News
Contained are links to a set of 9,054 sensitive Chinese keywords, which combine 13 existing lists. These keywords may be helpful to researchers who are searching for censored content in Chinese or testing for network interference.
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.
Jon Penney, a law professor at Dalhousie University and Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab, was interviewed by VICE Motherboard regarding the dynamic between Canada’s security agencies and the courts. He explained the government’s tendency to fight back against the court’s insistence that CSIS and the Communications Security Estabilishment Canada (CSEC) must keep them up to date on their operations.
Citizen Lab Senior Researcher Helmi Noman was interviewed by the International Business Times regarding the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), and its attack of several international news sites. The SEA is a group of hackers in support of Syrian President Bashar-al-Assad’s regime, known to target opposition political group.
Citizen Lab Fellow Jason Q. Ng published a number of articles on this month on Internet censorship in China.
Citizen Lab Post-Doctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons spoke to a number of media outlets this month on privacy issues in Canada, ranging from topics such as the expansion of Toronto Police Service’s surveillance technologies, the collection of social media data by the government, and concerns with particular mobile applications.
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.
An article on The Conversation references Citizen Lab reports, which documents the use of US-based Blue Coat Systems’ products by authoritarian regimes in Syria, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Yemen, Egypt and Kuwait.
The Epoch Times cited the OpenNet Initiative, a project of the Citizen Lab, the SecDev Group, and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, as one of the best resources in learning about Internet filtering.
Independent Researcher Claudio Guarnieri has partnered with Privacy International, Digitale Gesellschaft, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Amnesty International to publicly release the Detekt tool, which allows journalists and human rights defenders to scan their computers for traces of known surveillance spyware.