Tunisia: Understanding Conflict 2012 - Johns Hopkins School of ...

The Implements of Repression
There are two key issues to understanding the problem of internal security forces prior to
the revolution; the first has to do with the repressive methods of the political police,
especially in terms of electronic surveillance, and the second concerns the behavior of the
administrative police.
As the enforcers of Ben Ali’s doctrine of political conformity, the political police
were essential to the perpetuation of a rigid system, unresponsive to the needs of its
people. The methods of the political police were like those of the mafia, but imbued with
the resources and authority of a nation—surveillance, kidnapping, intimidation,
blackmail, even torture and most likely murder, the probable fate of the many political
prisoners who “disappeared” over the years. Islamists, in particular, were subjected to
various forms of torture, but adherents to other forms of political opposition deemed
“dissident” were also targeted. The result was an atmosphere of fear and mistrust among
the populace—fear of stepping out of line, and mistrust of the government and especially
the security forces. Due to the clandestine nature of the activities and the prolonged
period of media and academic censorship in the country, it is difficult to cite direct
evidence of these activities, which are catalogued primarily in the accounts of its victims
and their relatives, some of whom we met on our visit to Tunisia.
The surveillance operations of the regime merit further consideration beyond the
scope of this chapter, however, they are worth summarizing. They have significant
implications for oversight of the Internet and social media, which were—at least in
international perceptions—the defining implements of the revolution. Even prior to the
outbreak of the popular revolts, Internet surveillance was a regular tactic employed by the
regime to target and monitor politically active citizens who were critical of the regime
(Goldstein 2011). The precise affiliation of those involved in the monitoring is not
publicly known and it is unlikely to be soon given the lack of existing documentation, but
most sources point to the political police and the Ministry of the Interior, to which the
suspect Internet traffic would be diverted. Some refer to the perpetrators as an entirely
separate entity known as the “cyber police,” but still most likely under the purview of the
political police and certainly the regime. The actual implementation of the monitoring is
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