The Cybercrime Law & the Genocide in Palestine: a Perfect “Storm” to Shrink Freedom’s Space in Jordan

“I really don’t know what to tell them. Khalas, they need to leave us in peace!” This time, Abdallah’s* frustrations seem stronger than ever.

A long-term activist in the Jordanian capital Amman, he has visited the court, security services, and police offices much more frequently over the past 18 months than in the past. As he collaborates with several cultural and social centers, maintaining a regular “dialogue” with the authorities is nothing new in the Hashemite Kingdom. However, since October 7, 2023, the consequences of the Hamas surprise attack in Israel and the Netanyahu government’s genocidal response in Gaza have spread across the entire Middle East region. Unlike its neighbours Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, Jordan has not been directly hit by war and violence—but it has not been spared either.

Among the multiple effects of the war, which will be explored further below, there is one aspect that heavily affected the social, political, and cultural scene in the country: a much stronger control of people’s freedoms, especially when those are exercised online. For this to happen, a controversial legislative tool, the so-called Cybercrime Law, was approved a couple of months before October 7 and massively implemented since.

“The event organized [for] tomorrow has to be cancelled”, shared Abdallah after calming down a bit. “The mukhabarat [security services] said that it is too sensitive.” Over the past months, organizing activities like movie screenings, concerts, and cultural debates, has already been subjected to such orders, many triggered by the new law.

Back in January 2024, the police notified another Palestinian-Jordanian activist, Mohammad*, because he had participated in a Facebook group discussion about boycotting goods and companies supporting the Israeli occupation of Palestine and its allies. Such campaigns grew exponentially in Jordan after October 7 and also extended to companies symbolizing the US presence in the country, a key ally to both Amman and Tel Aviv and the main weapon supplier for the latter.

“Our idea was simply to prepare a list of accused companies and alternatives, to inform the public and give them choices they could consider for the same good. One day the police called me, I showed up at the station to be interrogated, and then I moved from one court to another for the whole day,” said Mohammed.

Eventually, he was accused of “provoking a scandal,” a vague accusation that was triggered after a company included in the boycott list called the police. When his lawyer could finally access the court, he understood that Mohammad was found guilty under the Cybercrime Law which had already affected hundreds of activists a few months since its approval.

“Eventually I got cleared in a strange way. After a few weeks nothing happened and at a certain point the lawyer informed me that the case was closed. But with the random application of this law, and all that is happening around and inside Jordan, we breathe an atmosphere of fear, that the government is spreading,” said Mohammad in a recent interview.

Abdallah and Mohammad are far from being alone in holding these concerns. Especially among the associations, groups, movements, and activists who attended the weekly demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine since October 7, the fear has been progressively growing, while participation in such events decreased over time. One of the reasons for the decline is that, over the past 18 months, around 2,000 people have been detained for participating in those activities or engaging with them on social media.

Apparently, the Cybercrime Law is working.

A “draconian” bill protecting the power and weakening citizens

Approved in August 2023 and entered into force the following month, the Cybercrime Law was drafted to replace another regulation from 2015 bearing the same name. The shared opinion among journalists, lawyers, and activists Turning Point talked to over the past year and a half is that the legislators used the need to tackle the “challenges set by hate speech and the spread of fake news” as an excuse to have stronger control over the internet.

While the previous law was structured around 15 articles, the new one consists of 41 points with several provisions and came amid an intensifying crackdown on civic space in Jordan over the past few years. According to a statement published by 14 civil society organizations in July 2023, the new version of the law posed “a serious threat to freedom of expression, the right to information, and the right to privacy.” The statement denounced several aspects of the law, highlighting that it failed to meet international human rights standards included in various conventions already ratified by Jordan.

The law has also been criticized for its vague terminology, with concepts such as “fake news,” “promoting, instigating, aiding or inciting immorality,” “online assassination of personality,” “provoking strife,” and “undermining national unity” offering a wide space for the police and intelligence services to prosecute online users. In formulating such terms, the law also introduced specific provisions to protect the law enforcement officials, “from anyone who publishes [their] names or pictures online, or any information or news about them that may offend or harm, without prior authorization.”

Failing to respect such orders means a minimum prison sentence of three months and a fine ranging from 5,000 Jordanian Dinars ($7,049) to 25,000 JDs ($35,246). Similar charges apply to online users who adopt anonymization measures, such as VPNs, proxies, and TOR network, and the law also demands social media companies with over 100,000 users to have a legal representation in Jordan to respond to judicial authorities and government officials’ requests. Failing to comply, such companies risk having advertising banned on their platform and gradually losing their bandwidth via internet throttling to make the platform slow or unusable.

“It was clear that there were flaws in this law since the first draft started to circulate. The worse is that they rushed to approve it, and they did not give us enough time to oppose it, nor they listened to us,” said R.M.*, a journalist and a long-time advocate for digital media outlets in Jordan. Back in the early summer of 2023, she immediately activated her network to reach out to Members of Parliament to try to convince the government to listen to civil society.

“We first organized a session inviting some MPs, lawyers, NGOs, activists, and legal experts on freedom of expression to discuss and write a letter to be presented to the legal committee at the Parliament”, she recalled. “We even involved technical persons to provide alternatives, because we understand the concerns of online harassment and hate speech, but they simply ignored everything and went straight on to approve it.”

R.M.’s concerns have been echoed by other prominent civil society figures, among them Firas Sakaja, one of the lawyers who have defended individuals affected by the law. Recently appearing on the podcast Rights Now, a program focusing on human rights in Jordan, he shared that he is still— a year and a half after the approval of this law—shocked by “how quickly it was passed.”

“It’s one of the laws that deal with very important issues for the people of Jordan. However, it has not been adequately studied from all perspectives, and its provision violates the fundamental constitutional rights to freedom of expression,” he said on the program. Like Firas, the Cybercrime Law has kept busy several other lawyers since its approval, and most of the cases have been about individuals convicted for expressing solidarity with Palestine.

Jordan’s “complicated” relationship with Palestine

With over 60% of its 11 million citizens being of Palestinian origin, many in Jordan are directly impacted by the ongoing conflict in Palestine, which the UN has described as bearing signs of genocide. These deep-rooted connections have developed over the past 76 years, with the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 Six-Day War—key events that shaped both sides of the Jordan River.

Unlike other Arab countries, Jordan granted citizenship to most Palestinian refugees, except those from Gaza. Today, their descendants number around 2.4 million and are largely excluded from public services, relying heavily on the assistance provided by the UNRWA. The agency, however, is in turmoil once again and facing potential closure after Israel’s parliament passed a law banning the agency from operating in the Occupied Territories.

Jordan’s history, rooted in the post-Ottoman division of the Middle East by Britain and France, has been marked by an ambiguous stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While Jordan administered the West Bank until 1988, it maintained diplomatic ties with Israel—even during major conflicts and the First Intifada. In 1994, it became the second Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel. This balancing act was influenced by Jordan’s relatively weaker internal and regional power as well as by the strategic alliances formed by its rulers. During his 47-year reign, King Hussein carved a diplomatic role for Jordan but failed to modernize its economy. As a result, Jordan has long relied on foreign support first from the UK and later from the US, which has provided nearly $2 billion annually since the peace deal with Israel. However, this dependency comes with compromises—now more than ever in its history.

It is thus not surprising that the ongoing massacre in Gaza has sparked massive protests in Jordan—the largest in the whole region—directed not only against Israeli and US embassies but also at Jordan’s own government. Many Jordanians are frustrated with their leaders, and activists like Sarah* have become increasingly vocal. Featured on the Rights Now podcast, she described how the Jordanian authorities used the Cybercrime Law to target activists: “Many were arrested not for what they did, but because they were known to attend protests. The law is too vague—they can use it however they want.”

Activists and journalists have observed the growing power of the Public Security Directorate (PSD), the security service reporting directly to the king. Like in Mohammad’s case, the Cybercrime Law can be activated by anyone who perceives that an activity online is causing some sort of “harm.” Once a police report is lodged, the “offender” is notified to attend the court, or can be visited directly. In between, the mukhabarat is activated to look for any possible information they can use against the perpetrator.

This is particularly true for the pro-Palestine activism, according to MENA Rights Group, a Geneva-based NGO which highlighted in December that the crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism in Jordan goes beyond the Cybercrime Law. Other laws, such as the Penal Code and Crime Prevention Law, are used to escalate charges, ban gatherings, and detain people administratively—that is, without a charge or judicial oversight—under the guise of protecting public security.

“It’s the CIA of Jordan, which now have much more freedom to intervene than ever”, explained R.M., pointing out that such tight control on the society is nothing new in Jordan. She experienced that directly when she was notified by the Frontline NGO in 2022 to be among the Jordanian journalists, activists, and politicians to be spied on with the Israeli firm NSO Group’s Pegasus mobile phone spyware.

“At first I was surprised, because I always took the needed precautions. You know, being a journalist in Jordan means knowing your boundaries. But I never thought they could spy me 24 hours,” she said. Pegasus is considered one of the most potent commercial spyware globally, as it can infect the victim’s phone without any user interaction (zero-click exploit) and extract practically all its data, including end-to-end encrypted private communications.

That was not the only time Pegasus has been used by the Jordanian mukhabarat. In February 2024, a joint forensic investigation by Access Now and the Citizen Lab, with the support of Jordanian local partners, uncovered that at least 35 individuals in Jordan had been targeted with the spyware. Among them was Daoud Kuttab, an award-winning Palestinian-American journalist, media activist, and columnist based in Jordan, where he leads the community radio station Radio Al-Balad, the network’s website AmmanNet.Net, and the online newspaper Milhilard.org. Between February 2022 and September 2023, Kuttab was hacked with the Pegasus spyware three times. After the first hacking incident, Kuttab was arrested upon arrival at the Amman airport after a trip to London. He was detained under the previous Cybercrime Law for an article written in 2019, before being released a few hours later. 

“It was scary to know that somebody knows your schedule and follows you”, revealed Kuttab, however clarifying that although he has suspicions, he never got a confirmation on who infected his phone. “The fact that they arrested me upon my return is a sign that they wanted to use deterrence in a context where there is already a lot of censorship and control.” In addition to experiencing this directly himself, multiple times, Daoud has also written extensively about freedom and repression of the media in Jordan. In 2021, despite enormous pressure, his network AmmanNet was the only Jordanian media to cover the Pandora Papers, one of the largest journalistic investigations exposing a shadow financial system benefiting the world’s most rich and powerful figures, among them also Jordan’s King Abdullah II.

Between censorship and self-censorship

Jordan is not a free country, but a conservative monarchy where the king plays a dominant role in politics and governance, and where most of the media are directly or indirectly owned by the government. At the beginning of his reign, in 1999, there were positive signs from King Abdullah II and the government, including public statements proving intentions to open up for more freedoms, starting with the press, and important policy and economic reforms.

“I remember those times, that was when I founded Radio Al-Balad in 2000 and its website”, recalled Kuttab.

However, in the early 2010s, echoing the Tunisian, Egyptian, and Syrian revolts, Jordanians started also to take to the streets to protest inflation, political corruption, and the rampant unemployment rates which rose to 25% in 2011—a number still valid today. Against that backdrop, the approach towards journalists and the internet increasingly got more restrictive, while the government slowly reformed a third of the constitution towards a democratic trajectory. In 2013, amendments to the Press and Publication Law regulated that every website had to be licensed like a newspaper.

“All websites, which were escaping until then to the control of the government suddenly had to be registered as a company, with an editor-in-chief who must be a member of the government-run syndicate—at least from 4 years,” remembered Kuttab.

Furthermore, the law mandated media outlets to bear legal responsibility for all the comments under their online articles and even on their social media channels. “In practice, since then either a magazine disallows comments on their website or instead, if they can afford, employ somebody to be completely dedicated to the moderation or the deletion of those.”

The crackdown then continued with the first 2015 Cybercrime Law, and finally with the “terrible version we have now, which results in journalists and anybody to risk jail if we say anything that the power does not like.”

Kuttab, like R.M., and all the other activists, journalists, and lawyers interviewed by Turning Point unanimously agreed that worse than the explicit censorship and control, is the increased self-censorship—the biggest “achievement” of the Jordanian authorities.

“There is a funny story that circulates among journalists in Jordan, based on an old statistic stating that 94% of journalists in the country actively practice self-censorship,” shares Kuttab. “Well, the story goes that the remnant 6% did not understand the question.”

To describe how much this story reflects the reality it was helpful to listen to a young journalist at a very much earlier career stage compared to Kuttab or R.M. recently in a conversation over a coffee. To a question on what he thought of self-censorship, he candidly replied that “it is difficult to define, but living in such context it [is] something that comes quite naturally.”

As a journalist, you know very clearly until which extent you can push, what are the dos and don’ts. It’s stronger than us, something we applied even when not needed. We work within the space we have, and you are free as long as you don’t touch certain red lines: the king, the army—that nobody can offend as they are protected by the constitution—and the relations with Israel…” he said.

Considering how extremely delicate Jordan’s position has become during the past year and a half, it seems that censorship and self-censorship are proceeding hand in hand— with the Cybercrime Law fuelling both at the same time.

A delicate historical moment for the ‘oasis of stability’ in the Middle East

The ongoing genocide in Palestine is having multiple repercussions that go beyond the social and rights sphere. The boycott campaign affected at least 12,000 businesses, which have either closed, downsized or dismissed at least 5,000 employees. The tourism sector, one of the few pillars of Jordan’s economy, may have experienced estimated losses of at least three billion dollars according to unofficial estimates.

As Jordan hosts almost 4 million refugees, including Syrians, Sudanese, Iraqis, Yemenis, and Palestinians registered with the UNRWA, US president Donald Trump’s decisions to drastically cut the development, humanitarian, and foreign aid are critically affecting its fragile state model which—as mentioned earlier—relies heavily on external financial support to provide basic services to its population. Furthermore, Trump’s “blackmail” to both Egypt and Jordan to withhold the funds until they “will not absorb more Palestinians” is touching on a very sensitive subject for the Hashemite Kingdom, where memories of the Palestinian-Jordanian “Black September” civil war remain vivid among the citizens.

It is therefore not a surprise that nowadays many in Jordan talk openly about an “inevitable war” should Israel push the genocide to its completion and the US support the displacement of more people from the West Bank and Gaza.

In such a historical conjunction, sympathy for radical and political Islam grew significantly in the country. The recent, very lowly participated general elections were won by the opposition party Islamic Action Front which is aligned with Hamas and the international Muslim Brotherhood movement.

“Jordan is a monarchy and not a free country, sure. But it has an asset enviable by all other nations in the region: stability,” said Kuttab, adding that the “Islamic threat” is another pressure point between Jordan and the Gulf countries. In fact, the Gulf’s foreign policy in the kingdom has been for years focused on the marginalization of the Muslim Brotherhood and lately, they seem to have reached their goal.

On April 23^rd, a week after accusing the Muslim Brotherhood of planning to carry out attacks in the country, the Jordanian government announced a total ban the Islamist group. Considered by analysts as a direct result of a coordinate pressure by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the US and Israel, one might have expected some protests in response to the ban. However, with the except of very few gatherings across the country, nothing major happened. The threat issued by the Cybercrime Unit of the PSD warning “social media users to refrain from publishing anything related to ban’s decision”, might have sufficed as deterrent. Or, once again, as self-censorship booster.

While its consequences need to be carefully assessed, the ban exemplifies how Jordan is forced to balance pressures on all fronts, according to Kuttab. “Internally, it is likely that the government will continue to act like a valve. They open it and they close it as they see it fit to protect the asset.”

“We call it the ‘unwritten law’. In Jordan, we have a written law which says there is no censorship, but then you have the unwritten law making you to get a phone call from the intelligence department if they don’t want an article you have written.”

Despite the glooming scenario, hope is still not lost, at least among journalists like him and R.M.

“Without a functioning media, a country doesn’t develop”, R.M. sighed. “With no valid journalists, people don’t read anymore, we lose a critical attitude which is almost a rarity today in this country. I started doing what I do because I believe in change. I still do it.”

“As journalist, with all that I lived so far, I am still not giving up in speaking the truth power”, concluded Kuttab. “We’re still breathing. With our community radio, we wanted to change people’s attitudes and thinking. It is becoming increasingly challenging, but that’s a long-term mission to have a strong backbone in the society.”

*Due to security concerns, the interviewees asked to be referred not with their real identity.