Digital Rights Primer

Digital Rights Community & Field Primer

The digital rights primer covers the field and global community of people working at the intersection of rights and technology.

This primer is based on our experience and point-of-view of having worked as community conveners in the digital rights space for more than 12+ years.

It is designed for people new to the digital rights field, as well as adjacent practitioners—journalists, activists, technologists, funders, and policymakers—who want a grounded understanding of the community of practice working to addressing digital rights issues.

For a better understanding of digital rights as a rights concept, we strongly recommend the What are Digital Rights primer.

✊🏽 First, A Quick Introduction to Digital Rights

Technology is political

Digital rights matter because they determine who gets to participate safely in society — and who is silenced.

Digital technologies shape nearly every part of our lives — from how we communicate and work, to how governments deliver services and corporations handle our data. With these opportunities come risks and threats such as surveillance, censorship, and disinformation. As technologies evolve, so does the list of problems negatively impacting societies.

Digital rights are the extension of human rights into the online and technological sphere. They ensure that the freedoms we hold offline — freedom of expression, privacy, assembly, and access to information — are also protected in the digital age.

Marginalized communities experience the most acute attacks against their digital rights.

🫶 A Fight to Protect the Most Vulnerable and Marginalized

The fight for digital rights affects everyone, but it weighs heavily on the most vulnerable communities around the globe. This is because technology is not neutral. The design of platforms, algorithms, and data systems reflects existing power structures, and those without power often pay the highest price.

This includes marginalized and vulnerable groups such as women, LGBTQI+ people, ethnic, religious and racial minorities, individuals with disabilities, and children, as well as those standing up to power, such as journalists and civil society actors. These groups are disproportionately surveilled, censored, and targeted online.

protect your communities

Additional Resources on Digital Rights Issues

What are Digital Rights a more robust explanation of the issues.

What are Targeted Attacks how and why bad faith actors target civil society.

What is Digital Literacy and Why It Matters, an intro of the basis.

How to Get Involved And Learn More About Digital Rights

TCU's Digital Rights Newsletter delivers a weekly curated roundup of essential digital rights news, funding and job opportunities, community updates, upcoming events, and learning resources. This includes updates on TCU's workshops, monthly digital rights town hall meetups, and more!

The Emerging Community of Practice: The Digital Rights Community

The Digital Rights Community is a global community of practice made up of diverse practitioners working at the intersection of technology and rights.

The Digital Rights Community is a global community of practice that works at the intersection of rights and technology, and work collaboratively on issues such as:

● Holistic digital security and protection of civil society;

● Counteracting online censorship and surveillance;

● Community-focused approaches to issues like AI, disinformation, internet policy and governance, climate and tech, among others.

The field brings together representatives of diverse backgrounds, professions, and experiences from around the world.

This includes profiles such as movement leaders, technologists, security experts, civil society organization employees, journalists, researchers, policymakers, and policy advocates, and many others. (We have a longer list of profiles further down in this article).

The digital rights community is global and interdisciplinary because digital rights challenges are transnational and complex in scope, and require transnational solutions.

Ss digital rights issues grow, so does the need to attract new talent to the community of practice. However, in recent years, historic funding cuts to the field, increased regional instability, and rising exhaustion related to years of difficult work in low resourced environments, where often people's own safety is at risk, has lead to a historic brain drain. This poses a significant risk to the future of human rights and social justice worldwide, given the steep learning curve required to enter the field, and the combination of skills needed to be effective.

Vulnerable and Targeted Communities Are the Leading Experts on Digital Rights Threats

Canaries in the coal mine.

The digital rights community includes a high proportion of people from historically marginalized and vulnerable groups, precisely because these communities experience the most acute and persistent attacks on their digital rights. Their lived experience on the frontlines of surveillance, censorship, harassment, and repression makes them uniquely qualified subject-matter experts on understanding the tactics and methods used by adversaries.

In many ways, they act as early indicators of future threats for broader society as tools and tactics are often tested on these communities first before being scaled to the wider public. Moreover, adversaries and authoritarian regimes routinely share and refine these tactics across borders, meaning that methods used against one marginalized group today in one country often become the blueprint for targeting broader populations tomorrow in other countries.

Marginalized and vulnerable groups that are usually targeted include religious and ethnic minorities from the Global Majority, BIPOC from the Global North, and LGBTQ+ and women from around the world, particularly in places where it may be illegal to be themselves.

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The Cultural Values and Challenges Inherited from Hacker and FLOSS Spaces

It is not uncommon to find technologists in the digital rights field who identify as white hat hackers, or ethically motivated to help.

The digital rights field has its origins in two separate but interconnected communities: open-source and free/libre open-source software (FLOSS) technologists, and hacker spaces. As both architects and builders of technology, they were the first to identify how digital systems could be exploited—by corporations, governments, and other powerful actors—to surveil, censor, discriminate against, or otherwise harm individuals and communities.

Their early warnings were shaped not by theory alone, but by hands-on experience designing, breaking, and stress-testing technologies in real-world conditions.

Hacker communities have long understood that privacy, security, and anonymity are not optional features, but essential safeguards in a digitally mediated world. As a result, it is not uncommon to find technologists in the digital rights field who identify as white hat hackers and/or hacktivists —individuals who use hacking or other digital tactics as a form of political or social activism.

It is important to note, however, that not all hackers or open-source technologists are concerned with digital rights or motivated by the public interest; like any community, these spaces encompass a wide range of profiles. For example, black hat hackers violate laws and ethical standards for nefarious purposes such as cybercrime or cyberwarfare.

However, many of the hackers active in the digital rights space see their work as an extension of their values or activism, and understand how technology impacts rights. Additionally, many open source technologists build tools for the common good.

Influencing How Technology is Shaped and How the Culture is Made Security-Conscious

Tor is widely recognized as one of the most robust and interference-resistant public-interest tools for anonymity and privacy.

This lineage also helps explain why Internet Freedom was a concept embraced by the digital rights community — it was clear early on that an open, interoperable, and globally accessible network was essential to protecting freedom of expression, access to information, and the ability to organize and participate in public life.

Internet freedom emerged as a framework that connected technical design choices with human rights outcomes, emphasizing that the structure of the internet itself could either enable or constrain fundamental freedoms.

This same lineage explains why tools developed and/or championed by these communities—such as the Tor Project—have played a foundational role in shaping the digital rights ecosystem. Tor is not only widely recognized as one of the most robust and interference-resistant public-interest tools for anonymity and privacy; through its research and development, it has influenced an entire generation of privacy-preserving technologies, threat models, and security practices. Its design principles reflect values central to the digital rights movement: decentralization, resilience against censorship, and protection for users operating in hostile or high-risk conditions.

The Cultural Values

Together, hackers and FLOSS technologists have helped define both the technical and some of the ethical foundations of digital rights work. Their contributions continue to inform how civil society responds to emerging threats—from mass surveillance and internet shutdowns to AI-enabled repression—ensuring that the field remains grounded in practical, user-centered, and rights-respecting approaches to technology. Values include:

Decentralized vs. Centralized Community Models

Just as distributed technologies are more resilient and secure, so are decentralized communities. By distributing leadership, trust, and knowledge across interconnected nodes, single points of failure are reduced. This allows communities to endure even when parts of the network are disrupted.

Transparency and Verifiability

Open-source tech is more secure because vulnerabilities can be identified and fixed by many, rather than hidden behind secrecy. These principles extend to communities: transparency builds shared understanding, while verifiability allows people to independently confirm information —strengthening trust through evidence, not blind faith.

Freedom and Autonomy

Freedom in technology means preserving user agency—ensuring people can understand, choose, and adapt the tools they rely on, rather than being constrained by opaque or coercive systems that may conceal harmful functions. Technology should empower users, not lock them into closed systems they cannot inspect, control, or modify.

Privacy by Design

Privacy is a fundamental right and should be a core design principle of any technology. Tools should minimize invasive data collection and retention, limit unnecessary data retention, and supporting anonymity. For journalists and rights defenders, it allows for the ability to communicate, organize, and participate in public life safely and without fear of retaliation.

Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing

Open collaboration, peer review, and shared learning are prioritized over competition or siloed expertise. Meaningful progress happens through collective effort, where knowledge is openly exchanged and diverse perspectives are actively included, strengthening both solutions and the communities that build them.

Resisting Abuse of Power

Systems that centralize power and enable harm must be questioned, audited, and challenged. People should be free to communicate, organize, and share information —without surveillance, coercion, or interference.

Serving the Public Good

Technology should improve the human condition and serve the common good. In the digital rights context, this means building and sustaining tools, infrastructure, and support systems that enable journalists, human rights defenders, and communities to safely inform, organize, and serve their societies.

The Cultural Challenges

This lineage has introduced a number of structural and cultural challenges within the digital rights field, particularly related to equity. This is not surprising, given that open-source and hacker communities have historically exhibited lower levels of representation than the broader technology sector because of both structural problems and lack of resources. As an example, most for-private tech companies have human resource departments. Meanwhile, individuals from marginalized groups have less time to volunteer actively in open source projects.

The good news is that these challenges have been increasingly recognized and actively addressed over the past decade, though the work remains ongoing. Within this context, Team CommUNITY’s efforts have played a critical role in supporting the growth of the field in more equitable and inclusive ways, while also helping to shift norms toward healthier, more sustainable community cultures. If you would like to learn more about this history and the work underway, we invite you to reach out to us at [email protected].

The Human Rights Field and Multilateral Government Entities

The United Nations plays a critical role in digital rights fight.

Digital rights is now firmly situated within the broader human rights field, even as it continues to function as an evolving area of practice. Over the past decade, multilateral institutions and intergovernmental bodies have played an increasingly influential role in shaping how digital rights are defined, interpreted, and governed at the global and regional level.

Entities such as the United Nations have progressively recognized that human rights obligations extend to online spaces, digital infrastructures, and emerging technologies. This recognition is reflected in UN resolutions on internet access and online freedom of expression, the work of Special Rapporteurs, and growing attention to issues such as digital surveillance, biometric technologies, artificial intelligence, and cross-border data flows.

As a result, digital rights advocacy frequently involves engaging multilateral institutions to translate established human rights standards into technology-mediated contexts, and to ensure that global digital policy processes are grounded in human dignity, equity, and accountability.

Rise of Digital Warfare

As digital technologies increasingly mediate civic participation, access to information, public services, and democratic processes, governments have expanded their use of digital tools within national security, defense, and foreign policy agendas. In this context, states act simultaneously as protectors of rights and as central actors in practices that place those rights at risk.

Governments are increasingly engaging in forms of digital warfare, including cyber operations, information manipulation, mass surveillance, internet shutdowns, and the deployment of digital technologies in armed conflict and political repression. These practices intensify longstanding tensions between state power and the protection of fundamental rights, positioning digital rights squarely within the geopolitical struggle.

Unlike many traditional human rights domains, digital rights work is shaped by rapid technological change, cross-border digital infrastructures, and the growing influence of private technology companies. This environment requires ongoing adaptation, as defenders respond to both state and non-state abuses while navigating complex international power dynamics.

This Results in An Usual and Radically Diverse Ecosystem

For people entering the digital rights space, the field can feel disorienting at first given that it draws together an unusually diverse set of actors.

Unlike more established rights or movement spaces—where shared values, language, and organizing traditions are often well defined—digital rights brings together a wide mix of actors who do not always share the same political frameworks, cultural references, or professional norms. These individuals come from different regions, ideological backgrounds, and lived experiences, and may hold differing views on power, governance, and strategy.

What unites them is not a single worldview, but a shared commitment to protecting people from harm in increasingly digital societies.

This diversity enables creative, cross-disciplinary responses to complex challenges, while also introducing friction, disagreement, and competing approaches to power and governance.

As a result, effective digital rights work requires more than traditional advocacy skills. It depends on the ability to translate across technical and non-technical communities, build coalitions across difference, and develop shared ethical frameworks within a rapidly evolving global field. For digital rights defenders, the work is therefore not only about confronting external threats such as surveillance, censorship, or digital warfare, but also about cultivating trust, shared norms, and collective responsibility within the community itself.

The Growing List of Digital Rights Challenges

It is impossible to fully capture the expanding range of issues addressed by the digital rights community. As digital technologies become more deeply embedded in society, governance, and everyday life, the risks and harms associated with them continue to grow and evolve. To date, however, most digital rights challenges can be broadly grouped into the following areas

Countering Online Censorship and Surveillance

Censorship and surveillance have grown increasingly sophisticated as state and non-state actors refine tools used to repress expression, silence journalists and communities, and close civic space. Alongside technical measures, non-technical tactics—such as online harassment and transnational repression—are widely used. More recently, there has been a sharp rise in the deployment of advanced spyware by authoritarian governments.

Protection of Civil Society, Journalists, and Defenders

Civil society actors, journalists, and human rights defenders face persistent digital threats, including hacking, surveillance, and targeted attacks. This work includes the development and promotion of trustworthy open-source privacy and security tools (such as Tor and Signal), alongside protective practices, capacity building, and incident response.

Artificial Intelligence, Disinformation, and Emerging Technologies

The rapid expansion of AI and automated systems has introduced new risks, including algorithmic bias, opaque decision-making, and large-scale disinformation. These challenges intersect with internet policy, governance, and the growing environmental and climate impacts of digital technologies.

Infrastructure Ownership and Design

Who owns and controls digital infrastructure has profound implications for rights and access. This includes advocacy for decentralized, independent, and community-owned infrastructure—such as mesh networks—that prioritize resilience, autonomy, and local governance.

Network Interference and Information Manipulation

Network interference ranges from internet shutdowns and throttling to computational propaganda and coordinated disinformation campaigns. These practices may be carried out by human actors, automated systems, or AI, and are often used to manipulate public discourse or suppress dissent.

Legal Persecution and Judicial Harassment

Governments increasingly criminalize online behavior, including the use of encryption or digital expression. There has also been a rise in Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs), used to intimidate, silence, exhaust, or financially drain those speaking out on matters of public interest.

Internet Governance and Global Norm-Setting

Digital rights defenders work to protect the integrity of global internet governance processes, resisting coordinated attacks on encryption, opposing extreme data sovereignty regimes, and shaping international norms that keep the internet interoperable and rights-respecting.

Platform Power and Corporate Accountability

A small number of technology companies exert outsized influence over speech, labor, markets, and democratic processes. This includes work on antitrust, platform accountability, content governance, labor rights in the gig economy, and resisting the privatization of public digital spaces.

Data Extraction and Exploitation

Many communities—particularly in the Global Majority—are subjected to large-scale data extraction without meaningful consent, benefit, or accountability. This includes biometric systems, digital ID programs, health data collection, and AI training datasets.

Identity-Based and Targeted Digital Harm

Digital harms disproportionately affect marginalized communities and include doxxing, non-consensual intimate imagery, deepfakes, coordinated harassment, and technology-facilitated intimate partner violence.

Digital Labor and Exploitation

Digital economies rely on invisible and precarious labor, including content moderators, data labelers, gig workers, and platform-dependent creators. These workers often face poor labor protections, psychological harm, and algorithmic control.

Digital Divide and Disability Justice

Persistent digital divides limit who can safely and meaningfully access the internet. Barriers related to disability, language, geography, gender, income, and literacy exclude many communities from digital participation.

Knowledge Control, Archives, and Cultural Erasure

Platform governance and algorithmic visibility shape whose histories and struggles remain visible online. Archives, journalism, and cultural memory—especially from marginalized communities—are increasingly vulnerable to erasure.

Cross-Border and Transnational Repression

Digital tools enable governments to target critics beyond their borders through spyware, harassment, legal threats, and coercion of family members, leaving many defenders without effective legal protection.

Samples of work conducted by Digital Rights Defenders:

As more and more issues arise at the intersection of technology and rights, the scope of digital rights work continues to grow.

• Creating and maintaining technology solutions that enable users to circumvent online surveillance, censorship, and internet shutdowns.
• Securing social movements, journalists, and human rights defenders through holistic digital and physical security training, risk assessments, and emergency incident response.
• Advocacy efforts, including challenging draconian laws that penalize the use of encryption, anonymity tools, or technologies such as VPNs.
• Policy engagement and strategic litigation aimed at reforming harmful legislation, promoting rights-respecting regulation, and defending individuals targeted for their use of digital tools.
• Pushing for industry standards by engaging with technology companies and participating in international and multistakeholder bodies that oversee the technical infrastructure of the internet, with a focus on privacy and security by design.
• Researching, documenting, and mapping emerging challenges such as the impacts of artificial intelligence, disinformation, biometric surveillance, and smart cities on human rights.
• Building collective action and coalitions around issues such as platform accountability, content moderation practices, shadow banning, and algorithmic transparency.

• Raising public awareness through media engagement, campaigns, and narrative work to strengthen understanding of digital rights among broader audiences.

The Profiles

Digital Rights Defenders come from all regions, disciplines, and backgrounds. They work on different aspects of digital rights, but ultimately are trying to protect and advocate for activists, journalists, and civil societies from attacks and risks. Here are some common profiles we see:

• Movement Leaders
• Journalists & Media Workers
• Community Organizers
• Security Professionals
• Digital Security Trainers
• Software Developers
• Tool Makers (UX, designers, etc.)
• System Administration and Network Experts
• Academic Researchers
• Community Researchers
• Policy Advocates
• Policymakers
• Technologists that come in different shapes, sizes, and skill sets. For example, one can be a technologist who focuses on analyzing the impact tech has on society.
• Diverse professionals working at different types of civil society organizations including grassroots organizations, and large international NGOs.

Organizations and Projects

Below are selected categories of organizations and projects, with examples provided for reference.

Member Networks focused on Community and Capacity Building

• Team CommUNITY

Technology Tools and Organizations focused on Open-Source Circumvention, Encryption, Safety and Privacy

• Tor Project
• Guardian Technologies
• Resilience Technologies
• Wire
• Circulo
• GlobaLeaks
• HTTPS Everywhere
• OpenPGP
• GNU Privacy Guard
• Privacy Badger
• NoScript
• Tails
• Qubes OS
• Tahoe-LAFS
• Amnezia VPN
• NewNode

Network, Hardware, and ISP Providers

• Calyx Institute
• Greenhost

International Human Rights Organizations

• ARTICLE 19
• Internews
• Front Line Defenders
• Civil Rights Defenders

Rapid Response and Digital Security Networks

• Rarenet
• CiviCERT
• Center for Digital Resilience
• Access Now’s Digital Security Helpline

Journalism and Press Freedom Organizations

• Border Center for Journalists and Bloggers (BCJB)
• Freedom of the Press Foundation
• Committee to Protect Journalists
• PEN International
• IFEX

Regional and Issue-Focused Organizations and Networks

• D3
• Open Culture Foundation
• SMEX
• Jordan Open Source Association
• Pollicy
• SocialTIC
• Paradigm Initiative
• CIPESA
• Derechos Digitales
• Conexo
• EngageMedia
• Open Culture Foundation
• IT for Change
• Equality Labs
• Safe Sisters
• Hackers on Planet Earth
• DEF CON
• Chaos Computer Club
• Venezuela Inteligente
• Digital Society of Africa
• Nois Radio
• Fundación Karisma

Research Organizations (Academic and Non-Academic)

• Amnesty International Security Lab
• OONI
• Citizen Lab
• Fairwork
• Oxford Internet Institute
• Freedom House
• OpenNet Initiative
• Berkman Klein Center
• IODA

Policy Focused Organizations

• Access Now
• Electronic Frontier Foundation
• Global Partners Digital (GPD)
• Open Rights Group (ORG)

Security Vendors

• Radical Security

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While some of the following actors are not inherently pro–digital rights, some have played key roles in advancing privacy and security standards. All, however, shape global digital governance.

Multistakeholder and Intergovernmental Bodies

• United Nations
• Internet Governance Forum
• International Telecommunication Union
• Freedom Online Coalition
• Internet Engineering Task Force
• Global Network Initiative

Companies

• VPN providers: TunnelBear, Mullvad
• Social media platforms: Meta, X (formerly Twitter)
• Large technology companies: Apple, Google

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Want to Work In Digital Rights? Things You Should Know

For many of us working in digital rights, we are deeply passionate about this work for several reasons: the significant need for it—often within our own communities; the impact it can have—frequently global in scale; and the level of creativity and intellectual rigor required to address emerging challenges that sit at the forefront of the most urgent, next-generation issues affecting humankind. We are also drawn to the remarkable people in this field—individuals who are among the most thoughtful and systems-oriented thinkers anywhere.

Check out our Digital Rights Job Board, which gets updated with opportunities on a weekly basis!

A Young, Emerging Community Experiencing Growing Pains

As an emerging field, digital rights work comes with many of the growing pains commonly associated with startups and the nonprofit sector. Some important realities to keep in mind include:

• Most digital rights organizations are small and less than ten years old.
• Funding is often unstable. Many traditional funders remain hesitant to support what they perceive as a “technology” space, despite the increasing and diverse digital threats faced by movements, journalists, and everyday users.
• There is no formalized career pathway. Many practitioners build expertise through a combination of self-study, proactive opportunity-seeking, and chance openings that align with their skills. As a result, many individuals become “unicorns,” possessing rare combinations of technical, policy, and organizational expertise.
• Smaller organizations—which make up a large portion of the ecosystem—often require staff to wear multiple hats out of necessity. This can make it difficult to onboard new talent, scale operations, or hire effectively.

This is why community engagement projects like Team CommUNITY are so needed — they help onboard new talent and communities, strengthen peer learning, and grow the field sustainably.

In 2025, severe funding cuts have affected a large majority of digital rights organizations worldwide. Until this funding crisis is resolved, we expect that most opportunities will continue to concentrate in technical roles (such as developers and systems administrators) or development roles (including fundraising and partnership development)

History: How Did Digital Rights Start?

Digital Rights evolved alongside the growth of technology and the Internet. The massification of the Internet began in the 90’s, bringing unprecedented opportunities for communication, access to information, and innovation. At the same time, this period marked the rise of online surveillance, censorship, and the privatization of digital resources. These developments led early observers to recognize that fundamental rights and freedoms needed protection in the digital realm, just as they do in the physical world.

In its earliest stages, the digital rights movement was largely driven by technologists—particularly those involved in open-source communities. These communities were also central to adjacent movements such as Internet Freedom and Free Culture. Technologists were among the first to witness the emergence of cyber threats, data breaches, and privacy violations, which highlighted the urgent need to protect personal information and freedom of expression online.

Many early digital rights advocates emerged from hacker and technical communities, such as the 2600 hacker group, which published a popular magazine covering digital rights and related issues including freedom of information and expression. These communities played a crucial role in promoting public awareness around security, emphasizing the importance of understanding vulnerabilities in order to protect against emerging threats.

Over time, technologists—often directly or indirectly connected to these early communities—led the development of “circumvention tools”: technologies designed to bypass surveillance, censorship, and information controls.

The 2000's and Now

By the early 2000s, more social justice–oriented organizations began engaging with digital rights, as communities around the world increasingly experienced repression online. A significant milestone came in 2001, when the the Association of Progressive Communications (APC) published the Internet Rights charter often described as an early “Internet Bill of Rights.” This effort helped bring traditional human rights organizations into digital rights debates. APC was particularly well positioned to do so, having been a pioneer in the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) within civil society.

Despite these developments, digital rights and the societal impacts of technology remained opaque to much of the general public and many non-technologists. Moreover, due to its origins in technical communities, the digital rights field inherited some of the same structural challenges found in the technology sector—most notably a lack of diversity and equity, high barriers to entry, and limited safe and inclusive spaces for marginalized groups.

In the early 2010s, the digital rights field began to grow and professionalize, driven in part by significant government funding—mostly coming from the US—directed toward Internet Freedom initiatives. A substantial portion of this funding supported open-source technologies, with code that was publicly accessible and licensed to promote reuse and collaboration. The underlying belief was that the free flow of information online could strengthen democratic societies by enabling accountability, innovation, creativity, and civic participation.

This influx of funding was also a response to the accelerating spread of online surveillance and censorship worldwide—a trend that has continued to intensify. Authoritarian actors increasingly invested in technologies designed to control, monitor, and repress digital communications.

Around the same time, authoritarian regimes began to more fully recognize the political power of digital technologies. In some cases, this realization followed mass mobilizations enabled by digital tools, such as during the Arab Spring. In others, it led to deliberate investments in surveillance infrastructure and information control. While some regimes were late adopters, others moved early. China, for example, began developing what would become the Great Firewall in the late 1990s, establishing one of the most extensive systems of internet censorship and control in the world.

Growth, Diversification, and Today’s Challenges

By around 2012, the digital rights community began making more intentional efforts to grow and diversify for two key reasons:

• To ensure that a wider range of voices and lived experiences shaped the priorities, strategies, and standards of Internet Freedom and digital rights work. Many circumvention tools developed in the Global North were proving ineffective—or even unsafe—for at-risk users in the Global South.
• To meet growing demand, as more communities worldwide experienced digital rights violations, particularly related to surveillance and censorship.

Since then, digital rights networks have emerged in nearly every region of the world. This expansion reflects both the increasing number of actors using digital means to repress and attack movements, civil society organizations, journalists, and individuals, and the rapid evolution of the tactics they employ.

By 2023, digital rights challenges extended well beyond traditional surveillance and censorship to include internet shutdowns, spyware, online harassment, disinformation campaigns, biometric surveillance, and other emerging threats. Much of this escalation is driven by the growing coordination among repressive actors, who increasingly share knowledge, legislative templates, tactics, and technological resources across borders.

Please contact us at [email protected] if you have any feedback about our Digital Rights Primer.