Publications

COVID-KAYA, a platform used by frontline healthcare workers in the Philippines to collect and share COVID-19 cases with the Philippines Department of Health, contained vulnerabilities in both the web and Android apps that allows for unauthorized users to access private data about the app’s users, and potentially patient data.

This annotated bibliography compiles and summarizes relevant literature on “digital transnational repression” (i.e., where states seek to exert pressure—using digital tools—on citizens living abroad in order to constrain, limit, or eliminate political or social action that threatens regime stability or social and cultural norms within the country). While transnational repression itself is not a new phenomenon, there has been limited research on how such repression is enabled and expanded by digital tools.

This submission outlines Canadian technology companies and the threat they pose to human rights abroad, as well as suggests mechanisms the Government of Canada’s RBC strategy can adopt to address the harmful impacts of Canadian-made technology. 

This document provides a high-level introduction to deep packet inspection, Internet filtering, and targeted intrusion dual-use technologies with the aim of familizaring the reader with their key technical features, the surrounding international human rights law framework, and some of the leading research to date on their deployment.

In this report, we describe how Canadian permanent resident and Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz was targeted with a fake package delivery notification. We assess with high confidence that Abdulaziz’s phone was infected with NSO’s Pegasus spyware. We attribute this infection to a Pegasus operator linked to Saudi Arabia.