Chinese protesters back Iranian women, Ethiopia hosts internet meet while keeping the internet off, and NSO’s legal woes

It feels as if the world can see and hear the voices of regular people in China in a way that seemed impossible just a few weeks ago. Reports of new demonstrations happening in different city plazas and university campuses across the country seem to surface by the hour. Protesters are taking incredible risks in the face of China’s notorious surveillance regime, most of them for the very first time. China operates the world’s most powerful and sophisticated digital censorship apparatus for this express purpose: to keep people quiet. And indeed, the news is awash with stories of protest messages and media being censored across the Chinese internet, alongside reports of pro-China trolls flooding protest hashtags on Twitter with pornography and ads for escort services. There’s probably a whole lot that is going unspoken or unreported. South China Morning Post’s Vivian Wu, who is posting terrific minute-by-minute coverage of the protests, tweeted that there is still “a huge info vacuum about real China.” 

But if the censorship regime were truly all-powerful, we wouldn’t even know this much. I’ve spent nearly a decade editing and organizing coverage of protest movements in the social media era. And I never imagined I could open my browser to find people in China and Iran, two of the “original gangster” internet authoritarian states, if you will, defying these controls and beaming their solidarity across borders. My former colleague Mahsa Alimardani, a seasoned expert on internet controls in Iran, re-shared a video from Shanghai, in which people shouted: “We don't want a dictatorship, we want a democracy. We don't want a leader, we want to vote. We stand with the people of Xinjiang! We stand with the women of Iran!” It’s a reminder that when you’re connected, it remains possible to transmit and receive information.

It’s an option that people in Ethiopia’s Tigray region have not had, or only had intermittently, for two years now. Information about atrocities and human rights abuses is almost impossible to gather. And an estimated six million people have been silenced. There remains no internet access in Tigray and no timeline for when access might be restored. Nonetheless, this week, government delegations, tech experts and civil society groups gathered in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, for the UN Internet Governance Forum. As if this were not ironic enough, delegates were apparently prohibited from bringing digital devices into the main conference hall. Nigerian tech law expert Gbenga Sesan put it plainly: “The focus on restricting access to digital devices, just the same way the Internet is still shut down in Tigray, is weird for an INTERNET Forum!”

NO IMMUNITY FOR NSO IN US COURTS

Embattled Israeli spyware giant NSO Group faces legal action in several jurisdictions, including civil trial in the U.S. In 2019, WhatsApp sued NSO Group after researchers proved that the company had exploited a technical vulnerability in WhatsApp’s systems in order to send its invasive surveillance software, known as Pegasus, to at least 1,400 people, including more than 80 journalists and human rights defenders. NSO does this exclusively as a client of governments. But that does not absolve it of responsibility for the harms it causes.