The growth in the popularity of the internet around the world, as evidenced by growing user numbers, particularly in Africa, has enabled citizens to harness its power as a tool of agency, creating new global and transnational spaces for civic participation, advocacy, and social change…
Governments around the world use surveillance technology to monitor external threats to national security. Some African governments are also spending vast sums on mass surveillance of their own citizens.
They are using mobile phone spyware, internet interception devices, social media monitoring and biometric identity systems. Artificial intelligence for facial recognition and car number plate recognition is another digital surveillance technology in their growing toolkit…
This week the UK is set to host its first AI Safety Summit. It aims to bring together international governments, leading AI companies, civil society groups and research experts to consider the risks of AI and how they can be mitigated through governance and international collaboration.
Street surveillance camera and graphical representation of facial recognition screening…
Mobile SIM registration linked to digital ID is causing exclusion of marginalised groups, and concerns about privacy in the absence of sufficient legal safeguards, especially in nations with a history of abuse by authorities…
On paper, citizen’s privacy rights are well protected throughout Africa. They are explicitly written into constitutions, international human rights conventions and domestic law. But, in the first comparative review of privacy protections across Africa we found that governments ignore the law to to carry out illegal digital surveillance of their citizens. What’s more, they are doing so with impunity…
State surveillance of citizens extends far beyond Pegasus spyware, the software developed by the Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group. There is a multi-million-pound global market in which companies compete to profit from helping states to illegally spy on their own citizens…
During Ethiopia’s June 2021 general election social media platforms became a contested political space, characterised by hate speech, disinformation, fake government accounts, and internet shutdowns…
This is the core of my contribution to a Nethope 2022 seminar at the invitation of Oxfam US: The Abolition of Some Digital Technologies Is Essential to Human Development and Social Justice…
Like so many aspects of our life, democratic debate is increasingly moving online. Yet it seems like every time citizens adopt a new digital tool or enter a new digital space to voice opposition, repressive governments respond with a whole arsenal of tactics to dampen dissent and deny their right to opinion and expression. For every new activist tactic there are three or four state countermeasures. New research has found that this digital game of whack-a-mole is playing out across Africa…
The publication of Digital Rights in Closing Civic Space by the African Digital Rights Network is the first comprehensive analysis of the range of digital technologies and tactics being used across Africa by citizens to open democratic space online and by governments to close it down…