This post recaps Citizen Lab’s major research reports for 2016, which span issues surrounding censorship, surveillance, privacy, and cybersecurity as they relate to fitness trackers, political dissidents, social media users, and more.
This report describes an espionage operation using government-exclusive spyware to target Mexican government food scientists and two public health advocates.
Toronto-based documentary filmmaker and cinematographer Nicholas de Pencier (Four Wings and a Prayer, Watermark) examines the complex global impact that the internet has had on matters of free speech, privacy and activism.
The Division of Engineering Science and The Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs has one position available for an Engineering Science student completing Year 2 or Year 3, for a summer fellowship.
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.
This report discusses the targeting of Egyptian NGOs by Nile Phish, a large-scale phishing campaign. Almost all of the targets we identified are also implicated in Case 173, a sprawling legal case brought by the Egyptian government against NGOs, which has been referred to as an “unprecedented crackdown” on Egypt’s civil society. Nile Phish operators demonstrate an intimate knowledge of Egyptian NGOs, and are able to roll out phishing attacks within hours of government actions, such as arrests.
February 9 – Stanford, CA
The second post in this series examines a Chinese mobile payment app feature increasingly covered in foreign media: testing of what may one day be a nationwide official social credit system to replace its traditional analog counterpart. Our exploration of potential security, privacy, and other issues of such a system is meant to raise questions that can inform discussions about how it will evolve.
This research series presents an in-depth examination of mobile payment systems, a rapidly evolving form of financial technology. We will provide an overview of how they are used in China–where they are taking off faster than anywhere else in the world–and what implications their security and data protection practices may have for millions of users, by presenting a case study on Alipay.
A CBC article exploring the Chinese government’s use of surveillance techniques, what has been called the “Great Firewall,” highlights Citizen Lab’s work in studying the state and private enterprises that support it. In an interview, Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert comments on the surveillance practices that the regime uses.
