The following is an excerpt from Marietje Schaake’s new book,“The Tech Coup: How To Save Democracy from Silicon Valley,” now out at Princeton University Press.
In early 2010, at a café in the eastern part of Turkey, a young man (I’ll call him Ali) told me of his escape from Iran. Ali had been arrested the previous summer during the Green Movement, a series of popular protests that erupted after what many Iranians regarded as a fraudulent presidential election. As Ali sat on the sidewalk with his wrists tied, anticipating being picked up by police and pondering his fate, a local woman happened to drive by. She stopped her car, courageously whisked him away, and dropped him off at home. Despite this brief reprieve, Ali knew that the Basiji, part of the infamous Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, would soon be knocking on the door of his parents’ place, and he decided to flee to a remote area in the north where his family owned a small plot of land.
Ali was one of millions of Iranians who challenged Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory in the presidential election that summer. On June 20, 2009, one of these brave demonstrators, Neda Agha-Soltan, was killed by a sniper. Her death came quickly as she sank down to the pavement, blood running from her mouth, people around her screaming in horror. We know this because, unlike many of the brutal incidents that authoritarian regimes carry out in dark prison cells, Neda’s death was captured on a bystander’s cell phone. Videos of this and other state violence against peaceful protesters were shared around the world, fueling outrage and condemnation. Green Movement demonstrators posted their eyewitness accounts on social media with the hashtag #iranelection, allowing the entire world to witness a revolution unfolding in one of the most repressive countries on the planet.
The role of social media (specifically, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) and the use of technology (cell phones and internet connections) quickly became a defining theme in how journalists and politicians around the world understood the protests in Iran. These platforms were filling an important gap left by the Iranian regime’s press crackdown. A few days after the protests started, in a desperate move to regain control, authorities banned journalists from doing any street reporting. Ahmadinejad closed twelve newspapers and locked up over one hundred journalists. Twitter (now known as X) emerged as the main platform for citizens to transmit information about the protests and the government’s violence. As a result, some even called the Green Movement a “Twitter Revolution.” There was a widespread sense of hope about the democratizing potential of these nascent technologies; beyond using social media and cell phones to document and share human rights abuses, activists could also use them to coordinate actions and mobilize their movement. The administration of U.S. president Barack Obama even asked Twitter to delay a planned systems update to avoid temporarily disabling access for protesters in Iran.
This hopefulness about technology as a partner in liberation was bolstered in 2010 as popular protests erupted in Tunisia and Egypt. When Egyptians revolted against the regime of President Hosni Mubarak, Western media proclaimed it a “Facebook revolution,” in homage to the gigantic Facebook groups formed by youth protesters to coordinate the demonstrations. Many believed that young people in the Middle East and North Africa would be better equipped to secure justice and rights with the help of U.S.-made technologies.
While Western media and policy circles excitedly buzzed about the democratizing potential of new technologies, the picture on the ground in Cairo, Tehran, and Tunis was not as straightforward. As Iranian journalist Golnaz Esfandiari would later explain, activists typically used word of mouth, text messages, emails, and blog posts to organize protests rather than social media.
Finally, as Ali himself would soon discover, cell phone technology exposed protesters to enormous risks. When he arrived at his hideout destination in the north of Iran, he called his mother to tell her he was safe. Her relief would not last long: Ali’s phone signal was picked up by a nationwide monitoring network, and he was arrested soon thereafter, in the middle of nowhere. He ended up in the notorious Evin Prison, known for the brutal rape and torture of inmates. After spending several dreadful months behind Evin’s walls, he was able to escape during a furlough and eventually made his way to eastern Turkey. Yet even at the time of our meeting in early 2010, he still changed locations every day, since he knew that the Iranian security services were actively hunting down dissidents across the border.
Those who praised the democratizing possibilities of technology and social media platforms failed to appreciate that repressive authoritarian regimes could be tech-savvy too. In Iran, and later in Syria, state authorities tactically lifted bans on the use of internet services, only to later scan posts to incriminate the messengers. The same technologies that help detect spam assisted state militias with identifying authors of antiregime social media posts. Military intelligence services were able to use location services to spot a group of people gathering on a street corner—real-time information that can be very useful when looking to disperse crowds before they can form.
I was appalled by the suffering the Iranian protestors endured; Neda Agha-Soltan was only four years younger than I was at the time. Their courage also deeply inspired me. I had recently won an election for a seat in the European Parliament by criticizing the Dutch government, while people in Iran were being shot by theirs for doing the same. I felt shocked—not by the behavior of these repressive governments, from whom I expected little else, but by our own double standards. The monitoring and surveillance technology these regimes were using came from Europe: Italian-made hacking systems were the technology of choice for the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, while French technologies helped Muammar al-Gaddhafi in Libya and British systems facilitated the Mubarak regime in Egypt.
Right when European governments were condemning the repression of people and their human rights, European companies were exporting sophisticated monitoring software to Middle Eastern rulers. As Nokia-Siemens Networks would admit in 2010, they sold cell phone surveillance technologies to the Iranian authorities that enabled them to track the protesters—people who were peacefully asking for freedoms that any European today takes for granted. In a hearing before the Subcommittee on Human Rights of the European Parliament, Nokia-Siemens’s head of marketing tried to distance the company from Iran’s abuses, arguing that, ultimately, “people who use this technology to infringe human rights are responsible for their actions.” While this is obviously true—no one disputes that the Iranian government is responsible for its actions—this does not absolve the company of its moral obligation to avoid assisting a repressive government. Engineers of companies with such contracts would have traveled to Iran multiple times to train users or to repair surveillance systems, and they likely received additional pay for staffing a hardship post. Moreover, the human rights violations in Iran were well known and well documented even before the crackdown on protests began in 2009.
As a newly elected member of the European Parliament, I was incensed by Ali’s story, as well as by the stories of the other Iranian refugees I met on my trip to Turkey. What meaning did European statements in support of human rights even have when global tools of repression were produced right here at home? These double standards became a galvanizing foundation for much of my work in public service. I would spend the next decade using every policy tool imaginable trying to stop what I then called “digital arms”—software that inevitably violates human rights and ends up harming innocent people. Unfortunately, there is still much more work to be done. Today, newer versions of these commercial hacking systems have only grown in force and scale. Even worse, as I learned more about the sprawling digital arms trade over the past decade, I realized that Iran’s Green Movement was merely one battle in the war to protect democracy from technological overreach.
Excerpted from “The Tech Coup: How To Save Democracy from Silicon Valley.” Copyright © 2024 by Marietje Schaake. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of ProMarket, the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
