Digital Hopes, Real Power: How the Arab Spring Fueled a Global Surveillance Boom (eff.org) AI

The EFF argues that the 2011 Arab uprisings’ digital tactics spurred a global surveillance industry: governments upgraded monitoring, expanded cybercrime and protest-related laws to criminalize dissent, and relied on spyware markets to hack targets at scale. It also describes how biometrics, facial recognition, and “smart city” systems helped normalize automated tracking and risk profiling, including in migration and humanitarian settings. The piece warns that these tools and legal frameworks—often sold without meaningful safeguards—have been exported beyond the Middle East to support digital authoritarianism worldwide.