The Citizen Lab has sent an open letter to the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of both Canada and Chile, as co-chairs of the Equal Rights Coalition (ERC), and Mr. Randy Boissonnault, Special Advisor to the Prime Minister on LGBTQ2 Issues, flagging important issues for discussion at the upcoming ERC Global Conference on LGBTI Human Rights and Inclusive Development (August 5-7, 2018, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada).

Today, Director Ron Deibert on behalf of the Citizen Lab sent a letter to the National Energy Board (NEB) raising critical questions and concerns in response to the NEB issuing a Request for Information (RFI) about “security threat monitoring services”.

Critical analysis and insight that navigates the complex implications of ongoing encryption debates.

This report describes our investigation into the global proliferation of Internet filtering systems manufactured by the Canadian company, Netsweeper Inc.

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.

In this section, we spotlight several countries where we have evidence of public ISPs blocking websites using Netsweeper’s products. Each country has significant human rights, public policy, insecurity, or corruption challenges, and/or a history of using Internet censorship to prevent access to content that is protected under international human rights frameworks.

This section examines the legal, regulatory, corporate social responsibility, and other public policy issues raised by our report’s findings. We focus on the responsibilities of Netsweeper, Inc. and the obligations of the Canadian government under international human rights law.

Canadians can learn new things about your personal data by requesting access to it from companies. What can be found out varies by company and there can be some hurdles to overcome before you get access.

The Citizen Lab and the Canadian Internet Policy & Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) have collaborated to produce a report which provides timely legal analysis, political context, and historical background on the Communications Security Establishment Act and related provisions in Bill C-59 (An Act respecting national security matters), First Reading (December 18, 2017).

As part of Citizen Lab’s SIGINT working group (which focuses on Canada’s signals intelligence activities), Bill Robinson offers an analysis of proposed legislative changes in Bill C-59.