Surveillance and Democracy: Chilling Tales from Around the World

This report offers a ground-level view of some of the ways surveillance, and digital electronic surveillance in particular, is impacting on the lives of citizens and residents in ten countries in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. The ten author organizations are members of the International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations (INCLO), and their dispatches are rooted in their experiences as civil and human rights litigators and advocates in their respective countries. Their stories are distinct, reflecting local and national political realities, but their concerns, like the surveillance technologies themselves, are transnational, interconnected, and increasingly shared.

Separately, these stories describe concrete instances in which governments have used surveillance to violate civil and human rights. Together, they challenge the notion that digital and more traditional surveillance operations are harmless intrusions and that these tools are being used in democratic countries with adequate restraint and oversight.

Read the complete report here.