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.

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.

Cyber Stewards Network partner Tibet Action Institute has launched a new program aimed at getting ordinary users of mobile and online technology in Tibet to adopt safe habits capable of preventing malware and viral attacks. The ‘Cyber Superhero’ website contains information that is particularly relevant for Tibetans living in exile, whose online and mobile communications with friends and family in Tibet are often the subject of security intrusions and malware attacks by Chinese government officials.

In a piece published in the Wall Street Journal, Morgan Marquis-Boire commented on government complains that antivirus programs are thwarting their planned surveillance activities.

A public interest litigation case launched by CSN Partner Bytes For All (B4A) at the Lahore High Court has been met with obstacles during court proceedings. Despite a court order to look into the matter and produce a report in one month, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) has failed to do so.

While there has been much discussion about the use of software described as ‘implants’ or ‘backdoors’ to perform targeted surveillance, this report is about the less well understood method by which most targeted surveillance is delivered: network injection.