Masaar campaign against digital surveillance and internet censorship in Egypt (2020–ongoing)

Masaar — Technology and Law Community launched its sustained campaign against Egypt's digital surveillance and internet-censorship infrastructure in 2020, building on the mass blocking wave that had struck Egyptian civil-society, media, and human-rights websites since May 2017. The campaign combines technical censorship monitoring, investigative documentation of commercial surveillance vendors, strategic litigation against repressive laws, coalition building, data-protection advocacy, and AI-governance proposals — making Masaar the corpus's primary Egyptian anchor on digital surveillance resistance and the first North Africa campaign entity focused on state-operated digital control infrastructure.

Context: three layers of Egyptian digital control

Egypt's surveillance and censorship infrastructure operates across three interlocking layers. The legal layer — Egypt's 2018 Anti-Cybercrime Law (Law 175/2018), the Press and Media Regulation Law, and the Anti-Terrorism Law — provides vaguely worded powers to block websites, compel data retention, and prosecute online speech under provisions such as "harming national security" and "spreading false news." Article 7 of the Cybercrime Law grants competent investigation bodies the right to order website blocks; Article 2 requires service providers to retain communications records for 180 consecutive days. The technical layer deploys deep-packet-inspection equipment — primarily Sandvine PacketLogic devices positioned at the Telecom Egypt transit chokepoint — to filter, block, and intercept user traffic. The commercial layer involves a global surveillance-technology industry documented by Masaar as including NSO Group, Gamma Group, Blue Coat, Sandvine, Hacking Team, Candiru, and Circles supplying Egyptian authorities with interception and blocking tools. Masaar's campaign addresses all three layers simultaneously.

Censorship monitoring: OONI partnership and Stop the Block (2019–2021)

Masaar's technical documentation work centres on its research partnership with OONI — the Open Observatory of Network Interference — through which Masaar contributes to the Egyptian website-testing list and generates measurement data on censorship events. This collaboration produced the landmark finding that Egyptian authorities used deep-packet inspection targeting TLS SNI fields to block BBC and Alhurra in September 2019, establishing the technical mechanism through which Egyptian ISPs implement government blocking orders.

In 2021, Masaar and the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) jointly launched the "Stop the Block" campaign, demanding an end to Egypt's mass-blocking policy. The campaign documented at least 628 blocked URLs — 596 websites and 32 alternate domains — including 116 press and media websites, 349 VPN and proxy services, 15 human-rights websites, 27 political-criticism websites, 8 blogs and blog-hosting services, and 12 multimedia-sharing platforms. Masaar and ANHRI submitted formal letters to the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders, UNESCO, the National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA), and the Supreme Council for Media Regulation (SCMR). A 29-organisation joint international statement called on Egypt to lift all blockages, placing the campaign inside a coordinated global civil-society response rather than a local bilateral complaint.

Sandvine exposure (2020–2021)

Masaar's most technically grounded surveillance-exposure work concerns Sandvine, the Canadian-American company whose PacketLogic deep-packet-inspection equipment Egyptian authorities deploy to simultaneously block websites and intercept user communications. In March 2018, Citizen Lab published the first report revealing Sandvine devices in Egypt being used to redirect users across multiple ISPs for cryptocurrency mining and to deliver nation-state malware. In October 2020, Egyptian authorities were confirmed to be using Sandvine devices to block at least 600 websites, including 100 independent news and media sites. Masaar's own technical testing found that 15 of 20 sampled blocked news and human-rights websites — including Mada Masr and Human Rights Watch's Egypt page — had been blocked using Sandvine equipment. The companion report "Sandvine — the surveillance octopus in the Arab region" situates Egypt's Sandvine deployment inside a regional pattern across 50+ MENA countries, providing Arabic-language analysis of the commercial surveillance technology undergirding Egyptian state censorship. Masaar's surveillance-companies-in-the-MENA-region file extends this frame to seven surveillance vendors, treating the commercial surveillance-technology export industry as a systematic civil-society concern.

MENA Coalition to Combat Digital Surveillance (2021)

On June 7, 2021, at RightsCon, Masaar co-founded the MENA Coalition to Combat Digital Surveillance alongside Access Now, ARTICLE 19, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Front Line Defenders, the Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR), Human Rights Watch, INSM (Iraq Network for Social Media), JOSA (Jordan Open Source Association), Red Line for Gulf, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), and SMEX. The coalition was constituted specifically to end the sale of digital surveillance tools to repressive MENA governments, to fight for a safe and open internet, and to defend human rights defenders, journalists, and internet users from government surveillance. For Masaar, co-founding the coalition placed its Egypt-specific documentation inside a regional, multi-stakeholder alliance with international human-rights organisations capable of amplifying findings to global audiences and generating multilateral advocacy pressure on surveillance-technology exporters.

Strategic litigation: Anti-Cybercrime Law challenge (2020–2022)

Masaar's litigation work targets the legal infrastructure enabling digital surveillance. In 2020, Masaar filed a memorandum before Cairo's Misdemeanors Economic Court of Appeal arguing for the unconstitutionality of Article 25 of Law 175/2018 — the Anti-Cybercrime Law provision repeatedly invoked to suppress freedom of expression online. In 2022, the Court of Cassation issued a ruling limiting website-blocking authority to the NTRA under the Cybercrime Law, finding that the Ministry of Interior could not independently order blocks — a procedural constraint Masaar analysed as a building block for future challenges to the blocking regime, even as it fell short of a direct challenge to the regime's existence. Masaar's own assessment of the opportunities and limits of strategic litigation in this environment reflects candidly that Egyptian lawsuits challenging blocking have clarified procedural aspects but have not produced radical policy change — their value lies in documentation, accountability, and building the legal-argument infrastructure for future challenges.

Data protection advocacy (2020–2025)

Egypt enacted a Personal Data Protection Law (Law 151/2020) in the same year Masaar formed, and the organisation has tracked its implementation closely, submitting formal proposals on the independence of the Personal Data Protection Center — the regulatory authority the law created — recommending full independence from the executive branch as a precondition for effective enforcement. In February 2025, Masaar analysed the landmark Alexandria Economic Court ruling ordering Orange Egypt Telecom to pay EGP 10 million in compensation to a woman whose SIM card was replaced without consent — enabling WhatsApp account takeover and subsequent extortion. Masaar framed the ruling as the first significant judicial application of Egypt's PDPL against a telecom company, using it to argue for stronger regulatory enforcement in an environment where the law's executive regulations had not been issued for five years after the law's passage. Egypt's Minister of Telecommunications finally issued the PDPL executive regulations in 2025 (Decree 816/2025), vindicating the independence-of-enforcement framework Masaar had been proposing since 2020.

AI governance: extending the surveillance frame (2022–ongoing)

Masaar's AI governance papers connect the surveillance campaign to the emerging domestic AI-policy debate. "Regulating Artificial Intelligence in Egypt: Proposed Standards and Principles" proposes 24+ governance principles including a prohibition on mass surveillance, a prohibition on lethal autonomous weapons, mandatory non-discrimination, human oversight across all AI deployment, and mandatory human-rights impact assessments — explicitly grounding AI governance in the international human-rights framework rather than innovation-promotion framing. The AI governance thread positions Masaar as the corpus's primary Egyptian anchor on domestic AI-law design from a human-rights standpoint, a register distinct from the corpus's other MENA entries: 7amleh approaches AI from an AI-and-armed-conflict and platform-accountability angle; SMEX from a platform-accountability and content-moderation angle. Masaar alone connects the surveillance-accountability register to a domestic AI-law-design proposal.

Significance in the corpus

The Masaar campaign is the corpus's first Egypt and North Africa campaign entity on digital surveillance, and the first MENA campaign entry grounded in a domestic Egyptian legal and technical register rather than a global rights-enforcement or platform-accountability frame. It is structurally distinct from the corpus's other surveillance campaigns — the MENA Coalition co-membership positions it inside a regional alliance against commercial surveillance exports; the Stop the Block documentation work is Egypt-specific censorship monitoring; the Sandvine exposure names specific commercial vendors operating through Egyptian state contracts; and the data-protection and AI-governance threads extend the surveillance frame into domestic law-design. The combination makes Masaar's campaign the methodologically most complete civil-society surveillance-accountability effort in the Egyptian context in the corpus, connecting technical measurement (OONI), vendor documentation (Sandvine, seven surveillance companies), legal challenge (Anti-Cybercrime Law), judicial analysis (Court of Cassation, Orange Egypt), regulatory advocacy (PDPL proposals), and policy design (AI governance) into a single sustained campaign posture.