Cyber Archive

In October 2017, an unlikely pair of Saudi expatriates began exchanging messages on WhatsApp. Omar Abdulaziz was a dissident YouTuber in Canada in his 20s, well-known for his satirical videos that mocked the Saudi leadership. Jamal Khashoggi, 30 years older and more of a moderate, was a prominent Saudi journalist who had grown increasingly alarmed by the kingdom’s crackdown on dissent. Having gone into self-imposed exile in Washington in June 2017, Khashoggi used his newfound perch as a Washington Post columnist to criticize the worsening human rights situation under Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s young crown prince and de facto […]

Russia is launching one of the boldest experiments in the recent history of the internet, but perhaps not in the way it thinks. On Nov. 1, a strict new law meant to impose Russia’s own version of China’s “great firewall”—the autocratic gold standard for state control of cyberspace—officially takes effect. While the law’s details are sketchy, it aims to cut off Russia’s connections to the World Wide Web and replace them with its own tightly controlled “domestic internet.” Whether or not the Kremlin knows it, when the history of 21st-century cyberwars are written, this move could be seen in retrospect […]