January 20, 2015 – London, UK

Christopher Parsons, post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and managing director of the Telecom Transparency Project, spoke to Canada.com regarding how discussions around privacy shifted in 2014 and what to expect in 2015.

Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert wrote an article entitled “The Geopolitics of Cyberspace after Snowden,” [pdf] published in the January 2015 edition of Current History, a journal of contemporary world affairs.

Christopher Parsons spoke to the CBC regarding the Canadian government’s growing interest in the real-time contents of social media and to the Washington Post on privacy concerns with Uber’s rider database.

Citizen Lab Senior Security Researcher Morgan Marquis-Boire discussed his research into online threat to activists and media and his work as the director of security at First Look Media.

Jon Penney, a law professor at Dalhousie University and Research Fellow at the Citizen Lab, was interviewed by VICE Motherboard regarding the dynamic between Canada’s security agencies and the courts. He explained the government’s tendency to fight back against the court’s insistence that CSIS and the Communications Security Estabilishment Canada (CSEC) must keep them up to date on their operations.

Citizen Lab Post-Doctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons spoke to a number of media outlets this month on privacy issues in Canada, ranging from topics such as the expansion of Toronto Police Service’s surveillance technologies, the collection of social media data by the government, and concerns with particular mobile applications.

In an op-ed on OpenCanada.org, Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert argues that law enforcement and intelligence agencies such as the US’s NSA, UK’s GCHQ and Canada’s CSE must be highly accountable, transparent to democratically elected representatives, and unleashed to act only in tightly circumscribed way, in order to protect the liberal democratic society in which we live.

Independent Researcher Claudio Guarnieri has partnered with Privacy International, Digitale Gesellschaft, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Amnesty International to publicly release the Detekt tool, which allows journalists and human rights defenders to scan their computers for traces of known surveillance spyware.

Privacy International has filed a criminal complaint with the UK’s National Cyber Crime Unit requesting police investigation into allegations that the computer and telecommunications data of Bahraini democracy activists were subject to unlawful surveillance, which cites reports authored by Citizen Lab on the presence of FinFisher in Bahrain, as well the global proliferation of the software.