This call comes on the heels of recent Citizen Lab research which shows that Netsweeper, a Canadian company who has received funding from the Canadian government, is being used by governments to block access to content in ten authoritarian countries around the world, including LGBTQ2+ sites.

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).

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.

In this report, we confirm the use of the services of Canadian company Netsweeper, Inc. to censor access to the Internet in the Kingdom of Bahrain.

The following is a statement from Citizen Lab Director, Ron Deibert, concerning a defamation suit recently filed, and then discontinued by Netsweeper against the University of Toronto and Ron Deibert.

A Canadian Internet filtering company, Netsweeper, is blocking Internet content during armed conflict in Yemen following the dictates of the rebel group, the Houthis, according to a new report from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.

This report provides a detailed, mixed methods analysis of Information controls related to the Yemen armed conflict, with research commencing at the end of 2014 and continuing through October 20, 2015. The research confirms that Internet filtering products sold by the Canadian company Netsweeper have been installed on and are presently in operation in the state-owned and operated ISP YemenNet, the most utilized ISP in the country.