Freedom House abroad. The digital tactics not only expand the pool of potential victims, but also allow perpetrators to disrupt the dissidents’ work, impede their ability to communicate with family and friends, or drive them offline altogether—all without physically violating the host state’s sovereignty. In addition to using spyware, repressive governments are monitoring the public social media activities of exiled dissidents and diaspora groups. The Chinese government, one of the most prolific perpetrators of transnational repression, employs advanced social media monitoring programs to track dissent.106 Chinese authorities have increasingly extended their investigations to platforms that are blocked in China, such as Twitter and Facebook.107 This strategy ensnares people who live abroad, including private individuals who are not involved in activism and may even use social media anonymously. Scrutiny of their activities sometimes leads to coercion by proxy, in which police visit and intimidate homecountry relatives of people living abroad. Research by Freedom House and others, including Citizen Lab and the digital surveillance scholar Marcus Michaelsen, has consistently found that digital tactics of transnational repression produce severe social and psychological effects, and that they are used in concert with physical attacks.108 As an academic from Indian-administered Kashmir explained, “I decided it’s not good for my mental health to deal with that [harassment], so I’m off of social media.” A Saudi-American activist said her mother cannot sleep well after seeing the harassment and threats against her daughter online: “She developed some health issues as a result of the fear, the anxiety.”109 Digital transnational repression can facilitate physical attacks, which in turn increase the credibility of digital threats. A Ga, a Vietnamese pastor who resettled as a refugee in the United States, told Freedom House that he has received threatening messages on Facebook from suspected Vietnamese officials. One message said, “If we wanted to kidnap you, we could have—remember the case in Berlin,” in an apparent reference to the brazen 2017 state-sponsored kidnapping of a Vietnamese asylum seeker in broad daylight.110 Mohamed Soltan, a US-based EgyptianAmerican activist, sees digital and physical transnational repression as closely related: “Character assassination comes before any physical attempt to hurt or assassinate somebody. It always precedes it because it gives cover for any transnational repression.”111 A US-based Saudi activist who receives threats of death and sexual violence online, usually from Twitter accounts that she believes are run by Saudi government trolls, expressed a similar perspective: “Those threats are not just threats… Some threats are really intimidating after what happened to Khashoggi.” In fact, the UN investigation into Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination identified spyware as playing a role in the planning for the attack, and he previously faced online abuse from progovernment accounts.112 “Those threats are not just threats… Some threats are really intimidating after what happened to Khashoggi.” –US-based Saudi activist The importance and limits of digital hygiene Given the extensive suite of tactics for digital transnational repression, it is critically important that potential victims adopt strong digital security measures. Many activists, journalists, and others who may be targeted in exile take painstaking efforts to conceal their location and protect their accounts from hacking attempts. But they are clearly operating at a disadvantage compared with the powerful states that are pursuing them. Relying solely on digital hygiene practices to combat transnational repression unfairly puts the burden on the targeted individuals, leaving them more vulnerable to attack. Many of the activists who were interviewed by Freedom House take precautions, including limiting location sharing, using two-factor authentication, changing passwords, regularly updating software, and using encrypted platforms. “I always have my location turned off unless I absolutely need to use my GPS,” said Claude Gatebuke, a Rwandan-born activist in the United States.113 Another activist explained the extent of the safety measures that he and his colleagues have adopted: “We have a whole list of things that we do as far as two-factor authentications. We have separate email addresses when it comes to things that are sensitive. Even though our organizational emails are from Gmail, with fairly high level of protection, we still use … [the encrypted email service] ProtonMail, for example … and a VPN [virtual private network].” freedomhouse.org 27