Sarah McKune is a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab and a U.S. lawyer specializing in international human rights law and the human rights impacts of digital surveillance technologies. Sarah has consulted for the Special Rapporteur for freedom of expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, as well as the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression. She has worked with a number of civil society groups over the course of her career, including as a consultant with Amnesty International regarding surveillance-related strategic litigation and private investment in the spyware trade; as a senior legal advisor to the Citizen Lab at Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto; and as law officer and special assistant to the executive director of Human Rights in China. In her early career she worked as a litigator at Morrison & Foerster L.L.P.
Publications
HIDE AND SEEK
Tracking NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware to Operations in 45 Countries
In this post, we develop new Internet scanning techniques to identify 45 countries in which operators of NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware may be conducting operations.
Planet Netsweeper
Executive Summary
This report describes our investigation into the global proliferation of Internet filtering systems manufactured by the Canadian company, Netsweeper Inc. After undertaking a mapping of worldwide country installations, we focus in on ten country cases in which we verify that Netsweeper systems are being used to censor the Internet for subscribers of consumer Internet Service Providers, and where human rights and corporate social responsibility questions are acute.
Planet Netsweeper
Section 1 – Methodology & Technical Findings
This section details the research questions that informed our study. We also outline in detail the methods that we adopted to identify Netsweeper installations worldwide, and those that we employed to reduce the findings to countries of interest. We also present high-level technical findings and observations.
