SMEX

Are you a technologist, journalist, human rights defender, lawyer, CSOs, academic, or student passionate about digital rights and secure communications in the SWANA region? Participate in the SMEX Secure Communication Workshop on October 10 and 11. The Secure Communications Hackathon brings together 20 carefully selected participants from across the region to prototype communication solutions that withstand the region’s real and pressing conditions.

As governments around the world move to limit children’s exposure to technology and social media, 52 U.S. state attorneys general have reached a settlement with Meta, potentially reshaping how social media platforms protect teenagers from the harmful effects of digital technology. The approach marks a positive step toward addressing the demands of digital rights organizations at the international level.

Imagine a journalist investigating corruption, an activist documenting human rights abuses, or a civil society organization exposing government wrongdoing. The technology they once thought belonged only to the realm of law enforcement can now be used to watch, track, and intimidate them. Commercial spyware, developed by private companies and sold to governments as a tool for fighting crime, has been repurposed into a powerful instrument of digital surveillance.

In Lebanon, Starlink’s arrival has been promised, postponed, and promised again. The Ministry of Telecommunications has yet to offer a clear roadmap for when, or how, the satellite internet service will actually launch. Then, in the first week of June 2026, an ad appeared offering Lebanese customers something that sounded a lot more concrete: pre-orders for Starlink subscriptions through a local internet provider called Lebanon Net. The advertisement was not an isolated development.

We wouldn’t dream of leaving our front doors wide open for strangers. So why do we do that online, letting companies collect and sell our personal information every day without thinking twice? We ignore privacy, thinking we have too many “real” problems to worry about. But in the era of big tech, your data is your identity, your security and your dignity. Ignoring our privacy doesn’t solve bigger problems, it just makes us more exposed to risks we all want to avoid. So how are we protected?

Imagine being summoned to court because of messages sent from your phone that contain insults and defamation directed at someone you’re in a dispute with, although you’ve never sent that person a single message. This is the story of a woman living outside of Egypt in 2024.

You write something online. Nothing heroic. Nothing controversial. A joke about the electricity that never works or a sarcastic comment on a minister’s speech. Weeks later, your phone rings. There is a law you’re being held accountable under, and there’s a good chance it has the word “cybercrime” in the title, which is strange because you didn’t hack anything! Cybercrime laws have been passed around like a recipe in the SWANA region. Oman enacted a new one this year.

Lebanon is on the verge of creating a Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Technology. The government has been pushing to advance the draft law quickly, but Parliament just decided to slow things down, referring the proposal to joint parliamentary committees for deeper review. We think that’s the right call, and we want to explain why. This is not a question of whether Lebanon should engage with artificial intelligence; rather, it is a question of how we should, and the best way to do it.

The European Union is at it again, with regulations that not only threaten the privacy rights of Europeans but also set a dangerous global precedent due to the Brussels effect. On 9 July 2026, the European Parliament managed to extend “Chat Control 1.0,” a major exemption to European privacy laws that allows platforms to voluntarily scan private chats, despite the majority of MEPs voting against it.

Lebanon’s digital landscape has grown more volatile with every year of crisis. Financial collapse, a rise of disinformation, the spread of hate speech, and the ongoing pressures of instability have all left their mark on how people in Lebanon experience the internet. Several cases of disinformation have been documented by SMEX’s digital safety Helpdesk, highlighting the escalating online threats and increase in hate speech.