On August 21, join Citizen Lab founder and director Ron Deibert as he explores the Lab’s groundbreaking work on digital security, surveillance, and human rights, drawing insights from his book Chasing Shadows.
In this paper, the Citizen Lab’s Mohamed Ahmed and Jeffrey Knockel examine Chinese censorship bias in LLMs with a censorship detector they designed as part of the research. They warn that when LLMs are trained on state-censored texts, their output is more likely to align with the state. An Analysis of Chinese Censorship Bias in… Read more »
In this paper co-authored by the Citizen Lab’s Jeffrey Knockel, researchers investigate the secret relationships between VPN operators and the vulnerabilities these VPNs share. The authors warn that the obfuscation of these relationships prohibits consumers from making informed decisions about their digital security and misleads them about the security properties of the VPNs. Hidden Links:… Read more »
Researchers take a look at the analytics and first-party tracking ecosystem of WeChat Mini Programs.
In a new article published in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, the Citizen Lab’s Noura Aljizawi, Siena Anstis, and Gözde Böcü investigate the practice of transnational repression in its physical and digital forms. They examine its impacts on dissidents abroad, focusing especially on women and queer individuals, and argue that host states bear the… Read more »
What’s stopping diaspora members from speaking up against the government in their home country? In an interview with the Stockholm Center for Freedom (SCF), Citizen Lab senior researcher Marcus Michaelsen discusses digital transnational repression (DTR) and its impacts on diasporas worldwide. Read the interview.
In a submission to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights, Citizen Lab researchers warn of the dangerous rhetoric of “birth registration and certification as a prerequisite for other rights” and the risks digital ID infrastructure could pose to human rights.
On August 6, join Citizen Lab director Ron Deibert for his keynote, “Chasing Shadows: Chronicles of Counter-Intelligence from the Citizen Lab,” at Black Hat 2025.
In a new piece for Policy Options, senior research associate Kate Robertson and legal extern Song-Ly Tran discuss how outdated protections in Canada’s decades old wiretap laws fail to protect people in Canada from abuse of spyware technologies.
This new piece co-authored by the Citizen Lab’s Gabrielle Lim discusses the risks of privatized space technology. She and her co-authors highlight that the issue is not private-sector involvement, but the concentration of power in the hands of a few private firms that are “incentivized to serve the surveillance state and further a new kind… Read more »
