The Citizen Lab is one of the winners of the 2015 Pioneer Award, awarded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

We were shocked and deeply saddened to hear the news of the passing of MIT’s Roger Hurwitz, a close friend and colleague of the Citizen Lab and a senior scholar of the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto.

In an article published in the Institute for Research on Public Policy’s (IRPP) “Policy Options” blog, Research Fellow Jon Penney observed that the debate on Canada’s Bill C-51 Anti-Terror law has been “contentious and ranging, yet few commentators have drawn on experience or expert voices elsewhere to understand its implications.”

The Citizen Lab will be hosting two sessions, “Asia Chats” and “Filtering Free Expression,” at the RightsCon 2015 conference in Manila, Philippines.

Doctoral Student Fellow Jennie Phillips wrote an article on Relief To Recovery regarding what digital humanitarianism is and how to get involved.

Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert interviewed by the CBC News regarding documents the news agency obtained on the Communications Security Establishment project dubbed “Levitation.”

In an article published on Slate, entitled “Code Is Law,” Citizen Lab Research Fellow Jon Penney discussed how US laws, such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), are determining the ethics of computer code.

Christopher Parsons, post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and managing director of the Telecom Transparency Project, spoke to Canada.com regarding how discussions around privacy shifted in 2014 and what to expect in 2015.

Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert wrote an article entitled “The Geopolitics of Cyberspace after Snowden,” [pdf] published in the January 2015 edition of Current History, a journal of contemporary world affairs.

In an article published on openDemocracy.net, Citizen Lab Senior Legal Advisor Sarah McKune writes about the digital threats that civil society organizations (CSOs) face in carrying out their work, which undermine their privacy and compromise sensitive information. “To address this problem we must expand the terms and scope of the debate, exploring the link between the right to privacy and access to digital security more fully,” said McKune.