Greece bans spyware, Belarus ramps up web surveillance, and Twitter deepens its Saudi ties
Greece will ban the sale of spyware, according to Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. The announcement comes as new details emerge about journalists and an opposition party leader who were targeted with Predator, a mobile surveillance software manufactured by the North Macedonian company Cytrox. Mitsotakis claims Greece will be the first country to enact substantive and effective legislation to explicitly ban such surveillance tech. A Greek parliamentary inquiry into the scandal is ongoing but Mitsotakis has already been accused of seeking to stifle the inquiry by blocking key witnesses from testifying. It seems unlikely that other countries will enact similar bans, with Predator already supplying its spyware to Egypt, Armenia, Serbia, Spain and Indonesia, among other countries, to enable authorities to track political opponents, journalists and critics.
Belarus’ KGB may soon have a backdoor to most network-based communications in the country. Under a decree issued by president Alexander Lukashenko last month, website owners and telecom operators will be required to connect to a state-controlled monitoring system that will capture all kinds of data about people’s day-to-day online activities. How will this actually work? That part is less clear, but the intent — to impose even stronger surveillance mechanisms on Belarusian citizens — is unmistakable.
Two TikTok stars in Nigeria were sentenced to 20 lashes each after they used the social media site to mock the governor in their northern state of Kano for alleged land grabbing, corruption and “sleeping on the job.” The pair was also forced to pay a fine, clean the courtroom for 30 days and publicly apologize on social media. Kano is one of a dozen northern, majority-Muslim states in Nigeria where the Sharia legal system has been used alongside the country's secular laws since 2000.
Last week, I wrote about Egyptian digital activist and political prisoner Alaa Abd El Fattah, who has been on hunger strike since April and stopped drinking water on November 6, to coincide with the launch of the COP27 climate summit in Sharm El-Sheikh. As of publication time, family members reported that Abd El Fattah was receiving medical attention and that judicial authorities had given his attorney permission to visit him. In an interview with Deutsche Welle, his sister Sanaa Seif said the family is in a panic. “None of us really wants to face the reality that my brother is about to die,” she said.