Given Novalpina Capital’s recent acquisition of NSO Group and the obvious human rights concerns raised by NSO Group’s business practices, Citizen Lab’s Ronald Deibert seeks a response from the South Yorkshire Pensions Authority regarding how its investment in Novalpina is consistent with the Authority’s Policy and what measures were taken by the Authority to inform and educate pension fund contributors and members regarding NSO Group.

Endless Mayfly is an Iran-aligned network of inauthentic websites and online personas used to spread false and divisive information primarily targeting Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Israel. Using this network as an illustration, this report highlights the challenges of investigating and addressing disinformation from research and policy perspectives.

A recently discovered security vulnerability on WhatsApp, currently used by over 1.5 billion people worldwide, has been found to have been exploited by NSO Group developed spyware.

A recent New York Times article investigates how authoritarian states target citizens and dissidents with sophisticated spyware, developed within a secretive, multi-billion dollar industry.

The window of a murdered Mexican journalist was targeted with Pegasus, a spyware product which can secretly access the contents of a phone and turn on its camera and microphone.

He provided oral comments to the committee which were, substantially, a truncated version of the brief he submitted. His oral comments are available to download, and what follows in this post is the actual brief which was submitted.

The submission reviews Citizen Lab research on the use of private surveillance technology against human rights actors, describes some of the common practices of concern among private companies in the surveillance industry, and proposes a set of recommendations for the path forward.

Held July 31 – August 2 in Toronto, the Citizen Lab Summer Institute (CLSI) workshop is a meeting place for researchers and practitioners from academia, civil society, and the private sector who are working on Internet openness, security, and rights.

Over the last month, two Citizen Lab staff members were contacted by two separate individuals in what appears to be an attempt to compromise our work. Each of the contacts purported to show an interest in the staff members’ personal, non-Citizen Lab related interests, and presented themselves as serious and professional.

The Information Controls Fellowship Program (ICFP) from the Open Technology Fund (OTF) supports research into how governments in countries, regions, or areas of OTF’s core focus are restricting the free flow of information, cutting access to the open Internet, and implementing censorship mechanisms, thereby threatening the ability of global citizens to exercise basic human rights and democracy; work focused on mitigation of such threats is also supported.