Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert interviewed by the CBC News regarding documents the news agency obtained on the Communications Security Establishment project dubbed “Levitation.”

An article by The Verge on the persecution of Bahraini activists Moosa Abd-Ali Ali, Jaffar Al Hasabi, and Saeed Al-Shehabi features the Citizen Lab’s extensive analysis into FinFisher, a line of remote intrusion and surveillance software developed by Munich-based Gamma International GmbH, conducted by Senior Security Researcher Morgan Marquis-Boire and Research Fellow Bill Marzcak.

Christopher Parsons, post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and managing director of the Telecom Transparency Project, has published a draft paper analyzing the effectiveness of the ‘transparency reports’ that Canadian telecommunications companies released in 2014.

January 20, 2015 – London, UK

Christopher Parsons, post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and managing director of the Telecom Transparency Project, spoke to Canada.com regarding how discussions around privacy shifted in 2014 and what to expect in 2015.

This report describes a malware attack on a Syrian citizen media group critical of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Though we are unable to conclusively attribute the attack to ISIS or its supporters, a link to ISIS is plausible. The malware used in the attack differs substantially from campaigns linked to the Syrian regime, and the attack is against a group that is an active target of ISIS forces. In the interest of highlighting a developing threat, this post analyzes the attack and provides a list of Indicators of Compromise.

Contained are links to a set of 9,054 sensitive Chinese keywords, which combine 13 existing lists. These keywords may be helpful to researchers who are searching for censored content in Chinese or testing for network interference.

Jon Penney, a law professor at Dalhousie University and Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab, was interviewed by VICE Motherboard regarding the dynamic between Canada’s security agencies and the courts. He explained the government’s tendency to fight back against the court’s insistence that CSIS and the Communications Security Estabilishment Canada (CSEC) must keep them up to date on their operations.

Citizen Lab Post-Doctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons spoke to a number of media outlets this month on privacy issues in Canada, ranging from topics such as the expansion of Toronto Police Service’s surveillance technologies, the collection of social media data by the government, and concerns with particular mobile applications.