Igniting Change Podcast Season 2: Episode 15

Michael Kleinman is Director of Amnesty International’s Silicon Valley Initiative, which helps one of the world’s largest global human rights organisations, address the human rights implications of tech. His work looks at how tech is helping to advance human rights, and which ways it’s undermining human rights. 

Before Amnesty, he was the founder and CEO of Orange Door Research, which helped donors, NGOs, and UN agencies gather data in conflict-affected countries. Prior to that, he was Director of Investments at Humanity United, where he worked on the intersection of technology and human rights.  

He has also worked for development and humanitarian NGOs in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sudan. His writing on development, human rights, and technology has been published in Vox, The Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, and LA Times. He is a graduate of Yale and Harvard Law School.

His career path has been anything but linear, but his North Star is his desire and motivation to be a part of the “big issues” of our time. Working within Amnesty Tech allows him to do just that!

Amnesty Tech is working to answer one of the most critical questions facing the world today: what do our fundamental rights look like in the digital age?

Around the world, hard-won rights are being weakened and denied every day. And increasingly, much of the repression faced by human rights defenders is digital. Since 2017, Amnesty Tech’s investigations have exposed vast and well-orchestrated digital attacks against activists and journalists in countries such as Morocco, Egypt, Azerbaijan, Qatar, Mexico, and Pakistan.

Amnesty Tech aims to counter digital repression by:

• Investigating, exposing, and shutting down digital attacks against civil society, from spyware to misinformation and online abuse
• Providing direct support to groups most at risk
• Undertaking strategic litigation to challenge the corporate actors who provide software and services to rights-violating governments
• Harnessing the power of the Amnesty movement to campaign for accountability and stop the export of surveillance tech which risks violating human rights

The Security Lab, launched in 2019 and located in Berlin, leads technical investigations into cyber-attacks against civil society and provides critical support when individuals face such attacks.  The Lab also builds tools and services to help protect human rights defenders from cyber-attacks. It conducts technical training with the wider support community to help them identify and respond to digital threats.

Their global team of technologists provides digital security training, one-on-one support to activists, and security audits for partner NGOs. They also focus on the secretive surveillance tech industry, including campaigning to stop the export of tech which risks being used to target human rights activists.

In October 2019, they uncovered targeted digital attacks against two prominent Moroccan human rights defenders using NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware. they are also carrying out further investigations of abuses linked to the company.

To hear more of the conversation with Michael, listen now using the links below!

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