Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert was interviewed in The Tyee ahead of his lecture at the University of British Columbia’s Cecil Green Park House. The lecture was part of the “Utopia/Dystopia: Creating the Worlds We Want” lecture series organized by the Creative Writing Program and Green College.
Speaking about the NSA revelations, Deibert said, “If I had been asked if the [U.S. National Security Agency] siphoned off everything, including metadata, I would have thought so. What was most shocking was the audacity of it. The extent to which they have subverted the engineering community, especially over security standards, gave me pause, and certain types of exploits such as the Der Spiegel revelations that the NSA toolkit includes being able to penetrate computers by radio waves at a distance. That was really surprising.”