Censorship, Surveillance, and Identifying the Unknown

Nestled into the beautifully modern Gardner Commons building on the University of Utah campus, Yuree Noh’s office is a textbook definition of cozy. Sunny yellow accents, a table lamp perched on a bookshelf, and books and art collected from fieldwork in the Middle East add to an eclectic, intellectual atmosphere. At odds with the cheerful surroundings is Noh’s somewhat somber subject of expertise: authoritarian autocracies in the Middle East and Northern Africa, human rights, censorship, and surveillance. I settle into a chair opposite the desk from Noh, and she begins to talk about her work. “I study public opinion in autocracies with an emphasis on women and women’s rights. Lately there’s been a trend of authoritarian leaders increasingly adopting gender-based reforms to improve women’s political, economic, and social rights,” she says. “Yet, we still know little about how the public views these seemingly progressive, top-down reforms. Consequently, how do societal values and norms dampen women’s empowerment?”

Noh is currently collaborating on a project that aims to answer this question by examining public opinions about reforms with Bethany Shockley of the American University of Sharjah (which is also funding the research). Their work involves conducting interviews and experiments in the UAE to better understand how economic grievances, such as competing with women and migrants for jobs, and cultural grievances, such as perceptions that the Emirati society is moving away from its traditional values, are interacting with positive messaging about women and migrants from political elites. “A lot of these places are currently experiencing a backlash to women’s and migrant’s rights,” says Noh. “How are people perceiving and reacting to the government’s ambitious initiatives to include migrants and women?”

A newcomer to the University of Utah’s Middle East Center, Noh is based in the Department of Political Science. Says Hollis Robbins, dean of the College of Humanities in which the Middle East Center is housed, “I was pleased to work with Dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Michelle Camacho, to recruit Yuree Noh to the University of Utah. We recognized her as a rising star with a growing national reputation."  Chris Low, Director of the Middle East Center, concurs: "Yuree Noh’s grantsmanship and multi-country network building open up new horizons for the Middle East Center and the University of Utah. Her outstanding productivity confirms our hope that she will be a pillar of the center's scholarly community for many years to come."

Our conversation turns to another of Noh’s recent awards, a National Science Foundation Research Grant to study the interlocking practices of censorship and surveillance. Nearly every state in the world practices some forms of surveillance and/or censorship on its citizens and foreign entities, but very little information exists on the details. “Traditionally, repressive practices were primarily conducted offline, such as following targets, tapping phone lines, jailing dissidents, etc. But increasingly with the advancement of technology, unfortunately even in democracies a lot of these things have moved online,” Noh explains. “There are certain patterns that we can spot – for example, censorship is much less likely to happen in democracies, but surveillance is pretty much universal now.” The lack of information around modern surveillance and censorship practices can lead to poorly crafted foreign policy and vulnerabilities in American national security, among other critical issues.

Noh’s study, titled “Advancing the study of repression: The Global Surveillance and Censorship Scores (GSCS) dataset,” is misleadingly simple. What Noh and her colleagues – Christopher Fariss at the University of Michigan and Nadiya Kostyuk at Carnegie Mellon University – are doing is actually creating the dataset, using machine learning and large language models to assemble a comprehensive set of global indicators of censorship and surveillance practices from every country around the world from 1990 to the present. Indicators of surveillance include practices such as having targeted individuals physically followed and watched, setting up video recordings, phone taps on a person’s home or cell phone, or tracking a person’s whereabouts through their cell phone location. Censorship indicators could include anything from bureaucratic means (such as rejecting a political dissident’s application for a business license or revoking a journalist’s press pass or a broadcast license after an unfavorable publication) to legal means (such as arresting and jailing dissidents under the pretext of national security laws or changing laws to make voter suppression more likely), to violent means (such as beatings or assassinations).

For each of the indicators identified through the project, the researchers will assess them on four dimensions: the extent of the practices, the target(s) of the practices, the actors working to carry out the practices, and the tactics they are using. Noh will be leading the work to validate the dataset with on-the-ground fieldwork, confirming or correcting elements that have been identified with AI tools. The team’s methodology will set an international standard; while other similar datasets exist, they are often incomplete or created with a strong bias towards particular governments – generally the ones who are publishing the data – and their allies. Once the dataset has been assembled and validated, the team will study it to learn about the causes and consequences of censorship and surveillance, both online and offline.

In the context of today’s geopolitical landscape, this information is vital. Noh reflects, “This is really important, especially in the era of technology advancement and widespread censorship and surveillance – which has been largely as a result of technological advancements, unfortunately. It’s affecting a lot of ordinary Americans and lot of ordinary people around the world. We still have so little understanding and so little knowledge. All of these repressive practices are connected. The use of surveillance is connected to the use of censorship, and vice versa. I think I am most excited about the fact that this is going to be a public good for years to come.” The dataset that Noh and her colleagues are creating will be available to members of the public, a resource for academics, policy makers, and practitioners as well as anyone who wants to better understand the contours along which information is shaped by censorship and surveillance in our incredibly networked world.

All of this seems a world away from the comfortable, softly lit office where I sit with Noh, as distant from reality as the action scenes in a spy movie. But as I am reminded by the substance of our conversation, we are also citizens of a state that employs censorship and surveillance to its own ends, and members of a globally connected species; perhaps these practices are not all so far away as they seem. After all, it is precisely a lack of data about censorship and surveillance that Noh is aiming to ameliorate. I thank Noh for her time and walk back out into the early autumn sunshine, feeling both better informed and vaguely unsettled.