Marietje Schaake

The Tech Coup

Bastien Vaucher

Those who praised the democratizing possibilities of technology and social media platforms failed to appreciate that repressive authoritarian regimes could be tech-savvy too.

I felt shocked—not by the behavior of these repressive gov-ernments, from whom I expected little else, but by our own double standards. The monitoring and surveillance technology these regimes were using came from Europe: Italian-made hacking systems were the technology of choice for the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, while French technologies helped Muammar al-Gaddhafi in Libya and British systems facilitated the Mubarak regime in Egypt.

Corporate giants did not feel accountable to lawmakers like me. They thought that they could dodge real policy and enforcement questions with free frozen yogurt and inspirational buzzwords-and we hadn't yet proven them wrong. As democratic governance long failed to impose guardrails on companies like Facebook, they had grown to believe that they operated above the law.

In June 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the previous landmark case, Roe v.

Wade. The ruling made it legal for individual states to ban abortion, which is now the case in over a dozen of them? In this new legal land-scape, a novel digital threat emerged: casually collected location data could end up revealing that someone visited an abortion clinic. When we surf, pay, or chat, we are subconsciously leaving digital footprints, and it may be hard to imagine how innocent web surfing or online searching could become a hammer in the hands of law enforcement.

When tens of millions of jobs end up displaced by Al, shareholders of companies will benefit, while the price of unemployment or reeducation will fall to societies to shoulder.

The Tech Coup

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