Citizen Lab Senior Security Researcher Morgan Marquis-Boire was interviewed by CNN.

Pakistan and BlackBerry have agreed to delay the shutdown of BlackBerry’s Enterprise Server (BES) by one month. This comes months after Pakistan initially ordered the shutdown of the company’s encrypted messaging services for businesses. Postdoctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons weighed in on the policy reasons for the disagreement.

Citizen Lab surveillance research on Hacking Team and FinFisher highlighted in articles on Motherboard, the Varsity, and the New York Times.

Citizen Lab Postdoctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons published a paper titled “Beyond Privacy: Articulating the Broader Harms of Pervasive Mass Surveillance” in Media and Communication. The paper explores how dominant theories of privacy grapple with the pervasive mass surveillance activities undertaken by western signals intelligence activities, including those of the NSA, CSE, GCHQ, GCSB, and ASD.

Citizen Lab Communications Officer and Researcher Irene Poetranto speaking at a number of cybersecurity events in Latin America, including the second annual Colombian Internet Governance Forum.

In this paper presented at USENIX FOCI 2015 we use reverse engineering to provide a view into how keyword censorship operates on four popular social video platforms in China: YY, 9158, Sina Show, and GuaGua. We also find keyword surveillance capabilities on YY. Our findings show inconsistencies in the implementation of censorship and the keyword lists used to trigger censorship events between the platforms we analyzed. We reveal a range of targeted content including criticism of the government and collective action. These results provide evidence that there is no monolithic set of rules that govern how information controls are implemented in China.

At the  2015 USENIX Free and Open Communications on the Internet (FOCI) workshop, held in Washington DC on August 10, Citizen Lab and collaborators present three papers.

The papers include: investigation of censorship and surveillance on China’s most popular social video platforms, an updated analysis of China’s Great Canon, and examination of securing cookie-based identifiers from passive surveillance.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), a government agency responsible for the establishment and operation of telecommunications in the country, ordered the shutdown of BlackBerry’s encrypted communication services.

Hacking Team, a Milan-based developer of “offensive security” technology that markets its products to governments and law enforcement agencies around the world, was significantly compromised when hackers leaked nearly 400 GB of its internal data, including emails, client files, and financial documents. The leak was announced via Hacking Team’s own compromised Twitter account, and the content made publicly available. Among other things, the leaked documents confirmed our findings that the company sells its software to several governments with repressive human rights records, such as Ethiopia, Sudan, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, and more.

Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert spoke at the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), joining a panel discussion on “The Global Campaign Against Democratic Norms.”