News
In a new article for the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, Director Ron Deibert writes about the rise of Asia’s cyberspace.
Director Ron Deibert joined Al Jazeera’s The Stream via Skype to talk about a collective of pro-Assad hackers and online activists, who call themselves the Syrian Electronic Army.
Read the article and watch the video here.
In this article, CTV News reports on the role of Western companies in promoting censorship in the Middle East and North Africa. Specifically, it looks at Netsweeper Inc., a Canada-based developer of content filtering software, and its role in providing governments in Qatar, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates with tools to filter online content.
Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, told CTV News that the recent controversy surrounding the Canadian company demonstrates that the Canadian federal government needs to take a clear position on content filtering, and within this, develop a clear foreign policy for cyberspace. For example, Deibert suggests that the Canadian government introduce legislation which makes it “illegal for Canadian companies to filter content in countries that violate the freedoms outlined in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.” In essence, “take a major international treaty of the 20th century, and apply it in a decidedly 21st century context.”
Deibert said that Canada should take on a leadership role on cyber policy “in international forums to spotlight and develop a kind of normative agreement that is consistent with the values we hold as a country.”
For the full article see here.
On CBC Dispatches, Rick MacInnes-Rae interviews Ron Deibert, Director of the Citizen Lab in the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, about the way governments in the Middle East are using the internet to fight back against their opponents – and Canada’s role too.
Click here for interview.
“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.'”