The Citizen Lab is pleased to announce the release of a new report by Director Ron Deibert, “Shutting the Backdoor: The Perils of National Security and Digital Surveillance Programs,” written for the Strategic Studies Working Group (SSWG), a partnership between the Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute (CDFAI) and the Canadian International Council (CIC).
The following remarks were delivered by Professor Ron Deibert, Director of the Citizen Lab, to the Internet Governance Forum’s High Level Leader’s Meeting, October 21, 2013, Bali Indonesia.
On October 22-25, 2013, Indonesia will host the eighth annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF), a multi-stakeholder dialogue on the issues and policies of Internet governance. The main theme of this year’s IGF is “Building Bridges: Enhancing Multi-stakeholder Cooperation for Growth and Sustainable Development.”
This post is the first in a series that will explore online freedom of expression and the state of information controls in Indonesia in the context of their role as host of the IGF.
The Citizen Lab is pleased to announce the release of a new publication by Director Ron Deibert, “Bounding Cyber Power: Escalation and Restraint in Global Cyberspace, ” written for the CIGI Internet Governance Paper series.
The Targeted Threat Index is a metric for assigning an overall threat ranking score to email messages that deliver malware to a victim’s computer. The TTI metric was first introduced at SecTor 2013 as part of the talk “RATastrophe: Monitoring a Malware Menagerie” by Katie Kleemola, Seth Hardy, and Greg Wiseman.
Cyber Steward partner Bytes for All (B4A) has launched “Access Is My Right” — an advocacy campaign to engage Pakistani citizens on Internet censorship, privacy, and freedom of expression in the country. The campaign calls on citizens to raise awareness of information controls by sharing campaign visuals across the Internet, especially on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
In June 2013, news broke out in media outlets around the world of a secret program operated by the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) regarding the collection of information directly from several major U.S. Internet companies. The program, referred to as “PRISM”, involves data collection on a large scale from phones, streams of Internet traffic, and content stored by Internet companies. Despite denials by major Internet companies of their complicity with the NSA regarding this program, leaked reports have also indicated the agency paid millions of dollars to major technology companies to cover the costs of the program.
Recent research from The Citizen Lab has detected the presence of devices capable of surveillance on networks operated by Nigerian Internet service providers. In January 2013, Citizen Lab researchers found installations of Blue Coat Systems’ PacketShaper device on netblocks associated with IPNX ISP and Cobranet. In April 2013, Citizen Lab released “For Their Eyes Only: The Commercialization of Digital Spying,” in which researchers identified FinFisher servers on a network operated by Suburban Telecom.
Marczak is a Computer Science PhD student at UC Berkeley working on developing new languages, abstractions, and tools for distributed programming. He is also a founding member of Bahrain Watch, a monitoring and advocacy group that seeks to promote effective, accountable, and transparent governance in Bahrain through research and evidence-based activism.
Scott-Railton was part of the “Emerging Bad Actors in the Virtual and Physical Worlds” panel alongside Jeffrey Carr, Moderator with Dr. David Kilcullen, Jonathan Hutson, Thomas Dzieran, Aaron Weisburd, and Peter Mattis.