Citizen Lab researchers reviewed the consultation materials, including the “Technical Paper” and the “Discussion Guide” associated with the government’s proposal to address what it has referred to as “online harms.” We provide the following comments in response to that consultation process.
This submission outlines Canadian technology companies and the threat they pose to human rights abroad, as well as suggests mechanisms the Government of Canada’s RBC strategy can adopt to address the harmful impacts of Canadian-made technology.
The UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women, Ms. Dubravka Šimonović, recently released her draft report to the Human Rights Council on online violence against women and girls from a human rights perspective. The Special Rapporteur’s report includes many key insights from the Citizen Lab’s formal response on this issue last fall and echoes many of our sixteen key recommendations.
Critical analysis and insight that navigates the complex implications of ongoing encryption debates.
This report describes our investigation into the global proliferation of Internet filtering systems manufactured by the Canadian company, Netsweeper Inc.
This section details the research questions that informed our study. We also outline in detail the methods that we adopted to identify Netsweeper installations worldwide, and those that we employed to reduce the findings to countries of interest. We also present high-level technical findings and observations.
In this section, we spotlight several countries where we have evidence of public ISPs blocking websites using Netsweeper’s products. Each country has significant human rights, public policy, insecurity, or corruption challenges, and/or a history of using Internet censorship to prevent access to content that is protected under international human rights frameworks.
This section examines the legal, regulatory, corporate social responsibility, and other public policy issues raised by our report’s findings. We focus on the responsibilities of Netsweeper, Inc. and the obligations of the Canadian government under international human rights law.
In this post, we evaluate the Government’s explanation of some of the more problematic elements of Bill C-59 in its briefing notes. We ultimately conclude that while the government’s briefing material provides insight into some of the ways that the CSE might act following the passage of the CSE Act, the material itself does not resolve our concerns with the CSE Act.
The Citizen Lab and the Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) have collaborated to produce a report which provides timely legal analysis, political context, and historical background on the Communications Security Establishment Act and related provisions in Bill C-59 (An Act respecting national security matters), First Reading (December 18, 2017).
