Citizen Lab Postdoctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons reviewed documents on BlackBerry for the CBC, and was interviewed by VICE on Canada’s RCMP’s use of IMSI catchers.

Recent reports have indicated that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) has had a key to unlock encrypted messages sent between BlackBerry users since 2010. Citizen Lab Postdoctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons commented on the significance of the revelations in an interview with VICE Motherboard.

Pakistan and BlackBerry have agreed to delay the shutdown of BlackBerry’s Enterprise Server (BES) by one month. This comes months after Pakistan initially ordered the shutdown of the company’s encrypted messaging services for businesses. Postdoctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons weighed in on the policy reasons for the disagreement.

Professor Deibert spoke about the Canadian company Blackberry and the lack of transparency in Blackberry’s agreements with governments abroad.

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.

“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.'”

From San Francisco Chronicle

“The type of steps taken by the UAE are going to become more common in the future as governments struggle to gain control of cyberspace for national security reasons,” said Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

“Just like Google has had to grapple with the pressures of China and other countries who censor search engines, RIM will find itself the centre of pressures from governments eager to tap encrypted mobile data streams.”

From The Globe and Mail