How Debrestion & Co are Making Ethiopia A Prison State
There’s a knock at your door. You open it, only to find several grave-looking police officers accusing you of a crime you didn’t commit. They pull out records of your most recent phone calls and tie you to your alleged co-conspirator, and now you’re screwed. This is Ethiopia.
According
to a
recent Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, Ethiopian
surveillance of phones and emails is rampant. Eskinder
Nega, a journalist and dissident blogger, reports being
shown emails, text messages, and phone recordings when approached by
Ethiopian police who were investigating him. Nega’s newspaper,
Ethiopis,
was shut down for being critical of the Ethiopian government’s
abuses in freedom of expression and freedom of the press. Nega was
sentenced to 18 years in prison for allegedly conspiring against the
government in July of 2012.
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“Ethiopia
certainly doesn’t have the resources or capacity to engage in
surveillance on the scale of the NSA—very few governments do,”
Cynthia Wong, a Senior Researcher at HRW, told me. “The biggest
difference, however, is that Ethiopia is using surveillance
