While stories of individuals in the United Arab Emirates being prosecuted under the nation's cybercrime law for posting unwanted photos on social media or cursing in private chats are becoming common, other Arab governments are using similar laws to silence political dissent and human rights activists.
A new study published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and authored by Wafa Ben Hassine documents how Arab governments are using cybercrime laws, anti-terror legislation and legal codes on narcotics to silence dissident voices online. Specifically, the report looks at cases in Egypt, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
Titling her report "The Crime of Speech: How Arab Governments Use the Law to Silence Expression Online, " [ PDF ] Hassine initially hypothesized that the specific Arab governments relied "predominantly on cybercrime and counterterrorism laws to crack down on meaningful assembly and expression online." However, her findings revealed that "each country’s respective law enforcement authorities used unique mechanisms to prosecute human rights defenders."
While Jordan and Saudi Arabia were more consistent about prosecuting individuals under counterterrorism laws, Egypt turned to anti-demonstration laws and Tunisia relied on defamation laws. Interestingly, Hassine's study did not find a single instance of cybercrime laws being used to actually prosecute criminals hacking into online infrastructure or committing online fraud.
"In my study on the judicial record of these laws, I did not find any examples of law enforcement arresting and detaining actual hackers attempting to break into critical infrastructure or otherwise engage in detrimental criminal activity online," Hassine writes in the report.
Yet, as Hassine admits in the paper, it is difficult to create an exhaustive report of suppression of speech as many instances may be buried or may remain relatively undocumented. The report relied entirely on publicly accessible information and there may be many other cases that have been kept hidden.
The study does however note that "politically motivated arrests of online activists are on the rise" in each of the four countries examined. "All four countries studied in this report have a history of broad censorship, arbitrary monitoring and blocking of critical websites, and infiltration of opposition social media pages," the report says.
"The trend is clear: law enforcement consistently abuses laws to suit the needs of opportunistic politicians. It is driving critical voices to extinction by locking up those who dare speak up, and instilling self-censorship in those that remain free."