Amy Abdalla '21 presents her certificate project, "Revolutionary Surveillance," during the Program in Journalism's third annual Senior Colloquium.
My article will expose the National Security Agency's strategy of using the 2011 Arab Spring as a way to increase the online presence of dissidents and subsequently track their online activities. I will do this by using documents from the NSA data leak of 2013 along with data on the usage of social networks leading up to and after the Arab Spring. I will argue that the U.S. media was inadvertently complicit in this strategy, as they pushed the narrative of a "social media revolution" despite the reality on the ground proving otherwise. I will prove that social media usage in Egypt skyrocketed after the Arab Spring, not before.