Over the last decade, authoritarian governments have rapidly tightened their grip on the digital realm. As they grow more sophisticated, learn from each other’s tactics, and, increasingly, spread their models of repression abroad, the battle for digital freedom that has always been central to Jigsaw’s mission has never been more urgent.
Jigsaw was founded on the cusp of the Arab Spring, perhaps the high-water mark for global optimism in technology’s ability to deliver a freer, more democratic period. During that period, the world witnessed the transformative power of technology in the hands of people striving for freedom and change. Yet, even then, it was abundantly clear that technology could be a powerful tool not just for the people yearning for liberty but also for the authoritarians who aimed to control them.
In the dozen years since our founding, Jigsaw has worked to counter repressive censorship around the world. We have worked with partners to document abuses through tools like the Digital Attack Map and the Censored Planet dashboard and developed technologies like Shield to protect vital sources of information as well as Outline and Intra to keep people connected to the open internet and fulfill Google’s mission to make the world’s information universally accessible.
On September 14th at our Confronting Digital Authoritarianism convening in New York, we brought together over 100 human rights activists, technologists, and policy experts, many of whom have been targeted by repressive governments. The day consisted of four panels, seven lightning talks, and two fire-side chats. Participants delved into the origins of and proliferation of the technological tools of authoritarianism, spotlighting tools for surveillance, censorship, and state-backed influence operations.
There is no place on earth where the abuses of technology have been felt more acutely than in Xinjiang, Nurey Turkel, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, told the audience in the first talk of the day. As many as three million Uyghurs and other Turkic have been detained in the region at the direction of an AI-powered algorithm for reasons that often even local police could not determine. While these technologies are first deployed in Xinjiang, they do not stay there. “Many spying practices against the Uyghurs are already commonplace across China,” according to Turkel, and surveillance technology sold under the umbrella of “smart city” systems has already been deployed in cities across Europe and North America. “China intends to leverage its dominance in the technology sector to reshape life within its borders and radically transform the global order at the cost of human freedom everywhere,” Turkel asserted.
Repressive technologies developed by the most sophisticated authoritarian states are a critical threat, but only part of the larger picture of global democratic decline. Speakers, including Chris Meserole, Director of the Brookings Institution’s Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative, highlighted the critical need not only to confront the biggest players in the development of authoritarian technologies, but also to better support what Meserole called “the vast middle.” Tirana Hassan, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch likewise urged against the “safari” approach to human rights and technology, one that focuses on the “big five” authoritarian states while neglecting the vast majority of the world. Doing so, she suggested, risks centering the harms of technology while crowding out space for innovative solutions to support human rights. Faltering democracies around the world face genuine challenges, from security to corruption, and stable democracies have failed to adequately advance a vision and purpose for freedom in the face of cheap, readily available — but repressive — solutions.
During a fireside chat with me, Uzra Zeya, Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights at the US Department of State, highlighted the uneven impacts of digital repression on different communities. She highlighted in particular “the detrimental impact of technology-facilitated gender-based violence on girls, young women, and members of the LGBTQI+ community.” Even amid increasingly fractious international relations, Under Secretary Zeya underscored that international pressure, both from governments and civil society, can still play a critical role in increasing respect for human rights. She pointed in particular to international rankings, highlighting how eager countries were to play up improvements in their rankings when engaging with the US and in multilateral fora.
While the challenges facing democracy and human rights in the digital age are manifold, promise abounds as well. Jun Han, Assistant Professor at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, highlighted how the sensors that surround us in the modern world, sucking up data and putting the most vulnerable at risk, also create data that can be used to reveal covert attempts at surveillance, from spy cameras to hacked microphones.
Others similarly highlighted the need to reframe our most pressing challenges. In light of the rapid advances of generative AI and its potential abuse by state-backed actors, Lee Foster, Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins and former director of information operations intelligence analysis at Mandiant, highlighted the critical importance of certifying the real rather than trying to label the fake, and the need to build new architectures for trust.
And even as technology has extended the reach of repressive regimes, it also continues to play an essential role in connecting communities fighting for freedom, both locally and around the world. During a conversation with Anna Kwok, Executive Director of the Hong Kong Democracy Council and Yasmin Vossoughian, an anchor for MSNBC, Nazanin Boniadi, the actress and activist, highlighted the essential role Instagram has played in connecting her with activists on the ground in Iran, ensuring that their voices can be heard despite the Iranian government’s efforts to silence them. Both Kwok and Boniadi, articulating a sense that the outbreak of protests in Hong Kong and Iran had caught the international community on the back foot, stressed the need to be better prepared in the future. While the internet has connected activists globally, democracies have largely failed to coordinate their response to human rights abuses even as autocracies have bolstered their alliances. “We can’t always be the ones responding,” Kwok said. “We need to be the ones to lead the dance.”
Few have been more adamant in their refusal to play by authoritarians’ rules than Galina Timchenko, Co-Founder and CEO of the exiled Russian media outlet Meduza. “We refuse to follow the laws of a criminal, aggressor state,” she told the audience. In the face of the all-out information war that began with the Russian annexation of Crimea, Timchenko and the Meduza team continue their tireless efforts to get independent sources of information into Russia at tremendous risk to themselves. The day before the conference it was revealed that Timchenko’s phone had been hacked using NSO Group’s notorious Pegasus spyware, and in 2022 one of their journalists, Elena Kostyuchenko, was poisoned while in Munich. As a result, Timchenko told the audience, “we’ve stopped playing hide-and-seek.” “We have millions of readers still in Russia,” she said, “and we’re not leaving them.”
During the conference, we also announced our new Outline software developer toolkit (SDK). The SDK makes it easy to plug the circumvention technology we have been developing for years into apps directly, allowing developers of a wide range of applications to ensure that information can reach people in repressive countries without the need to install and use a VPN. The SDK further allows developers of VPNs to develop and deploy censorship countermeasures more rapidly, which has become essential as censors have grown more sophisticated.
“The Outline SDK has enabled us to shorten the response time during a global event, like a major protest, from a few weeks, as when we first developed nthLink, to just a few days,” Martin Zhu, Director of Engineering at nthLink, a VPN provider, said. “This will allow us to get new versions out there within a day or two.”
The Outline SDK is just one small step towards building new infrastructure, purpose-designed for agility and rapid response, that, along with increased international solidarity and greater preparedness, will be critical for advancing democracy and human rights online. The community we gathered this month and will continue to build in the months and years ahead will play the central role in rewriting the rules of the game between authoritarians and human rights defenders, and delivering on the promise of the moment we saw long ago in the first awakenings of the Arab Spring.
While we have long been in the winter, seasons change, and the spring will come. The challenge for all of us now is to lay the groundwork for its arrival.
By Yasmin Green, CEO, Jigsaw
