Ali Al-Ahmed
Contributor
Ali Al-Ahmed is the founder and director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs.
Matthew Hedges
Contributor
Dr. Matthew Hedges is a postdoctoral teaching assistant at the University of Exeter.
The TechCrunch Global Affairs Project examines the increasingly intertwined relationship between the tech sector and global politics.
Governments that purchase spyware tend to share a common pretext: the need to fight terrorist and other public safety threats. But we know that when autocratic regimes acquire state-of-the-art surveillance technology, they also intend to use it against activists, journalists, academics and any other dissenting voices they deem a threat. Spyware programs — used to infect phones and other hardware without the owner’s knowledge in order to track movements and steal information — are tools of repression just as surely as guns.
There have been too many well-documented cases to ignore this basic 21st century reality. Yet companies continue to sell their spyware to despotic governments, in some cases claiming ignorance about what is likely to happen next. This trend has rocked the community of political dissidents across the globe and has put them at greater risk of arrest and much worse.
We know because this technology has been used on us. As a naturalized American from Saudi Arabia and a British academic, we count ourselves and many colleagues among the v …
