26th edition – Margins – Pike & Hurricane

Invisible Asylum Seekers

EditorChief — Fri, 03 Jun 2016 13:04:00 +0000

My friend was stressed a few days before his final interview at the Migration Board, like other asylum seekers who know their lives are dependent on a simple decision of people who do not know them and their stories too well. He was reviewing his case with me. I told him that he should try to convince officers in the Swedish Migration Board that he is just attracted to men and cannot imagine being with a woman. It was the first time that I was suggesting a bisexual to hide his sexual orientation. As an Iranian bisexual’s rights activist, I always encourage other bisexuals to come out and be proud of themselves, but he was an exception. I just wanted to protect him from being deported. Five years ago, when I came to Sweden as a student, I realised that being bisexual is not enough to seek asylum. I was not the only one who was advising a bisexual to pretend to be gay. On May 2015, members of Bi UK, a charity that supports research and activism regarding bisexuality, released an open letter to the British Members of Parliament in support of Orashia Edwards, a bisexual asylum seeker. They wrote:

“Since we became aware of this case, other bisexual asylum seekers have confirmed that they have been advised by Home Office officials as well as LGBT group advisers, to conceal the fact that they are bisexual and to pretend to be gay or lesbian, in order to have a chance of gaining asylum.”

A few days after, I met a female bisexual asylum seeker in the Malmö Pride who also had told the Swedish Migration Board that she was a lesbian. In August of 2014, I attended the second conference on “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights in Iran” organised by OutRight, which, at the time, was still called International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC). The article I contributed to this conference was one of the first articles that criticised biphobia and bi-erasing in the researches and media reports about Iranian LGBT people. Other Iranian LGBT activists told me that sometimes they have tried to give a voice to bisexuals in their reports but it was not easy to find bisexuals who were willing to be interviewed by the researchers or journalists, especially among asylum seekers. I asked them how they expected bisexuals to be open, when our sexual orientation is not an acceptable reason to gain asylum in Western countries?

Many Western countries claim protecting LGBTs’ rights based on the United Nations’ Human Rights Conventions and also the European Union’s recommendations. Swedish law clearly mentions sexual orientation as a reason to grant asylum seekers residence permits, but in reality bisexual asylum seekers do not have that much of a chance to be granted a refugee status in Europe.

Orashia Edwards maybe was the most famous bisexual asylum seeker. He was not deported due to media coverage and supportive campaigns, but his case has been rejected repeatedly because the British Home Office thinks he is not in danger in Jamaica as a bisexual person. He was even arrested and kept in detention centres in the UK on several occasions. He has been in a relationship with a man for two years, but it was not enough for the British Home Office. They said because he once had a female spouse, he must be hoodwinking the system. Edwards’s asylum tribunal also alleged that while he had been sexually active with men, he had been “experimenting” with his orientation and was in fact heterosexual. “I’ve been in relationships with men and women since 2003, If I had been experimenting then maybe I would have slept with a man once and never gone back, but I’m bisexual, it’s who I am.” said Orashia to the Guardian. Finally, some months ago, he won the fight against the Home Office and will be able to remain in the UK.

This regulation is not limited to the UK; many other European countries have also rejected bisexuals for having spouses of the opposite sex in the past. For example, Bulgaria rejected a male Lebanese asylum seeker who was seeking asylum for having a wife and children.

According to research published in 2011 about LGBT asylum seekers in Europe that was conducted in collaboration with several European LGBT or refugee groups and networks, there are strong signs that European migration offices’ decisions in several cases have been based on this stereotype that bisexual asylum seekers do not have an “overwhelming and irreversible” desire to have sex with a person of the same sex.

Sometimes non-monosexual asylum seekers’ claims are rejected because they are not familiar with the different labels that LGBTs in the Western countries use to identify themselves. For instance, this report mentions a male bisexual asylum seeker whose claim was rejected in Finland on 2010. He first applied as as homosexual, but then married with a woman and immediately explained that he is bisexual. He was aware of the difference between these two sexual orientation from the begging, but was not familiar with the right term for bisexuality at the time of first application.

In one case, Denmark accepted that a bisexual man is in danger in his home country due to his previous relationship with another man, although in the time of application in Denmark he was living with a woman. France also follows the same policy and asylum seekers do not receive a negative answer just because of their opposite sex marriage but still it can effect on the decision of migration office or court among other factors.

Still, in many European countries, bisexuals’ desire for someone of their own gender is not taken seriously by migration boards. Sometimes bisexuals are just simply advised to hide their sexual orientation to be able to live in their home countries. Austria has rejected bisexual asylum seekers application based on the discretion argument. About an Iranian bisexual, the court decided same sex sexual conduct is not “deeply engraved in his sexual orientation”, so he can go back to Iran and have relationship just with opposite sex.

These stereotypes about bisexuals could be a result of the lack of information about them. Most European migration boards take their decisions based on the official information that their governments or well-known NGOs have provided about situation of LGBT people in different countries, which is called Country of Origin Information (COI). These reports rarely cover the situation of bisexuals. According to the aforementioned researchers, these documents just focus on gay men in most cases. Meanwhile, there is only limited information on lesbians and transsexuals while bisexuals and intersexuals are almost forgotten. In this situation, decision makers do not have access to official information on how to decide on bisexual and intersexual asylum seekers.

The researchers conclude that while a homosexual orientation is seen as a stable and normal situation by the migration boards, transsexuals and intersexuals are deemed in need of medical intervention and bisexuals are told that they can solve their problems by choosing to live as a heterosexual.

While I was not personally forced to go through the asylum seeking process, all these stories could be mine since I am bi-sexual. I could have been in a situation in which I either had to hide my sexual orientation, as I suggested to my friend, or be in danger of deportation like Orashia.

By Zeynab Peyghambarzadeh,
Board member of LGBTQ Students Malmö

Image credit:

Picture 1: Peter Salanki, CC BY 2.0

Picture 2: vl04, licensed under CC BY 2.0

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The Same, but Different

Emilia Henkel — Fri, 03 Jun 2016 13:03:19 +0000

When I was small, my mum and dad read books to me about families with two dads or with one mum who were just as normal as ours. I was taught to accept everyone equally, no matter what their race, religion, gender or sexual orientation is. My time in Bangladesh showed me, how far I still am from this ideal. I came there for one year to work as a volunteer for an NGO in the North-Western part of the country. My self-perception of being open and tolerant got shaken right from the start.

I arrived in Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka, a bustling 20 Million city. I was overwhelmed, never having been in a comparable metropole before. We volunteers were taken to explore the city, the ancient monuments, the shopping streets and parks. We walked around the Dhanmondi Lake, on lovely paths made for the recreation of the urban middle class. I noticed a lot of new, different things about the people around me, but what bothered me most were the male couples. They were walking by with fingers intertwined, teasing and leaning on to each other. I could not help watching them with irritation and confused giggles. I never saw men being so tender with each other in public and I immediately assumed that they were homosexual. Why would men hold hands otherwise?

In my rural district of Germany, this behaviour was considered appropriate for heterosexual couples and for girls. Gay was a common insult and the boys would only act affectionate to joke around. The serious greetings were fist bumps and body checks. Hugging, cuddling and going hand in hand was girly. The gender roles defining how boys and girls ought to behave were very rigid in my head and the physical display of male affection in Bangladesh shocked me.

For the first time, I became painfully aware of my own homophobia hidden under all the liberal support for the rights of sexual minorities. It was necessary for me to leave my own culture, to realise that these roles were not natural, biologically determined behaviour but constructed and taught by society. Bangladesh, just like Germany, has rigidly defined gender roles, but along different lines. Since I am unfamiliar with the Bangladeshi constructions, they enabled me to question the German gender roles that I always took for granted. Over time, I got used to cuddling men and stopped turning my head after them. Beside me, nobody interpreted their behaviour as sexual or strange.

Hijras, who got accepted as Third gender by the Bangladeshi government in 2013, were the people who made me question my ideas about gender. The sexual minority identifies as intersexual and they face a lot of discrimination and constraints in their daily lives in Bangladesh. Their existence does not uproot the Bangladeshi gender roles. Rather, the Third gender has had a limited place and assigned tasks in South Asian society since 300 A.D. Compared to sexual minorities in Germany, the 10,000 Hijras of Bangladesh are very visible in public, mostly by chatting up people for money. The common explanation from my colleagues and friends was that Hijras were obviously unfit for work and therefore needed to be supported by the society. In my German society the Third gender is not established and assigned a clear role. Because I was not accustomed to the gender role they fulfilled, I could not predict the Hijras’ actions and they made me feel insecure. I really wished I could have taken them like my Bangladeshi friends who were familiar and at ease with their behaviour. Instead of being scared, they were joking around with the Hijras. Once more, I had to adjust my previous idea about two clearly defined sexes

But of course, the Bangladeshi society is not perfect when it comes to rights of sexual minorities. In fact, it is terrible. Gender Roles might be different from Germany, but they exist and limit people nevertheless. Hijras got accepted as a Third gender, but they are still forbidden to have relationships with each other. The section 377, introduced by the British colonial rulers in 1860, punishes all “unnatural” sexual behaviour with up to ten years in prison. Several attempts to get rid of the section 377 by activist groups were fruitless. The government does not want to grant sexual minorities their human right because that would be in conflict with the values of the majority population. Homosexuality remains a taboo in society. In spite of the government’s and the society’s repressions, mostly gay men have been able to form a community with help of the internet. “Boys of Bangladesh” is the most famous site, organising trainings and secret meetings. The Hijras as well have organisations demanding for the Third gender to be accepted as equal citizens with equal access to the labour market and health care.

The discrimination against the few Bangladeshis who openly live and defend their sexuality against the norm, has peaked in the murder of two activists for gay rights. On the 25 April 2016, five men stormed into the apartment of Xulhas Mannan in Dhaka. He was the editor of Bangladesh’s first LGBT magazine “Roopbaan”. They stabbed him and his friend Mahbub Rabbi Tonoy to death and managed to escape. Responsibility for the attacks was later claimed by Ansar-al-Islam, a group associated with Al- Qaida. Mannan had received death threats for wanting to organise a LGBT rally at the big festivities of the Bangla New Year earlier in April. The rally was suspended for security reasons and the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina criticised Mannan for adultery in his writings.

The LGBTI community agrees that the attack on Mannan cannot be blamed only on the extremism of Ansar-al-Islam. The murder took place in an environment of dominant ideas about gender and sex that are harming sexual minorities. It hurts me to hear about this terrible crime being committed in Bangladesh. But now it is important for me to stay away from old, Eurocentric stereotypes about the Global South that does not get human rights, asking: “In what kind of backward country is this possible?” I have to remember, that Bangladesh is also the country which opened my mind to new approaches to gender roles. The murder of Mannan and Tonoy should remind everyone of us to learn from each other and work together for a pluralist world, where different ideas on sex and gender can exist next to each other. To reach this aim Germany has just as much to learn from Bangladesh as the other way around.

By Emilia Henkel

Image credit:

Picture 1: Adam Jones, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Picture 2: R Barraez D´Lucca, licensed under CC BY 2.0

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Kidnapped, Butchered, Offered: Human Sacrifices in the 21st Century

Michael Schätzlein — Fri, 03 Jun 2016 13:03:16 +0000

When a head- and limbless body of a boy was found floating down the Thames in London in 2001, it sparked widespread international interest. Not only due to the gruesome details of the murder – but also because his stomach contained an extract of the calabar bean, a fruit whose components effectively work like a nerve gas: leaving the body of the victim paralysed, while still being able to feel pain. The fruit is used in voodoo magic in sub-Saharan Africa. As a result, ritual murder was deemed the most likely explanation for the killing. The heinous crime reminded the world once again that human sacrifices and medicinal killings, i.e. murder in order to harvest organs for medicinal use, are still a reality today.

Commonly associated with the bloody excesses of the Aztecs and cheap tribal exploitation films from the 1980s, human sacrifices are an often overlooked issue in nowadays’ world. In India, quite a few cases have emerged in recent years, most notoriously that of P. R. Palanichamy, the head of the country’s largest granite export firm, in which it was alleged that he had ordered the killing of four people for personal gain. In another case, a 10-year-old boy was killed by a man in Nepal, hoping to cure his ill son as a result.

Witch doctors were to blame for many of the atrocities.

However, human sacrifices mainly occur in sub-Saharan Africa. In early 2016, amidst an election that was criticised by the international community, it was alleged that six children had been mutilated and sacrificed in rural Uganda, in order to win the favour of mystical beings and to thus boost election results. The allegations were made by the charity Kyampisi Childcare Ministries, which provides education for children in Uganda and cares for survivors of child sacrifice. It is reported that a veritable industry builds on ritual murders. In exchange for money, the rich and powerful can order the ritual killing of children, who are often kidnapped or trafficked for this very purpose.

Reports indicate that the practice is still alive and well in Botswana, Liberia, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, and Uganda. While ritual killings are considered murder in all of these countries, the laws are hard to enforce, as ritual killings often go unreported, due to the secret nature of these murders and the common complicity of relatives of the victims, which are often especially vulnerable: children, women, and disabled people are most commonly targeted. It is also worth noting that these problems do not only persist in countries where most people still adhere to traditional beliefs, but also in countries that are largely Christian or Muslim.

While some of the sacrifices are performed for purely spiritual reasons, most of them are done for personal gain, be it in the form of material wealth, health or power. It is also proven that some of the deeds are committed out of fear of repercussions if the sacrifice was not to be performed as planned, be it in the form of peer pressure or doom brought about by vengeful spirits. Closely connected to the ritual murders are medicinal killings, in which the body parts of the victims are harvested for later use in traditional medicine. Especially Albinos, often considered unnatural by superstitious and uneducated populations, are at great risk of being abducted and murdered for their body parts, which are then used as medicinal ingredients or powerful charms.

People suffering from albinism are especially at risk

When looking at these crimes, it becomes apparent that they all have a common themes: the murders are always perpetrated by or at the advice of witch doctors, gurus, and other spiritual leaders. Why is that so? In sub-Saharan Africa, witch doctors still have a very eminent position in society. They foretell the future, record traditions and the oral history of their communities, and are said to be able to cure all kinds of sicknesses that are commonly believed to be a result of witchcraft or moody ancestors. In countries that often have less than one doctor in 8,000 people, witch doctors are the persons to call on for whatever ailment might befall one. Due to their role as shamans and traditional niche in society, it is easy for them to ensnare superstitious populations in their charlatanry.
Many government measures aimed at stopping human sacrifices and medicinal murders thus target witch doctors, either through the regulation of their work or through education campaigns. Only one year ago, Tanzania made the headlines when more than 200 witch doctors were arrested in order to prevent further killings of Tanzanian albinos. In Uganda, the problem of human sacrifice has become so rampant that a special Anti-Human Sacrifice and Trafficking Task Force has been set up in order to tackle the problem. While official figures only show about twenty to thirty cases a year in Uganda, the real figure is likely way higher.

In the end, however, change will have to come about from within the communities. While increased accessibility of education and medical services will surely aid in decreasing the amount of human sacrifices and medicinal murders, it is peoples’ minds that need to change.

Related articles:

Witchcraft in Africa: Practice and belief

Witchcraft Brewery: The Dark History of Beer, Witchcraft and Gender

Witch Hunts and Violence in Papua New Guinea – A Millenary Belief System

Photo credits:

Picture 1: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Public Health Image Library, in the Public Domain

Picture 2: ViktorDobai, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

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Reichsbürger – Citizens of the Reich

Michael Schätzlein — Fri, 03 Jun 2016 13:03:11 +0000

Imagine the following: A person gets stopped by the German police for speeding, but when asked for their ID and driver’s licence, they not only refuse to show them in the first place, but it also turns out that their papers are fake and bear the name of the German Reich, something that has not existed since the end of World War 2. Further, the person insists that they are a citizen of the German Reich and that the policemen thus have no authority over them, as the Federal Republic of Germany which they are working for does not exist. Indeed, these so-called “Reichsbürger” (citizens of the Reich) are no uncommon occurrence any more, and there is a worrying trend towards radicalisation.

The beginnings of the Reichsbürger movement date back to 1985, when Wolfgang Ebel proclaimed the founding of his Provisional Imperial Government and appointed himself Reich Chancellor. Since then, a large number of offshoots following a similar ideology have been founded, revealing one of the greatest problems of the movement: as anyone can assume an imaginative and pompous title and claim sovereignty over Germany and the legitimisation of the leaders is sketchy at best, the movement has troubles uniting under one leader. The Sonnenstaatland website, which specialises in these kinds of movements, lists seven German Reichs alone – all with different leaders, seats of government, and constitutions.

A common theme in the ideology of these movements is the thesis that the German Reich continues to exist and that Germany still is occupied by Allied forces. The Federal Republic, then, is in truth a company, a financial agency controlled by the Allies, Big Capital or the Jews, depending on who you ask. This is further affirmed by misinterpreting the ambiguous name of the German Personalausweis, or personal identification, as “personnel identification“, insinuating that everyone who has a German ID is in truth an employee of aforementioned elusive financial agency. The goal of the Reichsbürger movement is to go back to the glory of days past, to a Reich in its old borders of before the Second World War.

The people participating in these organisations are often referred to alternatingly as esoterics with right-wing extremist tendencies, or right-wing extremists with esoteric tendencies. Indeed, the Reichsbürger movement is a melting pool of many different brands of people, including conspiracy theorists and Holocaust deniers, and quite a few of them have been declared not criminally responsible by reason of mental disorder in their many clashes with the German authorities.

Of course, not all of the Reichsbürger are merely motivated by a drive for independence – in many cases, it is about money. On the one hand, Reichsbürger usually opt not to pay taxes, fines and other public dues, yet are more than willing to accept benefits if the German state should pay them. Others may draw out eventual bankruptcies by refusing to cooperate with their creditors. On the other hand, the leaders of the imaginary states can make a lot of money by selling all sorts of fake identifications, licence plates, and driver’s licences to their gullible followers.

Fuelled by their contempt for any form of state authority, the Reichsbürger have long been a thorn in the side of German civil administration and judiciary. Since they neither respect laws nor the authority of the enforcers of German law, it is near impossible to reason with them. Many spend their lives within the illusionary borders around their home, without ever fulfilling their duties as German citizens. Officials’ attempts to contact them are answered by endless monologues on why the Federal Republic does not exist, with references to a sheer unlimited amount of documents, letters and outdated constitutions. Many have taken to obstructing the work of the German authorities as much as possible, by flooding them with requests, lawsuits, or even bogus debt claims – a veritable paper terrorism has been unleashed.

A Reichsbürger protest in Berlin

There are also signs of radicalisation. Compared to other German right-wing extremist groups, the Reichsbürger’s fetishism for weapons has been described as being the strongest. In 2014, a known Reichsbürger was arrested after trying to buy an AK-47 in Luxembourg using a fake ID from a supposed “Prussian Free State”. In March 2016, several Reichsbürger attempted to thwart a process against one of their own by causing a turmoil in the court room and stealing the record of proceedings in the process. Further, Reichsbürger are known for routinely trying to harass, blackmail or intimidate officials. In 2012, 15 to 20 men clad in the uniforms of the now-dissolved Reichsbürger vigilante group “Deutsche Polizei Hilfswerk” (DPHW) tried to arrest a bailiff in the line of duty.

While the German state cracked down hard on these groups after each of these excesses, it cannot do much against the routinely obstruction of the administration’s work. Due to its high fragmentation, it is also hard to collect data on the Reichsbürger movement. The Ministry of the Interior estimates their numbers to be in the thousands, with their numbers constantly rising, probably due to increased presence in the media and a general dissatisfaction with the powers that be. The federal State of Brandenburg alone counts more than 150 known Reichsbürger in its territory. As the revisionist ideology of the Reichsbürger movement inherently cannot be reconciled with the German Constitution, their groups have been deemed anti-constitutional, and four out of sixteen federal branches of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution are currently observing the movement.

The rise of the Reichsbürger movement goes hand-in-hand with that of the far-right in Germany. It indicates a weakening of the State’s authority and the State monopoly on violence. While it is unlikely that the Reichsbürger movement will ever have success in reaching their goals, dealing with them will continue to cost the taxpayer exorbitant amounts of tax money.

Photo credits:

Dirk Ingo Franke, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

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Your Privacy on Sale – the Commercial Spyware Market

Yaroslav Mikhaylov — Wed, 01 Jun 2016 13:13:45 +0000

When during the Arab Spring, protesters equipped with Facebook, Twitter and other social media applications began toppling authoritarian leaders all over the Middle East, commentators and political scientists alike hailed them as the new tools that would help protesters and activists throughout the world democratize their nations. However, the Arab Spring also exposed the darker side of Western technology that was coming to the developing world. In government buildings, protesters found the tools which those regimes used to spy on their own citizens – highly advanced spyware and tracking suites developed by for-profit Western companies and sold, perfectly legally, to Arab dictators for the express purpose of keeping tabs on political activists.

Egyptian pre-Arab Spring strongman Hosni Mubarak was a customer of the British-German Gamma International and their FinFisher spyware, while Lybia’s Muammar Qaddafi used software purchased from the French company Amesys to spy on journalists and human rights campaigners. Even more egregious were the actions of the Italian company Area SpA, which was installing new surveillance equipment for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad as late as March 2011 – at the same time as the Syrian army was killing protesters demonstrating against the regime.

Many of these applications entered development during the growth of government-sanctioned surveillance following the September 11^th terrorist attacks against the United States. But the technology originally developed for the likes of the American NSA and the British GCHQ did not remain in the hands of governments for long and now a multi-billion dollar industry sells solutions for everything from cell-phone tracking to Skype call interception and Facebook Messenger hijacking to those who have the money to pay, including dictatorships and other authoritarian governments with histories of habitual human rights violations.

And this business has been growing steadily over the last 15 years. The whistleblower website WikiLeaks has started publishing a feature called Spy Files in 2011 detailing the booming market for digital surveillance. The intrusive digital surveillance industry even has its own trade show with a somewhat euphemistic name Intelligence Support Systems (ISS) that convenes every few months to match vendors with potential buyers and allow companies to show off new products at seminars like “Offensive IT Intelligence Information-Gathering” or “Tactical GSM Interrogation and Geo-Location System”.

That is not to say that these products do not have legitimate uses for governments and law-enforcement officials. Large-scale government uses of spyware such as the Stuxnet virus used to disable Iranian nuclear centrifuges or the PRISM mass metadata collection program tend to dominate the media discourse. However, the vast majority of the uses to which such surveillance has been put are far more banal. The US government relied on an as-yet-unnamed surveillance company to break into an iPhone of a terrorist-affiliated mass shooter, while the police in New South Wales, Australia use the same FinFisher software as Hosni Mubarak’s security services to covertly examine suspects’ computers for evidence of drug smuggling, money laundering or child pornography.

However, in the hands of repressive regimes, these surveillance tools pose an entirely new set of challenges. Of particular importance is the borderless nature of the Internet, which allows dictators to repress not just the activists within their own country, but to target political refugees and dissidents abroad as well. In 2011, a Bahraini political activist living in exile in the United Kingdom discovered with the help of a security expert that the government of Bahrain had infiltrated his computer with FinFisher software and was using his online identity to discredit him and collect information on other activists. Similarly, the Moroccan government hired the Italian company Hacking Team to get access to the computer of a France-based democracy activist to extract the contact info of his sources in Morocco. The activist and four of his contributors have now been arrested by the Moroccan government and are awaiting trial on national security charges. Even in Sweden, the national security service SäPo has listed foreign threats against refugees and asylum-seekers as an item of significant concern in both its 2013 and 2014 annual reports.

Some action is being taken by Western nations to limit the spread of such capabilities. The Wassenaar Agreement, signed by most nations in the developed world, mandates export controls on a number of goods, including telecommunications surveillance software, to states or groups engaging in armed conflicts or human rights violations. The EU, at the end of 2014, went even further, requiring all exports of intrusion software to have export licenses in the same way that exports of weapons or rocketry components do. The affected states, however, respond that they need such capabilities to combat terrorism and downplay the effects on civil society or political freedoms.

The software vendors themselves are also reluctant to give up the lucrative contracts available as more and more nations join the network surveillance arms race. Hacking Team’s founder David Vincenzetti tried to move his company to Saudi Arabia, which has not signed the Wassenaar Agreement. Another non-signatory – Israel – has also proven attractive as a home base to both current and new players in the cyber-security field and now accounts for 20% of all cyber-security investments in the world according to Tom Ahi Dror, a project leader at the Israeli National Cyber Bureau.

The debate and controversy around the topic reveals the fundamental duality of the relationship between society and technology. Just as social media has become an effective organizational tool for democratic reformers, so has it helped terrorists and criminals carry out their activities under a cloak of privacy. All across the world, in both developed and developing countries and in both democracies and dictatorships, ‘public safety’ is used as an excuse to violate the privacy of their own and other nations’ citizens; the differences are only in how different regimes define public safety. This shifts the problem from a technological one to a moral one: when we, as citizens of democratic states, approve our own governments’ use of spyware to protect us, we also approve the use of the same technologies by authoritarian states toward their own definitions of safety. This leaves us with a powerful question: is it really worth it?

By Yaroslav Mikhaylov

Image Credit:

Cover: Christiaan Colen, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.

Picture 1: Michael Coghlan, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic.

Picture 2: CPOA, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic.

Picture 3: National Security Agency, public domain.

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