A TOOLKIT OF TRANSNATIONAL REPRESSION Authoritarian regimes use a “toolkit” of repressive practices to control and contain activists abroad. Digital technologies are key to all mechanisms of transnational repression as they allow regimes to monitor and respond to diaspora activism with greater scope and speed. Digital and non-digital threats against diaspora activists thus tend to be intertwined. This section of the report details the range of repressive tools utilized by Egypt, Syria, and Iran. These include: monitoring and surveillance; account and device hacking; slander, harassment, and disinformation campaigns; online publication hacking; threats from embassies and regime agents; threats against incountry relatives; and threats against property rights. Each “tool” is detailed below. MONITORING AND SURVEILLANCE State actors aim to gain influence and control through the systematic collection of personal details and information. Most surveillance targeting diaspora and exiled communities takes place online. Digital communication technologies are essential tools for diaspora activists who communicate with contacts and relatives in the home country, maintain work relations across countries and communities, and publish information on different platforms. As avid users of social media and other online channels, activists leave potential clues related to their current activity, travel, conference participation, friends, and collaborators. With professional and personal lives converging on social media, threat actors find ample opportunity to gather open source intelligence: publicly available information collected and exploited for the purposes of intelligence and security agencies.56 In general, the use of digital communication technologies exposes diaspora activists to monitoring and surveillance. Communication with contacts inside the home country creates opportunities for messages to be intercepted because their content, at least partly, travels through infrastructure under regime control. Additionally, social media profiles provide information on the activities and social relations of targets which can then be used for social engineering, activist network profiling, and malware attack preparation. This information is also useful for other forms of transnational repression, such as harassment of in-country relatives and disinformation campaigns. In addition, intelligence agencies monitor the programs of international and exiled media, tracking the work of journalists and media appearances of activists in the diaspora. Bazzell, M. (2016). Open source intelligence techniques: resources for searching and analyzing online information. CreateSpace 56 Independent Publishing Platform; Trottier, D. (2015). Open source intelligence, social media and law enforcement: Visions, constraints and critiques. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 18(4-5), 530-547. 17