UAE / Middle East & North Africa

The trolling started after Reem Abdellatif, a prominent Egyptian-American journalist now based in The Netherlands, published her first column in December for the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz. Titled “How I escaped Saudi Arabia, the Kingdom that terrorizes women,” it described the challenges she faced as a female journalist who had previously worked in Saudi Arabia and denounced Saudi…

The last time New York Times cybersecurity journalist Nicole Perlroth spoke with Emirati activist Ahmed Mansoor in 2016, his passport had been taken and he had recently been beaten almost to the point of death. “We learned later on that our phone conversation had been tapped, that someone was in his baby monitor, that his…

In a mid-2020 Washington Post opinion piece, Lebanese Al-Jazeera broadcast journalist Ghada Oueiss described hackers stealing private photos and videos from her phone and posting them online. The leak resulted in a sharp escalation of online attacks, Oueiss told CPJ in a January 2021 call. Since the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi…

In early February 2011, Alaa Abdelfattah was in Egypt’s Tahrir Square, documenting and participating in the nascent pro-democracy uprising that would topple the government and transform the country and the region. Today, he is in prison on anti-state and false news charges, which his family believes are partly retaliatory for his work. Abdelfattah is one of…

New York, December 21, 2020 – NSO Group’s advanced Pegasus spyware was identified on phones of at least 36 journalists and media executives in July and August 2020, according to the University of Toronto-based Citizen Lab, which said the surveillance product was installed via a vulnerability in the iPhone messaging application. Most targets were affiliated…

On December 17, 2019, authorities at Abu Dhabi International Airport denied entry to Stevan Dojčinović, a Serbian national and editor of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an investigative news outlet, according to Dojčinović, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app, and news reports.

New York, January 30, 2019–At least four journalists were surveilled under Project Raven, a United Arab Emirates (UAE) cybersurveillance and hacking operation, Reuters reported today. The UAE hired former U.S. National Security Agency employees to assist in deploying a surveillance tool called Karma that exploited a vulnerability in the iPhone’s messaging application, according to a…

It is a cruel irony that Jamal Khashoggi’s last unpublished column for The Washington Post was a call for press freedom in the Arab world. His homeland, Saudi Arabia, has spent the last three decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure that never happens.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: See CPJ’s updated safety advisory here https://cpj.org/2019/11/cpj-safety-advisory-journalist-targets-of-pegasus-.php.] In a report published on September 18, Citizen Lab said it had detected Pegasus, a spyware created for mobile devices, in over 45 countries. Pegasus, which transforms a cellphone into a mobile surveillance station, could have been deployed against a range of journalists and civil society…

Search for “Al-Jazeera” on Snapchat, and the first result that comes up is a ubiquitous publisher channel in the app’s famed vertical layout. That is, unless you are in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), or Bahrain. Users in these counties are instead offered a list of stores and restaurants that bear a similar…