The Canadian International Council (CIC) interviewed Mr. Jon Penney, a lawyer and Google Policy Fellow at the Citizen Lab, about a report recently released by McAfee, which contains “circumstantial evidence” pointing to the Chinese government involvement in what it claimed to be the largest series of cyber-attacks to date.

On Wednesday, August 17, 2011, Dr. Rafal Rohozinski, Senior Scholar at the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and the Citizen Lab, will be speaking at the 2011 GlobalFest Human Rights Forum Breakfast in Calgary, Alberta. His talk is titled Ghost in the Machine – The Battle for the Future of Cyberspace.

On August 8, 2011, Canada Centre Visiting Research Fellow in International Broadcasting, Karl Kathuria, and a team from the Citizen Lab presented a paper titled Bypassing Internet Censorship for News Broadcasters at the first USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI ’11) in San Francisco, California. The paper is concerned with Internet censorship as a major problem faced by news organizations.

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 March 27-28 2011 the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies at the  Munk School of Global Affairs and the SecDev Group (Ottawa) convened a  public forum entitled Securing the Cyber Commons: a Global Dialogue .

This video presents highlights of the two day event. A full video of  the opening plenary and panel will be made available soon. For  information on the upcoming 2012 Dialogue and future sponsorship opportunities   please contact: [email protected]

Recent attacks on three U.S. defense contractors could be tied to cyberespionage campaigns waged from China, several security experts told CNET.

“The reality is, part of the basis of U.S. hegemony…has been the ability to leverage command of signals intelligence to have perspective on the motivations and activities of others. Cyberspace has equalized that, so all of a sudden we’re in a competitive intelligence environment,” said Rafal Rohozinski, a principal at SecDev who did research on targeted attacks on Tibet and others with supposed links to China. Those attacks were detailed in a “GhostNet” report in 2009.

“China has made no secret that they see cyberspace as the domain that allows them to compete with the U.S.,” Rohozinski said.

For full original 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.

On March 25 Professor Ron Deibert will deliver the keynote for Mesh 2011 Canada’s Web conference. He will discuss state control and surveillance of the internet, and how citizens are responding.

For full details see the Mesh 2011 website

The St. Gallen Symposium is the world’s leading platform for dialogue on key issues in management, the entrepreneurial environment and the interfaces between business, politics and civil society.

This video presents Rafal Rohozinski and Rex Hughes’ panel on cybercrime, as well as a video of an interview with Dr. Hughes entitled “Cybersecurity: A Business with Fear” at the 41st St. Gallen Symposium.

Today the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs announced Jonathon Penney as its 2011 Google Policy Fellow. Jon is currently a pursuing a doctorate in information and communication sciences at Oxford University.

Before Oxford, Jonathon spent time studying and researching at Columbia Law School, where he was a Fulbright Scholar, and at Victoria University , where he was a Senior Research Fellow and Lecturer in the law faculty. A graduate of Dalhousie University and native Nova Scotian, he has served as Associate Editor of the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal, and worked as a lawyer and as a policy adviser at the federal level.

Welcome Jon!

Full details can be found here.