by Brendan de Caires (Executive Director, PEN Canada)
Twenty years ago, Florian von Donnersmarck’s dark film “The Lives of Others” showed how easily a nation state – in the form of a Stasi agent monitoring the private life of an East German playwright – could infiltrate and control the life of a surveilled citizen. Today, our laptops, cell phones and social media have made these sinister intrusions much easier, extending surveillance well beyond national borders.
In the twenty-first century a state can not only monitor its critics in diaspora populations, remotely, but actively isolate, threaten and extort them — as circumstances require. Artificial Intelligence has accelerated the deployment of deepfakes, doxxing, phishing, and spyware. These new forms of harassment and disinformation have made Digital Transnational Repression (DTR) a cheap, pervasive, and persistent form of censorship even though most of us have never even heard of it.
In late October, PEN participated in a panel discussion of DTR hosted in Ottawa by The Coalition For Women In Journalism. Arzu Yildiz (pictured left), a member of PEN’s Writers in Exile network, was one of several journalists who recounted their experiences of DTR and the frustrations of trying to find help, or protection, from law enforcement or the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) at a time when there is neither a clear definition of DTR, nor adequate legal or bureaucratic mechanisms to counteract it.
The American NGO Freedom House also joined the panel. Its 2020 study “The Digital Transnational Repression Toolkit, and Its Silencing Effects” warns that:“Digital attacks via malware, online harassment, and disinformation campaigns are often intertwined with more traditional methods of transnational repression, such as pressure on families inside the country, smear campaigns in state media, or, as the Khashoggi case demonstrates, even assassinations.” The report adds that “Female journalists and activists are particularly targeted with degrading, misogynistic, and sexually violent insults.”
Speaking at the end of the session, I drew attention to this article in the June 2010 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism which recounts the vulnerability that many exiled writers and journalists experience within Canada. Having been lionized by Canadian institutions while risking their lives in their homelands, they generally felt disappointed by the lacklustre reception that awaited them as immigrants to Canada. Working as low-paid freelance drudges at the periphery of mainstream media, most are easy prey for foreign governments or even wealthy non-state actors that wish to silence them.
I argued that these forgotten writers and journalists should be considered the front line of our democracy. For what does it mean to be Canadian if another country can threaten, humiliate, or terrorize you and your loved ones, with impunity? Six years ago, the Trump administration concluded that US cybersecurity should “defend forward” by refusing to cede cyberspace to its rivals. Where better, then, for countries like Canada to draw the front line for our own digital lives than around the Charter-protected right to free speech?
DTR not only undermines freedom of expression, it devalues the meaning of citizenship. Isn’t that just as important as the cybersecurity concerns that currently frame the issue? Weaponized disinformation is eating away at democracy on every continent, and it will continue to do so unless civil society groups like ours protect dissidents from harassment. While there is no silver bullet solution to such a complex problem, the creation of a clear definition and appropriate legal frameworks for DTR would be a welcome and increasingly overdue step in the right direction.
