The Digital Panopticon: Gendered Surveillance as the Most Dangerous Form of Internet Control in Iran and Saudi Arabia

1. Introduction

This essay answers the question: what form of Internet control is most dangerous for dissidents, and why? It does so through a gendered lens, comparing different forms of internet control to which women dissidents are exposed in Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Women dissidents in authoritarian states face a distinctive and compounded form of digital repression that remains systematically understudied. Standard frameworks of internet control, censorship, shutdowns, throttling, fail to capture the gendered dimension of state surveillance, which targets women not only for political speech but for transgressing patriarchal gender norms. This dual targeting constitutes a qualitatively distinct and more dangerous threat, one whose mechanisms and psychological consequences demand analytical frameworks that go beyond traditional internet freedom scholarship.

This essay argues that women are the primary victims of the digital panopticon, carried out in both Iran and Saudi Arabia through a detailed system of gendered surveillance, making this the most dangerous form of internet control for women dissidents. Surveillance is understood here as any collection and processing of personal data, whether identifiable or not, for the purposes of influencing or managing those whose data have been gathered, with the specific intent to suppress activism and criminalize online dissent (Lyon, 2001). In patriarchal societies, digital surveillance performs a modern form of social discipline aimed at policing women’s behaviors, mobility, and speech. This form of digital policing shapes societal norms of femininity and respectability, further harming women dissidents’ engagement in political discourse and online activism, and compelling self-censorship or complete withdrawal from digital spaces.

It will be shown throughout the essay how the same digital tools that initially empower women dissidents can easily become instruments of surveillance that undermine those very freedoms, a dynamic whose implications extend well beyond the cases examined here. As European institutions grapple with the regulation of digital surveillance technologies, ranging from the AI Act’s restrictions on real-time biometric monitoring to ongoing debates over spyware exports, the question of how authoritarian states weaponize these same tools against their own citizens acquires urgent policy relevance.

The essay proceeds as follows. The Literature Review maps the scholarly conversation on surveillance studies, feminist theory, and authoritarian internet control. The Methodology section outlines the comparative case study approach and its analytical framework. The Results section documents the mechanisms of gendered surveillance in Saudi Arabia and Iran respectively, before the Discussion draws these cases into comparative dialogue, examining both shared logics and divergent architectures of control. The Conclusion reflects on the broader implications of these findings, with particular attention to their relevance for European digital policy.

2. Literature Review

The scholarly literature on internet control has developed several analytical frameworks that inform this study. Lyon (2001) defines surveillance as the collection and processing of personal data for the purposes of managing those whose data has been gathered, providing the foundational definition employed throughout this essay. Foucault’s (1978) concept of the panopticon, a surveillance structure where individuals internalise self-discipline under the constant threat of being watched, offers the theoretical backbone for understanding how digital monitoring transforms behavior even without direct enforcement.

Building on Foucault, scholars such as Chun (2005) and Dubrofsky (2015) have argued that surveillance technologies are not neutral tools but are deeply gendered, racialized, and classed, disproportionately targeting women and marginalised communities. Bartky (1990) further grounds this in feminist theory, tracing the surveillance of women’s bodies to historical patriarchal practices of policing public and private conduct. Imam, Manimekalai, and Suba (2025) extend these arguments to the contemporary digital landscape, demonstrating that the expansion of surveillance technologies amplifies patriarchal scrutiny.

In the specific context of authoritarian states, Henshaw (2023) argues that digital surveillance has become a tool of state building on patriarchal foundations, while Morozov (2011) cautions against assuming the internet is inherently liberating, noting that states have learned to weaponize the same platforms that dissidents use. Uniacke (2022) and Bsheer (2020) specifically address Saudi Arabia’s evolving model of digital repression, characterizing it as ‘dominance without hegemony’ legitimized by religion. For Iran, the Miaan Group and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (2024) provide the most comprehensive account of the National Information Network as a surveillance infrastructure.

Research on transnational repression, the extension of state control beyond national borders, is addressed by Freedom House (2021) in relation to Saudi Arabia, and by Aljizawi et al. (2024), whose Citizen Lab report documents how gender is weaponized as a specific instrument of digital transnational repression, including through deepfake pornography and reputational attacks targeted at women dissidents abroad.

A notable gap in the existing literature is the comparative analysis of gendered surveillance across different authoritarian models, specifically between the guardianship-based surveillance model of Saudi Arabia and the infrastructural panoptic model of Iran. This essay contributes to filling that gap.

3. Methodology and Methods

This essay employs a qualitative, comparative case study methodology, analysing Iran and Saudi Arabia as paired cases of authoritarian patriarchal states that deploy digital surveillance against women dissidents. The comparative approach is justified by the structural similarities between the two cases, both are authoritarian regimes grounded in Islamic law, both target women as a specific dissident category, while their different surveillance architectures allow for analytical differentiation.

The primary analytical framework is feminist surveillance studies, drawing on scholars such as Dubrofsky (2015), Bartky (1990), Imam et al. (2025), and Henshaw (2023), combined with Foucauldian concepts of discipline and the panopticon (Foucault, 1978). This framework is applied to evaluate the relative danger of gendered surveillance compared to other forms of internet control – namely, censorship and internet shutdowns.

The research relies on secondary qualitative data drawn from the following source types: (1) academic scholarship on surveillance studies, feminist theory, and Middle Eastern authoritarian politics; (2) reports by human rights organisations and digital rights bodies, including Citizen Lab (Aljizawi et al., 2024), (Freedom House, 2021), (Article 19, 2022a, 2022b), (Access Now, 2022) and the (Group & (FES), 2024); (3) legal documents, including Saudi Arabia’s Anti-Cybercrime Law (2007) and Iran’s Computer Crimes Act (2003), as well as the 2023 Saudi Media Law and Iran’s 2024 Hijab and Chastity Law; (4) investigative journalism and reportage from The Guardian, BBC News, NBC News, Time Magazine, and specialized outlets including Filterwatch; (5) testimony and case studies from women dissidents and activists, drawn from secondary reporting.

The analysis proceeds in two stages: first, the empirical documentation of gendered surveillance mechanisms in each country (Results section); second, a comparative and theoretical evaluation of why gendered surveillance constitutes the most dangerous form of internet control (Discussion section). This structure allows the essay to move from descriptive evidence to analytical argument.

Limitations of this study include the reliance on publicly available information, which may underrepresent clandestine surveillance activities, and the inherent difficulty of accessing first-hand testimony from women dissidents who remain inside these countries for fear of reprisal. Additionally, both case studies are evolving rapidly; legal and technological developments occurring after the essay’s research period may not be captured. Lastly, the research has updates dating back to December 2025 and does not include any information nor research that might have arisen considering the most recent incidents. 

4. Results

a. From Absher to Exile: How Saudi Arabia Weaponizes Digital Tools Against Women Dissidents

Saudi Arabia is a monarchy ruled by the Saud dynasty. The official constitution of the country is composed of the Qur’an and the Sunnah, and governance is based on Islamic Law, i.e. the Sharia (Cavendish, 2006). The legal framework requires all Saudi women to have a male guardian. Legally, women no longer require guardian permission to work or study, though many employers and universities continue to demand such authorisation in practice (Bridger Philby, n.d.).

The situation in Saudi Arabia is two-sided: Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman has introduced new rights for women, including the right to drive (Gardner, 2017), while simultaneously discouraging women from posting on social media and participating in online activism (Marie Lamensch, 2022a). Saudi Arabia operates as an authoritarian regime based on ‘dominance without hegemony,’ with violence legitimised by religion (Bsheer, 2020) and every repressive government move is framed as a ‘necessity for the integrity of the national’ (Uniacke, 2022).

The repression that women dissidents face in Saudi Arabia is unique for its gendered character (Marie Lamensch, 2022b). Women dissidents in Saudi Arabia are primarily those who oppose the guardianship system, enshrined in the ‘Personal Status Law,’ which establishes a deeply unequal legal framework: women require male guardian permission to marry, face restricted divorce rights compared to men’s unilateral ability to divorce, must maintain ‘obedience’ to husbands to receive financial support, and have limited parental authority since fathers are default guardians who can seek to terminate mothers’ custody if they remarry (Human Rights Watch, 2023).

Among the mechanisms through which this guardianship system is enforced digitally, the most significant is an app called ‘Absher,’ which allows guardians to grant or revoke entry and exit visas to the women they guard via a mobile phone. The app also allows guardians to receive an SMS alert when their female ‘dependents’ present their passports at a border (Leung, 2019). This digital guardianship surveillance reveals why surveillance is more dangerous than outright censorship: a woman cannot simply circumvent Absher the way she might access blocked websites through a VPN. The surveillance is embedded in the legal structure governing her movement.

As Amani Al-Ahmadi, a Saudi human rights activist now living in the United States, observed: ‘men don’t have any power when it comes to politics, but by having power over women, they still feel like they have some sort of power. By abolishing the guardianship, these tribal men would retaliate against the government; they would take away their power. This is why feminism is tied so closely to politics in Saudi Arabia’ (Salem, 2021).

The case of Manal al-Sharif illustrates the personal cost of this activism. Her campaign against the Saudi Guardianship Law culminated in a protest outside the Saudi Embassy in Washington D.C.; she now lives in self-imposed exile in Australia, and after the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, assassinated in 2018 by a 15-person team inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul (Roth, 2025), she immediately deleted her social media accounts (Aratani, 2019). Unlike Iran, women in Saudi Arabia live in fear both domestically and abroad.

Saudi Arabia’s digital control is reinforced through a legislative and technical infrastructure. The kingdom operates a filtering system run by the internet service unit at King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, blocking content ranging from pornography to political dissent (Black, 2009). The 2023 Media Law mandates media outlets to obtain a license from the General Authority of Media Regulation (GAMR) before producing or disseminating content; Article 11 formally guarantees freedom of expression but prohibits content critical of Islam, the royal family, or content deemed a threat to national security (Zaghdoudi, 2024).

The Anti-Cybercrime Law (Anti-Cyber Crime Law, 2007), though enacted under the premise of combating hacking and identity theft, grants authorities the power to monitor, censor, and prosecute dissidents; Article 6 criminalizes the production, transmission, or storage of material that violates public order, religious values, or public morals (Anti-Cyber Crime Law, 2007). This provision is routinely deployed against women dissidents. Additionally, smartphones in Saudi Arabia serve as tools of state surveillance through IMEI tracking, enabling the regime to monitor dissidents while reinforcing digital spying practices and social media-based surveillance culture (Bourdeloie, 2025).

Women dissidents who attempt to flee Saudi Arabia face transnational repression. Saudi Arabia focuses heavily on repressing women dissidents even when they are abroad; the government has been documented using digital tools to track, intimidate, and pursue exiled women activists (Freedom House, 2021). The Khashoggi assassination serves as a vivid demonstration of the regime’s willingness to project lethal force transnationally.

b. From Green Movement to Woman, Life, Freedom: Evolution of Digital Repression in Iran

Following the 1979 revolution, Iran’s monarchy was replaced by an Islamic theocracy. Its constitution declares Shia Islam the state religion and combines theocracy with a presidential system; the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, is head of state, hierarchically above the president (Khosrow Mostofi (Britannica Editor), 2026).

The internet plays a double-edged role in Iran: it works as a tool to empower activism, especially that of women, while simultaneously being used to repress them. Internet control tools, although deployed against all dissidents, are disproportionately used against women because women and their demands for equal rights embody the most direct threat to the ideological foundation of the state (AUDRi, 2023).

During the 2009 Green Movement, the internet was used to mobilise mass protests. This triggered the government to prioritise the ‘National Information Network’ (NIN), first announced in 2006, as a national security matter. The NIN is a combination of infrastructure, laws, regulations, and market incentives aimed at creating an alternative to the worldwide web, allowing authorities to isolate the domestic network from the global internet and to regulate and censor content while accessing user data (Group & (FES), 2024).  By law, traffic within the NIN costs significantly less than global internet access, forcing consumers to prefer the NIN over the global internet (لویی شکیبی, 2023). Unlike Saudi Arabia’s model, which tracks women through specific applications, Iran’s approach makes surveillance architecturally inevitable: every digital interaction within the NIN is, by design, observable by the state.

The 2009 Computer Crimes Act made it mandatory for internet service providers to block and filter online content, leading to the permanent blocking of international social media platforms including Instagram and messaging applications such as WhatsApp (Group & (FES), 2024). Authorities use delivery apps, Twitter, and facial recognition technology to monitor protesters, eavesdrop on opponents, and identify women who breach dress code regulations (Sanam, 2022). Iran’s authorities also target women’s online activities by monitoring social media, censoring feminist discourse, criminalizing digital dissent, and conducting disinformation campaigns and psychological intimidation (Tori, 2025). 

The most significant inflection point in Iran’s gendered digital repression was the 2022 death of Jina Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman from Kurdistan arrested by the morality police for allegedly violating the mandatory hijab law (OHCHR – Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2025). Her death sparked the Woman, Life, Freedom protests. The Iranian regime’s response to these protests combined infrastructure shutdowns with targeted surveillance and arrests. Protests began on September 16th, and internet shutdowns began the same day; internet disruptions overlapped with protest events, with a de facto ‘digital curfew’ after 4 PM, implemented through blockages of encrypted DNS, and targeted only at areas where protests were occurring (Group & (FES), 2024; Sanam, 2022).

Iran’s surveillance of women’s appearance is particularly systematic. The national police use an Android application called ‘Nazer’ to report vehicles with female occupants wearing ‘improper’ hijab; authorities use the app to fine women and confiscate cars for dress code violations. The app has been in circulation since May 2019 and has been updated to allow vetted members of the public to report unveiled women in vehicles, ambulances, buses, metros, and taxis (Azin, 2024; Foulkes & McArthur, 2025; Parent, 2025). The crowdsourcing of surveillance through Nazer transforms every citizen into a potential state enforcer, distributing the panopticon’s gaze across society.

In April 2023, the Iranian police launched the ‘Warden Initiative’ targeting public figures who reject the hijab, resulting in over 300 arrests and 1,300 websites and social media accounts taken down (Group & (FES), 2024)In 2024, the ‘Law on Protecting the Family through the Promotion of the Culture of Chastity and Hijab’ came into force, imposing prison sentences up to 15 years and allowing judges to apply the death penalty under ‘corruption on earth,’ with harsher penalties for violations in cyberspace than in physical public spaces (OHCHR – Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2024).

The 2022 ‘user protection bill,’ passed without parliamentary approval through the Supreme Council of Cyberspace, requires international tech companies to appoint legal representatives in Iran to ensure compliance with Iranian surveillance and censorship law; platforms that refuse face throttling (Article 19, 2022a, 2022b). Control of the NIN would be transferred to the armed forces and security agencies under the same bill.

Women dissidents who flee Iran face transnational digital repression specifically calibrated to their gender. Iran employs spreading rumors about dissidents’ sexuality, rape threats, reputational smears targeting dissidents’ families, and deepfake pornography using AI-generated explicit images based on dissidents’ existing photographs (Aljizawi et al., 2024). During the 2020 Iranian #MeToo movement, accounts sharing the hashtag #tajavoz (i.e., rape in Persian) were flooded with bots and trolls, damaging both the profiles’ engagement and credibility (Access Now, 2022).

5. Discussion

a. Patriarchal Control, Digital Means: Comparing Surveillance Strategies

Returning to the research question, whether gendered digital surveillance constitutes the most dangerous form of internet control for women dissidents in authoritarian patriarchal states. The comparative evidence from Iran and Saudi Arabia supports an affirmative answer, while also revealing important distinctions in how this danger is operationalized.

Saudi Arabia’s surveillance model operates through what can be termed ‘targeted guardianship surveillance,’ leveraging existing patriarchal legal structures and amplifying them through digital tools like the Absher app, which makes women’s movements trackable in real-time through guardian smartphones. This model extends transnationally through IMEI tracking and coordinated repression that pursues women dissidents into exile.

Iran’s surveillance model, by contrast, represents ‘infrastructural panoptic surveillance,’ building monitoring capabilities into the architecture of digital space through the National Information Network, integrated with facial recognition technology, the Nazer crowdsourced reporting app, and a legal framework that criminalizes digital dissent more harshly than physical non-compliance. This systemic integration makes evasion structurally impossible without completely abandoning domestic digital services.

Both systems achieve similar outcomes through overlapping mechanisms. They create self-perpetuating cycles of control through surveillance, compelling women to self-censor not only for actual violations but for potential future violations. Both weaponize women’s intimate data in ways that blur public and private spheres. They specifically target women’s bodies as sites of political control, Saudi women monitored through their movements, Iranian women through their physical appearance. This makes women’s embodied existence itself evidence of either compliance or dissent in ways that male dissidents do not experience.

What makes gendered surveillance the most dangerous form of internet control is not any specific technology but rather its comprehensiveness, permanence, and intimacy. Unlike internet shutdowns, which are temporary, or censorship, which can potentially be circumvented with VPNs, gendered surveillance creates permanent records, operates continuously, and transforms women’s existence into potential evidence against them. While censorship says ‘you cannot see this,’ and shutdowns say ‘you cannot communicate now,’ surveillance says ‘we see everything you are and everything you do, forever, and we will use it against you.’

The psychological impact manifests identically across both countries despite their different technical approaches: exhaustion, paranoia, burnout, sleeplessness, depression, identity fragmentation, relationship breakdown, and constant risk calculation (Aljizawi et al., 2024; Shaw, 2016). This multi-scalar operation means surveillance attacks not just individual dissidents but entire networks of resistance, breaking the very social bonds that make collective action possible.

Both models demonstrate that gendered surveillance succeeds not by being perfect but by being pervasive. It does not need to catch every dissident; it only needs to create sufficient chilling effects that most women choose silence. Because it merges digital monitoring with offline threats such as arrest and gender-based violence, surveillance becomes the most pervasive, intimate, and psychologically detrimental form of internet control for women dissidents.

b. Surveillance Without Borders: The Transnational Extension of Patriarchal Control

A dimension that sets gendered surveillance apart from other forms of internet control is its transnational reach. Women dissidents who flee Saudi Arabia or Iran and attempt to continue their activism abroad do not escape the surveillance apparatus; they remain targets of what can be termed digital transnational repression.

Women dissidents who are victims of transnational repression report significant psychological consequences: feelings of exhaustion, stress, anxiety, burnout, sleeplessness, and depression. Women dissidents also suffer from paranoia triggered by an altered sense of security. Digital transnational repression further affects the social relations of women dissidents, who are forced to limit contact with family members to protect them from backlash in their home countries. Activists’ partners frequently urge them to abandon activism to prevent further harm. Repression also impacts professional relationships, affecting the financial means necessary to sustain activism (Aljizawi et al., 2024; Shaw, 2016).

The methods of transnational gendered repression are specific to the targeted subjects. Iran’s approach includes spreading rumors about dissidents’ sexuality, rape threats, reputational smears targeting dissidents’ families, and AI-generated deepfake pornography based on dissidents’ existing photographs (Aljizawi et al., 2024; Meghan Davidson Ladly, 2025). Saudi Arabia’s transnational repression of women dissidents is documented by Freedom House (2021), and the Khashoggi assassination serves as an extreme case demonstrating the regime’s willingness to pursue dissidents regardless of national borders.

The transnational dimension of gendered surveillance confirms that this form of internet control is uniquely dangerous precisely because it cannot be escaped through physical relocation. While a dissident might leave a country to escape internet shutdowns or domestic censorship, she cannot leave the digital traces that surveillance has already compiled, nor the networked reach of states with transnational repression capabilities.

6. Conclusion

This essay has demonstrated that gendered surveillance constitutes the most dangerous form of internet control for women dissidents in authoritarian patriarchal states. The research question asked whether this was the case, and why; the comparative analysis of Iran and Saudi Arabia confirms the affirmative with the following reasoning.

Digital surveillance is an extension of patriarchal oppression in which the digital world functions as an amplifier of traditional mechanisms employed to control gendered bodies. This is especially pronounced in the Global South, where digital surveillance is routinely deployed under the guise of ‘national security.’ Through examining Iran’s infrastructure-based surveillance system and Saudi Arabia’s guardianship-enabled monitoring apparatus, the analysis reveals how authoritarian regimes weaponize cutting-edge technology to reinforce centuries-old mechanisms of controlling women.

The digital panopticon described here is not merely a security measure but a comprehensive system of social discipline that shapes norms of femininity, criminalises dissent, and extends beyond national borders to silence women even in exile. Gendered surveillance operates as the most dangerous form of internet control precisely because it is comprehensive, permanent, invasive, and transnational in ways that censorship and shutdowns cannot match. It transforms women’s bodies into sites of state control, their data into weapons against them, and their social bonds into vulnerabilities to be exploited.

These findings carry implications that reach beyond the two cases examined. As the European Union advances its regulatory architecture around digital technologies, through the AI Act’s restrictions on biometric surveillance, the Digital Services Act’s accountability mechanisms, and ongoing legislative scrutiny of commercial spyware such as Pegasus, the gendered dimension of surveillance must be explicitly incorporated into that framework. Export controls on surveillance technologies, due diligence requirements for technology companies operating in authoritarian contexts, and asylum and protection policies for women dissidents fleeing digital repression all represent concrete policy levers through which European institutions can respond to the dynamics documented here. Treating surveillance as a gender-neutral phenomenon risks producing regulation that is structurally blind to its most pervasive and intimate harms.

Yet women activists continue to resist. The images that penetrate media blackouts, the testimonies that escape censorship, the movements that persist despite shutdowns, all reveal how women remain powerful agents of change even under patriarchal authoritarianism. Their determination challenges the digital panopticon’s reach, exploiting its failures, adapting to its evolutions, and refusing the silence it seeks to impose. It is precisely this refusal that European policymakers, scholars, and civil society must amplify rather than overlook.

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