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.

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.

Donations to this scholarship will support a University of Toronto student who successfully completes the POL106H course, Contemporary Challenges to Democracy: Democracy in the Social Media Age, in the current academic year. Special consideration will be given to applications from Black or Indigenous students.

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

El Citizen Lab y Access Now han confirmado 35 casos de periodistas y miembros de la sociedad civil salvadoreña cuyos teléfonos fueron infectados con el programa espía Pegasus del NSO entre julio del 2020 y noviembre del 2021. Hemos compartido una muestra de nuestros datos forenses con el Laboratorio de Seguridad de Amnistía Internacional, el cual confirma de forma independiente los hallazgos.

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 report, we introduce the design of GFWatch, a large-scale longitudinal measurement platform that informs the public about how GFW censorship changes over time and its negative impact on the free flow of information.