Research
Social Media Watch returns with updates from the EU and US legal landscape, some notable cases of government access to personal data, and an overview of some important reports describing the need for updated regulation in the data economy.
Cyber Stewards Network (CSN) partner Collaboration on International ICT Policy in East and Southern Africa (CIPESA) released a report outlining the policies and practices surrounding Internet freedom in East Africa. Titled “The State of Internet Freedoms in East Africa,” the release of the report has drawn key individuals from the continent’s ICT industry to Kampala, Uganda for a forum.
This blog post investigates the recent blocking of video-sharing site Vimeo in Indonesia and examines the ongoing efforts to regulate online content in the country
In this post we explain how Canadians can issue requests to their telecommunications companies to learn what personal information those companies collect, retain, and disclose about them. We argue that Canadians should do this both to empower themselves and to enable Canadian policy experts and government officials to better hold the companies to account.
This report is the third in a series which analyzes regionally-based keyword censorship in LINE, a mobile messaging application developed by LINE Corporation. We document recent changes to the list of keywords used by LINE to trigger regionally-based keyword filtering for users with accounts registered to Chinese phone numbers.
The Anti-Pornography Act 2014, the Public Order Management Act 2013, the Anti-Homosexuality Act 2014, the 2014 Press and Journalist regulations and the Non Government Organisation (NGO) Amendment bill have been criticised for creating unwarranted restrictions to liberties granted by the country’s 1995 constitution.
In this post we analyze the partial disclosures concerning Canada’s federal agencies’ domestic telecommunications surveillance practices. We argue that key federal agencies remain unaccountable to Parliamentarians and the Canadian public alike, and that accountability measures are urgently needed for Canadians to understand the extent of their federal government’s surveillance activities.
In the past 24 hours The Citizen Lab has identified a maliciously repackaged copy of the popular circumvention software Psiphon 3. This post describes the malware and outlines steps to be taken.
As a follow-up to our post about the number of sites miscategorized by SmartFilter, our tests with Blue Coat show that miscategorization is not a problem limited to a single product. We should be skeptical of any company’s claims that they are able to categorize much of the web accurately, or that their rate of “collateral damage” is very low.
On January 20, 2014 the Citizen Lab along with leading Canadian academics and civil liberties groups asked Canadian telecommunications companies to reveal the extent to which they disclose information to state authorities. This post summarizes and analyzes the responses from the companies, and argues that the companies have done little to ultimately clarify their disclosure policies. We conclude by indicating the subsequent steps in this research project.