Censorship and surveillance in the Middle East

Reposted from the College of Humanities.

Nestled in the beautifully modern Gardner Commons building on the University of Utah campus, Yuree Noh’s office is a textbook definition of cozy. Sunny yellow accents, a table lamp perched on a bookshelf, and books and art collected from fieldwork in the Middle East add to an eclectic, intellectual atmosphere.

Noh is collaborating on a project that aims to answer this question by examining public opinions about reforms with Bethany Shockley of the American University of Sharjah, which is funding the research and is based in the United Arab Emirates. They are conducting interviews and experiments in the UAE, investigating how economic grievances, such as competition from women and migrants for jobs, and cultural grievances, such as perceptions that the Emirati society is moving away from its traditional values, are interacting with positive messaging about women and migrants from political elites.

“A lot of these places are currently experiencing a backlash to women’s and migrants’ rights,” Noh says. “How are people perceiving and reacting to the government’s ambitious initiatives to include migrants and women?”

Noh this year joined the U’s Middle East Center housed with the College of Humanities.

“I was pleased to work with dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Michelle Camacho, to recruit Yuree Noh to the University of Utah,” says Hollis Robbins, former dean and senior advisor at the College of Humanities. “We recognized her as a rising star with a growing national reputation.”

Adds Chris Low, director of the Middle East Center: “Yuree Noh’s grantsmanship and multi-country network building open up new horizons for the Middle East Center and the University of Utah. Her outstanding productivity confirms our hope that she will be a pillar of the center’s scholarly community for many years to come.”

Noh recently landed a National Science Foundation grant to research the interlocking practices of censorship and surveillance. Nearly every state in the world practices some form of surveillance or censorship on its citizens and foreign entities, but very little information exists on the details.

“Traditionally, repressive practices were primarily conducted offline, such as following targets, tapping phone lines, jailing dissidents, etc. But increasingly with the advancement of technology, unfortunately, even in democracies a lot of these things have moved online,” Noh explains. “There are certain patterns that we can spot. For example, censorship is much less likely to happen in democracies, but surveillance is pretty much universal now.”

The lack of information about modern surveillance and censorship practices can lead to poorly crafted foreign policy and vulnerabilities in American national security, among other critical issues.

Noh’s study, titled “Advancing the study of repression: The Global Surveillance and Censorship Scores (GSCS) dataset,” is creating this dataset, using machine learning and large language models to assemble a comprehensive set of global indicators of censorship and surveillance practices from every nation from 1990 to the present. Indicators of surveillance include following and watching targeted individuals, video recordings, phone taps on a person’s home or cell phone, and tracking a person’s whereabouts through their cell phone location. Censorship indicators could include anything from bureaucratic means (such as rejecting a political dissident’s application for a business license or revoking a journalist’s press pass or a broadcast license after an unfavorable publication) to legal means (such as arresting and jailing dissidents under the pretext of national security laws or changing laws to make voter suppression more likely), to violent means (such as beatings or assassinations).

For each of the indicators identified through the project, the researchers will assess them on four dimensions: the extent of the surveillance practices; the targets of the surveillance; the actors carrying out the practices; and the tactics they are using. Noh will lead the work to validate the dataset with on-the-ground fieldwork, confirming or correcting elements that have been identified with AI tools. The team’s methodology will set an international standard; while other similar datasets exist, they are often incomplete or created with a bias favoring particular governments – generally the ones publishing the data – and their allies. Once the dataset has been assembled and validated, the team will study it to learn about the causes and consequences of censorship and surveillance, both online and offline.

“This is really important, especially in the era of technology advancement and widespread censorship and surveillance—which has been largely as a result of technological advancements, unfortunately. It’s affecting a lot of ordinary Americans and lot of ordinary people around the world. We still have so little understanding and so little knowledge. All of these repressive practices are connected. The use of surveillance is connected to the use of censorship, and vice versa.”

The dataset that Noh’s is creating will be a publicly available resource for academics, policymakers and practitioners to better understand the contours along which information is shaped by censorship and surveillance in our networked world.

All of this seems a world away from the comfortable, softly lit office where I sit with Noh, as distant from reality as the action scenes in a spy movie. But as I am reminded by our conversation, we are also citizens of a state that employs censorship and surveillance to its own ends, and members of a globally connected species; perhaps these practices are not so far away as they seem.