In an exclusive with New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow, Citizen Lab researchers reveal the presence of Pegasus spyware on the phones of 65 activists, politicians, and civil society groups in Catalonia.

In an interview with Click Here, Citizen Lab research assistant Noura Al-Jizawi comments on her experience being targeted by surveillance technologies. She sheds light on how such technologies enhance oppressive regimes’ ability to order up “sophisticated subversion campaigns.”

We investigate how activists and dissidents living in Canada are impacted by digital transnational repression: the various ways that individuals continue to be harassed and targeted online by authoritarian governments, even after they leave their country of origin.

A report by the Citizen Lab sheds light on how digital technologies have strengthened the ability of authoritarian regimes to suppress the work of dissident advocates abroad. Relying on a series of interviews with targets in Canada, the report investigates the political, legal, and psychosocial elements of digital transnational repression.

Citizen Lab researcher Bill Marczak discovered women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul’s phone had been hacked, unfolding several legal actions against the Israeli NSO Group.

These comments are meant to identify areas of data governance that need improvement with regards to the Government of Canada’s use of mobility data, and personal and anonymized information more generally, as well as the management of such information by private organisations.

The Information Controls Fellowship Program from the Open Technology Fund (OTF) supports research into how governments in countries, regions, or areas of OTF’s core focus are restricting the free flow of information, cutting access to the open Internet, and implementing censorship mechanisms, thereby threatening the ability of global citizens to exercise basic human rights and democracy; work focused on mitigation of such threats is also supported.

Citizen Lab researchers find several encryption vulnerabilities on China’s mandatory app for Olympic athletes, MY2022.

Citizen Lab researchers were able to identify over a thousand web addresses used to deliver Pegasus spyware to the phones of targets in 45 countries. Pegasus, developed by Israel’s NSO Group, claims it is used against terrorists and criminals, but an analysis by Bill Marczak found evidence of Pegasus spyware on a phone belonging Jamal Khashoggi’s inner circle.

In this submission, we urge the TPSB to centre precaution, substantive equality, human rights, privacy protections, transparency, and accountability in its policy on the use of AI technology by the Toronto Police Services (TPS).