January 20, 2015 – London, UK

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.

Christopher Parsons spoke to the CBC regarding the Canadian government’s growing interest in the real-time contents of social media and to the Washington Post on privacy concerns with Uber’s rider database.

Citizen Lab Senior Security Researcher Morgan Marquis-Boire discussed his research into online threat to activists and media and his work as the director of security at First Look Media.

In an op-ed on OpenCanada.org, Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert argues that law enforcement and intelligence agencies such as the US’s NSA, UK’s GCHQ and Canada’s CSE must be highly accountable, transparent to democratically elected representatives, and unleashed to act only in tightly circumscribed way, in order to protect the liberal democratic society in which we live.

Summary of our report, entitled “Communities @ Risk: Targeted Digital Threats Against Civil Society,” in the Tibetan language.

Citizen Lab’s Irene Poetranto authored an op-ed in The Jakarta Post, urging for Indonesia’s new communications and information minister to end the country’s outdated Internet controls.

A new report, entitled “Communities @ Risk: Targeted Digital Threats Against Civil Society,” involved 10 civil society groups that enrolled as study subjects over a period of four years. The study sought to obtain greater visibility into an often overlooked digital risk environment affecting–whether they know it or not–many of society’s most essential institutions.