This letter is in response to a statement issued by Hacking Team that has recently come to our attention, concerning Citizen Lab’s report titled “Police Story: Hacking Team’s Government Surveillance Malware” (June 24, 2014).

In this report, we update the results of our June 2014 network measurement tests in Iraq in reaction to the ongoing insurgency in the country, and analyze two mobile applications, FireChat and Dawn of Glad Tidings.

The May 2014 coup d’etat in Thailand was the 19th coup attempt in the country’s history. It stands out from previous coups due to the military junta’s focus on information controls. In this report we document the results of network measurements to determine how the Internet is currently being filtered in Thailand and discuss other forms of information control implemented in the coup’s aftermath.

This edition of Social Media Watch deals with top court rulings on digital privacy, social media monitoring, and mobile security news.

Our latest report analyzes our discovery of an Android application called Qatif Today that is bundled with a Hacking Team payload. The app provides news and information in Arabic with a special relevance to the Qatif Governorate of Saudi Arabia, which is a predominantly-Shia community.

We analyze a newly discovered Android implant that we attribute to Hacking Team and highlight the political subtext of the bait content and attack context. In addition, we expose the functionality and architecture of Hacking Team’s Remote Control system and operator tradecraft in never-before published detail.

In this report, we document the results of network measurement tests we ran to determine how the Internet is being filtered in Iraq in reaction to ongoing insurgency in the country. The results identify 20 unique URLs that are blocked on three Iraq-based Internet Service Providers. Notably, none of the 7 websites we tested that are affiliated with, or supportive, of the jihadist insurgent group the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) were found to be blocked.

This special issue of Business & Society invites scholars to explore what some have referred to as the Internet‐industrial complex, the intersections between business, states and other actors in the shaping, development and governance of the Internet.

This post first identifies the individual and collective benefits of using the Access My Info tool to request access to one’s personal data held by Canadian data operators. It then discusses technical design decisions that went into the tool’s development and implementation.

By getting into the malware business the federal and potentially provincial governments of Canada would be confronted with an ongoing reality: is the role of government to maximally protect its citizens, including from criminals leveraging vulnerabilities to spy on Canadians, or is it to partially protect citizens so long as such protections do not weaken the state’s ability to secure itself from persons suspected of violating any Act of Parliament?