A new report, entitled The Canadian Connection: An investigation of Syrian government and Hezbullah web hosting in Canada, continues Citizen Lab research into the intersection of the private sector, authoritarianism, and cyberspace regulation, turning our attention to a component of the Internet that does not typically receive the same amount of attention as filtering, surveillance, and computer network attack products and services: web hosting services.

Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert joined other panelists Christopher Soghoian, Allan Paller, and Sukanya Pillay to discuss cyber security issues and policies, including questions regarding Internet filtering, cyber warfare, and protection of civil liberties. You can watch the entire very interesting 60 minute discussion here.

In this article Professor Ron Deibert discusses the active contestation of cyberspace and the need to protect the cyber commons. He calls on liberal democratic governments to form “a common domestic and foreign policy strategy that creates structural conditions to protect and preserve cyberspace as a secure, decentralized, and open commons”.

This article originally appeared in The 2011 G8 Deauville Summit: New World, New Ideas published by the G20 Research Group.

The OpenNet Initiative-2010 Global Summit/L’Initiative OpenNet-Sommet
Mondial 2010

Should Cyberspace be Secured as an Open Commons?
Le Cyberspace—faut-il défendre l’universalité de ce bien commun?

The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) 2010 Global Summit will convene three high-level panels of experts and practitioners on prominent topics related to cyberspace governance, security, and advocacy.

Victoria Hall (Old City Hall) 111 Sussex Drive
Ottawa, Ontario
June 30, 2010
9:30 AM – 4:30 PM

Registration Required: here

The Information Warfare Monitor/ (Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and the SecDev Group, Ottawa) and the Shadowserver Foundation announce the release of Shadows in the Cloud: An investigation into cyber espionage 2.0.FULL REPORT. The report documents a complex ecosystem of cyber espionage that systematically targeted and compromised computer systems in… Read more »

When Youtube went down for a few hours, many people speculated that it may be China seeking to punish Google for their recent actions. Ron Deibert suggests this is not likely the case, and that the Youtube outage is likely independent of any Chinese actions. He describes the consistent nature of the Great Firewall, in this story from CNN.

From CNN

In this article published in International Political Sociology Deibert and Rohozinski analyze cyberspace security concepts, which they argue can be divided into two related dimensions, articulated as “risks”: risks to the physical realm of computer and communication technologies (risks to cyberspace); and risks that arise from cyberspace and are facilitated or generated by its technologies, but do not directly target the infrastructures per se (risks through cyberspace). They argue that the contrasts between how governments view the domains has led to contradictory tendencies and paradoxical outcomes.

Microsoft recently added a new layer of complexity to the ongoing debate regarding the filtering and censorship practices of U.S. search engines via its own search engine, Bing. ONI testing reveals liberal filtering by Bing in one of the most censored regions in the world: the Arab countries.

Microsoft’s Bing, which tailors its search engine to serve different countries and regions and offers its services in 41 languages, has a filtering system at the keyword level for users in several countries. 1 Users in the Arab countries2—or, as termed by Microsoft—“Arabian countries”—are prevented from conducting certain search queries in both English and Arabic.

ONI testing reveals that Microsoft filters Arabic and English keywords that could yield sex- or LGBT-related images and content.

From OpenNet Initiative