Citizen Lab senior legal advisor Siena Anstis co-authored an article with Jillian Sprenger (McGill University) in the International Journal of Human Rights on the ways that members of civil society targeted by spyware attempt to seek remedy.  Anstis and Sprenger analyze gaps and challenges that remain in obtaining a remedy for targets, suggesting areas for… Read more »

In a new article published in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, the Citizen Lab’s Noura Aljizawi, Siena Anstis, and Gözde Böcü investigate the practice of transnational repression in its physical and digital forms. They examine its impacts on dissidents abroad, focusing especially on women and queer individuals, and argue that host states bear the… Read more »

New paper co-authored by researchers at the Citizen Lab and Princeton University explores the network security of Android apps.

In a piece for the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, Emile Dirks and Diana Fu argue that the U.S.’s pull back from its liberal-minded engagements in China “poses an imminent challenge to Canada: how to curb Beijing’s foreign interference without the support of a network of organizations backed by its powerful ally to the south.”… Read more »

The Citizen Lab’s Marcus Michaelsen and Siena Anstis published a research article in the peer-reviewed journal Democratization about the gendered forms of digital threats faced by women human rights defenders and journalists in exile and in the diaspora.  Click here to read the article.

A new book co-authored by Siena Anstis, senior legal advisor at The Citizen Lab, is now available for purchase. Transnational Repression and International Law explores the rise of state-sponsored extraterritorial killings and the implications for international law. Order your copy here.

Siena Anstis, senior legal advisor at the Citizen Lab, highlights the urgent need for an international treaty to tackle digital transnational repression in her article “Regulating Transnational Dissident Cyber Espionage,” published by the Cambridge University Press’ journal International and Comparative Law.  In the article, Anstis argues that the absence of an international law to prevent… Read more »

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.

The May 2019 WhatsApp Incident As reported in May 2019, WhatsApp identified and shortly thereafter fixed a vulnerability that allowed attackers to inject commercial spyware on to phones simply by ringing the number of a target’s device. Today Oct 29th, WhatsApp is publicly attributing the attack to NSO Group, an Israeli spyware developer that also… Read more »

The Citizen Lab and the Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) have collaborated to produce a report which provides timely legal analysis, political context, and historical background on the Communications Security Establishment Act and related provisions in Bill C-59 (An Act respecting national security matters), First Reading (December 18, 2017).