The following is my written testimony to the Senate Standing Committee on Human Rights – Canada, which will take place November 30, 2016 at 11:30 AM EST and video webcast here.)* Background For over a decade, the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto has researched and documented information controls…

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I am pleased to announce a new Citizen Lab report, entitled “It’s Parliamentary: KeyBoy and the targeting of the Tibetan Community.” The report is authored by the Citizen Lab’s Adam Hulcoop, Etienne Maynier, John Scott Railton, Masashi Crete-Nishihata, and Matt Brooks and can be found here: https://citizenlab.org/2016/11/parliament-keyboy/ In this report, the authors track a malware operation…

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Today, the Citizen Lab is releasing a new report, entitled: “Harmonized Histories? A year of fragmented censorship across Chinese live streaming platforms.”  The report is part of our NetAlert series, and can be found here. Live-streaming media apps are extraordinarily popular in mainland China, used by millions.  Similar in functionality to the US-based and Twitter-owned streaming…

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I am pleased to announce a new Citizen Lab report: “Tender Confirmed, Rights At Risk: Verifying Netsweeper in Bahrain.”  The full report can be found here: https://citizenlab.org/2016/09/tender-confirmed-rights-risk-verifying-netsweeper-bahrain Internet censorship is a major and growing human rights issue today. Access to content is restricted for users on social media, like Facebook, on mobile applications, and on…

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I am pleased to announce a new Citizen Lab report: “The Million Dollar Dissident: NSO Group’s iPhone Zero-Days used against a UAE Human Rights Defender,” authored by senior researchers Bill Marczak and John Scott Railton. If you are one of hundreds of millions of people that own an iPhone, today you will receive a critical…

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Today at the Citizen Lab we released a new report on (yet more) privacy and security issues in UC Browser, accompanied by a new cartoon series, called Net Alert. Our new UC Browser report, entitled “A Tough Nut to Crack,” and authored by Jeffrey Knockel, Adam Senft and me, is our second close-up examination of…

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Today, the Citizen Lab is publishing a new report, authored by the Citizen Lab’s John Scott-Railton, Bahr Abdulrazzak, Adam Hulcoop, Matt Brooks, and Katie Kleemola of Lookout, entitled “Group 5: Syria and the Iran Connection.” The full report is here: https://citizenlab.org/2016/08/group5-syria/ Associated Press has an exclusive report here: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/6ab1ab75e89e480a9d12befd3fea4115/experts-iranian-link-attempted-hack-syrian-dissident And, I wrote an oped for…

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This post is cross posted from https://citizenlab.org/2016/07/research-interest/ On January 20, 2016, Netsweeper Inc., a Canadian Internet filtering technology service provider, filed a defamation suit with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. The University of Toronto and myself were named as the defendants. The lawsuit in question pertained to an October 2015 report of the Citizen Lab,…

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The world of “Big Data,” “The Internet of Things,” or simply… “Cyberspace.” Whatever we choose to call it, never in human history has something so profoundly consequential for so many people’s daily lives been unleashed in such a short period of time.  Certainly, the printing press, the telegraph, radio, the television, were all extraordinary.  But…

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Today, the Citizen Lab is publishing a new report, entitled “Be Calm and (Don’t) Enable Macros: Malware Sent to UK Journalist Exposes New Threat Actor Targeting UAE Dissidents.” The report is authored by Citizen Lab senior researchers Bill Marczak and John Scott Railton, and details an extensive and highly elaborate targeted digital attack campaign, which…

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