In this teach-in, participants will explore the complex ways surveillance companies operate across borders, exploiting legal loopholes & regulatory gaps to evade accountability. Through practical methodologies, we will learn techniques for mapping these industry networks, including how to trace company relationships, identify shell corporations, and follow financial flows between seemingly unrelated entities, and how this was done to develop the Surveillance Watch platform.

The session will also address the broader ethical implications, examining how this surveillance-industrial complex intersects with social justice and human rights, particularly focusing on how marginalized communities are disproportionately affected by these systems of control and monitoring. It will also unpack how data brokers leverage advertising networks as sophisticated surveillance tools, using seemingly innocuous ad tracking technologies to create detailed profiles of individuals' behaviors, movements &relationships that are then sold to surveillance companies & government agencies for further tracking and intelligence analysis with dire consequences to our lives.

Facilitator: Esra'a Al Shafei is the founder of Majal.org, a network of online platforms that amplify under-reported and marginalized voices in West Asia & North Africa. She is also the co-founder of the Numun Fund, which resources and sustains feminist groups who engage with technology in their activism in the Larger World (aka Global Majority.) She currently serves on the Board of Trustees at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit which hosts Wikipedia. She is also on the Board of the Tor Project, developers of one of the world’s strongest tools for privacy