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In 2009, world events collided with Schaake’s position as a newly-seated MEP. While the democratic elections in the EU were unfolding without incident, 3,000 miles away in Iran, a very different story was unfolding. Following the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to a second term as Iran’s president, allegations of fraud and vote tampering were immediately voiced by supporters of former prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the leading candidate opposing Ahmadinejad. The protests that followed quickly morphed into the Green Movement, one of the largest sustained protest movements in Iran’s history after the Iranian Revolution of 1978 and until the protests against the death of Mahsa Amini began in September 2022.
 
With the protests came an increased wave of state violence against the demonstrators. While repression and intimidation are nothing new to autocratic regimes, in 2009 the proliferation of cell phones in the hands of an increasingly digitally connected population allowed citizens to document human rights abuses firsthand and beam the evidence directly from the streets of Tehran to the rest of the world in real-time.
 
As more and more footage poured in from the situation on the ground, Schaake, with a pre-politics background in human rights and a specific interest in civil rights, took up the case of the Green Movement as one of her first major issues in the European Parliament. She was appointed spokesperson on Iran for her political group. 

The Best of Tech and the Worst of Tech

But the more Schaake learned, the clearer it became that the Iranian were not the only ones using technology to stay informed about the protests. Meeting with ights defenders who had escaped from Iran to Eastern Turkey, Schaake was told anecdote after anecdote about how the Islamic Republic’s authorities were using tech to surveil, track, and censor dissenting opinions.
 
Investigations indicated that they were utilizing a technique referred to then as “deep packet inspection,” a system which allows the controller of a communications network to read and block information from going through, alter communications, and collect data about specific individuals. What was more, journalists revealed that many of the systems such regimes were using to perform this type of surveillance had been bought from, and were serviced by, Western companies.
 
For Schaake, this revelation was a turning point of her focus as a politician and the beginning of her journey into the realm of cyber policy and tech regulation.
 
“On the one hand, we were sharing statements urging to respect the human rights of the demonstrators. And then it turned out that European companies were the ones selling this monitoring equipment to the Iranian regime. It became immediately clear to me that if technology was to play a role in enhancing human rights and democracy, we couldn’t simply trust the market to make it so; we needed to have rules,” Schaake explained.

The Transatlantic Divide

But who writes the rules? When it comes to tech regulation, there is longstanding unease between the private and public sectors, and a different approach between the East and West shores of the Atlantic. In general, EU member countries favor oversight of the technology sector and have supported legislation like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Digital Services Act to protect user privacy and digital human rights. On the other hand, major tech companies — many of them based in North America — favor the doctrine of self-regulation and frequently cite claims to intellectual property or widely-defined protections such as Section 230 as a justification for keeping government oversight at arm’s length. Efforts by governing bodies like the European Union to legislate privacy and transparency requirements are with raised hackles 
 
It’s a feeling Schaake has encountered many times in her work. “When you talk to companies in Silicon Valley, they make it sound as if Europeans are after them and that these regulations are weapons meant to punish them,” she says.
 
But the need to place checks on those with power is rooted in history, not histrionics, says Schaake. Memories of living under the eye of surveillance states such as the Soviet Union and East Germany still are fresh on many European’s minds. The drive to protect privacy is as much about keeping the government in check as it is about reining in the outsized influence and power of private technology companies, Schaake asserts.
 

Big Brother Is Watching

In the last few years, the momentum has begun to shift. 
 
In 2020, a joint reporting effort by The Guardian, The Washington Post, Le Monde, Proceso, and over 80 journalists at a dozen additional news outlets worked in partnership with Amnesty International and Forbidden Stories to publish the Pegasus Project, a detailed report showing that spyware from the private company NSO Group was used to target, track, and retaliate against tens of thousands journalists, activists, civil rights leaders, and even against prominent politicians around the world.
 
This type of surveillance has innovated quickly beyond the network monitoring undertaken by regimes like Iran in the 2000s, and taps into the most personal details of an individual’s device, data, and communications. In the absence of widespread regulation, companies like NSO Group have been able to develop commercial products with capabilities as sophisticated as state intelligence bureaus. In many cases, “no-click” infections are now possible, meaning a device can be targeted and have the spyware installed without the user ever knowing or having any suspicions that they have become a victim of covert surveillance.

“If we were to create a spectrum of harmful technologies, spyware could easily take the top position,” said Schaake, speaking as the moderator of a panel on “Countering the Misuse of Technology and the Rise of Digital Authoritarianism” at the 2023 Summit for Democracy co-hosted by U.S. President Joe Biden alongside the governments of Costa Rica, the Netherlands, Republic of Korea, and Republic of Zambia.
 
Revelations like those of the Pegasus Project have helped spur what Schaake believes is long-overdue action from the United States on regulating this sector of the tech world. On March 27, 2023, President Biden signed an executive order prohibiting the operational use of commercial spyware products by the United States government. It is the first time such an action has been formally taken in Washington.
 
For Schaake, the order is a “fantastic first step,” but she also cautions that there is still much more that needs to be done. The use of spyware made by the government is not limited by Biden's executive order, and neither is the use by individuals who can get their hands on these tools. 

Human Rights vs. National Security

One of Schaake’s main concerns is the potential for governmental overreach in the pursuit of curtailing the influence of private companies.
 
Schaake explains, “What's interesting is that while the motivation in Europe for this kind of regulation is very much anchored in fundamental rights, in the U.S., what typically moves the needle is a call to national security, or concern for China.”
 
It is important to stay vigilant about how national security can become a justification for curtailing civil liberties. Writing for the Financial Times, Schaake elaborated on the potential conflict of interest the government has in regulating tech more rigorously:
 
“The U.S. government is right to regulate technology companies. But the proposed measures, devised through the prism of national security policy, must also pass the democracy test. After 9/11, the obsession with national security led to warrantless wiretapping and mass data collection. I back moves to curb the outsized power of technology firms large and small. But government power must not be abused.”
 
While Schaake hopes well-established democracies will do more to lead by example, she also acknowledges that the political will to actually step up to do so is often lacking. In principle, countries rooted in the rule of law and the principles of human rights decry the use of surveillance technology beyond their own borders. But in practice, these same governments are also sometimes customers of the surveillance industrial complex. 

Schaake has been trying to make that disparity an impossible needle for nations to keep threading. For over a decade, she has called for an end to the surveillance industry and has worked on developing export controls rules for the sale of surveillance technology from Europe to other parts of the world. But while these measures make it harder for non-democratic regimes to purchase these products from the West, the legislation is still limited in its ability to keep European and Western nations from importing spyware systems like Pegasus back into the West. And for as long as that reality remains, it undermines the credibility of the EU and West as a whole, says Schaake. 
 
Speaking at the 2023 Summit for Democracy, Schaake urged policymakers to keep the bigger picture in mind when it comes to the risks of unaccountable, ungoverned spyware industries. “We have to have a line in the sand and a limit to the use of this technology. It’s extremely important, because this is proliferating not only to governments, but also to non-state actors. This is not the world we want to live in.”

Building Momentum for the Future

Drawing those lines in the sands is crucial not just for the immediate safety and protection of individuals who have been targeted with spyware but applies to other harms of technology vis-a-vis the long-term health of democracy.

“The narrative that technology is helping people's democratic rights, or access to information, or free speech has been oversold, whereas the need to actually ensure that democratic principles govern technology companies has been underdeveloped,” Schaake argues.

While no longer an active politician, Schaake has not slowed her pace in raising awareness and contributing her expertise to policymakers trying to find ways of threading the digital needle on tech regulation. Working at the Cyber Policy Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Schaake has been able to combine her experiences in European politics with her academic work in the United States against the backdrop of Silicon Valley, the home-base for many of the world’s leading technology companies and executives.
 
Though now half a globe away from the European Parliament, Schaake’s original motivations to improve society and people’s lives have not dimmed.

“It’s up to us to guarantee the upsides of technology and limit its downsides. That’s how we are going to best serve our democracy in this moment,” she says.
 
Schaake is clear-eyed about the hurdles still ahead on the road to meaningful legislation about tech transparency and human rights in digital spaces. With a highly partisan Congress in the United States and other issues like the war in Ukraine and concerns over China taking center stage, it will take time and effort to build a critical mass of political will to tackle these issues. But Biden’s executive order and the discussion of issues like digital authoritarianism at the Summit for Democracy also give Schaake hope that progress can be made.
 
“The bad news is we're not there yet. The good news is there's a lot of momentum for positive change and improvement, and I feel like people are beginning to understand how much it is needed.”
 
And for anyone ready to jump into the fray and make an impact, Schaake adds a standing invitation: “I’m always happy to grab a coffee and chat. Let’s talk!”

The complete recording of "Countering the Misuse of Technology and the Rise of Digital Authoritarianism," the panel Marietje Schaake moderated at the 2023 Summit for Democracy, is available below.

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