This report investigates the surveillance capabilities of IMSI Catchers, efforts by states to prevent information relating to IMSI Catchers from entering the public record, and the legal and policy frameworks that govern the use of these devices. The report principally focuses on Canadian agencies but, to do so, draws comparative examples from other jurisdictions. The report concludes with a series of recommended transparency and control mechanisms that are designed to properly contain the use of the devices and temper their more intrusive features.

This report describes how a government targeted an internationally recognized human rights defender, Ahmed Mansoor, with the Trident, a chain of zero-day exploits designed to infect his iPhone with sophisticated commercial spyware.

This report describes a malware operation against the Syrian Opposition. We name the operator Group5, and suspect they have not been previously-reported. Group5 used “just enough” technical sophistication, combined with social engineering, to target computers and mobile phones with malware.

This report describes a campaign of targeted spyware attacks carried out by a sophisticated operator, which we call Stealth Falcon. The attacks have been conducted from 2012 until the present, against Emirati journalists, activists, and dissidents.

In “Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and Wikipedia Use,” Citizen Lab Research Fellow Jon Penney analyzes the fall of traffic to Wikipedia articles about terror groups and their techniques after the Snowden revelations.

April 27 – Boston, Massachusetts

Court documents provided in a case before the Quebec Court of Appeal indicate that the RCMP used advanced technology to spy on mobile phones in a criminal investigation on organized crime. Citizen Lab Postdoctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons spoke to the Globe and Mail about the case.

Privacy International (PI) latest report, entitled “The President’s Men?,” explores the role of Egypt’s Technical Research Department (TRD), a secret unit in the country’s intelligence infrastructure. In the report, PI cite Citizen Lab research on FinFisher and Hacking Team.

Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert hosted a Q&A session with Ben Wizner, Director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, and attorney for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The event followed the screening of the CITIZENFOUR film.

March 30-April 1 – San Francisco, California