The Adversary Is Watching: What Can We Learn From Communities Under Surveillance | Ramy Raoof Halim

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Thank you. Hi. Hi everyone. Good morning. Thank you so much for being here.

Hope you're doing well. Uh I'm so happy to be among you all today. Over the next 15 minutes, I'm going to share personal lessons uh from living and working with communities living under actual surveillance and censorship. My name is Ramy and uh I'm a technologist and security researcher and I work with human rights defenders, activists, and journalists on their safety and security in high-risk environments. I specialize in researching how does technology facilitate human rights abuses such as torture, kidnap, and disappearance.

Over the course of my career over 18 years, I worked with the European Union, Amnesty International, Citizen Lab, and the Red Cross as well as various human rights organizations in Africa, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. When I first started doing this work, I thought the problem was technology. I thought if we build stronger technology, stronger systems, stronger encryption, it will make people automatically safe. And we built a fortress of code. Over time, I realized I was wrong.

Technology alone cannot solve people problems. We live in a reality shaped by complex political, social, and economical realities. We rarely fail because of we lack technology or tool. We usually fail because our biggest problem as a community is trust, adoption, and sustainability. Privacy as a notion globally is not distributed equally because power is very different in different parts of the world.

This means that the people experience privacy in a very different way. And the consequences of losing your right to privacy depends on who you are, where do you live, and who is watching you. This also means that everyone's experience with surveillance is very different. For some people, surveillance can mean commercial profit, it can mean misinformation, it can mean online advertisement. For other people, surveillance can mean police harassment, detention, interrogation, and violence.

In my opinion, the information itself is not the problem. Some people think surveillance is very dangerous because of information collection. I think surveillance is dangerous because someone in power will act based on the information against you. The reality of being watched and living under surveillance is basically the combination of information and power used against you and leads to repression, exclusion, and various forms of violence. Many people who lives in the global south encounter lots of real and physical threats because of surveillance.

It affects activists, journalists, queer groups, human rights defenders, not only the people as individuals, but also their families, their loved ones, and everyone around them. I think technology matters. It's very important. It gives us hope, it gives us chance to organize, and technology helped many people in the global south to dream of different realities, to think of different possibilities. And I think over 18 years of experience, I don't think communities survive because of technology or tool, they survive because people invest in each other.

I think someone invests in training, someone invests in documenting and sharing knowledge, someone runs infrastructure, someone helps in maintenance. These are all non-technical elements that help our community to become stronger. I think I think the strongest tool in the face of any threat, in the face of any adversary, is not a new protocol or new technology. It's the notion of trust and solidarity between the community. I think uh human relationships are like the physical key for our new world.

And I always think that code and computers will buy us time. But solidarity will ensure that we survive. Thank you so much for your time. And I hope you enjoy the conference today. And I will see you around.

Thank you for everything.

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