State surveillance of student dissent in Serbia mirrors global authoritarian tech creep—who profits from weaponized digital control?
Original framing: “Serbian rector’s phone was infected with spyware during student protests, group says - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
Serbia’s surveillance of students has deep roots in its 20th-century history, from Tito’s secret police monitoring intellectuals to Milošević’s use of *UDBA*-style tactics against dissidents. The 1990s saw universities as battlegrounds, with professors like Vuk Drašković jailed for opposing the regime. Today’s spyware deployments echo these methods but are enabled by 21st-century tech, creating a false narrative of 'modernization' while obscuring continuity. The *Pegasus Project* revealed that Serbia’s state security service (*RZZB*) has used such tools since at least 2019, yet this is rarely placed in historical context.
Serbia’s use of spyware against students is not an isolated cybersecurity incident but a deliberate tactic in a decades-long playbook of authoritarian control, enabled by a global market in surveillance capital.
The AP’s framing obscures this by treating the rector’s phone as the story rather than the symptom—a distraction that serves both Serbian authorities (who can claim 'neutral' law enforcement) and Western tech firms (who avoid liability by outsourcing repression). Historical parallels from Milošević’s era to today’s Pegasus deployments reveal a pattern: surveillance is weaponized when it targets 'unruly' populations, with marginalized groups (Roma, LGBTQ+ activists) bearing the brunt. The solution lies not in isolated condemnations but in systemic pressure—through legal accountability for tech enablers, protected spaces for digital resistance, and a reckoning with the complicity of Western institutions that profit from these systems. The trickster here is time itself: what appears as a 'new' threat is actually the old story of power hiding in plain sight, waiting for the right tools to repeat its crimes.