Citizen Lab Senior Research Fellow Bill Marczak and Senior Security Researcher Morgan Marquis-Boire were featured in an episode of Al Jazeera’s ‘Faultlines’ program, in an episode entitled “Crypto Wars: Behind the Encryption Debate.” They discussed attitudes concerning surveillance in the wake of the San Bernadino shooting as well as other terrorist activities, including the claim that security agencies should have blanket visibility to online content.
Morgan Marquis-Boire argued that the prevalence of these events despite the growing surveillance infrastructure worldwide, in what could be called the “golden age of surveillance,” suggested that there isn’t a “going dark problem” at all. He went on to discuss the possibility of hackers and security agencies in the FBI accessing personal data on mobile phones despite encryption methods being in place.
Bill Marczak discussed the recent Citizen Lab report entitled “Keep Calm and (Don’t) Enable Macros: A New Threat Actor Targets UAE Dissidents,” and his broader work in detecting software allowing individuals and security agencies to spy on users mobile phones.
Morgan and Bill’s portion of the episode begins at 15:05 in the video.