Personal Details Exposed: Spyware and Human Rights in the Middle East and North Africa

Abstract

Much attention has been devoted in recent years to the dangers of spyware such as Pegasus, which its creators said would make the world safer by allowing government agencies to monitor and thwart terrorism and criminal activity. However, before the advent of spyware, governments used traditional tools to surveil, and in some instances, to repress. Thus, spyware in many countries continues past practices of stifling dissent in order to preserve regime stability. Spyware isn’t the only digital tool used to silence opposition voices; it is one of several tools in the authoritarian ruler’s digital repression toolkit. This thesis seeks to understand whether spyware like Pegasus has made human rights worse since it became commercially available in the early 2010s, and as it is just one of the many tools used to digitally repress, if it poses a unique threat. This research also seeks to understand whether different variations of autocracies, which have a high correlation with using repression to maintain power, use spyware differently. To examine these questions, this research will focus on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, where most systems of governance are either electoral autocracies or closed autocracies. The Arab uprisings that began in late 2010 will serve as a reference point as they signify a period when most governments in the MENA region were tamping down protests but had not yet harnessed the power of the internet.