Based on more than 50 qualitative interviews with activists from Egypt, Syria, and Iran, this report aims to provide a deeper understanding of the type of threats faced by human rights defenders and journalists in these situations. In doing so, the report seeks to answer the following questions: 1. 2. 3. What are the tools and practices used by regimes to control and contain dissent across borders? What are the effects of these threats on diaspora and exiled activists? How do targeted activists respond? What are their security practices and needs? The report highlights the systematic attempts of authoritarian regimes to harass, threaten, and silence critics and dissidents abroad. It also outlines the principal motives and tools of regimes engaging in repression across borders. In line with current literature on authoritarianism, the report argues that the methods and tactics of transnational repression have both an illiberal and an authoritarian dimension: they not only interfere with individual rights, they also serve to consolidate uncontested political power. For example, spying on dissidents abroad by hacking into their accounts and communications is illiberal because it violates one’s privacy and dignity. But the practice also has an authoritarian intent, as doing so aides and accompanies other threats to disable the voices of political exiles, suppress and distort critical information, and, ultimately, “shield power-holders from accountability.”5 Transnational repression that utilizes digital technologies is therefore both a human rights problem and a political problem.6 This report provides insight into the vulnerabilities of transnational activists and the security practices they rely on in an increasingly complex environment of sociotechnical risks. Diaspora and exiled activists navigate complex “transnational fields” with ties to various contexts and communities in home and host societies.7 Their security is dependent upon these relations as regime agents identify and exploit weak spots in social networks to reach for key activists abroad. Safeguarding the security of diaspora activists is therefore a collective effort that should seek to strengthen resilience, support, and information-sharing in civil society networks. EMBEDDING IN CURRENT RESEARCH This report intervenes at the intersection of three pre-existing areas of research: (1) the extraterritorial reach of state repression, (2) the use of digital threats against civil society, and (3) the security of human rights defenders. First, research on the extraterritorial reach of state repression has shown that contemporary authoritarian regimes are not confined to a specific territory with rigid and closely guarded borders. Instead, as global flows of information and migration intensify, these regimes are able to extend the reach of their domestic political controls and assert authority over citizens living abroad via a range of policies designed to threaten and silence dissidents.8 As this report shows, digital technologies have enabled governments to expand their established tactics of extraterritorial state repression by monitoring and rapidly responding to diaspora activities on a large scale. 5 Glasius, M. (2018). What authoritarianism is… and is not: A practice perspective. International Affairs, 94(3), 515-533, p. 530. 6 Glasius, M., & Michaelsen, M. (2018). Illiberal and authoritarian practices in the digital sphere—Prologue. International Journal of Communication 12, 3795-3813. 7 Levitt, P., & Schiller, N. G. (2004). Conceptualizing simultaneity: A transnational social field perspective on society. International Migration Review, 38(3), 1002-1039. 8 Glasius, M. (2018). Extraterritorial authoritarian practices: A framework. Globalizations, 15(2), 179-197; Jörum, E. L. (2015). Repression across borders: homeland response to anti-regime mobilization among Syrians in Sweden. Diaspora Studies, 8(2), 104-119; Lewis, D. (2015). “Illiberal Spaces:” Uzbekistan’s extraterritorial security practices and the spatial politics of contemporary authoritarianism. Nationalities Papers, 43(1), 140-159; Moss, D. M. (2016). Transnational repression, diaspora mobilization, and the case of the Arab Spring. Social Problems, 63(4), 480-498. 6