that the site “sprinkled its coverage with Chinese government talking points.” They also quoted a phrase from a video that NewsClick published in 2019 about the 70th anniversary of the 1949 revolution which ended with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China: “China’s history continues to inspire the working classes.” But it appeared to be enough for the Delhi police to seize equipment from and intimidate even junior staff members, cartoonists and freelance contributors to the site.

Angered by the unintended consequences of The New York Times report, a knot of protestors gathered outside its New York offices near Times Square a couple of days after the raids. Kavita Krishnan, an author and self-described Marxist feminist, wrote on the Indian news and commentary website Scroll that she had warned The New York Times reporters who had contacted her for comment on the Singham investigation that their glancing reference to NewsClick would give the Modi government ammunition to harass Indian journalists.

The “NYT needs to hold its own practices up to scrutiny and ask itself if, in this case, they have allowed themselves to become a tool for authoritarian propaganda and criminalization of journalism in India,” she wrote.

While The New York Times stood by its story, a Times spokesperson told Scroll that they “would find it deeply troubling and unacceptable if any government were to use our reporting as an excuse to silence journalists.”

On October 10, a Delhi court ordered that Purkayastha and NewsClick’s human resources head Amit Chakraborty be held in judicial custody for 10 days, even as their lawyers insisted that there was no evidence that NewsClick had “received any funding or instructions from China or Chinese entities.”

India’s difficult relationship with China is at a particularly low ebb, with tens of thousands of troops amassed along their disputed borders and diplomats and journalists on both sides frequently expelled. From a Western point of view, India is also being positioned as a strategically vital counterweight to Chinese dominance of the Indo-Pacific region. Though diplomatic tensions are high, India’s trade with China has — until a 0.9% drop in the first half of this year — flourished, reaching a record $136 billion last year.

While the Indian government continues to court Chinese investment, it is suspicious of the Chinese smartphone industry — which controls about 70% of India’s smartphone market — and of any foreign stake in Indian media groups. The mainstream Indian media is increasingly controlled by corporate titans close to Modi. For instance, Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, who control vast conglomerates that touch on everything from cooking oil and fashion to petroleum oil and infrastructure and who have at various points in the last year been two of the 10 richest men in the world, also own major news networks.

By March this year, Adani completed his hostile takeover of NDTV, widely considered to have been India’s last major mainstream news network to consistently hold the Modi government to account. Independent journalists and organizations such as NewsClick that report critically on the government are now out of necessity building their own audiences on platforms such as YouTube. Cutting off these organizations’ access to funds, particularly from foreign sources, helps tighten the Modi government’s grip on India’s extensive if poorly funded media.

Siddharth Varadarajan, a founder of the Indian news website The Wire, said that the actions taken against NewsClick are “an attack on an independent media organization at a time when many media organizations are singing the tune of the government.” It was not a surprise, he told me, that Delhi police were asking NewsClick journalists about their reporting on the farmers’ protests in India between August 2020 and December 2021. “While the government says it is investigating a crime on the level of terrorism, the main goal is to delegitimize and criminalize certain topics and lines of inquiry.”

The allegations against NewsClick’s Purkayastha and Chakraborty are classified under India’s Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, controversial legislation intended to give the government sweeping powers to combat terrorist activity. Under the provisions of the act, passed in 2019, the government has the power to designate individuals as terrorists before they are convicted by a court of law. It is a piece of legislation that, as United Nations special rapporteurs noted in a letter to the Indian government, undermines India’s signed commitments to uphold international human rights.

Legislative changes introduced by the Modi government include a new data protection law and a proposed Digital India Act, both of which give it untrammeled access to communications and private data. These laws also formalize its authority to demand information from multinational tech companies — India already leads the world in seeking to block verified journalists from posting content on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter — and even shut down the internet, something that it has done for days and even months on end in states across the country during periods of unrest.

India’s willingness to clamp down on freedom of information is reflected in its steep slide down the annual World Press Freedom Index. Currently ranked 161 out of 180 countries, India has slipped by 20 places since 2014 when Modi became prime minister. “The violence against journalists, the politically partisan media and the concentration of media ownership all demonstrate that press freedom is in crisis in ‘the world’s largest democracy,’” observes Reporters Without Borders, which compiles the ranking.

Atul Chaurasia, the managing editor at the Indian digital news platform Newslaundry, told me that “all independent and critical journalists feel genuine fear that tomorrow the government may go after them.” In the wake of the NewsClick raids, Chaurasia described the Indian government as the “father of hypocrisy,” an acerbic reference to the Modi government’s boasts about India’s democratic credentials when world leaders, including U.S. President Joe Biden, arrived in Delhi in September for the G20 summit.

When Biden and Modi held a bilateral meeting in Delhi before the summit began, Reuters reported that “the U.S. press corps was sequestered in a van, out of eyesight of the two leaders — an unusual situation for the reporters and photographers who follow the U.S. President at home and around the world to witness and record his public appearances.” Modi himself, despite being the elected leader of a democracy for nearly 10 years, has never answered questions in a press conference in India.

Instead, Modi addresses the nation once a month on a radio broadcast titled “Mann ki baat,” meaning “words from the heart.” And he very occasionally gives seemingly scripted interviews to friendly journalists and fawning movie stars.

As for unfriendly journalists, Purkayastha is currently in judicial custody while a variety of Indian investigative agencies are on what Arundhati Roy called a “fishing expedition,” rooting through journalists’ phones and NewsClick’s finances and tax filings in search of evidence of wrongdoing. Varadarajan of the Wire told me that the message being sent to readers and viewers of NewsClick and other sites intent on holding the Modi government to account was clear: “Don’t trust their content and don’t even think about giving them money because they are raising money for anti-national activities.”

U.S. President Joe Biden and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi greet each other at the G20 leaders’ summit in Delhi last month. Evan Vucci/POOL/AFP via Getty Images.

Since my conversation with Roy at the Press Club of India on October 4, it has been reported that she faces the possibility of arrest.

Delhi’s lieutenant governor — an official appointed by the government and considered the constitutional, if unelected, head of the Indian capital — cleared the way for her to be prosecuted for stating in 2010 that in her opinion, Kashmir, the site of long-running territorial conflict between India and Pakistan, has “never been an integral part of India.” A police complaint was filed 13 years ago, but Indian regulations require state authorities to sign off on prosecutions involving crimes such as hate speech and sedition. Now they have.

Apar Gupta, a lawyer, writer and advocate for digital rights, describes the Modi government’s eagerness to use the law and law enforcement agencies against its critics as “creating a climate of threat and fear.” Young people especially, he told me, have to have “extremely high levels of motivation to follow their principles because practicing journalism now comes with the acute threat of prosecution, of censorship, of trolling, and of adverse reputational and social impacts.”

A young NewsClick reporter, requesting anonymity, told me that “with every knock at the door, I feel like they’ve finally come for me.” They described the paranoia that had gripped their parents: “My father now only contacts me on Signal because it’s end-to-end encrypted. I could never have imagined any of this.”

Following the NewsClick raids, Rajiv Malhotra, an Indian-American Hindu supremacist ideologue, appeared on a major Indian news network to openly call for the Modi government to target even more independent journalists. Malhotra singled out the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI), a website founded by P. Sainath, an award-winning journalist committed to foregrounding the perspectives of rural and marginalized people.

On what grounds does Malhotra suggest that the Modi government go after Sainath and PARI? The site, Malhotra told the newscaster, who does not interrupt him, encourages young villagers, Dalits (a caste once referred to as “untouchable”), Muslims and other minorities to “tell their story of dissent and grievances against the nation state.”

Criticism of the nation and its authorities, in other words, is akin to sowing division. Whether it’s an opinion given in 2010 or a reference to Chinese funding within an article from a newspaper loathed by supporters of Modi and his Hindu nationalist ideology, the Indian government will apparently use any excuse to silence its critics.

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For Arab dissidents, the walls are closing in

Frankie Vetch — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 13:30:14 +0000

In November 2022, Sherif Osman was having lunch with his fiancee, his sister and other family members at a glittering upscale restaurant in Dubai. A former military officer in Egypt and now a U.S. citizen, Osman had traveled to Dubai with his fiancee, Virta, so his family could meet her for the first time.

Toward the end of the meal, Osman got up and said to Virta, “Go ahead and finish up, I’ll go vape outside.” He kissed her on the forehead and walked out the door.

When Virta came out of the restaurant a few minutes later, she saw Osman talking to two men. Initially, she thought they were talking about parking spots. Then one of them grabbed his arm and started dragging him into a car.

Virta tried to get to Osman but the car sped away, leaving her standing on the side of the road with his family.

Virta, who is originally from Finland, knew that Osman had been making YouTube videos about human rights violations in Egypt, but it was a part of his life she knew little about. Osman left Egypt in 2004 after becoming frustrated with the corruption he witnessed within the government while serving as an air force captain. He is now considered a deserter. Two years after leaving his home country, he set up a YouTube channel, @SherifOsmanClub, where he routinely criticized the Egyptian government. Today, the channel has more than 40,000 subscribers.

A few weeks before traveling to Dubai, Osman had posted a video calling for Egyptians to capitalize on COP27, the United Nations climate conference due to be held that month in Sharm El-Sheikh, to protest the state’s dismal human rights record and the rising cost of living.

In the car, Osman’s mind was spinning. When they approached a turn on the highway that leads to the international airport he began to panic, fearful that he was on a one-way trip to his grave.

“I have seen very, very, very high-ranking Egyptians that have lived in Dubai and opened their mouths with a different narrative on Egypt, and they were actually put on a flight and shipped out to Egypt,” he said, referring to former Egyptian prime minister Ahmed Shafiq, who was deported from the UAE just days after he announced he was running for president in 2017.

Osman soon realized that he was being taken to the Dubai police headquarters.

Dubai's central prison where Sherif Osman was detained. Giuseppe Cacace/AFP via Getty Images.

He was escorted through the back entrance of the building. Osman waited for hours while officers moved frantically around the room, giving him no information. When he asked for clarity, they told him to wait and promised to bring him coffee.

“They actually made me coffee,” he told me, laughing. Osman’s sardonic sense of humor comes out in full force when he recounts the ordeal.

Osman was eventually taken from police headquarters to the Dubai Central Prison where he was made to wait while the authorities decided if he would be deported to Egypt. On November 15, Charles McClellan, an officer in the U.S. Consulate in Dubai, told Virta that Interpol had issued a red notice and extradition case number for Osman.

A few days later, Virta sent an email to Radha Stirling in Windsor, a town in southeast England, pleading for assistance. “Sherif’s deportation to Egypt is a death penalty without a fair trial!” Virta wrote.

Stirling, the CEO of an organization called Detained in Dubai, was no stranger to these kinds of cases. Knowing that the United Arab Emirates could extradite a U.S. citizen to Egypt in the dark of night, Stirling acted quickly. She contacted the American embassy to offer advice, tried to rally support from U.S. politicians and sought media coverage of the case.

And then something strange happened. McClellan told Stirling that he’d gotten new information: According to the UAE, Osman was detained on a “red notice” issued by a less well-known organization: the Arab Interior Ministers Council. An Emirati official speaking to The Guardian confirmed the same.

When Osman learned it was not Interpol but rather the Arab Interior Ministers Council pursuing the case, his heart sank. “That’s when I was like, I’m fucked,” he told me.

The Arab League meeting in Cairo on May 7, 2023. Khaled Desouki/AFP via Getty Images.

A body made up of the interior ministries of all 22 Arab League states, the Arab Interior Ministers Council was established in the 1980s to strengthen cooperation between Arab states on internal security and combating crime. In recent years, it has played an increasingly visible role in extradition cases between Arab countries, particularly in cases that appear to be politically-motivated.

Experts I spoke with say that the shift has occurred as some of the Council’s member states, including the UAE and Egypt, have become notorious for abusing Interpol’s system. Although it is often portrayed in the media as an international police force with armed agents and the power to investigate crimes, Interpol is best understood as an electronic bulletin board where states can post “wanted” notices and other information about suspected criminals. Arab League states are increasingly posting red notices via Interpol in an effort to target political opponents, despite Interpol rules expressly prohibiting the practice.

Ted Bromund, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, thinks tensions surrounding Interpol may be driving increased cooperation within the Council, especially in politically-motivated cases. “My suspicion is that this Arab Ministers Council is basically a reaction to the fact that Interpol is maybe not quite as compliant or as lax as they used to be,” Bromund told me.

It was around 2018, shortly after Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi-born U.S. resident, was murdered in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey, that Abdelrahman Ayyash first heard of the Council. Ayyash is a case manager at the Freedom Initiative, which advocates for people wrongfully detained in the Middle East and North Africa.

Ayyash told me that over the past year he has identified at least nine cases in which the Council was likely involved in the extradition or arrest of political dissidents, with some of them dating as far back as 2016. In one case, Kuwait extradited eight Egyptians to Cairo in 2019 following accusations that they were part of a terrorist cell with links to the Muslim Brotherhood. Ayyash suspects their arrest and deportation stemmed from a notice from the Arab Interior Ministers Council.

In a case highlighted by other advocates from 2019, Morocco extradited activist Hassan al-Rabea to Saudi Arabia after he was arrested on a warrant that The New Arab reported was issued by the Council. Hassan’s brother Munir is wanted by the Saudi government due to his involvement in the country’s 2011 protest movement. Their older brother, Ali, is already in a Saudi prison, where he is facing the death penalty. Another of al-Rabea’s brothers, Ahmed, told me over the phone from Canada that he is now extremely careful about where he travels: “For me, like all my brothers, it is extremely scary to go to any Arab country,” he said.

Agreements enabling more extradition cooperation among Arab states and other nearby countries also are being adopted widely. In 2020, Morocco, Sudan, the UAE and Bahrain signed an agreement with Israel known as the Abraham Accords, which established official relations between the signatories. Since then, Morocco and the UAE in particular have increased their use of repressive technologies developed by Israeli companies when targeting dissidents abroad. Last year, 24% of Israel’s defense exports were to Arab Accords signatories. In 2021, Egypt signed an agreement to strengthen military cooperation with Sudan after years of tensions, including a border dispute.

Members of the Arab Interior Ministers Council are signatories to the Riyadh Arab Agreement for Judicial Cooperation and the Arab Convention for the Suppression of Terrorism, which prohibit extraditions if the crime is of a “political nature.”

Three U.N. special rapporteurs in June wrote a letter to the Arab League stating that red notices issued by the Council do not comply with member states’ commitments under international law, such as non-refoulement, non-discrimination, due diligence and fair trial.

Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman greets President of Egypt Abdel Fattah El-Sisi ahead of the 32nd Arab League Summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on May 19, 2023. Bandar Aljaloud/Royal Court of Saudi Arabia/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.

A few weeks after Osman’s arrest, Virta returned to the U.S. for her job. She adjusted her schedule to work different hours, so she could be awake for part of the night working on his release.

Behind bars in Dubai, Osman was struggling to sleep. “The second I opened my eyes my head would go numb, the exact second my eyes opened, I realized I am in deep shit,” he told me. “I can count the days that I had a full night's sleep on one hand and have left over fingers.”

Virta was certain the UAE was going to extradite him to Egypt. But then, late one night towards the end of December, she got a call.

“I have some good news,” Osman told her. He was going to be released.

Osman was taken to the airport five days later, but it was not until the plane door closed that he allowed himself to believe he was actually going home. When the door clicked shut, he passed out from exhaustion. Osman had spent 46 days in detention.

This past July, Osman filed a lawsuit at the U.S District Court in Washington, D.C. against Interpol and its major general Ahmed Naser Al-Raisi, the UAE and its deputy prime minister, Egypt and its president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, the Arab Interior Ministers Council, a UAE prosecutor and four other unnamed individuals. The complaint accuses them of international terrorism for their “kidnapping, abduction, imprisonment, prosecution, and threatened extradition” of Osman.

The 32nd Arab League Summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on May 19, 2023. Bandar Aljaloud/Royal Court of Saudi Arabia/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images.

The lawsuit accuses Interpol of colluding to shift the justification for Osman’s detention from an Interpol red notice to one issued by the Arab Interior Ministers Council. An Interpol spokesperson said “there is no indication that a notice or diffusion ever existed in Interpol’s databases,” but Osman’s lawyers say otherwise.

Osman hopes that the case will push Interpol to agree to reforms, such as improving its system for reviewing cases in order to determine whether they are politically motivated. If his lawyers can prove that what the Arab Interior Ministers Council did was an act of terrorism, Osman expects this will make it much harder for Arab states to justify their participation in its functions. “Funding it would be very hard at that point,” he said, as it would effectively mean that the Arab league was funding a terrorist organization. One of Osman’s lawyers also is seeking an agreement from the UAE to stop accepting red notices for U.S. citizens by way of the Council.

Osman and Virta now live in a small city in Massachusetts, where they largely keep to themselves. “The speed limit is 35 miles and people don't say hi to each other. It’s New England, so everybody’s an asshole,” said Osman. “There’s even a word for it: ‘Massholes.’”

He sees a psychologist who specializes in post-traumatic stress disorder. Osman says it is helping him understand what feels like a “new self.”

Osman is trying to launch a cannabis cultivation business, which missed out on some vital funding when investors heard about his arrest. He stayed quiet for six months after his release, but recently went back to posting about Egypt’s human rights record online.

“I'm back again, talking and tearing down the president and his regime and military regime without mercy,” he said. “I got the news that they are worried in Egypt about my case.”

CORRECTION (09/29/2023): An earlier version of this article described Jamal Khashoggi as a U.S. citizen. It has been corrected to reflect that Khashoggi was a U.S. resident.

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For migrants under 24/7 surveillance, the UK feels like ‘an outside prison’

Isobel Cockerell — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 14:47:54 +0000

In June 2022, the U.K. Home Office rolled out a new pilot policy — to track migrants and asylum seekers arriving in Britain with GPS-powered ankle tags. The government argues that ankle tags could be necessary to stop people from absconding or disappearing into the country. Only 1% of asylum seekers absconded in 2020. But that hasn’t stopped the Home Office from expanding the pilot. Sam, whose name we’ve changed to protect his safety, came to the U.K. as a refugee when he was a small child and has lived in Britain ever since. Now in his thirties, he was recently threatened with deportation and was made to wear a GPS ankle tag while his case was in progress. Here is Sam’s story, as told to Coda’s Isobel Cockerell.

I came to the U.K. with my family when I was a young kid, fleeing a civil war. I went to preschool, high school and college here. I’m in my thirties now and have a kid of my own. I don’t know anything about the country I was born in — England is all I know.

I got my permanent residency when I was little. I remember my dad also started applying for our British citizenship when I was younger but never quite got his head around the bureaucracy.

When I got older, I got into a lifestyle I shouldn’t have and was arrested and given a criminal sentence and jail time. The funny thing is, just before I was arrested, I had finally saved up enough to start the process of applying for citizenship myself but never got around to it in time.

In the U.K., if you’re not a citizen and you commit a crime, the government has the power to deport you. It doesn’t matter if you’ve lived here all your life. So now, I’m fighting the prospect of being kicked out of the only country I’ve ever known.

When I finished my sentence, they kept me in prison under immigration powers. When I finally got bail, they said I’d have to wear a GPS-powered ankle tag so that I didn’t disappear. I couldn’t believe it. If I had been a British citizen, when I finished my sentence that would be it, I’d be free. But in the eyes of the government, I was a foreigner, and so the Home Office — immigration — wanted to keep an eye on me at all times.

My appointments with immigration had a strange quality to them. I could tell from the way we communicated that the officers instinctively knew they were talking to a British person. But the system had told them to treat me like an outsider and to follow the procedures for deporting me. They were like this impenetrable wall, and they treated me like I was nothing because I didn’t have a passport. They tried to play dumb, like they had no idea who I was or that I had been here my whole life, even though I’ve always been in the system.

I tried to explain there was no need to tag me and that I would never abscond. After all, I have a child here who I want to stay with. They decided to tag me anyway.

The day came when they arrived in my holding cell to fit the tag. I was shocked by its bulkiness. I thought to myself, ‘How am I going to cover this up under my jeans?’ I love to train and keep fit, but I couldn’t imagine going to the gym with this thing around my ankle.

It’s hard to explain what it’s like to wear that thing. When I was first released — after many months inside — it felt amazing to be free, to wake up whenever I wanted and not have to wait for someone to come and open my door.

But gradually, I started to realize I wasn’t really free. And people did come to my door. Not prison guards, but people from a private security company. I later learned that company is called Capita. When things go wrong with the tag, it’s the Capita people who show up at your home.

The visits were unsettling. I had no idea how much power the Capita people had or whether I was even obliged, legally, to let them in. The employees themselves were a bit clueless. Sometimes I would level with them, and they would admit they had no idea why I was being tagged.

It soon became clear that the technology attached to my ankle was pretty glitchy. One time, they came and told me, ‘The system says the tag had been tampered with.’ They checked my ankle and found nothing wrong. It sent my mind whirring. What had I done to jolt the strap? I suddenly felt anxious to leave the house, in case I knocked it while out somewhere. I began to move through the world more carefully.

Other times, Capita staff came round to tell me my location had stopped registering. The system wasn’t even functioning, and that frustrated me.

All these issues seemed to make out like I was the one doing something wrong. But I realize now it was nothing to do with me — the problem was with the tag, and the result was that I felt harassed by these constant unannounced visits by these anonymous Capita employees.

In theory, the Home Office would call to warn you of Capita’s visits, but often they just showed up at random. They never came when they said they would. Once, I got a letter saying I breached my bail conditions after not being home when they came around. But I’d never been told they were coming in the first place. It was so anxiety-inducing: I was afraid if there were too many problems with the tag, it might be used against me in my deportation case.

The other nightmare was the charging system. According to the people who fit my tag, the device could last 24 hours between charges. It never did. I’d be out and about or at work, and I’d have to calculate how long I could stay there before I needed to go home and charge. The low battery light would flash red, the device would start loudly vibrating, and I’d panic. Sometimes others would hear the vibration and ask me if it was my phone. Being around people and having to charge up your ankle is so embarrassing. There’s a portable charger, but it’s slow. If you want to charge up quicker, you have to sit down next to a plug outlet for two hours and wait.

I didn’t want my child to know I’d been tagged or that I was having problems with immigration. I couldn’t bear the thought of trying to explain why I was wearing this thing around my ankle or that I was facing deportation. Whenever we were together I made sure to wear extra-loose jeans.

I couldn’t think beyond the tag. It was always on my mind, a constant burden. It felt like this physical reminder of all my mistakes in life. I couldn’t focus on my future. I just felt stuck on that day when I was arrested. I had done my time, but the message from the Home Office was clear: There was no rehabilitation, at least not for me. I felt like I was sinking into quicksand, being pulled down into the darkness.

My world contracted, and my mental health went into freefall. I came to realize I wasn’t really free: I was in an outside prison. The government knew where I was 24/7. Were they really concerned I would abscond, or did they simply want to intrude on my life?

Eventually, my mental health got so bad I was able to get the tag removed, although I’m still facing deportation.

After the tag was taken off, it took me a while to absorb that I wasn’t being tracked anymore. Even a month later, I still put my jeans on as if I had the tag on. I could still kind of feel it there, around my ankle. I still felt like I was being watched. Of course, tag or no tag, the government always has other ways to monitor you.

I’ve begun to think more deeply about the country I’ve always called home. This country that says it no longer wants me. The country that wants to watch my every move. I’m fighting all of it to stay with my child, but I sometimes wonder if, in the long term, I even want to be a part of this system, if this is how it treats people.

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Why trans people can’t trust Tennessee with their data

Rebekah Robinson — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 13:59:15 +0000

Patients in Nashville receiving gender-affirming care from the Vanderbilt University Medical Center were told last month that their records had been turned over to the Tennessee Attorney General’s office. The request was made as part of an investigation into insurance fraud claims.

The investigation comes at a time when the Tennessee state government has been proposing a barrage of legislation to limit access to healthcare for trans people. On July 8, a ban on gender-affirming care for minors went into effect. A block on the ban by a federal district judge was temporarily overturned by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, a higher federal court, in a split decision after an appeal by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti.

In such a hostile atmosphere, Skrmetti’s demands for records from the Vanderbilt’s Clinic for Transgender Health have alarmed patients.

Chris Sanders, executive director at Tennessee Equality Project, an LGBTQ advocacy organization, told me that the parents of young trans people have expressed fears that their children might be targeted. “When you’re a parent intent on defending your child, this looks like danger coming down the road,” said Sanders.

States with aggressive anti-trans laws like Texas and Florida have been seeking large swathes of data on trans people. In the wake of the VUMC revelations, people are asking if Tennessee is taking a similar path.

In September 2022, VUMC battled claims on social media, including by conservative politicians and religious leaders, that their gender-affirming care services were morally and legally objectionable and amounted to “money-making schemes.” Nashville, due in part to the VUMC clinic, has been seen as a haven for people seeking gender-affirming options in Tennessee. In response to allegations of illegal conduct, Attorney General Skrmetti said he would “use the full scope of his authority to ensure compliance with Tennessee law.”

VUMC was required by law to turn over records to Skrmetti’s office. In response to a request for comment, the Tennessee Attorney General’s office directed me to its statement on June 21: “This investigation is directed solely at VUMC and related providers and not at patients or their families. The records have been and will continue to be held in the strictest confidence, as is our standard practice and required by law. This same process happens in dozens of billing fraud investigations every year.”

But on social media, many feared that Skrmetti’s data sweep was a gross violation of the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and that VUMC could have done more to protect confidential information. In one tweet, a person who said VUMC had shared their data and that they were “terrified” claimed to have “challenged it with a HIPAA violation report.” In another tweet, containing a news clip from Nashville’s WKRN station in which the mother of a trans teen says she felt betrayed by the VUMC, several of the comments suggested VUMC had committed a HIPAA violation.

Jolynn Dellinger, senior lecturing fellow on privacy law and policy at Duke University School of Law, says that while HIPAA “is a pretty good law it’s widely misunderstood.” It only applies, she told me, “to a very small number of covered entities. The vast majority of health data is not covered by HIPAA.”

As VUMC is a hospital, HIPAA does in fact protect its patient records, conversations with healthcare providers, and billing information. This means that the information cannot be shared without consent, but exceptions are made for law enforcement requests such as subpoenas and court orders. In this instance, a VUMC spokesman told reporters, the Tennessee Attorney General had the necessary legal authority to obtain the data.

According to Dellinger, laws that are looking to criminalize access to gender-affirming care and abortion care leave the door open for authorities to seek people’s health data. On June 16, attorneys general from 19 states, including Tennessee, signed a letter addressed to the Secretary of Health and Human Services voicing their objection to a proposed expansion of HIPAA protections that would prevent states from exploiting their authority to fish for data. The dissenting attorneys general insist that the rule change “would unlawfully interfere with States’ authority to enforce their laws, and does not serve any legitimate need.” While focused on access to abortion, the complaints of Republican-governed states apply equally to those seeking gender-affirming care.

Laws that restrict bodily autonomy, whether it is access to gender-affirming care or abortion, leave people vulnerable to a set of threats from state authorities that very much include demands for digital data.

Dellinger fears that laws that criminalize access to health care disincentivize people from seeking the care they need because they feel they can’t trust their doctor or that their medical records will be seized. Dellinger also said, “Once criminalization comes into play, privacy risks grow.” In their letter, the 19 state attorneys general argue that HIPAA recognizes that “privacy interests must be balanced against the ‘public interest in using identifiable health information for vital public and private purposes.’”

Despite Tennessee Attorney General Skrmetti’s assertion that the VUMC patients’ records will be held in the “strictest” confidence, it is unclear how long that data will be held by authorities and whether it will continue to hold the data even after its investigation is complete. For now, though, Tennessee has taken another step in the legislative war that it appears to be waging against healthcare for trans people.

The decision this month by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals is the first time a federal court has overturned a block on the banning of gender-affirming treatment. Courts have unanimously blocked such bans, points out the American Civil Liberties Union, in Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Alabama and Kentucky. In a statement, the ACLU’s Tennessee chapter described the court’s decision as a “heartbreaking development for thousands of transgender youth, their doctors, and their families.”

Since 2015, reported the Washington Post, “Tennessee has enacted at least 14 laws that restrict LGBTQ rights — the most in the nation in that time frame.” On June 22, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by a group of trans women from Tennessee who wanted the right to change the designated sex on their birth certificates.

“It’s hard to exist as a transgender person in Tennessee at this moment,” said Jaime Combs, one of the plaintiffs. And now the state is asking the trans people whose rights it seeks to restrict to trust it with their data.

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Lithuania goes after bots following spikes in pro-Russian propaganda

Amanda Coakley — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 09:12:53 +0000

Big surges in international attention are unusual for LRT, the public media broadcaster in Lithuania. But last June, that changed suddenly when it began reporting on Lithuania’s decision to enforce EU sanctions on goods in transit to Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave that depends on trade routes through neighboring Lithuania for around 50% of its imports.

As Lithuania joined the ranks of countries across the globe imposing sanctions on Russia over the war in Ukraine, LRT saw an avalanche of likes and shares descend upon its Facebook page. Posts that would normally receive 40 or 50 views were getting tens of thousands of interactions. And roughly half of the comments posted by LRT’s suddenly enormous audience espoused pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian sentiments — an unusual dynamic in a country where support for Ukraine has been strong since the first days of the invasion. Analysis by Debunk, a Lithuanian disinformation research group, later found that much of this activity was driven by accounts situated in either Asia or Africa. This was a coordinated effort, one that almost certainly relied on automated accounts or bots.

Now, a bill moving through Lithuania’s parliament is attempting to rein in this kind of activity. Representatives are deliberating on a set of proposed amendments to the country’s criminal code and public information laws that would criminalize automated account activity that poses a threat to state security.

Under the changes, it would become a crime to distribute “disinformation, war propaganda, [content] inciting war or calling for the violation of the sovereignty of the Republic of Lithuania by force” from “automatically controlled” accounts. Violators could face fines, arrest or even three years’ imprisonment, depending on the particulars of the content in question.

The legislation is also expressly written to hold major social media platforms accountable for this kind of activity. It would empower the Lithuanian Radio and Television Commission to issue content and account removal orders to companies like Meta and Twitter.

Proponents of the legislation argue that social media companies have been ineffective in the fight against digital disinformation in Lithuania. In an explanatory note, lawmakers said the amendments would “send a clear message to internet platforms that an ineffective or insufficient fight against this problem is unacceptable and has legal consequences.”

“Right now, there is no regulation or legislation against bots,” said Viktoras Dauksas, the head of Debunk, the disinformation analysis center. But, he noted, “you can deal with bot farms through dealing with Meta.”

Twitter is a target of the policy too. In January 2022, a month before the invasion, U.S.-based disinformation researcher Markian Kuzmowyczius uncovered a bot attack on Twitter that falsely claimed that the Kremlin was recalling its diplomatic mission to Lithuania due to malign U.S. influence in the country. Removing diplomats is often a signal that the threat level to a country is high.

More than Meta, Twitter has long been a hub for automated accounts of all kinds. This was a key talking point for Elon Musk, who vowed to tackle the problem of malicious bots once the company was in his possession. While the company’s account verification policy has zigged and zagged since Musk’s takeover, it also appears to be honoring more requests for content removals that it receives from governments than it did under Jack Dorsey — in what could be a boon for Lithuania.

As for Meta, what the company terms “coordinated inauthentic behavior” has long been a violation of company policy, but its track record on enforcing this rule is mixed. The proposed amendments in Lithuania are meant to put the company on notice so that it is prepared to respond to requests from Lithuanian authorities in this vein. This is nothing new for Meta, which has faced regulatory measures around the world that are intended to ensure that content on the platform adheres to national laws. But Lithuania is among the smallest of countries that has attempted to bring the company to heel in this style.

Germany’s 2017 Network Enforcement Act, casually referred to by policymakers as “Lex Facebook,” requires platforms above a certain size to remove illegal content, including hate speech, within 24 hours of receiving notice or face fines that could easily rise to tens of millions of euros. India’s 2021 IT Rules require large platforms to establish offices in the country and to dedicate staff to liaise with government officials seeking content removals or user data. In each case, the company has ultimately opted to comply, and it’s easy to see why. India represents Meta’s largest national market worldwide — it is unquestionably in Meta’s best interest to stay in good standing with regulators. And Germany’s position within the EU would have made it politically risky for the company not to fall in line.

But can Lithuania expect the same results? In December, Meta responded to allegations that Facebook was blocking pro-Ukrainian content in Lithuania and even sent representatives to Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, to discuss the matter with policymakers. But two months later, Meta issued a formal response to Lithuanian politicians insisting that the platform's moderation principles were applied equally to both sides of the conflict and that the algorithm did not discriminate. The incident highlighted the small Baltic nation’s willingness to stand up to the tech giant as Facebook continues to be the most widely used platform in the country. But it also demonstrated Meta’s confidence in asserting its power in the region.

A month later, the heads of state from eight European countries, including Lithuania, wrote an open letter to tech firms calling on them to fight disinformation that “undermines” peace and stability.

Weeding out harmful bots is a complicated exercise in any country that wants to uphold freedom of expression. Although the proposed amendments would only apply to bots spreading information that is already prohibited under Lithuanian law, the criminalization of activity by an automated account still treads into relatively new territory. Lithuanian supporters of the two amendments, including Dauksas, argue that a clear line can be drawn between trolls, who are often people or profiles for hire, and bots, who Dauksas says should not be afforded human rights protections. Scholars like Jonathan Corpus Ong, an associate professor of global digital media at the University of Massachusetts, take a different stance. “Even in a bot farm, there are humans clicking the buttons and directing these armies of automated accounts. The distinction between human and automation is more nuanced and there are many layers of complicity,” he argues.

Speaking from the sidelines of TrustCon, a meeting of cyber security professionals in San Francisco, Ong was eager to stress that blunt force regulation is often not the answer to the complex set of challenges that arise when combatting bots.

“We all agree that some regulation is necessary, but we need to be extremely careful about using punitive measures, which could create further harm,” he said.

In Ong’s view, we need to be cautious about what kind of information is shared between platforms and governments and what data is exchanged between platforms and law enforcement agencies, all of which would depend on sustained levels of trust and transparency. While Lithuania is rated “Free” in Freedom House’s “Freedom in the World” report, such legislation could pave the way for new forms of censorship in countries where democracy is under pressure or has been eroded completely.

Underlying all of this is also a persistent dearth of independent research on these dynamics, research that would require full cooperation from companies like Meta and Twitter where the vast majority of operations like these play out. Calls for more transparency around bot and troll farms have been ongoing from analysts and scholars, but, so far, no social media platform has been open to independent audits of their own investigations, Ong said.

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The global rise of anti-trans legislation

Tamara Evdokimova — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 13:47:12 +0000

In her dissenting opinion on a U.S. Supreme Court decision concerning the rights of same-sex couples last month, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the Court “reminds LGBT people of a painful feeling that they know all too well: There are some public places where they can be themselves, and some where they cannot.”

On the last day of Pride Month, June 30, the court ruled to allow discrimination, under particular circumstances, against same-sex couples. By a majority of 6 to 3, the Court agreed that a web designer who opposes same-sex marriage could lawfully refuse to provide services for same-sex weddings.

This is just one in a litany of recent legislative and political assaults on LBGTQ+ rights. Conservative legislatures around the world have been targeting LGBTQ+ people, and especially transgender people, by denying them access to healthcare, dictating which public facilities are available to them, preventing them from speaking about their LGBTQ+ identities and, in the most severe cases, criminalizing their very existence. Here we reflect on Coda’s latest coverage of global LGBTQ+ rights and the trends these stories illuminate.

Florida, United States

In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis continues to target transgender youth through restrictive legislation, banning access to gender-affirming care to all children under 18 and dictating which books Floridians can read and which bathrooms they can use.

Reporting from Tallahassee, Rebekah Robinson tells the story of one family whose lives have been upended by the state’s anti-trans legislation. Milo, 16, and his family have made the difficult decision to leave their home and move 1,200 miles away, to Connecticut, to ensure that Milo can continue to access the medical care he needs.

It’s not just limited healthcare access that has forced Milo’s family to move. With the expansion of DeSantis’ Parental Rights in Education Bill — the so-called ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law — teachers in Florida can no longer discuss gender and sexuality in the classroom. In addition, trans people in Florida are now prohibited from using public bathrooms consistent with their gender identity.

Florida may be only one state out of 50, but Republican legislation hostile toward transgender youth is popping up all over the U.S and will likely be a hot button political issue right up to the 2024 presidential elections.

Russia

While Russia has recently dominated international headlines thanks to an attempted mutiny by Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian legislature has also been quietly cracking down on trans rights. A bill is making its way to President Vladimir Putin’s desk that will ban all gender-affirming care for transgender Russians.

Tamara Evdokimova spoke with Russian psychologist Egor Burtsev to understand what effects a blanket ban on gender-affirming care would have on the trans community. If the bill passes as expected, trans people in Russia will not be able to access life-saving treatments, ranging from psychological care to hormone therapy to surgeries. This will trigger a nationwide mental health crisis and likely provoke violence against transgender Russians.

Russia’s ban on transition-related care marks the latest escalation in Putin’s war against Western values. In November 2022, he signed a law prohibiting any activities that discuss or promote LGBTQ+ relationships. As Russia continues to wage war in Ukraine and further isolates itself from the West, vulnerable communities inside the country will face ever-greater risks of discrimination, violence and erasure.

India

Mirroring Vladimir Putin’s “family values” rhetoric, India’s government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has also been advocating against LGBTQ+ rights when it comes to marriage, arguing that permitting same-sex marriage would undermine Indian values. Some Indians have profited enormously by appealing to long-standing prejudice in Indian society against LGBTQ+ people, a prejudice seemingly endorsed, or at least tolerated, by the government.

Alishan Jafri reports from northern India to tell the story of Trixie, a young transgender woman whose mother pushed her to undergo conversion therapy with a YouTube guru. Santosh Singh Bhadauria, better known as the “YouTube Baba,” specializes in conversion therapy and livestreams “healing” sessions to tens of thousands of viewers. Similar to televangelists, Bhadauria is a “godman,” a self-styled guru who has persuaded his followers that he possesses spiritual powers.

Conversion therapy is illegal in India, and anyone subjected to it, as Trixie was, can take legal actions against the likes of YouTube Baba. The court system might offer some recourse to trans Indians, but with a federal government that advocates conservative, anti-LGBTQ+ views, homophobia and transphobia continue to prevail in many parts of the country.

Uganda

In March, Uganda virtually outlawed LGBTQ+ identity by criminalizing same-sex relationships. The 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Bill imposes draconian penalties for engaging in same-sex relationships, discussing one’s LGBTQ+ identity and renting or selling property to LGBTQ+ people — and institutes the death penalty for sexual assault and for having sex with people under 18.

And this is not the only law targeting gay people in Uganda, Prudence Nyamishana writes. The Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill, first proposed in 2021, targets Ugandans seeking fertility treatment by requiring them to be legally married in order to qualify for treatments. This bill heavily constrains the reproductive rights of unmarried women and LGBTQ+ people who want to have children, as Ugandan law does not recognize same-sex marriage.

Both bills underscore a push among Ugandan legislators to align national laws with their notions of “morality,” rooted in Christianity — or, as the legislation’s opponents suggest, Christian fundamentalism.

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Russia’s ban on gender transition amounts to ‘torture’

Tamara Evdokimova — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 13:08:35 +0000

On June 21, the Russian State Duma voted to ban gender-affirming care for all transgender people. The ban applies to any “medical interventions aimed at changing the sex of a person” and prohibits transgender people from changing their name and gender marker on official documents.

The ban on legal and medical gender transition marks the latest escalation in Russia’s crackdown on LGBTQ+ rights. In November 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law prohibiting any activities that promote “non-traditional sexual relationships,” effectively outlawing any books, films, media and online resources that discuss LGBTQ+ people.

The bill outlawing gender-affirming care must still pass through Russia’s upper house of parliament and be signed by Putin, but in the event of its likely adoption, it will prevent transgender people from accessing life-saving treatments, ranging from psychological care to hormone therapy to voluntary surgeries.

According to Egor Burtsev, a clinical psychologist who has worked with transgender and LGBTQ+ patients in Russia for over 10 years, the abolition of gender-affirming care amounts to “torture.”

Burtsev, who left Russia in April 2022 out of concern for his safety and now lives in Lithuania, worries that the new law will precipitate a mental health crisis in Russia’s trans community, amplify the stigma that LGBTQ+ Russians have long faced and trigger violence against transgender people in Russia. To better understand the far-reaching consequences of a ban on gender-affirming care, I spoke with Burtsev on Telegram.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The Russian parliament has passed a law banning legal and surgical sex changes. What impact will this have on access to medical and psychological care for transgender people?

What they are proposing is a complete abolition of gender reassignment procedures, surgeries and hormone therapy for transgender people. It is a complete ban. What consequences will this have? Transgender people remain, but the procedures are banned. A transgender person — someone who has been undergoing hormone therapy for 10,15 years, who’s looked completely different for a long time, socialized in a completely different way — is suddenly deprived of the possibility to receive hormone therapy. The body changes, not quickly, but it changes, there are all kinds of reversals, transformations. And the relationship with one’s body, for transgender people, is quite complicated. What we will see is the highest risk of depression, the highest risk of self-harm, the highest risk of suicide.

All possible channels of any kind of medical care will be cut off. Transgender people are not going anywhere. They can’t change how they feel, what their gender identity is, because the authorities ordered it. They're being thrown overboard. And I would equate this to torture: depriving transgender people of medical care, hormone therapy and any psychological help that might have been available before.

Trans people have been left completely without help and in a terrible position of fear, humiliation, discrimination, stigma.

Russia is not the only country adopting laws against gender-affirming care. In the U.S., for example, Florida recently passed a bill that made it illegal to provide gender-affirming care to trans children under 18. From a medical perspective, is it necessary to have any restrictions on who, and at what age, should be able to undergo a gender transition?

There is a wave of such anti-gender movements in the world right now. Conservatism and neoconservatism are coming to the fore. The wave of anti-trans movements is sweeping the world, and Russia has actively, happily joined in. Even some quite democratic countries are not succeeding on this front right now. But that doesn't mean that this situation won’t change, because democracy works somewhat differently. Democracy doesn’t work like this, with one vulnerable group receiving help while another gets discarded.

As for helping trans children under 18, that’s a very controversial issue. There is no uniform policy on this. It’s understandable that the first feeling the idea evokes is probably bewilderment: ‘How can we allow something like this to happen before a child turns 18?’ But as a psychologist who’s worked mostly in Russia, where gender transition was allowed from the age of 18, I usually recommend to parents to simply provide support, to call the person by their name and use their pronouns. And according to statistics, this dramatically reduces the risk of suicidal behavior — just accept the child, call them what they like.

It is important to give people the right to decide for themselves, from a certain age, what will happen with hormone therapy and to give endocrinologists the opportunity to help people intelligently, clearly, taking into account their circumstances.

Based on what you’ve seen in your practice, what have been some of the challenges — medical, interpersonal, social — for transgender people in Russia?

The first problem has to do with socialization. It begins with a person becoming aware of themselves and bringing themselves before society — this is the coming-out process. And the first problem is usually related to acceptance: by family, friends, colleagues, classmates and so on. Of course, there's the constant stigma. There is also a huge problem with accessing healthcare that has always been there.

Because the stigma is so layered, so varied, trans people experience different challenges. Often they experience trauma, stress and suicidal ideation. Episodes of depression can be pretty severe. A large percentage of transgender people experience depressive states. Anxiety is also extremely common. All of this happens because the stigma and the discrimination all over the world, and especially in Russia, are quite strong.

Can you briefly explain the legal and medical process that a trans person in Russia needed to go through if they wanted to transition, before this law was passed?

The transition procedure in Russia was one of the best in the world. We were even a little proud of it, because in recent years, Russia was preparing to adopt ICD-11. This is the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases, in which ‘transsexualism’ is excluded from the list of psychiatric conditions. The removal of this psychiatric diagnosis was a huge victory for the trans community. Plus, with the exclusion of this diagnosis, the procedure for changing one’s gender marker has been simplified in many countries. That is, people simply come in, declare their desire to transition and have different procedures.

We had commissions in Russia that issued permits [to transgender people]. The commission consisted of a psychiatrist, a clinical psychologist and a sexologist. People came before these commissions, had conversations and were diagnosed. Afterwards, they received written permission to change the gender marker in their passport without any legal obstacles. The procedure was quite humane. Before that, less than 10 years ago, this process still required surgery. You had to have at least one surgical procedure. And, in many countries of the world, this requirement still remains.

There has been a lot of talk from the Russian government about protecting “traditional values.” Putin often says that soon, in the West, children will have a “Parent #1” and a “Parent #2,” instead of a mom and a dad.

One of the major problems that Putin and some other politicians — or, rather, the entire State Duma — have is that they don't pay attention to science-based approaches. They don't look at the science, they don't look at the research, they don't know what they're proposing. They just engage in populism in the service of power.

The whole world is moving toward greater diversity, there is no stopping it. We see it in our teenagers — who are 15-16 years old, who are not interested in politics because of their age, who are more interested in relationships and their own identities — and in how they construct their identities, how they look at relationships, how they experiment. They have a much more open view on things. The world, for them, is much more multilayered, not black-and-white like it is for government representatives, who tend to be quite old.

Does the government’s position reflect prevailing attitudes toward transgender people?

I think in many ways it does. Because there is such a thing as propaganda, and propaganda shapes the average Russian’s public opinion. And if propaganda works, then quite a few people really are transphobic, homophobic. I'm afraid there will be a lot of violence against LGBTQ+ people and against transgender people. There will be murders, there will be violence. It's very scary. It's a nightmare.

So, fearing exactly that, LGBTQ+ people are now panicking and trying to escape to somewhere else. But trans people tend to be financially disadvantaged. It's very hard for them to move, they don't have the right documents, they don't always have passports. They find themselves trapped inside [Russia] with this society.

But there is an alternative, there are, of course, people who are more progressive, who think for themselves. Some have left for now, but many have stayed in the country. They just shut down, they keep quiet, they don't actively speak out, because staying safe right now is paramount. As soon as there is a chance to exhale, we will hear those voices. And I really hope that someday the situation will begin to change for the better. We must all work together to change it.

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Digital footprints on the dark side of Geneva

Thomas Dworzak/Magnum Photos — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 14:59:10 +0000

Digital footprints on the dark side of Geneva

For this photo essay, Magnum Photos President Thomas Dworzak traveled to Switzerland and documented the lives of Geneva residents along with the digital “footprints” they leave behind every day. Drawing on research by the Edgelands Institute that explored Geneva’s evolving systems of everyday surveillance, Dworzak sought to use photography to tell the story of how the digitalization of our daily lives affects — and diminishes — our security.

He accompanied Geneva citizens in their daily routines while documenting the digital traces of their activities throughout the day. Dworzak researched the places that store our digital data and photographed them as well — an investigation that proved difficult and revealing of the lack of transparency surrounding the handling and storage of personal data.

To conclude the project, Dworzak sent each of his subjects a postcard from places where their digital information is stored: a simple way to demonstrate the randomness of where our digitally collected information ends up.

Thomas writes:

Do citizens of Geneva understand how surveillance takes place in their daily lives? The relationship between surveillance and power can be understood as a contemporary version of the “social contract,” originally conceptualized by the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his 18th century seminal work on democracies.

As a photographer, I needed to set the place: Geneva. I wanted to play on the dark side of the quaint, cute and affluent image of one of the world’s wealthiest cities and the world of international relations in which the Genevans are so often entangled.

I needed to trace the connection between life in this comfortable European city and the hidden paths of information that form underneath a surveilled daily life. I spent time with a variety of regular Genevan people, all voluntary participants in our project. I photographed their daily routines, marking whenever they would leave a “digital footprint” when using their phones, credit cards, apps or computers. With the help of the Edgelands team, I then identified corresponding data centers around the world where their information was likely to have been stored. I created a set of postcards using open-source applications like Google Earth and Google Street View. These “postcards from your server” were then sent back to the respective volunteers from the countries where these data centers were located, highlighting the far-flung places that our private data goes to when they perform a simple task such as buying groceries or a bus ticket.

Geneva, December 2022. Davide agreed to let me track his digital footprints. Here, he shows his ticket on a train.

Geneva, January 2023. Postcard from the server. Google Earth screenshot of the location of the server where the digital footprints of Davide may be stored. Although corporate security and privacy policies prevented us from pinpointing its precise location, we were able to get an approximate idea of where individuals’ data was hosted.

Geneva, January 2023. Postcard from the server. A postcard from a server that may hold Davide’s data was sent back to Davide. This postcard was sent from a server administered by CISCO, at Equinix Larchenstrasse 110, 65993 Frankfurt, Germany.

Geneva, January 2023. United Nations Plaza. The broken leg of the “Broken Chair” monument, a public statue in front of the UN Palais des Nations. The statue is a graphic illustration evoking the violence of war and the brutality of land mines. It has become one of the city’s most recognized landmarks.

Geneva, January 2023. Postcard from the server. Google Earth screenshot of the location of the server where the digital footprints of Hushita may be stored. BUMBLE Equinix Schepenbergweg 42, 1105 AT Amsterdam, Netherlands. Hushita is another volunteer who agreed to let me track her digital footprints.

Geneva, December 2022. The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Geneva. CERN is an official United Nations General Assembly observer and is a powerful model for international cooperation. The history of CERN has shown that scientific collaboration can build bridges between nations and contribute to a broader understanding of science among the general public. In 1989, the World Wide Web was invented at CERN by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist.

Geneva, December 2022. Surveillance camera shop.

Geneva, January 2023. Postcard from the server. Google Street View. Screenshot of the location of the server where some of the digital footprints of Renata may be stored. Apple Data Center, Viborg, Denmark. Renata is another volunteer who agreed to let me track her digital footprints.

Geneva, November 2022. Proton corporate server in Geneva. ProtonMail is one of the world’s safest encrypted email services. Nicholas is another volunteer who agreed to let me track his digital footprints.

Geneva, November 2023. Renata uses a digital sports watch.

Geneva, December 2022. Digital footprints with Antoine. The bus stop near his flat is named after Jean-Jaques Rousseau's “Contrat Social.” Antoine is another volunteer who agreed to let me track his digital footprints.

Geneva, December 2022. Jean-Jacques Rousseau Island. The Genevan philosopher’s fundamental work on democracies is based on the notion of a “social contract.” The Edgelands Institute's Geneva Surveillance Report examines how the relationships between citizens and surveillance leads to a potential new social contract.

Geneva, January 2023. Postcard from the server. A postcard from the potential server location of Antoine’s digital footprint was sent back to him. This postcard was sent from the server location of GOOGLE MAPS Rue de Ghlin 100, 7331 Saint-Ghislain, Belgium.

Special series

This is the second in a series of multimedia collaborations on evolving systems of surveillance in medium-sized cities around the world by photographers at Magnum Photos, data geographers at the Edgelands Institute, an organization that explores how the digitalization of urban security is changing the urban social contract, and essayists commissioned by Coda Story.

Turkey uses journalists to silence critics in exile

Frankie Vetch — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 13:19:23 +0000

Early in the morning on May 17, the German police raided the homes of two Turkish journalists and took them into custody. Ismail Erel and Cemil Albay — who work for Sabah, a pro-government Turkish daily headquartered in Istanbul — were released after a few hours, but their arrests provoked strong condemnation in Turkey. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in the midst of a tight presidential race, told an interviewer that “what was done in Germany was a violation of the freedom of the press.”

The European Centre for Media Freedom also came out in support of the Sabah journalists, condemning the detention and demanding that press freedom be upheld. But Turkey itself is a leading jailer of journalists, ranked 165th out of 180 countries in the 2023 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders. And, according to German prosecutors, Erel and Albay were under investigation for the “dangerous” dissemination of other journalists’ personal data.

German authorities have legitimate concerns about the safety of Turkish journalists living in exile. In July 2021, Erk Acarer, a Turkish columnist, was beaten up outside his home in Berlin. Later that month, German authorities began investigating Turkish nationalist organized crime groups operating in Europe after the police found a hit list of 55 journalists and activists who had fled Turkey.

In September 2022, Sabah published information that revealed the location of Cevheri Guven’s home. It appears likely — though it has not been confirmed by German officials — that this was the reason for the arrests of Erel and Albay. Guven himself had been arrested in Turkey in 2015 and sentenced to over 22 years in prison. He was the editor of a news magazine that had published a cover criticizing Erdogan. Out on bail before his trial, Guven wrote that he gave his “life savings” to a smuggler to get him and his family out of Turkey. He now lives in Germany.

The ability of states such as Germany and Sweden to protect refugees, whether they are fleeing Turkey, China, Russia or Iran, has waned, as authoritarian leaders have become more brazen in using technology to stalk, bully, assault, kidnap and even kill dissidents. The Turkish state’s appetite for targeting critical voices abroad, especially those of journalists, has been growing for some time. As Erdogan’s government clamped down on media freedom at home, it has co-opted journalists working at government-friendly news outlets into becoming tools of cross-border repression. This has allowed the state to reach outside Turkey’s borders to intimidate journalists and dissidents who have sought refuge in Western Europe and North America.

Since last year, Sabah has revealed details about the locations of several Turkish journalists in exile. In October 2022, it published the address and photographs of exiled journalist Abdullah Bozkurt. The report included details about where he shopped. This was just a month after I met Bozkurt at a cafe in the Swedish capital, Stockholm, where he now lives. Bozkurt told me that he is constantly harassed online by pro-government trolls and because of the large Turkish immigrant population in Sweden, many of whom are Erdogan supporters, has been forced into isolation. It has had, he said, an adverse impact on his children’s quality of life.

Two years before Bozkurt’s personal information was leaked, in June 2020, Cem Kukuc, a presenter on the Turkish channel TGRT Haber, said of Bozkurt and other critical journalists: “Where they live is known, including their addresses abroad. Let’s see what happens if several of them get exterminated.” Just three months after that broadcast, Bozkurt was attacked in Stockholm by unidentified men who dragged him to the ground and kicked him for several minutes. “I think this attack was targeted,” Bozkurt told the Committee to Protect Journalists, “and is part of an intimidation campaign against exiled Turkish journalists with the clear message that we should stop speaking up against the Turkish government.” Bozkurt deleted his address and vehicle and contact information from the Swedish government’s registration system after the 2020 attack, but both Sabah and A Haber, another pro-government media outlet, still published his address last year.

Sabah and A Haber are both owned by the sprawling Turkuvaz Media Group. It is “one of the monopolistic hubs for pro-government outlets,” said Zeyno Ustun, an assistant professor of sociology and digital media and film at St. Lawrence University in the U.S. The group’s chief executive is Serhat Albayrak, the brother of a former government minister, Berat Albarak, who is also Erdogan’s son-in-law.

Turkuvaz says that its newspapers have a collective readership of 1.6 million. In April, a month before Turkey’s tense general election, in which Erdogan managed to secure his third term as president, Turkuvaz’s channel ATV was the most watched in the country.

A few days before the second round of the presidential election, in late May, I met Orhan Sali, the head of news at the English-language broadcaster A News and the head of the foreign news desk at A Haber. To enter Turkuvaz’s tall, glass-paneled headquarters on the outskirts of Istanbul, I had to pass through three security barriers. An assistant took me to Sali’s spacious office on the third floor. Sali, who was born in Greece, is small with an incongruously graying beard on his round, youthful face. He wore a crisp, white shirt. On a shelf near Sali’s desk sit a couple of awards, including at least one for “independent journalism,” he told me.

In the same breath, Sali also said, “We are pro-Erdogan, we are not hiding it.” He acknowledged that there is a risk in publishing the names of journalists critical of the Turkish government but said it was not unusual. “If you read the British tabloid newspapers,” he told me, “you will find tons of pictures, tons of addresses.”

This is not entirely accurate, according to Richard Danbury, who teaches journalism at the City University in London. “It is not true,” he told me, “that even tabloids as a matter of course publish people’s addresses and photos of people’s houses, particularly if they have been at risk of being attacked.”

But Sali was unconcerned. He approached a panel of screens covering the wall. Some of these channels, he said, are hardline and totally supportive of Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the main opposition candidate in Turkey’s recent election. “All of them,” he told me, “are terrorists.”

In the lead up to the presidential election, Turkuvaz outlets such as A News and A Haber gave Kilicdaroglu little to no coverage. Erdogan, meanwhile, received extensive coverage, according to Reporters Without Borders. One pro-government channel, TRT Haber, gave Erdogan 32 hours of airtime compared to just 30 minutes for Kilicdaroglu.

Sali, who seems to have a penchant for deflecting criticism of Turkuvaz’s journalism by comparing it to that of the British press, told me he sees no problem with this lack of balance. “The BBC,” he said, “is supporting the ruler. Who is the ruler? The king. You cannot say anything against the king, can you?”

At least seven journalists who have had their addresses published by Turkuvaz outlets are alleged by Erdogan’s government to be followers of the Islamic cleric Fetullah Gulen, who is suspected of having orchestrated a failed coup against Erdogan in 2016. Since the coup attempt, Erdogan’s government has imprisoned hundreds of critics they refer to as “FETO terrorists,” a derogatory reference to Gulen supporters. Cevheri Guven — the editor whose address in Germany was published in Sabah in September 2022 — is often described in pro-government media as the Joseph Goebbels of FETO, a reference to the Nazi propagandist.

“The 2016 coup had a major effect on the media landscape in Turkey,” said Joseph Fitsanakis, a professor of intelligence and security studies at Coastal Carolina University. “At that point,” he told me, “Erdogan made a conscious decision, a consistent effort to pretty much wipe out any non-AKP voices from the mainstream media landscape.” The AKP, or the Justice and Development Party, was co-founded by Erdogan in 2001.

In October 2022, the Turkish parliament passed sweeping legislation curtailing free speech, including implementing a vaguely worded law that effectively leaves anyone accused of spreading false information about Turkey’s domestic and foreign security facing three years in prison.

Before Erdogan’s rise to power, Turkey did not enjoy total media freedom, said Ustun, the media professor at St. Lawrence University. But, she told me, during his 21 years in politics, “there has been a gradual demise of the media freedom landscape.” Following the widespread protests in 2013, referred to as the Gezi Park protests, and the 2016 coup attempt, “efforts to control the mainstream media as well as the internet have intensified,” she added. The overwhelming majority of mainstream media outlets are now under the control of Erdogan and his allies.

Henri Barkey, a professor at Lehigh University and an adjunct senior fellow at the Council for Foreign Relations, told me that Erdogan has “muscled the press financially” by channeling advertising revenues to pro-government outlets such as those owned by the Turkuvaz Media Group. Erdogan, Barky says, has also weaponized the law. “They use the judicial system to punish the opposition press for whatever reason,” he told me. “You look left and you were meant to look right, and in Turkey today that is enough.”

The media has, for years now, been used as a tool of transnational repression, says Fitsanakis. In 2020, for instance, the U.K. expelled three Chinese spies who had been posing as journalists. But, Fitsanakis adds, since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, intelligence services in Europe and North America, fueled by a heightened awareness of the threat emanating from Moscow, have been collaborating more closely to remove Russian spies from within their borders.

The actions of other diplomatic missions too are being more closely monitored. Turkey, one of the most prolific perpetrators of transnational repression, according to Freedom House, has found itself a target of Western surveillance, making it harder for the state to place intelligence operatives inside embassies. In lieu of this traditional avenue for embedding intelligence sources in foreign countries, Fitsanakis believes, governments are turning in greater numbers toward friendly journalists. “It’s the perfect cover,” Fitsanakis told me. “You have access to influential people, and you get to ask a lot of questions without seeming strange.”

Erdogan’s re-election, experts fear, could mean he will further clamp down on democratic freedoms. Barkey believes there will be a brain drain as more intellectuals and critics leave Turkey for more congenial shores. But the evidence suggests that an emboldened Erdogan can still reach them.

“We might see a lot more emphasis on silencing any kind of opposition to Erdogan in the coming years,” Fitsanakis told me. “And because much of the opposition to Erdogan is now coming from Turks abroad, that fight is going to transfer to European soil.”

The Big Idea: Shifting Borders

Borders are liminal, notional spaces made more unstable by unparalleled migration, geopolitical ambition and the use of technology to transcend and, conversely, reinforce borders. Perhaps the most urgent contemporary question is how we now imagine and conceptualize boundaries. And, as a result, how we think about community.

Indian wrestlers say ‘me too’ but the BJP is not listening

Tusha Mittal — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 13:39:31 +0000

On the morning of May 28, the Delhi police manhandled a group of high-profile Indian wrestlers, including Olympic medalists, into a police bus. Images of the athletes — the most prominent of whom were women — being shoved, roughed up and dragged along the streets went viral, causing anger and outrage in a country with very few individual medal winners at the highest levels of international sport.

About a mile away, as the wrestlers were being violently restrained by the police, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was opening the country’s new parliament building, estimated to have cost $120 million, in a controversial ceremony that was boycotted by at least 19 opposition parties. The wrestlers were marching toward the building to draw attention to their cause when they were stopped. They had already been protesting for weeks at Jantar Mantar in central Delhi, a site designated for protests. But permission to protest outside the new parliament building, said the police, had been denied.

For a little over a month, the wrestlers camped out at Jantar Mantar. They have alleged that Brij Bhushan Singh, arguably the single most powerful official in Indian wrestling over the last decade, has been sexually harassing young female wrestlers for years. The protesters include some of Indian wrestling’s biggest names — Sakshi Malik,the bronze medalist at the 2016 Rio Olympics, Vinesh Phogat, a medalist at the World Wrestling Championship in both 2019 and 2022, and Bajrang Punia, the bronze medalist at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Since it became an independent nation in 1947, India has won 30 Olympic medals, seven of them in wrestling. Medal-winning athletes are celebrated with fervor largely because there are so few of them in India.

Brij Bhushan Singh, the man the wrestlers accuse of systematic sexual abuse, is a six-time member of parliament. He is an influential figure in the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s ruling party.. Singh has the reputation of being a strongman who wields considerable political muscle in Uttar Pradesh, a vast northern state that is electorally crucial for keeping the BJP in power. In addition to his parliamentary duties, Singh has been the president of the Wrestling Federation of India since 2011. Though he was asked to temporarily step aside from his role at the Federation after the allegations came to light, he is still listed as its president on its website.

Brij Bhushan Singh, a six-time member of India's Parliament and the president of India's wrestling federation, has been accused of sexually harassing young female wrestlers for years. Photo by Deepak Gupta/Hindustan Times via Getty Images.

Since April 23, Indian wrestlers, including the sport’s biggest stars, have been living in a makeshift plastic tent and sleeping on mattresses laid out on the pavement. They have called for Singh’s dismissal from the Federation and for his arrest. “We have been sitting here asking for justice,” Vinesh Phogat told me. Their supporters point to the lack of action by the police, including delays in just registering a complaint, as evidence that the BJP is shielding Singh.

He has, the wrestlers say, been harassing young athletes, including at least one minor, for over a decade with impunity. When Sakshi Malik joined a training camp in the city of Lucknow in 2012, she told me, older wrestlers warned her that Singh “was not a good man, that he sexually harassed girls.” She described his predatory behavior as an open secret in the wrestling community. “The parents, the women’s coaches, the men’s coaches, everyone knew this was happening.” But, she added, he was so powerful that “no one had the courage to speak out against him.”

Phogat also told me that Singh would “harass almost every girl.” And that if the young women wrestlers resisted, Singh “would ruin their game” and subject them to “mental torture.” Many young women, Phogat said, “have left wrestling because of him.”

Paramjeet Malik, a former official physiotherapist of the Wrestling Federation of India, said he was aware that Singh harassed women. He told me that in 2014, three young wrestlers had confided in him that they had been sexually harassed by Singh. Malik lived with the athletes at the training camp in Lucknow that year. He told me that, on several occasions, he had noticed a car that he knew belonged to Singh stop at the camp to pick up women wrestlers. “I saw them leaving the camp at night, after eleven, or sometimes at midnight,” he told me. When he asked the girls what was going on, he said, some of them broke down and told him that they were being called to Singh’s residence in the city.

If they refused to go, Malik told me, they were told that Singh “would have their names removed from the camp’s list, that they would be declared unfit, that their careers would be ruined.” Some of these girls, he said, were under 18 and came from low-income backgrounds. Sport, to them and their families, was a way out of poverty. Malik said he made a written complaint to a senior coach at the camp but no action was taken. Malik alleges that when he spoke to the media about Singh’s behavior, he was fired. According to Malik, the coach who fired him admitted that he had been receiving calls from Singh himself. The coach warned Malik that Singh was a powerful man and that Malik’s life could be in danger if he persisted. “That very night,” Malik told me, “we had to flee the camp.”

Wrestler Sangeeta Phogat, part of a famous family of Indian wrestlers, was detained by Delhi police along with other protestors as they tried to march toward the new parliament building in Delhi on May 28, 2023. Photo by Sanjeev Verma/Hindustan Times via Getty Images.

The three star wrestlers leading the current protests — Sakshi Malik, Vinesh Phogat and Bajrang Punia — said they believed they had reached a level of recognition that finally empowered them to take on Singh and stop the abuse. The trigger, Malik told me, was when she heard that 10 women had been harassed by Singh after a recent junior world championship. A few of the young women spoke directly to Malik. She said she had to speak up. “Enough was enough,” Malik told me, “we didn’t want coming generations of women to have to face the same thing.”

On April 21, seven women wrestlers, including a minor, filed police complaints against Singh at a Delhi police station. Their identities have not been publicly revealed. The women listed specific incidents of harassment between 2012 and 2022 and said they occurred at Singh’s official parliamentary residence in Delhi and during tournaments in India and abroad. The Indian Express newspaper reported that, in at least two complaints, the women described in detail how Singh touched them inappropriately on the pretext of checking their breath.

However, the Delhi police did not immediately register a case against Singh. The police in the Indian capital operate under the authority of India’s Home Ministry — as part of the federal, rather than local, government. India’s current home minister is Amit Shah, and he is effectively second only to Modi in the hierarchy of both the government and the BJP.

When the police failed to take note of their complaint, the wrestlers filed a petition with the Supreme Court asking for a police probe. Only after the court intervened did the Delhi police register two complaints against Singh. One of these complaints was from a minor and filed under India’s stringent Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses Act — a guilty verdict under the act results in, at minimum, a five-year sentence.

Singh denies all allegations and says he is willing “to be hanged” if found guilty. He has called the wrestlers’ protests “politically motivated.” Over the last month, several leaders from India’s opposition parties have visited the wrestlers’ sit-in to extend solidarity. Singh has since described the athletes as “toys” in the hands of opposition parties.

“Sexual harassment is not a political issue,” Phogat told me. She said it was Singh who was trying to make their complaints about politics in a bid to “save himself.” The wrestlers, Phogat said, have put their careers on the line for their cause. “We have some respect, some standing in the country,” she told me. “Something must have happened for us to be here.”

Phogat pointed to the U.S. gymnast Simone Biles, who testified against the U.S. national gymnastics team’s doctor Larry Nassar — accused of sexual abuse by more than 100 women. “When Simone Biles spoke up against sexual harassment,” Phogat said, “did they call her political?” She described Singh as India’s Larry Nassar. “There are many Larry Nassars here,” she told me, “not just one, but at least we are taking on one now.”

Kavita Krishnan, a feminist activist and writer, says that the BJP is “backing their leader” in a “brazen and shameless” way. “The ruling party has not distanced itself from this man,” she told me. “I cannot remember so blatant a case of political protection.” She said Singh’s “political power” in Uttar Pradesh, which has 80 seats in the Indian parliament, more than any other state, is “the basis of very cynical calculations this government is making about keeping this guy around.”

Krishnan added that in a normal, healthy democracy, the wrestlers’ complaints would have caused huge political embarrassment. One of the primary reasons for the absence of pressure on the BJP, she said, was the lack of serious and sustained mainstream media coverage of the scandal. The BJP exercises its control, she said, not only through government bodies but also through one of its “main propaganda arms” — the media. “The control of the propaganda media over public opinion,” Krishnan said, is what “the government relies on” to shape public conversation. Most mainstream media, she said, are either neglecting the story or suppressing it. “The most influential media with the greatest reach, especially in non-English Indian languages,” Krishnan told me, “are, for the large part, totally batting for the BJP and Brij Bhushan Singh.” Vinesh Phogat told me that “national TV is making Singh the hero and us the villains.”

The wrestlers first held a public protest in Delhi in January 2023. At the time, the government persuaded them to call it off by forming an oversight committee to examine the allegations and by asking Singh to “step aside” from his role at the Wrestling Federation. By late April, though, the wrestlers felt they had no choice but to resume protests after they saw no serious action being taken against Singh. The oversight committee’s report wasn’t made public, and the athletes expressed a lack of faith in its functioning.

Sakshi Malik told me that she believed the committee had given Singh “a clean chit,” which means effectively clearing him of all charges. The wrestlers claimed that Singh had also resumed overseeing tournaments in his area and was still calling the shots in the Federation, a sign of his political power.

To further show off his political clout, Singh has called for a mass rally on June 5 in the city of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, a place sacred to Hindus. “On the appeal of the nation’s revered saints, a grand rally for public awareness,” reads a poster for the event, complete with an image of a Hindu god. Krishnan described the rally as an attempt by a BJP politician at “invoking Hindu identity” and “Hindu supremacist politics” to imply that he is innocent and deserves the support of all Hindus. Singh has claimed that over one million Hindu seers will attend. “Under the leadership of seers, we will force the government to change the law,” he declared, referring to India’s Protection of Children from Sexual Offenses Act.

The wrestlers say that Singh has tried to intimidate the athletes who complained to the police. Malik told me that the minor in particular has been targeted. “Phone calls have been made to her parents,” Malik said. Strange cars have been spotted around her house at night.

Even as Singh has attempted grandstanding and deploying strong-arm tactics, the wrestlers have stood their ground. On May 28, the police detained the wrestlers for the day and arrested at least 700 others across the capital. With the wrestlers and their supporters held at different police stations, the authorities took the opportunity to clear their protest site and said they would no longer allow the month-long sit-in to continue. Delhi police also charged the wrestlers with “rioting” and “obstructing a public servant.” The wrestlers have since announced that they will begin an indefinite hunger strike.

In the past few weeks, as the protests have intensified, the wrestlers have received support from student unions, women’s groups, labor unions, farmers’ collectives and even the International Olympic Committee. On the evening of May 23, nearly 500 people marched to India Gate, a war memorial in the heart of Delhi, as part of a candlelight protest in support of the wrestlers. Sakshi Malik stood on the edge of a police barricade and lit a candle, as hundreds gathered before her waving Indian flags. “This is a fight for India’s daughters,” she told the crowd. “We have to win this. And we will.”

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Utah’s online porn law puts teens’ digital rights at risk

Rebekah Robinson — Tue, 23 May 2023 13:32:40 +0000

A new Utah law intended to keep kids from accessing pornography and other kinds of “harmful material” online is raising critical questions about the First Amendment rights of young people and the privacy implications of checking IDs at websites’ proverbial doors.

Policymakers who pushed for the law say it will help protect kids from mental health issues and other risks that can arise from viewing certain kinds of material online. But what counts as “harmful,” exactly? The law is aimed at pornography, but it extends to virtually any commercial website with content that does not have “literary, artistic, political or scientific” value for minors and that makes up more than a third of all material on that site. With the law now in effect this month, anyone in Utah can sue violators if a minor accesses content on their website. Nonprofit-run sites, search engines and news-gathering organizations are exempt from liability.

Utah passed another law earlier this year to regulate minors’ access to social media platforms, which requires teens to get parental consent to use the platforms and prohibits them from using such platforms between 10:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m. Research has shown that social media can be harmful to the mental health of young people. But age verification and time curfews might not be the best solutions to the problems that lawmakers have trained their focus on.

Heidi Tandy, a lawyer and First Amendment speech researcher, says it’s worrying that policymakers don’t consider kids’ rights. “It's very clear that there is a sliding scale of First Amendment rights for those under the age of 18,” Tandy told me.

On Twitter, Electronic Frontier Foundation researcher Jason Kelley pointed out that while politicians tend to frame these laws as protection for children, they apply to everyone under the age of 18. He warned against “lumping in 10 year olds with seventeen year olds who can work, apply for emancipation, and drive.” Older teens are much more likely to seek out sexual content online — and have legitimate reasons to do so — than kids who are just nine or 10 years old.

Kelley suggested that the Utah law might end up pushing well past pornography to cover things like sexual education materials or fiction that includes sexual themes.

“The goal is often not just to remove or block what most of us would consider adult content, but go beyond that,” he told me. Kelley says advocates have “a certain reasonable fear that larger swaths of sites would be swept up in the law.”

“You've seen that, with definitions of what’s considered pornography or adult content in places like Florida, they're removing books from libraries,” Kelley said, referring to recent legislation targeting books that are considered “sexually explicit” or that deal with gender identity, sexuality and related subjects.

Experts and adult film industry voices have also noted that these restrictions could send teens toward more obscure sites that parents or policymakers might not be aware of. This is a key argument that Pornhub makes, the Canada-based adult content site that consistently ranks among the most popular websites in the world. Earlier this month, Pornhub blocked access to videos on its site for all users based in Utah to show its opposition to the law. People in Utah who tried accessing the site were instead redirected to a video featuring adult film actress Cherie DeVille explaining the company’s objections to the law. Among other things, she noted that it could lead teens to sites with no protections against videos depicting things like sexual violence or child abuse.

There’s good reason to believe that rules like the one in Utah will soon spread to much of the U.S. The state of Louisiana was the first ever to implement this type of age verification law. A raft of similarly-worded age verification bills, what Kelley calls “copycat laws,” have been introduced in six states so far this year. All of these policies ostensibly require websites to introduce technical mechanisms for checking a user’s age before they can access that site’s content. Although the Louisiana law provides special guidance on this, Utah hasn’t established a standard for how sites should digitally verify a user’s age.

How should websites card their users, exactly? Utah recently implemented a pilot project for making driver’s licenses accessible on a mobile device that comes with an annual subscription cost. A digital ID works in tandem with a state's motor vehicle administration, so it can be considered a valid form of identification for buying alcohol or other age-restricted products.

Louisiana, meanwhile, requires sites to use “commercial age verification systems.” And there’s a burgeoning industry waiting to serve sites in states with these requirements. Third-party services like FaceTec and Yoti offer biometrics-driven age verification software that websites can pay for, but this software can be costly to buy and maintain, making it difficult for small businesses to comply with the law.

All of the solutions on the table thus far raise significant concerns about the privacy of young people’s data. As Coda has reported in the past, using biometrics to verify someone’s identity or assess their age often requires sites to hold troves of personal data that can become vulnerable to breaches or even targeted abuse, harming users in the near term or for years ahead.

“People who want age verification laws have the best interest of teenagers at heart,” Tandy told me. But, she said, “I don't think they're thinking through the privacy ramifications of what they're asking for.”

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Vietnam censors Netflix shows for ‘hurting the feelings of the people’

Dien Nguyen An Luong — Mon, 08 May 2023 13:52:15 +0000

Ordinary Vietnamese people have become increasingly fragile, prone to getting offended at the smallest slight against national pride. Or so the authorities claim. Nowhere is this narrative more manifest than in the censor’s wrath over Netflix.

The latest flare-up occurred in mid-April, when the American streaming giant scrambled to remove the first episode of the docuseries “MH370: The Plane That Disappeared” from its service in Vietnam. The Vietnamese authorities excoriated the three-episode show over what they characterized as “inaccurate and unsubstantiated” information about Vietnam’s search-and-rescue operation to locate flight MH370, the Malaysia Airlines plane that vanished in 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people onboard.

This wasn’t the first show to go. Before that, it was “Little Women,” a K-drama about three sisters living in modern day South Korea. The show was axed by Netflix in Vietnam last October after the authorities claimed it distorted Vietnam War history. And in 2021, Vietnam ordered Netflix to stop showing the Australian spy drama “Pine Gap,” which included footage of a map showing Beijing’s unilaterally declared “nine-dash line” that defines its expansive maritime claims in the South China Sea.

The removals followed an eerily similar pattern: To justify their censorship demands, Vietnamese censors invoked the “hurting the feelings of the people” narrative either in their own statements or by way of reports in state-controlled media.

But to what extent does this “hurt feelings” rhetoric actually reflect popular opinion on the ground?

Public opinion and state actions — which drives which?

The rationale of the Vietnamese authorities for flagging the MH370 docuseries could be boiled down to a just single line in the first episode, which featured a family member of a missing Chinese passenger desperately urging her country to step in: "We hope the Chinese government can quickly send a search-and-rescue team, as the Vietnamese [government] doesn't seem to have much ability."

The government claims that the show caused “an uproar among the populace.” But it is hard to fathom why the Vietnamese public would get riled up about a single line quoting a plea made by an ordinary citizen. Lam Nguyen, a 22-year-old student in Ho Chi Minh City who managed to watch the series before it was flagged by the authorities, told me that she was “a little surprised, but not frustrated” by the scene. The bottom line, Lam said, is that people in her social circle — herself included — feel that the Vietnamese government’s response to that line was an “overreaction.”

“While some believe that the Vietnamese government put a lot of effort in the search, it is unfair to criticize the docuseries that captured the anger and fear of family members who were desperate to find their loved ones,” Lam said.

The online backlash against the MH370 docuseries also played out primarily inside a bubble of pro-government Facebook groups and state-aligned media coverage. This means that, at best, the justification by the Vietnamese authorities stands on empirically thin ice. At worst, such nationalist sentiments were likely manufactured to rationalize censorship demands.

In asking Netflix to remove “Pine Gap” in 2021, the Vietnamese authorities claimed that the show “angered and hurt the feelings of the entire people of Vietnam.” Few moves risk stirring up a hornet’s nest in Vietnam more than one that validates China’s maritime claims — the Vietnamese public likely would have objected to the display of the nine-dash line if they had seen the drama. But it’s unlikely that many ordinary Vietnamese, let alone the “entire” population, had a chance to take in the mini-series before it disappeared.

And in the case of “Little Women,” while ordinary internet users did join the chorus of criticism about the show, this only happened after pro-government groups lit the flames.

It all comes at a time when Vietnam’s state-sponsored cyber troops are growing more and more adept at manufacturing public sentiment online. “Astroturfing” — state-orchestrated efforts to manipulate online discourse — likely had some role in what played out online. In a country where the public at large increasingly balks at the chance to express political opinions, what might have looked like grassroots public opinion may have been shaped or even dictated by online propagandists.

These reactions — whether genuine or not — gave the Vietnamese authorities the right pretext to ask Netflix to remove the content they deemed harmful and helped drive home their demands through the mainstream media. The streaming platform quickly accommodated the censorship orders.

Vietnam’s growing leverage over Big Tech

While the authorities were explicit in asking that Netflix remove “Pine Gap” and “Little Women” in their entirety, they were less specific when it came to the MH370 docuseries. In fact, they only requested the rectification and removal of “inaccurate information” related to the country’s search efforts in the show. But Netflix gutted the entire episode instead, in what looked like a bid to get on the good side of the officials who regulate it.

This underlines Vietnam’s growing leverage over western tech companies, many of which are making a lot of money in Vietnam. Facebook is especially dominant. Vietnam ranks seventh among the ten countries boasting the highest number of Facebook users worldwide, an estimated 70 million. The company reportedly generates annual local revenue of more than $1 billion. But others aren’t far behind. DataReportal estimates that YouTube has 63 million users in Vietnam and TikTok has around 50 million.

State-orchestrated efforts aimed at reining in public discussion have bred increasingly subservient responses from the industry. The state has wielded the stick of shutting down disobedient social media platforms altogether — it threatened to block Facebook in 2020 over political posts. And it has dangled the carrot of access to a lucrative market of 97 million people. In recent years, Big Tech firms — chief among them Meta’s Facebook, Google’s YouTube and ByteDance’s TikTok — have shown increasing willingness to honor content removal demands. Hanoi now openly brags about high compliance rates among those platforms, which all exceed 90%.

So Netflix is straddling a treacherous line. As content removal has remained a key tactic in Vietnam’s online censorship dragnet, resisting the government’s takedown requests does not seem to bode well for Netflix’s future. But placating such requests has proved equally daunting in a country where an arbitrary censorship regime makes it impossible to pinpoint precisely what kind of content will be seen as crossing a line.

Nationalism, weaponized

The need to safeguard national prestige online has dictated Vietnam’s internet controls. But this kind of censorship overdrive, compounded by the apparent manufacturing of public opinion to buttress their rationale, only lays bare the insecurity of the Vietnamese authorities when faced with inconvenient narratives.

Zachary Abuza, an expert on Southeast Asian politics and security issues at the National War College in Washington, D.C., told me he was “puzzled by the hypersensitivity” of the government over the MH370 show. “When the planes came down, I was quite impressed with how quickly Vietnam responded and how well coordinated their efforts appeared,” Abuza said of Vietnam’s search efforts. “To be fair, Vietnam has very limited numbers of aircraft that are suitable for maritime search and rescue but responded in remarkable speed to a humanitarian catastrophe,” he said.

The facade of toughness in axing “Little Women” appears to be a politically expedient ploy to paper over a reality in which the Vietnamese government has never publicly pushed for an official apology, much less reparations, from South Korea for its atrocities during the Vietnam War. This could invite public criticism that the Vietnamese authorities are preaching nationalism while at the same time drinking foreign Kool-Aid, given the economic leverage South Korea has established in Vietnam.

There have been times when the Vietnamese government has genuinely needed to appeal to nationalism to justify its foreign policy decisions. Case in point: In registering its indignation with Beijing’s muscle-flexing moves in the South China Sea, Hanoi has more than once tapped into anti-China sentiments to rally the public behind the flag. This dynamic manifests most often in cyberspace and sometimes in mainstream media. On a few occasions, Vietnam has even green-lit anti-China protests.

But moving forward, the more the manufacturing of public opinion becomes a pattern, the more likely foreign observers are to accuse the Vietnamese government of crying wolf about the need to protect nationalist sentiments. China may be especially equipped to do so, given the parallels between the regimes and their respective playbooks.

Like their Chinese counterparts, Vietnamese leaders are probably well aware that in addition to the country’s rising standard of living, nationalism remains a crucial tool for maintaining the regime’s legitimacy. But exploiting nationalism for authoritarian control could eventually end up chipping away at the very legitimacy the Vietnamese state is craving. The public’s eyes are discerning.

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Immigrating to the US? ICE wants your biometrics

Erica Hellerstein — Mon, 01 May 2023 13:48:36 +0000

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is testing a shiny new tool for its digital surveillance arsenal. It is a GPS-enabled wristwatch with facial recognition capabilities that will make it easier — officials say — for migrants awaiting immigration hearings to check in with the agency.

From ankle monitors to smartphone apps to the new Fitbit-esque smartwatch, the Biden administration has overseen a dramatic expansion of the technological toolbox used to surveil immigrants awaiting their hearings in the U.S. White House officials say these measures, all part of ICE’s Alternatives to Detention program, are more humane than traditional detention. But critics argue that the system reproduces the dynamics of incarceration with a technocratic spin, compromising the privacy rights of hundreds of thousands of immigrants and asylum seekers while leaving them with lasting psychological damage.

The program has also left migrants and human rights advocates with lots of questions about what exactly the government does with the substantial amounts of data that it collects. In a curious turn of events, less than a month before ICE announced its plans to pilot test the smartwatch, it unveiled its first-ever analysis of privacy risks that the Alternatives to Detention program carries.

All U.S. federal agencies are required by law to assess the potential privacy impacts of any technology they plan to use before actually deploying the software or tool. Although ICE first rolled out its electronic monitoring program in 2004, it didn’t get around to publishing an assessment of the program’s privacy-related risks until just last month.

Nearly two decades overdue, the assessment alludes to — but doesn’t answer — a number of key questions about the technologies that the agency uses to monitor immigrants to the U.S.

Critics say the document does little to address the privacy civil liberties and human rights concerns they have long raised with the agency about the program. Instead, they say it presents red flags about ICE’s broad data collection and retention policies — indications that the agency is failing to meaningfully confront the long-term consequences of placing migrants under an invasive surveillance regime.

“These technologies represent an assault on people's bodily autonomy,” said Hannah Lucal, a technology fellow with the immigrant rights legal firm Just Futures Law, which focuses on the intersection of immigration and technology. Alternatives to Detention, Lucal added, “is not a departure from the system of punishment that ICE produces. It's really an extension of it.”

Although ICE’s e-monitoring program began two decades ago, the number of migrants subjected to electronic monitoring has exploded during Biden’s presidency. When he took office in January 2021, there were 86,000 people in the program. Now, over 280,000 migrants are enrolled in the digital surveillance system.

Migrants assigned to Alternatives to Detention are placed under one of three forms of electronic surveillance: a GPS ankle monitor with 24/7 location tracking, a phone reporting system that uses voice recognition to verify a person’s identity or a smartphone app that uses facial recognition software and GPS location tracking for check-ins. The smartphone app, SmartLINK, is responsible for the exponential growth in enrollment under the Biden administration. About 253,875 immigrants under ICE’s electronic monitoring system are on SmartLINK, according to the most up-to-date statistics from ICE. That’s up from 26,000 people on the app when Biden took office.

SmartLINK has been a focal point of concern for privacy experts. Despite the rapid addition of migrants to the app in recent years, ICE has provided little information about the data it collects and how it might be shared with other agencies. The app is operated by B.I. Incorporated, a subsidiary of the GEO Group, a private prison company, as part of a $2.2 billion contract with ICE.

Last year, when I spoke with advocates who sued the federal government for more details about the app’s functionality and data collection policies (the lawsuit is ongoing), they posed some key questions about SmartLINK: Is the data collected by the app accessible to other government agencies? Does SmartLINK have the technical ability to gather location data about Alternatives to Detention enrollees beyond their designated check-ins? Does ICE provide adequate oversight of B.I.? Does B.I. have the ability to share the data it collects on Alternatives to Detention participants with third parties, such as other state agencies, or even other companies?

In 50 pages of explanation and assessment, the document does little to answer these questions. Chief among critics’ concerns are questions about location data tracking. The privacy assessment states that SmartLINK app is only able to collect GPS location data at the time of the program participants’ check-ins and when they log into the app. But a F.A.Q. about SmartLINK on ICE’s website complicates the picture. The page refers to another SmartLINK device — a B.I-issued phone with the app pre-installed — given to some program enrollees. According to the F.A.Q., this phone has the technical capability to monitor enrollees’ locations in real time, but “this is not a feature that ICE has elected to use for participants.”

Lucal, from Just Futures Law, is skeptical. If the agency has the capacity to turn on continuous location monitoring, “there is absolutely no assurance that that is not happening or would not happen,” she told me. The absence of discussion in the privacy assessment about the B.I.-issued phone’s continuous location monitoring capabilities “seems like a gaping hole,” she added. “At any time, it could become active. And how would we know?”

‘Abuse of data is a near-certainty at ICE’

Privacy experts also told me they feared the data collected through Alternatives to Detention could be disseminated to other databases. The privacy assessment acknowledges that there is a risk that the information from the electronic monitoring program could be stored in other databases run by the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE. It alleges that this risk, however, is “partially mitigated” by referring to a DHS policy that states that information is shared within the agency in accordance with the law and only for authorized purposes because officials “must have timely access to all relevant information for which they have a need-to-know to successfully perform their duties.” Jake Wiener, an attorney and surveillance expert with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says this portion of the policy ostensibly acknowledges that “instead of being mitigated, this risk is an open, ongoing, and harmful practice.”

This is no small matter, Wiener points out, given recent reporting from WIRED that found that ICE employees and contractors abused their access to internal databases to search for information about former partners and coworkers, provided their login information to family members and even shared privileged information with criminals in exchange for cash. The assessment, Wiener says, “fails to consider that abuse of data is a near-certainty at ICE, and that putting that data in more hands by sending it to DHS’s far-reaching databases increases the likelihood of harm.”

The document also reveals that ICE agents and case managers employed by the contractor B.I. have access to the historical location data of migrants who used GPS ankle monitors. The document does not explain why officials would need access to participants’ historical location data — information that could be used to patch together a full picture of enrollees’ routine movements, including where they work and regularly spend time. Last year, a former SmartLINK participant told me he became anxious about the agency’s access to his location data after learning that ICE officers used data collected from workers’ GPS monitors to orchestrate a mass immigration raid at a poultry plant in Mississippi.

“A major concern is that ICE can use any of the data that it extracts to carry out location surveillance of not just the people they subject to these programs, but also anyone who might be in close proximity to them, like family members or people they live with or neighbors,” Lucal said. “There's just this massive scale of surveillance that's happening through this program. And the privacy assessment is trying really hard to obscure that, but it's coming through.”

There is also a glaring omission in the assessment. In an announcement last week, ICE touted its latest surveillance tech tool — GPS-enabled wristwatch trackers — but there is no mention of the technology in the privacy assessment. One can only wonder how long it will be before ICE endeavors to assess the risks of its newest tool if the agency decides to deploy it en masse when the pilot testing period ends.

White House officials say these technologies are more humane than detention. But they still have adverse, real-world impacts on the people who use them. Migrants I interviewed last year described how the phone app and the agency’s other e-carceration technologies harmed their relationships and employment prospects and brought them emotional and physical distress.

A 2021 report by the Cardozo School of Law found that 90% of people with ankle monitors said the device negatively affected their physical and mental health, causing everything from electric shocks to sleep disruption, social isolation and suicidal ideation. In interviews with me last year, people forced to use SmartLINK, meanwhile, expressed deep anxieties about the app’s technological glitches, fearing that malfunctions during the check-in process could lead to their deportation. Carlos, an immigrant placed on SmartLINK, described the app as a “shadow” hovering over his family.

“Every time I get a call from an unknown number and they see it, they think that it’s from ICE asking me where I am.” He said no matter the technology used — from ankle monitors to smartphones — the outcome is the same: “Fear. The only thing that changes is the system.”

The artwork for this piece was developed during a Rhode Island School of Design course taught by Marisa Mazria Katz, in collaboration with the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting.

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Why India’s defamation laws are hurting its democracy

Ashish Khetan — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 13:41:27 +0000

On April 3, Rahul Gandhi, a son, grandson and great-grandson of former Indian prime ministers, showed up in Surat, an industrial city in the Indian state of Gujarat, to appeal his conviction for defamation and the two-year sentence that has resulted in his automatic disqualification from India’s Parliament. Gandhi, the face of the opposition Congress party, was accompanied by his sister and prominent party leaders. There were streetside protests in Surat by Congress supporters, as there have been around the country since March 23 when Gandhi was convicted.

It was, tweeted India's minister of law and justice, a member of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party, a “childish attempt to bring pressure on the appellate court.” Opponents of the BJP, though, say Gandhi was handed a practically unheard-of maximum sentence for remarks he made while campaigning in 2019 that did not meet the threshold for criminal defamation. They also point to the political expediency of the two-year sentence, the exact period of time required to ensure Gandhi was disqualified from Parliament and potentially from participating in the next general election.

Outrage over what appeared to be political chicanery spread quickly. Several opposition parties united to condemn the expulsion of Gandhi. “I strongly condemn the fascist action,” said Tamil Nadu’s chief minister, M.K. Stalin, of how quickly the BJP moved to ensure Gandhi's disqualification. “I request all Indian political parties,” he added, “to realize that the action against Rahul Gandhi is an attack on progressive democratic forces and oppose it in unison.”

On April 3, while Gandhi was in Surat, Stalin was hosting leading figures from all of India's major opposition parties as part of a social justice conference he said would help create a united front to fight "bigotry and religious hegemony," a pointed reference to the BJP's Hindu nationalist politics. Academic and political commentator Apoorvanand wrote that the opposition to the BJP was unified because it considered Gandhi's expulsion from Parliament “an audacious signal by the government that it can go to any extent to cripple political forces who challenge it democratically.”

How much of a challenge Rahul Gandhi represents to the BJP is open to debate. He has been mocked for years as an impetuous, naive and entitled politician who believes leadership to be his inheritance. The BJP's caricature of Gandhi as a princeling fawned over by acolytes in the Congress party — more loyal to a dynasty than the nation — has been incredibly effective. Regional leaders like Akhilesh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh or Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal bridled at being too closely associated with Gandhi and at the general assumption that he would lead any opposition coalition against the BJP.

Just before Gandhi was disqualified from parliament, Banerjee reportedly told her party workers that the BJP was deliberately making Gandhi out to be the face of the opposition because he was so easy for Modi to defeat. Now, Gandhi, as opposition parties rally behind him, might appear a more formidable figure. Spokespersons for the governments of both the United States and Germany have responded to the news of Gandhi's expulsion with cautiously-phrased references to the importance of “judicial independence.” The notoriously thin-skinned BJP government was angered by these tepid comments, with Jaishankar, the foreign minister, telling a sympathetic audience that “the West has a bad habit for a long time of commenting on other people.” They think, he said, “that it’s some kind of God-given right.” The urbane Congress politician Shashi Tharoor, a former United Nations official, joked that he would “strongly urge my friend Jai to cool it a little bit.”

In a year when the BJP hopes to use India's presidency at the G20 as evidence of its growing influence on world affairs, the treatment of Rahul Gandhi appears to confirm a growing belief that Modi and the BJP use the law — whether the courts or investigating agencies — to stifle critical voices in politics, the media or online.

The BJP seems particularly sensitive to criticism in the foreign media or on foreign soil. For weeks now, both houses of India’s Parliament have barely functioned. Proceedings are adjourned within minutes of the start. Incidentally, it costs the Indian people a little over $3,000 per minute to maintain their parliament, making any time wasted very expensive. At least part of the deadlock was caused by BJP representatives demanding an apology from Rahul Gandhi for criticizing India on a recent visit to the United Kingdom. In a talk at Cambridge University last month, Gandhi said India faced “an attack on the basic structure of democracy.” This was interpreted by the BJP as a demand for foreign interference in India's internal affairs.

It was against this backdrop that Gandhi was convicted by the court in Surat for the remarks he made in 2019. Speaking in Hindi at an election rally, Gandhi asked in a sarcastic aside why the names of prominent Indian frauds, men who’d stolen large sums of money, all happened to be Modi. He mentioned three Modis, including the prime minister, and said, roughly translated, “If you search a bit, a lot more Modis will come to light.”

This was enough for the magistrate in Surat to pronounce Gandhi guilty of defamation, an offense in India under both civil and criminal law. Indian criminal defamation law appears, in both letter and spirit, to have become only more regressive since it was first enacted in 1860. Truth is not an absolute defense. Even the relatives of a deceased person can claim defamation. Since the law criminalizes “any imputation concerning any person,” it means that even if the statement in question did not directly name the complainants, they can still initiate criminal action.

In Rahul Gandhi’s case, the complainants were not the three Modis he named but a BJP legislator from Gujarat named Purnesh Modi. He complained that Gandhi had defamed all 130 million people in India who bear the last name Modi, an apparently preposterous charge with which the Surat court agreed.

India and other major democracies have taken two different approaches in the area of defamation law. In the U.K. and U.S., defamation law has been transformed.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1964 ruling in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan transformed the law of defamation around the world, tilting the balance in favor of uninhibited, robust and wide-open speech. Justice William Brennan ruled that for free speech to survive it needed “breathing space.” Erroneous statements or even vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials were inevitable in a free debate, the court ruled.

The First and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution were used to extend constitutional protections in favor of free speech and bar elected officials from seeking compensation, even for false comments made about their official actions unless those statements were made with “actual malice.”

A plaintiff had to demonstrate with clear and convincing evidence that false or inaccurate statements were made with knowledge of their dishonesty or with a reckless disregard for the truth under the “actual malice” standard. It also shifted the burden of proof from the defendant to the plaintiff. The court rejected the common law presumption of damages and asked aggrieved public servants to prove actual damages. In the same year, in Garrison v. Louisiana, the U.S. Supreme Court held that criminal defamation laws must be narrowly tailored to target only speech intending to lead to group disorder or inciting a breach of the peace. The court noted that, generally, criminal law is reserved for those crimes that threaten the security of society, and criminal sanctions cannot be justified merely because defamation is evil or damaging to a person.

Common law criminal libel was abolished by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1966 in Ashton v. Kentucky. Since then, the criminal defamation laws in 38 U.S. states and territories have either been repealed or struck down as unconstitutional. Once the Supreme Court set the precedent, other former British colonies and common law countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa, followed. A consensus emerged that if speakers were threatened with criminal prosecution for speaking out on matters of public concern, it would have a chilling effect on public discourse.

In 2009, the U.K. Parliament abolished the offense of criminal defamation. The 2013 U.K. Defamation Act introduced a requirement for claimants to show that they had suffered serious harm before suing for defamation. It also introduced a defense of "responsible publication on matters of public interest” and new statutory defenses of truth and honest opinion.

Meanwhile, even after achieving independence from British rule and adopting a republican constitution, India has continued to uphold legislation designed to protect the colonial elite. By amending the Code of Criminal Process in 1955, India also placed public officials into a separate class and established for them a special procedure involving the state machinery to sue private parties for making defamatory statements.

The Indian Constitution contains a chapter on fundamental rights, styled after the American Bill of Rights. Chief among the constitutionally guaranteed freedoms is the right to free speech and expression, subject only to limited restrictions. One of these restrictions is defamation. The key is that the restrictions have to be reasonable. But the Indian judiciary has continued to interpret and apply these restrictions narrowly. In 2016, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India upheld the constitutionality of criminal defamation. “Criminalizing defamation,” noted one lawyer, “serves no legitimate public purpose.” And, he added, “the court's reasoning is wooly at best.”

As a result, India's influential politicians and corporations are the ones who most frequently invoke criminal defamation, typically against either political opponents or journalists. India's criminal defamation laws closely resemble 19th century libel laws in England. But there is a major difference. In England, defamatory libel always involved publication in writing. Even if they were malicious, spoken words or gestures weren't considered libel. Verbal slander, though, can result in criminal charges under India’s penal code.

Rahul Gandhi has been convicted by a court in Gujarat for spoken words. Unless his conviction is stayed by the appellate court on April 13, he will continue to be barred from parliament, from doing the job he was elected to do for his constituency. If he were living in England 170 years ago, he would not even have faced criminal proceedings, let alone the possibility of imprisonment.

The dangers that India's criminal defamation laws pose to Indian democracy are evident in Rahul Gandhi's conviction — they appear to exist to protect the ruling class and intimidate critics into silence.

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Fingerprinting employees could cost Illinois businesses billions

Caitlin Thompson — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 13:28:53 +0000

Each time Latrina Cothron, a manager at a local White Castle restaurant near Chicago, Illinois, wanted to access workplace computers or see her pay stubs, she had to provide her fingerprint. She sued her employer, alleging that the company had violated her rights under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act by collecting her biometric data without her permission.

Now White Castle could be on the hook for upward of $17 billion.

On February 17, the Illinois Supreme Court made a decision on Cothron’s case that sent the state’s business community reeling. According to the court, every time a company collects an individual’s biometric data without getting informed written consent, it counts as a separate BIPA violation with potential damages from $1,000 to $5,000. In the past, courts interpreted the law to mean one violation per person. Now, if an employee uses their fingerprint to sign into work, or every time they clock in and out for shifts or breaks, the number of infractions rack up quickly, and so does the amount of money to be paid out in damages.

“So now six times a day, 340 days a year for five years, one person is potentially a $1 million risk,” said Jason Stiehl, an attorney who works on litigation, technology and brand protection for Crowell & Moring LLP in Chicago.

Justices on the Illinois Supreme Court acknowledged that the extent of damages could be “harsh, unjust, absurd or unwise” but said the court is bound to interpret laws as they are written by state legislators.

This court decision in the White Castle case comes on the heels of another decision in Tims v. Black Horse Carriers. The ruling, announced on February 2, set the statute of limitations for BIPA violations at five years. Previously, that number had been unclear, but the courts had largely interpreted it to be about two years. So now not only are the damages potentially much higher but the number of incidents in violation could be much larger.

BIPA has been held up as the gold standard for consumer privacy acts. But the court’s latest interpretation of the Illinois law shows the pitfalls of some of its key aspects. The rulings underscore the risks of creating vague regulations for evolving technology and illustrate the tension between business interests and privacy.

When Ted Claypoole, an Atlanta-based data, technology and privacy lawyer, heard the news about the court’s ruling in the White Castle and Black Horse Carriers cases, his first thought was “Oh crap.”

But as a lawyer who advises clients on compliance with data laws, the court’s decision wasn’t a surprise to Claypoole. BIPA is vaguely written, and issues like the statute of limitations or whether violations are measured per person or per scan aren’t clearly written out.

“It’s not a crazy reading of the statute. It just is a crazy result,” said Claypoole.

BIPA has been around since 2008, and Claypoole and privacy advocates consider it to be one of the most important privacy laws in the U.S. because it allows individuals to sue companies using their biometric information without written consent.

But consumers or employees don’t actually need to show that they were harmed by their data being collected, thanks to a 2019 ruling by the Illinois Supreme Court in a case involving the Six Flags theme park.

After that decision, there was an increase in the number of BIPA complaints filed because anyone whose biometrics had been collected without proper consent could file a lawsuit.

This led to what Jeff Keicher, a Republican in the Illinois State House of Representatives, called “an obscene shakedown of business communities.”

Many of these cases have been large class-action lawsuits, resulting in companies like McDonald’s and its franchises across the state paying millions in damages.

In the first case to go to trial, BNSF Railway had to pay $228 million after truck drivers brought a class-action suit over the company’s policy of scanning their fingerprints when they went to BNSF rail yards.

But the recent decision in the White Castle case brings the potential damages to another level. Trade associations in Illinois are raising alarms that these large settlements will drive companies out of business and force Illinois residents out of their jobs.

“Getting a $2 million complaint is one kind of problem. Getting a $10 billion award against you is a whole other kind of problem,” said Claypoole. “It's not just that it's higher. It's that it is existential. It's life threatening to a business.”

Since the rulings, the number of BIPA complaints filed has gone up, according to Anne Mayette, a labor and employment lawyer who advises clients on BIPA compliance at Husch Blackwell, a national law firm. The number of cases expanded after the Six Flags ruling determined that plaintiffs don’t need to prove that harm was inflicted by the use of their biometrics, but the pace slowed down after a while. After the two latest decisions, Mayette estimates she sees 3 to 10 BIPA suits a day, compared to a few per week previously.

It’s not all panic for businesses though. Many of the companies who were vulnerable to lawsuits have already built policies to be compliant with BIPA.

Stiehl, the attorney, also sees a “silver lining.” The amount in damages is discretionary, not mandatory, meaning a jury can decide to order a smaller payment. Stiehl thinks the White Castle case will go on to trial court, and the company will not be hit with the full $17 billion in damages. “It sends a larger message,” he said, “saying this is not your pot of gold.”

The typical pattern is for regulation to lag behind technology. BIPA is the opposite. In the years since the law passed in 2008, biometrics have changed significantly. That’s why Keicher, the house representative, thinks that it’s time to make some changes to the Illinois law.

“We're dealing with a statute that's 15 years old that didn't even foresee any of the technological advances that we have today,” he said. “To say that it doesn't need any attention, I think, is naive to the way our society is progressing.”

Keicher has brought forward two bills regarding BIPA this year that decrease a company’s liability to BIPA lawsuits. One clarifies that a company only needs to get consent to collect a person’s biometrics once and makes it clear that BIPA doesn’t apply to biometrics that are stored as mathematical representations. The other says that if a company fixes the problem within 15 days of receiving notice of a violation of BIPA, it can’t be subject to legal action in pursuit of damages.

In particular, attorneys like Claypoole and Stiehl want to get rid of the ability for individuals to directly sue companies through a legal mechanism known as the right to private action. It’s what makes Illinois law unique and allows for these types of suits with statutory damages in the millions.

“Frankly, the easiest way is to take it out of the plaintiffs’ counsels’ hands,” said Stiehl. “ There are paths to still enforce these things in a reasonable way.”

A reckoning over BIPA could have an impact on potential legislation in states like New York, which is considering a similar law that includes the right to private action.

But BIPA isn’t the only model. Texas and Washington have similar biometric privacy laws, but they are enforced by the states’ attorney general, rather than individuals taking direct legal action against companies.

Keicher, for one, thinks handing the enforcement power to the attorney general, particularly in cases involving the employees of a company using biometrics, is a good idea.

Keicher is hopeful that there will be some amendments to BIPA made by the time the legislative session wraps up in May.

“I can't imagine we walk away at the end of the day without having some sort of accomplished guidepost of where this needs to go,” he said.

But not everyone shares that optimism. Bills amending BIPA historically haven’t gotten very far.

“I'm fully convinced a company will have to be bankrupted by this for a change to be made,” said Mayette, the lawyer at Husch Blackwell.

Keicher thinks that the current way BIPA is working in practice has gone beyond what the lawmakers who wrote the bill intended.

“I certainly don't think that the framers of the original bill would have wanted a $17 billion judgment against White Castle,” he said. “You can’t sell enough sliders to make that make sense.”

The artwork for this piece was developed during a Rhode Island School of Design course taught by Marisa Mazria Katz, in collaboration with the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting.

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Europe cracks down on China’s abuse of extradition

Frankie Vetch — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 14:38:11 +0000

A ruling that went into effect in January by the European Court of Human Rights halting all extraditions to China passed an important test earlier this month when the Italian Supreme Court overturned a decision to extradite a businesswoman to China.

The human rights court had determined that states that are party to the European Convention on Human Rights, which includes virtually all European nations except Russia and Belarus, cannot extradite people to China unless the Chinese government can demonstrate that the extradited person will not be tortured or be subject to inhuman and degrading treatment. This shuts down extraditions to a country that does not allow international scrutiny of its penitentiaries, underscoring international concern over the Chinese government’s widening dragnet that tries to bring home dissidents and critics living in exile.

But China still has the capability to tie down its citizens in lengthy legal battles by issuing Interpol red notices — an international alert that requests other countries find and arrest suspects who have fled abroad for extradition or other legal actions — while also deploying an array of illegal tools of repression. Despite Europe's attempt to close the door on China's extradition campaigns, Beijing has ratified a spate of new extradition treaties with countries outside of Europe.

In Liu v. Poland, the human rights court, which is based in Strasbourg, France, ruled that extraditing Hung Tao Liu, a Taiwanese man who had appealed his extradition from Poland, would place him at a significant risk of ill treatment and torture.

The judgment “substantially reduces the chances of extradition of persons to the PRC”, said Marcin Gorski, referring to the People’s Republic of China. Gorski is a Polish professor of law at the University of Ludz who represented Liu in the case.

China alleges Liu led a major telecommunications fraud. In an earlier case, the Spanish government in 2019 extradited 94 Taiwanese citizens to China as part of the same probe. The human rights court’s ruling covers anyone facing extradition to China, whether they are wanted for political reasons or for white-collar economic crimes.

China’s attempts to bring home dissidents and critics who are Chinese citizens living abroad have been intensifying over the past decade in tandem with China’s integration into the global financial system and its emergence as a world power, according to Nate Schenkkan, a senior director of research at Freedom House whose work focuses on authoritarianism.

Beijing has pursued dissidents in all corners of the world, triggering a response from the U.S. The White House has sought to control technology exports that can be used by China to conduct acts of repression while boosting the capacity of domestic law enforcement agencies to deal with the targeting of Chinese dissidents on U.S. soil. Members of Congress have introduced a bill that would define and criminalize transnational repression in federal law.

Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine last year was a wake-up call for Europe to the security threat posed not just by Moscow but by Beijing. But it has been left mostly to courts to protect people from China’s expanding reach.

European officials are failing to take action when it comes to the threat posed by China, often relying too heavily on the legal system to sort out the problem, said Laura Harth, the campaign director at the China-focused organization Safeguard Defenders.

While in many cases it is unlikely that China will be successful in its extradition attempts, the burden of defending themselves means the targets are quickly bogged down in costly legal battles, said Harth.

Europe’s human rights court has come under criticism from governments in recent years, accused of politicizing the domestic affairs of countries in Europe. The U.K. has made attempts to ignore the court’s rulings on granting prisoners the right to vote, and ministers have flirted with the idea of quitting the European Convention in response to the barriers it poses to the U.K.’s controversial plans on national immigration policy.

But for now, the court’s ruling on Chinese extraditions seems to be respected.

A Chinese businesswoman last summer was detained while passing through Italy. She was on her way to collect her kids from a holiday with their father in Greece. China had issued an Interpol red notice for her arrest and then requested her extradition.

Enrico Di Fiorino, a lawyer representing the businesswoman, said the European Court of Human Rights ruling was an important part of her defense and was likely to have played a role in winning the case.

Di Fiorino’s client is now free from extradition in Italy, but if she travels to other European countries, she is still at risk. If an Interpol red notice is issued against her while she is in a country that the Chinese government has an extradition treaty with, she risks being caught up in another lengthy legal battle. Hung Tao Liu, in the Poland case, spent five years in prison while litigating his extradition.

Formal extraditions comprise a small part of China’s larger campaign to silence and intimidate its dissidents into returning home. Coercion and harassment make up the bulk of China’s tactics. In fact, extraditions accounted for just 1% of the overall number of people returned to China. Involuntary returns, which include kidnappings, accounted for 64%.

Dissidents in Europe live in a climate of fear, frequently surveilled while their families back in China are harassed by the state. Several European countries have been investigating these more clandestine operations, most notably the use of overseas police stations, which can be used to silence Chinese dissidents living abroad.

Italy has been accused of hosting 11 overseas police stations. Chinese dissidents in the country are relieved by Italy’s court ruling while still fearful of China’s reach, said Harth.

In December, China ratified extradition treaties with Kenya, Congo, Uruguay and Armenia.

For Reinhard Butikofe, a German member of the European Parliament, this is concerning. But he cautioned that Europe should get its own house in order before European politicians can criticize other countries for cooperating with China’s extradition strategy. “I think before we can credibly approach anybody else, we have to clean up our own act first,” he said.

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Europe’s borders are a surveillance testing ground. The AI Act could change that

Isobel Cockerell — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 14:01:00 +0000

The European Union is currently drafting a new omnibus framework — the first of its kind in the world — to regulate the use of artificial intelligence for border control. The Artificial Intelligence Act is an attempt to create a legal framework that tech companies and governments would have to adhere to when testing new AI-powered technologies along European borders.

Currently fraught with delays, deadlocks and difficulties, the AI Act has the potential to be as powerful as the EU’s landmark GDPR act, which regulates data protection in the European bloc. And there are many marginalized groups who could benefit from the new legislation or suffer disproportionately if certain amendments don’t make it through.

For migrants crossing Europe in search of a safer and more dignified life, the law could have huge implications. Currently, Europe’s borders are a highly digitized, unregulated gray zone for tech companies and border agencies to test the latest developments in surveillance technology and predictive algorithms.

Europe’s borders bristle with drones, tracking and predictive technologies designed to make efficient guesses at which routes migrants might take. AI-powered lie detectors are also being deployed on arriving migrants, along with a vast range of other technologies. The European border could be described as a “testing ground,” said Petra Molnar, Associate Director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University and fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Centre. I spoke to her about what AI regulation could mean for people on the move — and for all of us.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

So why is the AI Act relevant for migrants crossing Europe?

Globally speaking, there are very few laws right on the books that can actually be used to govern tech. And currently, the border is a particularly unregulated space, and it’s become a testing ground for a lot of things, including tech. So the AI Act — if we can push through certain amendments — is a really unique opportunity to try and think through how we can create oversight, accountability and governance on all sorts of technologies at the border.

This act touches on pretty much everything from toys to predictive policing and AI-powered lie detectors. We really want to get policymakers to think about whether the act goes far enough to regulate or even ban some of the most high-risk pieces of technology because currently, it really doesn't. But unfortunately, we don't have high hopes that the migration stuff is going to be taken up in the way that I think it should.

Why not?

If you zoom out from the AI Act and you look at just the way that the EU has been positioning itself on migration, then you can see that securitization, surveillance, returns and deportations, importation of technology and facial recognition have all been really normalized. The EU doesn't really have an incentive to regulate tech at the border, because it wants to test out certain things in that space and then potentially use them in other instances. And the same with the private sector.

It’s also important to remember that there are vast amounts of money floating around to fund these tech projects. There’s money to be made on border tech — so that disincentivizes regulation. At the moment, it’s a free-for-all. And in an unregulated space, there’s a lot of room for experimentation.

What do you mean by experimentation? What kind of things are being tested out in Europe right now that you would like to see the back of?

We are trying to get the European Union to think about banning, for example, predictive analytics used for border enforcement. It’s a tool to assist border guards with their operations to try to push back people on the move. The European Border agency Frontex has already signaled its willingness to develop predictive analytics for its own purposes.

So how does predictive border policing work?

It works by using AI to predict which route a group of people on the move might take to cross a border, so that border enforcement can decide, for example, whether to station a platoon in a certain place. It helps them with their operations and can lead to pushbacks, which can potentially lead to rights-infringing situations.

Can you explain what the difference is between border agencies using this kind of technology to try to predict where people are and just using their own brains?

So for the past few years, reports about pushbacks have been marred with allegations of human rights abuses. And we’re still having that baseline discussion and debate around the humanitarian side of pushbacks. But with predictive border analytics, it’s as if we’ve skipped a few steps in that discussion. Because this technology adds a layer of efficiency to basically make it easier for border agencies to meet their needs and their quotas.

So we haven’t even properly talked about the humanitarian implications of these violent pushbacks and already they’re using technology to ramp up their operations.

Right. There’s also very little transparency about what exactly is happening and what kind of tools are being used. There needs to be a complete rethink about why we’re even leaning on these tools in the first place.

Can you talk a bit more about how the border is sometimes considered a separate space — and why it could be exempt from things like the AI Act?

So often the border gets conflated with national security issues. The space is already opaque and discretionary, but as soon as you slap on that national security label, it becomes very difficult to access information about what’s really happening. Responsibility, oversight and accountability are all muddied in this space — and that gets worse when you add tech on top of that.

You’ve talked before about how the concept of the border is moving away from the physical frontier to much further afield — and even beginning to exist in our own bodies. Can you just explain that a bit?

There’s this idea of the “shifting border.” Sometimes people call it border externalization. It’s not anything super new: The U.S. has been doing it for a while. The basic idea is that it removes the physical border from its geographic location and pushes it further afield. Either kind of vertically up — like when you're talking about aerial surveillance, the border is now in the sky. Or creating a surveillance dragnet that starts thousands of miles away from the actual border. For instance, the U.S. border actually starts in Central America when it comes to data sharing and surveillance. And the European Union is really leading the way in terms of externalizing its border into North and Sub-Saharan Africa. Niger, for example, gets a lot of money from the EU to do a lot of border enforcement. If you can prevent people from physically being on EU territory, where international human rights laws and refugee laws kick in, then half your work is done.

So basically someone is criminalized and marked out as a potential migrant before they’ve even tried to come to Europe?

Exactly. Predictive analytics and social media scraping tries to make predictions about who might be likely to move and whether they’re a risk. Like, ‘Oh, they happen to go to this particular mosque every Friday with their family, so let's mark that as a potential red flag.’ So the border as a physical space just becomes a performance. Even our phones can become a border. You can be tracked in terms of how you're interacting on Twitter or Facebook or TikTok. So we have to actually move away from these rigid understandings of what constitutes a border.

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