I joined Al Jazeera’s The Stream via Skype to talk about a collective of pro-Assad hackers and online activists, who call themselves the Syrian Electronic Army. Our InfoWar Monitor Project has released several reports about the Syrian Electronic Army, which can be found here.
See the Al Jazeera interview here.
The Information Warfare Monitor (Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and The SecDev Group, Ottawa) announce the release of Koobface: Inside a Crimeware Network by Nart Villeneuve, with a foreword by Ron Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski. There is a Globe and Mail story about the report here including a web commentary by Rafal Rohozinski and me here
Thursday, June 10, 2010
New Cyber Chief Outlines Strategy
Keith Alexander explains how the U.S. will fight espionage and crime.
By David Talbot
Read the full article here.
Deibert says one major question now is how to preserve privacy amid such efforts. “The key questions, as always, will concern the substance of those negotiations: will we see a charter for global cyberspace that protects and preserves this domain as an open, global commons of information? Or will we see the further imposition of digital controls, nationalized communications spaces, and widespread surveillance?”
Recently, the Canadian envoy to Iran was called in and admonished by Iranian officials for contributing to the destabilitization of the regime because of support for social networking tools, like Twitter and Facebook. The envoy must have scratched his head in puzzlement.
The Iranians’ furor was ignited by the work of our company, Psiphon, which is based in Canada and has actively engaged in a campaign to help Iranians bypass their country’s filters and exercise basic human rights of access to information and freedom of speech. On average, one Iranian per minute has signed up to our “right-2know” nodes — customized websites pushed into Iran that contain access to BBC Persian and Radio Farda — and more than 15,000 have used our service since the crisis began.
However, we have received no support from the Canadian government — not even a note of thanks. As far as we know, the Canadian government does not even have a cyberspace strategy (of promoting access to information and freedom of speech) about which a country like Iran would be irritated. As Canadians, we wish it did.
Psiphon’s activities in Iran are not the first of their kind to generate intense media interest. Just a few months ago, a related project of ours, the Information Warfare Monitor, published a report called Tracking GhostNet that discovered a cyber-espionage system infecting government ministries and embassies in more than 103 countries. The case was splashed across the front pages of newspapers, and produced a powerful curiosity about cyber security around the world that continues unabated.
Continue reading
By Kim Hart
Washington Post Staff Writer
“In terms of the scope and international dimension of this attack, it’s a landmark,” said Ronald J. Deibert, director of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab…. “International laws are very poorly developed, so it really crosses a line into murky territory . . . Is an information blockade an act of war?”
Several projects that I am involved in are bubbling with activity right now. The Information Warfare Monitor Project has been going overtime monitoring the Russia-Georgia cyberwar. We are issuing notices and posting news items as we come across them, and intend on issuing a detailed report soon. Greg Walton, the editor of the IWMP, has been leading up the effort.
The OpenNet Initiative is also very actively involved in testing for Internet censorship in China with our researchers in field in several places. You can read about our findings at the ONI blog.
Lastly, the psiphon project is in the midst of vigorously developing version 2.0, which we hope to release in the next few months. As we are working on it, we are also actively involved in outreach with psiphon to ensure users in places like China and Georgia are able to access the Internet in an unfettered way.