December 29 – Hamburg, Germany

Senior Research Fellow Bill Marczak was featured in a Vanity Fair article exploring his discovery of the spyware used to target UAE dissident Ahmed Mansoor, detailed in a recent Citizen Lab report.

Director Ron Deibert spoke to CNN International on Citizen Lab’s recent report, titled “One App, Two Systems: How WeChat uses one censorship policy in China and another internationally.” Deibert commented on trends of censorship and surveillance in China, and Asian instant messaging applications more broadly.

多伦多大学公民实验室的最新报告揭露了微信平台的审查机制。微信是中国腾讯控股有限公司旗下的即时通讯应用，目前是中国最受欢迎的聊天软件之一，也是全球排名第四的最流行聊天软件

Cyber Stewards Network Partner 7iber met with Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert, as well as Senior Research Fellows John-Scott Railton and Bill Marczak to discuss the Lab’s work in exposing spy systems in various countries, and in particular, the Middle East.

Citizen Lab Cyber Stewards Network Partner Pirongrong Ramasoota was featured in a Bangkok Post article exploring the role of the Thai government’s censorship measures and the subsequent rise of hate speech online.

Citizen Lab Cyber Steward Network Partner Donny Budhi Utoyo, Executive Director of ICT Watch, spoke to the Jakarta Post in an interview about Indonesia’s Electronic Information and Transactions (ITE) law.

In this post, we critically examine the Government of Canada’s proposal to indiscriminately access subscriber identity information that is possessed by telecommunications service providers. We conclude by arguing that the government has failed to justify its case for such access to the information.

In this report, we confirm the use of the services of Canadian company Netsweeper, Inc. to censor access to the Internet in the Kingdom of Bahrain.