Data, surveillance and freedom of expression in the digital age: Free and Open Source Software philosophy as an alternative for human rights defenders

Human rights defenders (HRD) and, in general, the whole population is surveilled. Hence, this study aims to deepen the understanding of government and platforms’ powers in the management of Internet physical and virtual infrastructures, as they are the basis of today’s communication and sharing of information. This thesis explores gray areas in the legislation via the analysis of European Regulations and literature, showing that this multifaceted phenomenon has yet to be effectively framed. On the other hand, governments can take advantage of this and, on behalf of “public safety”, employ surveillance systems against their citizens. Either way, this digital ecosystem is far from being one-sided, and two subcultures have emerged parallelly to technological evolution. The first one is the free software philosophy, born in the 70s as an alternative to the commodification of software and to permit instead the creation of a community that collaborates in writing the software itself. The second one, profoundly intertwined, is “hacktivism”, whose members decided to use their competences to counter state-sponsored censorship and protect free speech. Qualitative analysis was employed to track the benefits that free and open source software can still bring today, especially to the work of human rights defenders, who are usually more subjected to governments’ attention. Findings suggest that positive results can be more easily achievable where there is a higher case-specific awareness of what kind of menace HRD have to face.