In a recent speech, Ali Baba co-founder Jack Ma suggested that the Chinese government should use big data to help prevent crime, a view that resonates with the Communist party’s efforts to establish a system parsing citizen information online. Citizen Lab Senior Research Fellow Jason Q. Ng commented on Ma’s remarks in an interview with Bloomberg.

Citizen Lab Senior Research Fellow Bill Marczak and Senior Security Researcher Morgan Marquis-Boire were featured in an episode of Al Jazeera’s ‘Faultlines’ program, in an episode entitled “Crypto Wars: Behind the Encryption Debate.” They discussed attitudes concerning surveillance in the wake of the San Bernadino shooting as well as other terrorist activities.

In this post, we critically examine the Government of Canada’s proposal to indiscriminately access subscriber identity information that is possessed by telecommunications service providers. We conclude by arguing that the government has failed to justify its case for such access to the information.

Citizen Lab Research Fellow Andrew Hilts was interviewed by the Globe and Mail regarding Access My Info’s fitness tracker report, titled “Every Step You Fake,” in which the privacy and security safeguards of eight popular wearable fitness tracker devices was studied.

The United States Department of Homeland Security has filed a proposal to collect social media details from visitors to the country. Citizen Lab Postdoctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons commented on the privacy implications of the proposal, as well as broader trends in social media monitoring by security officials.

Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert authored an op-ed for CBC News detailing the newly revamped Access My Info tool, which now includes fitness trackers and dating applications. The tool allows Canadians to exercise their right to inquire about the information that technology companies store about them.

The DIY Transparency Report tool helps smaller organizations produce holistic transparency reports. Such reports comprehensively explain to customers, citizens, and government agencies alike how an organization can, and does, receive and respond to government requests. It does so by guiding organizational members through the process of developing a holistic report, while empowering them to customize their reports to reflect their organizational profile.

Access My Info (AMI), a web tool used to submit disclosure requests to companies on the data they collect and share with third parties about their customers, has now been expanded to submit disclosure requests to fitness tracker companies and dating applications.

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.