Opportunities and Challenges in Southeast Asia, 2019 (Bangkok, Thailand) 31 mentioned some form of engagement with governments, whether through consultations or through multistakeholder meetings such as Internet Governance Forums. Digital security trainings for human rights defenders or high risk and marginalised communities are common. In all of the countries within the sample, large scale online campaigns have been organised against draconian law-making, affecting digital rights, such as Thailand’s fight against the amendments of the Computer-related Crime Act which garnered more than 300,000 petition signatures (according to figures by Human Rights Watch (2016), even though a respondent put the figure at 370,000)), Malaysia’s Internet Blackout Day against Section 114A within the Evidence Act (Cheong & Yeap, 2012), and the Philippines in their crowdsourcing of a Magna Carta for Philippine Internet Freedom in opposition to the Cyber Crime Act 2012 (York, 2013). In most of these instances, the campaigns were successful in generating public awareness and conversations, even if many did not lead to a change in policy direction. There has also been work on protecting civil society with technical support and defense, as well as attempts to link civil society with tech communities, even though these areas of work are limited compared to other areas. Challenges Faced In terms of challenges that are specific to digital rights work, an oft-mentioned one is the lack of understanding of the topic, within civil society and also by the general public. Within civil society, digital rights work has an “inconsistent constituency”, according to one of the respondents. As people do not completely understand what digital rights is, participation in the advocacy is ad-hoc and reactive, based on issues that crop up. Change is difficult to sustain without a strong core movement, and when resources within civil society are spread thin. There is a “sheer lack of digital rights activists” - on one hand, some advocate on digital rights issues without seeing themselves as advocates for digital rights, and on the other hand digital rights issues are fragmented, and those who are working on specific issues (for instance, online gender-based violence) without identifying with the larger movement end up working with the same people repeatedly, without connecting their work with other issues such as data collection and retention. On top of that, the lack of digital literacy within the wider circle of human rights defenders means that activists continue to use third party platforms with problematic privacy and data policies, inadvertently contributing to corporate and state surveillance; lax attitudes towards personal and organisational digital security also mean that they would compromise themselves and their stakeholders if their devices or systems are compromised. Without a clear understanding of digital rights, human rights defenders and their funders end up perpetrating practices such as the indiscriminate collection of stakeholder data without a data retention policy or a data security plan. Digital rights advocates find it difficult to communicate their work, which compounds the problem of the lack of awareness in the general public. Sometimes the issues do not bring immediate consequences and are just potential violations that may happen in