The Canadian International Council (CIC) interviewed Mr. Jon Penney, a lawyer and Google Policy Fellow at the Citizen Lab, about a report recently released by McAfee, which contains “circumstantial evidence” pointing to the Chinese government involvement in what it claimed to be the largest series of cyber-attacks to date.

Dr. Rafal Rohozinski, Senior Scholar at the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and the Citizen Lab, testified before United States Congress on Friday July 15th, 2011 on Internet Freedom in the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

In this article Professor Ron Deibert discusses the active contestation of cyberspace and the need to protect the cyber commons. He calls on liberal democratic governments to form “a common domestic and foreign policy strategy that creates structural conditions to protect and preserve cyberspace as a secure, decentralized, and open commons”.

This article originally appeared in The 2011 G8 Deauville Summit: New World, New Ideas published by the G20 Research Group.

World Press Freedom Day, Canadian Committee for World Press Freedom
13th CCWPF Press Freedom Award

Acceptance speech on behalf of the Citizen Lab
Rafal Rohozinski, senior scholar
National Arts Center, Ottawa, Canada.
3 May 2011

Excellency, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen,

It is truly an honour and a humbling moment to accept this award on behalf of the Citizen Lab.

Just under 10 years ago, Ronald Deibert founded the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Following in the footsteps of other great Canadian media theorists — Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan — Ron recognized that the impact of technology lay in the social domain. With the help and support of Janice Stein, he created a unique space — a hothouse of sorts — where engineers, mathematicians, social scientists, and economists could treat cyberspace as a giant petri dish and examine its various transformative social and technical trajectories.

The Globe and Mail covered the latest Citizen Lab report, Shadows in the Cloud.

“Research In Motion Ltd., maker of the BlackBerry smart phone, faces increasing challenges to its overseas expansion as developing countries tighten restrictions on mobile e-mail.

‘It’s a reflection of fears of cyber-security and espionage that now extend to mobile phones,’ said Ron Deibert, director of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, who helped colleagues uncover a plot against the Indian government that involved computers in China. ‘It’s the type of thing that will become more common for RIM as they grapple with public policy and ethical issues in emerging markets.'”

From San Francisco Chronicle

“The type of steps taken by the UAE are going to become more common in the future as governments struggle to gain control of cyberspace for national security reasons,” said Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

“Just like Google has had to grapple with the pressures of China and other countries who censor search engines, RIM will find itself the centre of pressures from governments eager to tap encrypted mobile data streams.”

From The Globe and Mail

Nart Villeneuve and Ron Deibert are interviewed in a video regarding “the tensions now involved in doing business with China.”

Google’s fight with Chinese censors risks escalating into a fullblown US-China showdown over cyber warfare, as claims emerge about the unprecedented scale of Chinese attacks on US commercial and defence systems. The Chinese-originated attack on Gmail accounts of human rights activists, which Google said had partly prompted its threat to leave China, was “probably insignificant”… Read more »