Citizen Lab is sending an open letter to Hacking Team, providing a copy of our latest report on the company and highlighting our reasons for concern from these latest findings.

Citizen Lab Research Fellow John Scott-Railton is one of the authors of a report entitled “Behind the Syrian Conflict’s Digital Frontlines,” released today by FireEye, that documents a hacking operation that successfully breached the Syrian opposition.

Christopher Parsons, post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and managing director of the Telecom Transparency Project, has published a draft paper analyzing the effectiveness of the ‘transparency reports’ that Canadian telecommunications companies released in 2014.

In an article published on Slate, entitled “Code Is Law,” Citizen Lab Research Fellow Jon Penney discussed how US laws, such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), are determining the ethics of computer code.

The Canadian SIGINT Summaries includes downloadable copies, along with summary, publication, and original source information, of leaked CSE documents.

Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert wrote an article entitled “The Geopolitics of Cyberspace after Snowden,” [pdf] published in the January 2015 edition of Current History, a journal of contemporary world affairs.

This report describes a malware attack on a Syrian citizen media group critical of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Though we are unable to conclusively attribute the attack to ISIS or its supporters, a link to ISIS is plausible. The malware used in the attack differs substantially from campaigns linked to the Syrian regime, and the attack is against a group that is an active target of ISIS forces. In the interest of highlighting a developing threat, this post analyzes the attack and provides a list of Indicators of Compromise.

In an article published on openDemocracy.net, Citizen Lab Senior Legal Advisor Sarah McKune writes about the digital threats that civil society organizations (CSOs) face in carrying out their work, which undermine their privacy and compromise sensitive information. “To address this problem we must expand the terms and scope of the debate, exploring the link between the right to privacy and access to digital security more fully,” said McKune.

Contained are links to a set of 9,054 sensitive Chinese keywords, which combine 13 existing lists. These keywords may be helpful to researchers who are searching for censored content in Chinese or testing for network interference.

In an op-ed on OpenCanada.org, Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert argues that law enforcement and intelligence agencies such as the US’s NSA, UK’s GCHQ and Canada’s CSE must be highly accountable, transparent to democratically elected representatives, and unleashed to act only in tightly circumscribed way, in order to protect the liberal democratic society in which we live.