On May 13, 2013, Bytes for All (B4A), a Pakistani civil society group and partner in the Cyber Stewards Network, filed a petition with the Lahore High Court on the possible use of the FinFisher product suite in Pakistan. B4A has advocated for the rights of Pakistani netizens to browse the Internet free of censorship and surveillance through numerous court and government actions, including a recent petition submitted in January 2013 in protest of the ongoing censorship of YouTube.

This edition of the Middle East and North Africa CyberWatch discusses censorship and filtering, surveillance, blogger and netizen arrests and more.

This post is written by Citizen Lab Visiting Fellow Luis Horacio Najera on the occasion of World Press Freedom Day, 3 May 2013.

This edition of the Latin America and the Caribbean CyberWatch covers related developments from Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, Cuba, and Jamaica.

This Social Media CyberWatch looks at various legislative updates to privacy law, as well as other social media tracking activities.

Citizen Lab is pleased to announce the release of “For Their Eyes Only: The Commercialization of Digital Spying.”  The report features new findings, as well as consolidating a year of our research on the commercial market for offensive computer network intrusion capabilities developed by Western companies.

Jason Q. Ng is a graduate student in East Asian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Blocked on Weibo, a book about censorship and sensitive topics in Chinese social media.

Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert spoke about how repressive governments around the world have been getting assistance from Western technology companies.

This blog post reports on a malware attack in which a compromised version of Kakao Talk, an Android-based mobile messaging client, was sent in a highly-targeted email to a prominent individual in the Tibetan community. The malware is designed to send a user’s contacts, SMS message history, and cellular network location to attackers. This post was updated on 18 April 2013.

This edition of Social Media CyberWatch looks at new developments in privacy research, legal debates, and online service provider policies and decisions.