Recent Posts
Ron Deibert’s blog.
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✴︎ blogDigital Security for Whom or What?
With data surrounding us and networked into everything we do, the security of our data, both in transit and while at rest, is an obvious public safety issue. Which makes it puzzling why governments — whose principal job, since at least the time of Thomas Hobbes, is to keep us safe — have repeatedly sought…
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✴︎ blogSweeping the Internet for Netsweeper
The LGBTQ news website, “Gay Today,” is blocked in Bahrain; the website for Greenpeace International is blocked in the UAE; a matrimonial dating website is censored in Afghanistan; all of the World Health Organization’s website, including sub-pages about HIV/AIDS information, is blocked in Kuwait; an entire category of websites labeled “Sex Education,” are all censored…
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✴︎ blogIntroducing QUANTUM-as-a-Service
Imagine that your device could be silently commandeered and used to spy on you simply because you surfed the web. No need for anyone to have possession of it and physically install something. No need to trick you into downloading spyware, clicking on a malicious link, or entering your credentials into a phony login page.…
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✴︎ blogA Year in the Life of a Phishing Operation
It’s often remarked that digital espionage can be undertaken on the cheap. But just how cheap? In a new Citizen Lab report released this morning, we give one answer. Taking advantage of simple errors committed by the operator of a phishing operation, we were able to get an “inside view” of just what it takes…
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✴︎ blogA close look at the proposed “CSE Act”
The Citizen Lab is releasing a new report today, in collaboration with our partners at the Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), entitled, “Analysis of the Communications Security Establishment Act and Related Provisions in Bill C-59.” The 75 page report provides a detailed overview of Canada’s SIGINT agency, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), an…
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✴︎ blogEthiopian Cyber Espionage with Israel-based Commercial Spyware
Citizen Lab has published a new report today in which we uncover a major global cyber espionage campaign targeting numerous individuals in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and more than a dozen other countries. Strong circumstantial evidence points to Ethiopia, with the surveillance technology supplied by an Israel-based company, Cyberbit Solutions. WIRED has…
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✴︎ blogCitizen Lab Submission to UN SR on Online Violence Against Women
In March 1994, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights appointed a “Special Rapporteur on violence against women, including its causes and consequences”. The current Special Rapporteur is Dr. Dubravka Šimonović. Recently, Dr. Šimonović issued a call for submissions on the topic of “online violence against women” and Citizen Lab decided to make such a…
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✴︎ blogCanada’s new national security bill: one step forward, two steps back?
Over the last year, the Canadian government has been engaged in extensive public consultations meant to address widespread concerns around C-51 (the anti-terror law implemented by Prime Minister Harper’s government) as well as a range of other national security practices, policies, and oversight and public accountability issues raised by Canadians. (I participated in some of…
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✴︎ blogKorean Child Monitoring Applications: Insecure by Design
Nearly every day it seems, a friend asks about how to cope with a digital security risk. Among those with the most acute concerns are parents of minor children, many of whom now carry with them mobile devices. Parents ask how they can protect their children from inappropriate content, whether their child’s use of their…
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✴︎ blogMexican Surveillance Abuse Continues
We are publishing yet another update to the ongoing investigations Citizen Lab has been conducting, in partnership with R3D, SocialTic, and Article 19, on abuse of commercial spyware in Mexico. Our latest report shows that the Claudio X. González, director of the Mexican anti-corruption organization Mexicanos Contra la Corrupción y la Impunidad (MCCI), was…