Security Without Safety

Citizen Lab researchers Noura Aljizawi, Shaila Baran, Marcus Michaelsen, and Siena Anstis published a paper titled “Security Without Safety: Queering Cybersecurity in the Age of Digital Transnational Repression” in the special issue on “Digital Intersectionality and Marginalization in the Majority World” of the Journal of Online Trust and Safety. 

Exiled activists increasingly face government-sponsored digital threats, including surveillance, hacking, and spyware, while residing in host states such as the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. This use of digital technologies to track, intimidate, and silence individuals across borders, known as digital transnational repression (DTR). 

When the targets are women and queer activists, states additionally weaponize their intersectional identities and sexuality to target them in gender-based DTR threats (GDTR), employing doxxing, outing, disinformation, and deepfakes to discredit them and force them to stop their transnational advocacy and human rights work.

The authors argue that current digital security approaches are misaligned with the real experiences of targets of gender-based DTR, failing to mitigate the identity-based threats that cause profound social, reputational, and psychological harms. The paper identifies a pattern of “institutional abandonment,” where organizations benefit from the advocacy and labour of exiled queer activists, but fail to provide the “duty of care” necessary to protect them. 

To address these failures, they argue for “queering cybersecurity,” shifting to a human-centric intersectional framework that reconceptualizes digital safety as a collective institutional responsibility rather than an individual burden.