Brief

In recent days, United Nations Special Rapporteurs have released two revelatory reports that demonstrate the dangerous effects of unchecked technology in the hands of autocrats: one relating to the proliferation and abuse of surveillance software and one that investigates the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Both reports highlight the danger of unaccountable and unregulated surveillance technology sold to countries with egregious human rights records.

In this post, we evaluate the Government’s explanation of some of the more problematic elements of Bill C-59 in its briefing notes. We ultimately conclude that while the government’s briefing material provides insight into some of the ways that the CSE might act following the passage of the CSE Act, the material itself does not resolve our concerns with the CSE Act.

We are releasing a more comprehensive “checklist” consolidating our thoughts on how best to confront the lack of accountability in the commercial spyware trade.

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.

This post describes TrackerSSL, a browser extension that reveals the leaky ad trackers on webpages that leave your browsing habits open to surveillance.

We investigate what keywords might trigger censorship via automatic review in Sina Weibo and followed the pathways a typical censored post might take on Chinese social media.

This post provides a summary of early findings associated with Canadians creating right to information requests using the Access My Info tool. It discusses several themes emergent from an analysis of company responses to such requests.