Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert has been named as part of the “Humans of the Year” series of VICE Motherboard, which profiles his work in defending cyber security through studies of hacking groups and censorship worldwide.
In particular, VICE cites the work of Citizen Lab researchers in identifying a spyware threat against United Arab Emirates human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor, which was documented as part of the report titled “Million-Dollar Dissident: NSO Group’s iPhone Zero-Days used against a UAE Human Rights Defender.” The article goes on to describe Citizen Lab’s recent work, including reports documenting spyware campaigns carried out by government agencies and security firms in Morocco, Bahrain, Ethiopia, and a mass censorship system in China dubbed “The Great Cannon.”
Deibert explained that he started the Citizen Lab in 2001 to document the ways in which technology was changing the flow of information and civil liberties online, and aimed to discover methods to research this effectively.