“Contrary to the Order of Nature”

Article 534 of the Lebanese penal code prohibits and punishes any sexual relationships or “any act deemed contrary to the order of nature” (Article 19 2019). This article has been broadly interpreted by the authorities, the courts, and police to target queer people, even though since 2009 several lower courts (and the high appellate court of Mount Lebanon) have rejected prosecution cases based on this colonial-era law. Nevertheless, the number of arrests under this article increases every year (Abi Nader et al. 2021: 3). Many legal actors since 2009 in Lebanon have had difficulty establishing what the “order of nature” is and what runs contrary to it. According to Judge Mounir Suleiman, the first judge who challenged this law in 2009: “Whereas man is part of nature and one of its elements . . . it cannot be said that any practice of his or any behavior of his is against nature. . . . Therefore consensual same-sex relations are not ‘unnatural,’ and therefore shouldn’t be subjected to legal penalty” (OutRight Action International 2018).However, this is the only example of incremental legal progress made with regard to the acceptance of queer identity in Lebanon. In fact, the state security apparatuses are indifferent to these rulings and continue their persecution with increasing intensity. For instance, the Egyptian police tacitly encourage citizens to catfish and harass queer people through online dating apps (Insikt Group 2020: 19). In Lebanon police and state agents routinely harass queer people. In Jordan and Egypt the police continuously monitor dating apps using phone interference technology, international mobile subscriber identity (IMSI), or IMSI catchers to geolocate people. They also funnel photos and text messages from their phones and use them as evidence in prosecution and sentencing.Among the most targeted queer people in Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) are queer refugees, who are subject to dual marginalization: because they are refugees and because they are queer. This condition makes them doubly susceptible to surveillance and targets of state violence through facial recognition, phone surveillance, and other tools of tracing and recognition (Molnar 2021: 115–16). Queer refugees’ double layer of marginality questions the heteronormative structure of the nation-state and, as such, makes them primary targets of state policy that makes/defines/perceives them as gender deviants, sex workers, and a national threat. The formation of the nation-state, particularly in the postcolonial era, has often manifested in the shaping of normative citizens who would fit into normative national self-determination and circuits of global capital. In the first instance, this involves a social narrative of gender and sexual roles inscribed into national scripts of “tradition” and an imagined precolonial cultural purity. In the latter instance, this involves the neoliberal productive, individualistic, and responsibilized citizen who takes on previously state-provided provisioning as citizens in the private labor and consumption market as a duty toward national development. Austerity and privatization of social provisioning within the gendered nuclear family become the social duty of a responsible and normative citizen, particularly when it comes to sexual and gender discipline and the responsibility for social reproduction. Here, then, emerges the moralization of the social reproduction of each family unit along proper religious, cultural, traditional, and gendered lines. Consequently, those who deviate from this normative citizen model, the queer, are seen as a moral and economic threat to the nation.The problem of algorithmic surveillance of queer people is not confined to SWANA or Muslim-majority countries. In fact, my research shows that the economic and political entanglement between SWANA and settler-colonial economies in the global North is an imperial project of geopolitical consolidation using the data economy as a means of securing state sovereignty where it is increasingly challenged by gender- or sexually deviant subjects. For example, the Canadian state engages in surveillance of activist groups’ social media domestically, particularly those seen to challenge the legitimacy of the police as an institution or the Canadian nation-state, such as Indigenous organizations (Government of Canada 2020).This research aims to address how the data economy, specifically algorithmically facilitated surveillance, is the modality through which nation-states persecute queer people in SWANA. Furthermore, I show how settler-colonial states in the global North, such as Canada, have a direct interest in trading this technology with other settler-colonial states, such as Israel, to mutually reinforce each other’s surveillance capacities and their sovereignty. This holds important value because a large part of these regimes’ sovereign justification on the global stage is their claim of being safe harbors for queer people in opposition to the conservative “barbarians” of Arab countries (Government of Canada 2015). This practice of pinkwashing, as scholars have dubbed it, is a method of justifying the ongoing genocide of Palestinians by the Zionist state by claiming that Israel is a safe state for queer people (Jackman and Upadhyay 2014). Western imperial modernity is positioned as the queer haven in SWANA that is oppositionally situated to the “other” eastern Arab, characterized as inherently homophobic. Zionism and Canadian imperialism capitalize on queer subjectivity to claim that Western secularism and modernity are uniquely tolerant societies. This claim is fundamentally homophobic, as it erases the existence of queer people in Arab countries, including Palestine. Moreover, pinkwashing embraces a politics of representation, claiming that Israel is safe for queers, when in fact the biggest risk to queer Palestinians is the ongoing Zionist occupation. Pinkwashing, which constitutes a large part of Zionist and Canadian colonial sovereign discourse, is dually racist in that it ascribes an inherent whiteness to queerness, through the erasure of queer Arabs, and homophobic in that it assumes that we live in an era of posthomophobic violence in settler-colonial states. My study focuses on Canada’s relationship with SWANA countries because of the unique surveillance economy promoted by Canada’s official policy of supporting the Zionist state. Private firms and government contracts promote and profit from a surveillance economy rooted in repression, while settler-colonial states see a political interest in the surveillance economy for preserving their sovereignty. This, in turn, draws out a broader generalization about Canada’s and the United States’ strategic geopolitical and imperial ambitions through their alignment with states that have historically supported Zionism. One such example is the contemporary Egyptian state and the overlooked consequences this surveillance economy has on queer people in SWANA states. I argue that studying this particular settler-colonial and imperial trade in surveillance technology can also provide larger theorizations on the data economy as a new frontier of extraction on a global scale, as discussed by scholars such as Paola Ricaurte (2022).The value of theorizing data colonialism is to identify the continued relevance of gender-based discipline through surveillance for settler-colonial states, securing their sovereignty through gender and sexual discipline to create normative subjects. This involves exporting these disciplines to imperial outposts and among settler-colonial states such as Israel with the aim of policing Palestinian women and queer people’s bodies. Surveillance disciplines us into the ideal subject, which is just one form of imperial export Canada and other settler-colonial states participate in.There is a tight link between surveillance as a racial-colonial project and capitalism (Browne 2015). In fact, surveillance has also always involved the monitoring, bookkeeping, measuring, and quantification of human life in service of wealth accumulation and state sovereignty (Moreton-Robinson 2015). These two are intertwined as the interests of the sovereign state are often those of the dominant wealth class for the purposes of protecting their property, and capital interest, who need to quantify and categorize as much productive life as possible. This has been well documented by Simone Browne (2015: 32), who has meticulously traced the developments in surveillance technology through the slave trade and its attachments to intellectual production. Her primary case is Jeremy Bentham’s design of the panopticon, inspired by his travel on a Turkish slaveholding ship. The eighteen enslaved African women held captive “under the hatches” on this voyage are described as cargo, mere invisible interchangeable units below the deck out of view of the traveler’s eye. The cruel rationalization of space and measurements, the calculus of unit count in fitting as many people as possible in a cramped ship for profit in human lives depended on the bookkeeping and collection of data as methods of surveillance in their infancy. Today we can say that predictive analytics in policing and border securitization are quite literally the new frontier of the surveillance economy.An often-overlooked factor in critical AI scholarship about algorithmic surveillance is the role the global North plays in the global political economy of surveillance technology. However, I aim to demonstrate that the coloniality of data is not a metaphor but that, much as Ricaurte demonstrates, the impacts of the coloniality of data are very much material. Coloniality of data, data subjectification, and value extraction are all material expressions of colonial value production for wealth accumulation and nation-state securitization. Through regimes of data informed by privatization and monetization, automation at scale and algorithms that produce semiautonomous decisions, violence, and extraction can occur at a global scale, generating wealth for the data companies and increasing the state’s security capacity (Ricaurte 2022: 727). Countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Canada and firms based in these countries directly sell technologies to SWANA state agencies, which then use them to persecute queer people. The Canadian connection is particularly interesting because Canada is nested in a network of technological and financial exchange profiting from algorithmic surveillance, mutually reinforcing settler-colonial states in containing Indigenous populations. Canada’s official policy stance in supporting Zionism is also a self-affirming project of entrenching Canadian sovereignty that is already proved precarious by Indigenous historical knowledge. Canadian sovereignty rests on the racist doctrine of discovery, which the Supreme Court of Canada has officially rejected.1 For these reasons, the Canadian state, as a settler-colonial entity, in an act of self-affirmation, will always support and affirm Israeli sovereignty as a settler-colonial genocidal state and share a mutual interest in the exchange of disciplinary and surveillance technologies. The works of carceral abolitionists such as Ruha Benjamin (2019), Rinaldo Walcott (2021), and Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007) continue to inspire new visions and vantage points to address this next frontier of surveillance that is quickly tightening its grip on our intimate lives.Data tech companies have a responsibility toward protecting the privacy and information of their users. However, too often, queer dating platforms, such as Grindr, are targets of local police for catfishing operations through which they lure, sexploit, and blackmail queer people. Police officers pose as men seeking to hook up, for example, with other men and collect photos and other information shared with them to arrest and prosecute these men in court. There have been many stories shared by queer people of police using access to monitor queer people online for their own predatory ends, where many users become victims of sexual assault under the threat of blackmail. Police use features of apps such as Grindr to track and arrest users. Police in Egypt, for example, use Grindr’s geolocation feature to find and arrest gay men based on vague debauchery laws (Article 19 2019). In Lebanon, Grindr’s use has been banned since 2019 on the state’s internet network, signaling the heightened crackdowns on queer communities in the country.What these examples demonstrate are the geopolitical entanglements that hold to account global North countries to their role in providing surveillance technologies, training, funding, and capacities to SWANA countries that serve an imperial economic interest in order to secure settler-colonialism and white supremacy globally at the expense of queer people. These technologies are then mobilized to discipline and normativize the neoliberal subject and family unit under the rubric of national security and self-determination. Those who deviate from this rubric are punished by the nation-state as moral aberrations. Therefore the carceral economy is a global one, with the West deeply invested in SWANA carceral technologies to secure white supremacy and imperial projection. By extension, the framework of abolition and anti-imperialism is crucial to any critical surveillance studies, because the militarization of nation-states is occurring on a global scale and retrenching neocolonial power structures.Settler-colonial states are acting globally and mutually defending their interest in carceral technological development. This calls on abolitionists to also think and act globally. Canada, like the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and many other global North countries, have direct economic and sovereign interests in trading carceral technologies and techniques to the global South. Many of these technologies, such as algorithmic social media surveillance and data mining through third-party private companies, are sold as services to SWANA states interested in disciplining their subjects into moral confines determined by the nation-state. Data services companies, national governments, and police departments will sell us the narrative that these surveillance developments are inevitable and, in fact, necessary to protect national identity and sovereignty. What I am describing here is more than the gendered and racial impacts on queer communities in SWANA countries. Rather, I argue that the nation-state, itself a racialized and gendered construction, is mobilized through algorithmic and data surveillance, which entrench those global structures of power.In the case of Egypt, in 2015, the United Kingdom approved an export license for phone monitoring technology used by Egyptian authorities for widespread surveillance in the context of queer persecution (Privacy International 2016: 31). Egypt has a widely publicized history of persecuting queer people, such as the 2002 Cairo 52 case, where gay men attending a gay boat club moored in Cairo were arrested and prosecuted under debauchery laws (Pratt 2007).Such efforts today are rendered ever more seamless with algorithmic-assisted technology in the data economy. Egypt’s political alignment with the United States and the United Kingdom facilitates access to invasive surveillance technologies used in the brutal repression of subjects deemed a security threat to the Egyptian nation-state’s cultural and moral identity.The state of Lebanon has been reported to apprehend and torture queer people arrested under vague sodomy laws even after the suspension of Article 534. There have been accounts of Lebanese prisons where prison guards regularly torture queer inmates and perform “tests” on them to assess whether sodomy has occurred and make fabrications about the person’s sexual orientation (Nammour 2021). These forms of sexual assault and degradation of dignity performed on the bodies of queer people occur within the context of legal changes but are facilitated by apps and a digital economy where finding and persecuting queer people is possible in more aggressive ways. Dating apps remain unaccountable for the lack of protection of user privacy, data, or safety of queer people when using their apps. For example, there have been demands to remove the geolocation feature on Grindr to prevent men from being stalked or blackmailed. Companies such as Grindr have shirked responsibility toward their app users while collecting their data for profit (Article 19 2019). The relationship between the state and private data companies becomes a nexus of political repression to the data economy where queer people the to these global power relations that global North states and companies have with states in the SWANA my research has toward of predictive analytics in Canadian police departments to out the relationship between private analytics and data firms and the Canadian Police in more surveillance My research the exchange of Canadian technologies, and capital with other settler-colonial states, such as Israel, to mutually secure their colonial sovereignty and any Indigenous and efforts toward self-determination. that are and in Canada within police departments are the of global in predictive policing and surveillance of Indigenous and with the of securing the colonial nation-state and its to postcolonial states in Asia or settler-colonial states such as Israel, these technologies are and to practice to monitor and Palestinian to Zionist particularly by women and queer people. The of this research is to on and in not only to the quickly of algorithmic policing and but also visions that can to the new of the police state. 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