When Bahraini human rights advocate Esra’a Al Shafei appears in public, she often shields her identity, including using avatars to block her face.
As someone who has devoted her life to uncovering the identity of companies with nefarious purposes, she knows all too well what it takes for an individual to safeguard their personal security.
“I have to aggressively protect my physical anonymity, and my colleagues and the communities that we serve,” she said in a 2018 Instagram interview posted by the MIT Media Lab. “I would really, ideally, love to live in a society where I wouldn’t have to go to these lengths just to do the kind of work that I do.”
Al Shafei will explore these modern risks–and the work she does to prevent human rights abuses–when she leads a Department of Communication webinar on Wednesday, November 12 at 1:30 PM ET. The webinar, which is open to faculty and students, will explore practical methods to map surveillance networks, trace ties to governments and track funding for these activities.
“In an era when digital surveillance is expanding faster than the laws meant to regulate it, understanding who profits from watching and how to resist mechanisms of control have never been more urgent,” said Communication faculty member Martha Fuentes-Bautista, who helped organize the webinar.
Fuentes-Bautista and Communication faculty member Ethan Zuckerman will moderate the webinar.
Online monitoring is a tangled world that Al Shafei knows well. As the founder of Surveillance Watch, Al Shafei created an organization which tracks dozens of companies that use legal loopholes to gather information on activists, academics and journalists, while avoiding accountability.
Her work uses technology, she said, to “fuel the struggle for social justice.”
Along those lines, Surveillance Watch issues a kind of call to action:
“They know who you are,” it states on the website. “It’s time to uncover who they are.”
Al Shafei wants to give students and faculty the tools to do just that.
Besides Al Shafei’s expertise in tracing illegal surveillance, she co-founded the Numun Fund, which supports feminist tech activists.
She previously founded several digital platforms to support under-represented Middle Eastern and African voices, including LGBTQ+ youth and migrants.
Al Shafei has also received numerous fellowships to support her work in digital advocacy. She is a senior fellow with the Mozilla Foundation. Previously she was a senior TED Fellow and an MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow.
She serves on the board of The Tor Project, which is dedicated to private access to an uncensored internet. She has also served as the vice chair of the board of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit which hosts Wikipedia.
Al Shafei has received numerous awards for her work including the Global Trailblazer Award from Vital Voices in 2018 and the “Most Courageous Media” award from Free Press Unlimited in 2015.
Mideast Youth, an organization founded by Al Shafei, received the prestigious Human Rights Tulip Prize in 2014 from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In 2011, she received the Monaco Media Prize, which acknowledges innovative uses of media for humanity. When announcing the award, Prince Albert II of Monaco called Al Shafei a “trailblazer for human freedom, a true innovator and a real symbol of the Arab Spring.”
Al Shafei’s work has also been recognized by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, for her work in internet innovation.
Register here for the webinar.