A joint investigation by Agentura.Ru, CitizenLab and Privacy International was published in Wired Magazine on 21 December, 2012.
In April 2010, China Telecom’s network announced incorrect paths to 50,000 IP prefixes, referred to as a “hijack”. The politically sensitive nature of some of the IP prefixes that were hijacked brought this incident to the attention of the US government. It raises many important questions about how we characterize and reason about large-scale routing incidents when they occur.
This year-end report summarizes several trends and noteworthy happenings of the past 12 months, including an increase in government user data requests, a community governance decision-making debacle, and controversies around various privacy-oriented technical implementations.
Our assessment of events that took place in 2012 has found that freedom of expression continues to be under threat in these parts of the world, although some progress has been made in certain countries. This review discusses trends in cyber attacks, changing legal norms, social media use, technological development, censorship and filtering, and arrests of rights activists.
Seth Hardy was interviewed in a piece about the use of smartphones in cybercrime.
Citizen Lab Senior Advisor Robert Guerra and Post-Doctoral Fellow Brenden Kuerbis represented the Citizen Lab at the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF) that was held in Baku, Azerbaijan from 6-9 November, 2012.
Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert has published a new article titled “The Growing Dark Side of Cyberspace ( . . . and What To Do About It)” in the Penn State Journal of Law & International Affairs, Volume 1, Issue 2, November 2012.
John Scott-Railton is conducting research in collaboration with the Citizen Lab on electronic attacks against opposition groups and the media in Libya and Syria.