Op-ed

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 an article contributed to the National Post, Citizen Lab Postdoctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons explains that the activities of the Communications Security Establishment constitute spying on Canadians. Parsons summarizes several findings regarding the mandate and practices of the organization leaked over the last year and a half, many of which strongly undermine CSE’s claim that Canadians are not “targeted” by domestic security agencies.

Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert authored an article entitled “Who Knows What Evils Lurk in the Shadows?” published on OpenCanada.org.

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.

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.

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.

Citizen Lab’s Irene Poetranto authored an op-ed in The Jakarta Post, urging for Indonesia’s new communications and information minister to end the country’s outdated Internet controls.

Four years after the ‘Arab Spring’, it is believed that empowerment of civil society in Latin America has been hampered by formal and informal structures of power, which – legally and illegally- are funneling digital manifestations of social grievances, thus avoiding significant challenges to the status quo.