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 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 »

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 »

Former Google Policy Fellow Adrian Fong has published a paper titled “The Role of App Intermediaries in Protecting Data Privacy,” based on research that he had conducted, in part, at the Citizen Lab in summer 2016. The paper was published in the International Journal of Law and Technology.

Citizen Lab Senior Research Fellow John Scott-Railton has published an updated version of his “Security for the High-Risk user” paper, first published in the IEEE Security & Privacy in spring 2016. The updates were made based on new evidence of attacks against two-factor and account recovery SMSes, underlining the need for innovation in two-factor authentication.

As the United Nations General Assembly begins its milestone 70th session, international digital security is high on the agenda. One starting point for discussion is likely to be the International Code of Conduct for Information Security (the “Code”). This analysis explores how the Code has developed over time, impetus behind the changes made, and the potential impact of the Code on international human rights law and its application. It is accompanied by an interactive comparison of the 2015 and 2011 versions of the Code.

In this article, Sarah McKune calls for the encryption and anonymity debate to address the aspects of human rights that are unique to digital space.

Citizen Lab Senior Legal Researcher Sarah McKune explores the link between the United Nations’ human rights mechanisms and cybersecurity. The post also features an interview with UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression David Kaye.

In an article published in the Institute for Research on Public Policy’s (IRPP) “Policy Options” blog, Research Fellow Jon Penney observed that the debate on Canada’s Bill C-51 Anti-Terror law has been “contentious and ranging, yet few commentators have drawn on experience or expert voices elsewhere to understand its implications.”

In our blog post, we describe the results of tests we conducted to measure HTTPS support on the advertisers found on a sample of news websites as well as two sample lists of advertisers. We find a large disparity between our results and the the level of security support referred to in a recent post on the Internet Advertising Bureau’s website.