The Citizen Lab is thrilled to welcome Vuyo Kwakweni, recipient of the 2022 Reset Scholarship in Social Media and Democracy.

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.

We confirm that in 2020 and 2021 we observed and notified the government of the United Kingdom of multiple suspected instances of Pegasus spyware infections within official UK networks, including the Prime Minister’s Office and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

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.

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.