The Listening State: How Ethiopia’s Digital Dragnet Ensnares Journalists
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By Ethiopian Tribune columnist, June 23, 2025.
The casual conversation between two veteran journalists at Birana Bar and Restaurant on a Saturday evening should have remained just that casual. Instead, it became the centrepiece of a three-and-a-half-hour detention ordeal that exposes the chilling reality of surveillance in contemporary Ethiopia. When Andualem Sisay Gessesse and Wudneh Zenebe were separately apprehended and taken to Karamara Police Station on 21 June 2025, their interrogation revealed a surveillance apparatus so pervasive that private conversations over beer can trigger midnight detentions.
“The police has got intel information that we were mentioning names of influential political figures during our conversation in the bar,” Gessesse recounted after his release. The matter-of-fact delivery of this explanation by investigating officers betrays the normalisation of surveillance practices that would have been unthinkable in Ethiopia’s pre-digital era yet disturbingly familiar to those who lived through the darkest chapters of its authoritarian past.
The Architecture of Digital Tyranny
The detention of these journalists illuminates a sophisticated surveillance ecosystem that transforms ordinary spaces into intelligence-gathering venues. How did authorities know about a private conversation between two men sharing drinks? The answer lies in Ethiopia’s extensive deployment of digital surveillance technologies that have evolved far beyond the crude informant networks of previous regimes.
Research by Human Rights Watch details the technologies the Ethiopian government has acquired from several countries and uses to facilitate surveillance of perceived political opponents inside the country and among the diaspora. Modern surveillance tools such as “Pegasus” software can turn most smartphones into “24-hour surveillance devices”, allowing the “intruder” access not only to everything on our mobiles but also weaponising them to spy on our lives.
The implications are staggering. Every smartphone becomes a potential listening device, every conversation a possible state transcript, every gathering of minds a security concern. The technology transforms citizens’ own devices into instruments of their surveillance a digital Panopticon where the watched cannot see the watchers, but must assume they are always being observed.
The Ethiopian government appears again to be using Internet spying tools to attempt to eavesdrop on journalists based in suburban Washington, demonstrating that this surveillance apparatus extends far beyond Ethiopia’s borders. The reach of digital authoritarianism knows no geographical boundaries, pursuing dissenting voices across continents and into the diaspora communities that previous regimes could only dream of monitoring.
Echoes of Ethiopia’s Dark Past
To understand the present, one must examine Ethiopia’s historical relationship with press freedom and surveillance. The Derg regime (1974-1991) relied on physical terror, neighbourhood committees, and crude informant networks to monitor dissent. Journalists disappeared into prisons like Maikelawi, their typewriters silenced by bullets rather than algorithms. The surveillance was brutal but limited in scope constrained by human resources and analogue technology.
The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) era (1991-2018) marked a transition towards more sophisticated suppression. Journalists faced legal harassment through restrictive media laws, economic pressure through advertising boycotts, and selective prosecutions under anti-terrorism legislation. Yet even this system required human surveillance networks and physical monitoring labour-intensive and often inefficient.
Today’s digital surveillance represents a quantum leap in authoritarian capability. Ethiopia’s traditional surveillance network that once relied on neighbourhood watchers keeping files on residents and recommending who should get a loan or be arrested has been superseded by algorithms that can monitor millions simultaneously. The efficiency is terrifying: where once a dozen informants might monitor a neighbourhood, now a single software programme can surveil an entire nation.
The Global Context of Digital Repression
Ethiopia’s surveillance practices mirror a global trend of digital authoritarianism. Military-grade spyware licensed by an Israeli firm to governments for tracking terrorists and criminals was used in attempted and successful hacks of 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, human rights activists, business executives worldwide. In 2021, news broke that at least 180 journalists as well as political leaders had been targeted for surveillance by Pegasus spyware, a system that can be remotely installed on a smartphone enabling complete control over the device.
This global surveillance infrastructure operates with disturbing efficiency. Approximately 50,000 phone numbers appear on a surveillance hacking list containing business executives, human rights activists, journalists, politicians, and government officials from at least fifty countries. The commodification of surveillance has created a marketplace where authoritarian capabilities can be purchased off-the-shelf, democratising oppression for any government with sufficient resources.
Modern journalists now use internet messaging applications (e.g. WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal) to exchange messages and files and to communicate with their sources. Governments employ advanced spyware to monitor communications on computers and smartphones. The very tools that were supposed to liberate information and protect sources have become vectors for state surveillance.
The Death of Privacy, The Birth of Self-Censorship
The psychological impact of pervasive surveillance extends far beyond those directly targeted. When journalists know their private conversations might be monitored, when they understand their smartphones could be compromised, when they recognise that casual remarks over drinks might trigger detention, the chilling effect on press freedom becomes absolute.
At least 10 journalists went into exile in 2024, escaping arbitrary arrests, physical assaults, and threats from security forces, highlighting how surveillance creates a climate of fear that drives journalists from their homeland. The murder of journalist Batte following his detention alongside French journalist Antoine Galindo demonstrates that digital surveillance can serve as a precursor to ultimate silencing.
The case of Gessesse and Zenebe exemplifies this new reality. Their conversation, while touching on political figures, remained private discourse between professionals. Yet in Ethiopia’s surveillance state, privacy itself becomes suspicious, and political discussion transforms into potential evidence of subversion.
Technology as Weapon: The Smartphone Threat
The ubiquity of smartphones has created unprecedented opportunities for surveillance. These devices, carried willingly by their targets, contain microphones, cameras, GPS trackers, and complete communication histories. The recent cyber attack against Moroccan investigative journalist Omar Radi offers perhaps the most chilling example of the use of new generation technology to hack reporters.
Modern spyware can activate cameras and microphones remotely, track locations in real-time, intercept communications, and access stored data all while leaving minimal traces of intrusion. The smartphone becomes not merely a surveillance device but a comprehensive intelligence-gathering platform that follows its target everywhere.
Even in democratic societies, the political will to restrict spyware may be lacking, as governments are reluctant to lose surveillance capability for themselves, and many citizens may be willing to sacrifice their private information in the name of protecting national security. This dynamic creates a global environment where surveillance technology proliferates with minimal restraint.
The Failure of Legal Safeguards
Gessesse’s observation strikes at the heart of the matter: “I don’t know how discussing politics and debating in bar or anywhere can be considered as a harmful practice to the people of Ethiopia or the country worth investigating.” His bewilderment reflects a broader crisis in legal frameworks that have failed to adapt to digital surveillance capabilities.
Many reporters whose coverage did not support the government narrative were detained on serious charges such as “promoting terrorism and extremism”, revealing how elastic legal interpretations can criminalise routine journalistic activities. The gap between constitutional guarantees of free expression and surveillance practices that monitor private conversations represents a fundamental breakdown in legal protections.
Governments need to work together to put regulations in place, ensuring that spyware technologies comply with international human rights standards and develop legal frameworks that require surveillance technology companies to conduct effective human rights due diligence. Yet Ethiopia, like many authoritarian states, shows little interest in such restraints.
The Informational Autocracy
What emerges from this analysis is the picture of an informational autocracy a state where information itself becomes the primary tool of control. Unlike traditional autocracies that relied on controlling physical space and material resources, digital authoritarianism operates by controlling information flows, monitoring communications, and using data as both sword and shield.
The detention of Gessesse and Zenebe represents more than harassment of individual journalists; it signals the evolution of authoritarianism into the digital age. When private conversations become public intelligence, when casual political discussion triggers state intervention, when smartphones transform into surveillance devices, the very foundations of civil society erode.
Conclusion: The Shrinking Space for Truth
The three-and-a-half hours these journalists spent in detention may seem brief, but their broader implications are profound. They represent the compression of Ethiopia’s democratic space into an ever-smaller sphere where even private conversation carries risk. The surveillance apparatus that enabled their detention operates continuously, monitoring communications, tracking movements, and building profiles of potential dissidents.
As Gessesse noted, “I would rather suggest to the government to find ways on how to accommodate different opinions and voices of citizens, instead of engaging in censorship of citizens, like old days.” Yet the current trajectory suggests movement away from accommodation towards ever-more sophisticated forms of digital control.
The challenge for Ethiopia’s remaining independent journalists is stark: how to maintain professional integrity when privacy has been abolished, how to protect sources when communications are compromised, how to speak truth to power when power listens to everything. The answers to these questions will determine not merely the future of Ethiopian journalism, but the possibility of democracy itself in the digital age.
The conversation at Birana Bar has ended, but the surveillance continues. In Ethiopia’s listening state, every word matters because someone is always listening.
© Ethiopian Tribune, 2025. This work is protected by copyright. Reproduction, distribution, or transmission of this work, in whole or in part, without prior written permission from Ethiopian Tribune is strictly prohibited.
