Citizen Lab senior research fellow Bill Marczak and Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz joined CNN to discuss how NSO’s Pegasus spyware found on Omar’s phone is linked to Jamal Khashoggi.

Following a Citizen Lab report that identified the presence of NSO’s Pegasus spyware technology in Quebec, researchers contacted Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi Arabian dissident and Canadian permanent resident who has long been critical of the regime in Riyadh. After an extensive investigation, they discovered that his phone had been targeted with this powerful spyware and the operators of the technology were linked to Saudi Arabia’s government and security services.

في هذا التقرير ، نَصِف كيف تم استهداف المقيم الدائم في كندا، والمنشق السعودي؛ “عمر عبد العزيز”، عبر إشعار مزيف عن “تتبع شحنة بريد”. نحن وجدنا -وبثقة عالية- أن هاتف عبد العزيز قد تم استهدافه ببرنامج التجسس “بيغاسوس” من شركة NSO. نعزو هذه الإصابة إلى مشغل “بيغاسوس” مرتبط بالمملكة العربية السعودية.

The report finds that use of automated decision-making technologies to augment or replace human judgment threatens to violate domestic and international human rights law, with alarming implications for the fundamental human rights of those subjected to these technologies.

عَمِلنا في هذا البحث على تطوير تقنيات جديدة لمسح الإنترنت لتحديد 45 بلداً قد يقوم فيها مشغلو برامج التجسس بيغاسوس من شركة NSO بإجراء عمليات تجسس.

However, the NEB’s failure to address any of the questions in the Citizen Lab’s letter is unfortunate, as making such information available would be in the public interest even if the NEB has decided not to move forward with its initial request for information.

The Citizen Lab’s Ron Deibert and Sarah McKune don’t mince words in a recent op-ed for Just Security about Google’s plan to create a search engine that conforms to China’s demand for censorship.

This call comes on the heels of recent Citizen Lab research which shows that Netsweeper, a Canadian company who has received funding from the Canadian government, is being used by governments to block access to content in ten authoritarian countries around the world, including LGBTQ2+ sites.

A new paper by the Citizen Lab investigates how Chinese censorship reaches independent developers and reveals that, while developers include censorship lists in open source projects, there is little apparent similarity in these blacklists, raising several questions about their origins.