In May, a commercial flight carrying a critic of the Belarusian regime, Raman Pratasevich, en route from Greece to Lithuania was forced down by a false bomb threat in “a premeditated breach” of global aviation rules.
Pratasevich was plucked off the flight and arrested, prompting an international outcry.
Two months later, Iranian operatives tried to kidnap dissident journalist and activist Masih Alinejad in New York, bundle her into a speedboat bound for Venezuela, and take her back to Iran to face an uncertain fate.
“I was shaking with anger,” Alinejad tells The Age, “and it was the first time the threats against me became real.”
These operations captured the public’s attention, showcasing the cavalier confidence with which authoritarian regimes now act. But the spotlight on them obscured another reality: that of daily harassment by authoritarian regimes of their critics living overseas.
Aided by new technology and the growing appetites of authoritarian regimes to shape global opinions, this insecure world is a new reality for citizens of democracies.
US journalist Masih Alinejad: “It is no surprise that China, Russia, Iran and North Korea and many other authoritarian regimes take action against their own citizens, even those living in democracies.”Credit:Getty
US President Joe Biden will on Thursday convene a long-promised virtual Summit for Democracy, involving 110 countries across Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. The summit is being called to discuss ways to defend against the export of authoritarianism, how to fight the wave of corruption afflicting democracies, and how to promote human rights.
Everyday harassment of citizens within democracies has become normalised. So-called “threats from a distance are so widespread that measuring them is practically impossible”, a recent report on transnational repression prepared by US think tank Freedom House concluded.
After the activist who goes by the pseudonym Dongwuyuan Zoo participated in a protest in Melbourne, her mother was visited by police.Credit:
Some are more elaborate than others. After Chinese activist Dongwuyuan Zoo, who goes by a pseudonym, took to the steps of the State Library of Victoria to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre in June last year, technicians arrived at her mother’s house in China to install what appeared to be a set-top cable box. It turned out to be a police surveillance device.
“Then the local authorities said ‘if you tell your daughter [in Melbourne], you will never receive your superannuation’,” she says.
Cross-border harassment doesn’t just affect dissidents.
In 2019, Monash University lecturer and outspoken Chinese government critic Kevin Carrico commented on the trend towards hanfu, or traditional Chinese clothing, in an interview with CNN and suddenly found himself in the middle of a storm of online abuse.
What followed over the next six months was a “campaign of people setting up fake email addresses in my name and sending horrible emails to people”, culminating when a “fake email was sent to my department announcing my resignation”.
There was a time when strong, meaningful borders were a feature of the nation-state. Dissidents and critics in a democracy could generally enjoy protection of living in them, and governments spoke for their citizens in diplomatic disputes.
The adoption of new technology in recent decades – including mobile phones and social media – has eroded that arrangement; states of war and peace are now not so clear. While individuals can challenge governments as never before, they can also be targeted by autocratic states in novel ways.
University of Adelaide professor of international security Tim Legrand says authoritarian governments typically seek to muzzle expat critics first to ensure a regime’s credibility isn’t questioned at home. Then they move on to critics.
While such behaviour has always existed, Legrand says the scale and reach of the current challenge is exceptional: “There seems to be an erosion of the democratic states’ ability to control the flow of events within their borders.”
Evelyn Farkas’ political campaign was harassed.Credit:
When former Obama administration defence adviser Evelyn Farkas unsuccessfully ran for Congress in her native New York state last year, she found her campaign being criticised on an English-language website run by Russian intelligence.
Letters criticising Farkas’ campaign also appeared in her local New York state newspaper, penned by a person linked to the Russian website, the New York Times reported.
The Russian state seeks to knock down anyone who is negative about it, she says: “They wanted to prevent me from having any more power [through an election].”
The case showed how harassment from a regime can be micro-targeted and elude any border. To a degree, this reflects the design of so much technology of the past three decades – created with little imagination given to its misuse, both against democracies and the values linked to them.
Australia, France, Japan, and Canada are among the nations invited to Biden’s Summit for Democracy. China and Russia (which have both already criticised the event) and Iran are not invited.
Democracies’ leaders will reportedly be urged to “use tools such as export controls and sanctions to limit the ability of other governments to target dissidents across borders”.
The White House has already taken a small step in this direction by last month banning US companies from doing business with NSO Group, the Israeli company whose products are used to spy on journalists and activists. But the broader challenge remains.
“The resources a state can divert to social media surveillance and harassment are more than any one individual can contend with,” says Washington-based Freedom House’s Isabel Linzer.
Authoritarian states’ awareness of events within democracies created by social media form new challenges, as well.
In France, political analyst Nicolas Tenzer was sued for defamation by pro-Kremlin television channel RT (Russia Today) for posting on social media that RT was “an agency of propaganda” and guests who appear on the network as “useful idiots”.
Before being acquitted on December 3, he wrote in Le Monde: “One cannot imagine a French media organisation suing a person because he or she wrote that his or her reports were biased, politically oriented or simply false … Criticism of the media is part of democracy.”
RT filed the suit for “the specific words” used by Tenzer in two tweets, the channel told The Age, adding that Tenzer’s “tweets insult not only the honour and reputation of RT France journalists but also experts who are invited to speak at our channel”.
And yet the awareness of Tenzer’s postings, made within France, gave RT the ability to use the French judicial system against a French citizen.
The Summit for Democracy doesn’t have a specific plan for making technology safe for democracy.
But as the Atlantic Council’s Daniel Fried and Rose Jackson recently wrote, the forum can seek buy-in from companies to establish or reinforce democratic norms and standards: “Autocracies will loudly dismiss them, but such norms may give tech companies incentive to resist pressure from autocracies to enable repression.”
Five years after the Kremlin waded into US social media to influence an American presidential election, there has been no systematic reform of the platforms.
“If open societies can’t get this right, it will mean that they have ceded a natural advantage they possess over their authoritarian competitors,” says National Endowment for Democracy vice-president for studies and analysis Christopher Walker. “That in turn will leave democracies in a broader disadvantage.”
What’s at stake is not just the security of individuals but the broader perceptions and narratives of the regimes and democracies.
Between September 2020 and April 2021, Human Rights Watch interviewed 48 Chinese and Hong Kong international students at Australian universities. They recounted how their “patriotic” classmates had threatened them if they criticised Beijing, particularly over WeChat. One was told “I’m watching you” and another was confronted by a group of mask-wearing Mandarin-speaking men outside a suburban Brisbane home.
Academics who had discussed Taiwan or been critical of the Chinese Communist Party had to retract their statements or face email warnings that “you’re coming to your end”.
Such efforts to shape views on China, Russia and Iran have gone global.
Decades ago China typically didn’t care what was said about the government by dissidents such as those who fled the Tiananmen Square massacre, said Hong Kong-based lawyer Antony Dapiran. “Traditionally the Chinese government has not troubled itself with exiles. It has been ‘out of sight, out of mind’.”
Now China is increasingly “actively trying to manage its global image”, taking its activity into the heart of open democracies.
“A borderless world is borderless for everyone,” Dapiran says. “It seems to be an issue that hasn’t been faced on this scale [by democracies] up until now.”
The opening of Badiucao’s exhibition in Brescia, Italy, was subject to pressure from Beijing. The works on show included this composite portrait of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam. Credit:AP
Chinese-Australian artist Badiucao. Credit:Simon Schluter
In October, the Chinese embassy demanded a gallery in Brescia, Italy, remove an exhibition by Chinese-Australian artist Badiucao that lampooned Chinese President Xi Jinping. The gallery resisted but Badiucao said he still lives daily with the threat from the Chinese government to his work and daily life. “It has not disappeared,” he said.
Britain’s MI6 chief Richard Moore in a speech this week in said: “We are concerned by the Chinese government’s attempt to distort public discourse and political decision-making across the globe.”
Moore described the “big four” threats for democracies: China, Russia, Iran and international terrorism “as well as the overarching technological challenge”.
Ben Scott, director of the Australia’s Security and the Rules-Based Order Project at the Lowy Institute says democracies are now more vulnerable. “The fact we have a more open web-based society makes the problem worse.
“Not only are we more vulnerable and authoritarian states are more aware of what’s happening in our countries, they can see [the words and actions here] as a threat.”
Alinejad, the US-based Iranian-American journalist, says these threats from authoritarian regimes are not a new challenge for democracies “but only the latest”.
“Democracies need to take the tough choice of standing up to authoritarian regimes. But will they?”
In as much as the Summit for Democracy produces any consensus on technology, it may be the first step in a long-awaited pushback.
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