Day 1 Conference Opening & Keynote | Tracking Targeted Digital Threats: A View from the Citizen Lab

Political struggles in and through the global Internet and related technologies are entering into a particularly dangerous phase for openness, security, and human rights. A growing number of governments and private companies have turned to "offensive" operations, with means ranging from from sophisticated and expensive to home-grown and cheap. A large and largely unregulated market for commercial surveillance technology is finding willing clientele among the world's least accountable regimes. Powerful spyware tools are used to infiltrate civil society networks, targeting the devices of journalists, human rights defenders, minority movements, and political opposition, often with lethal consequences. Meanwhile, numerous disinformation and harassment campaigns are feeding intolerance and even violence, largely without mitigation. Drawing from the last decade of research of the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, I will provide an overview of these disturbing trends and discuss some pathways to repairing and restoring the Internet as a sphere that supports, rather than diminishes, human rights.
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Ron Deibert, (OOnt, PhD, University of British Columbia) is Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto. The Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary laboratory focusing on research, development, and high-level strategic policy and legal engagement at the intersection of information and communication technologies, human rights, and global security. He was a co-founder and a principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative (2003-2014) and Information Warfare Monitor (2003-2012) projects. Deibert was one of the founders and (former) VP of global policy and outreach for Psiphon, one of the world’s leading digital censorship circumvention services.
As Director of the Citizen Lab, Deibert has overseen and been a contributing author to more than 120 reports covering path-breaking research on cyber espionage, commercial spyware, Internet censorship, and human rights. These reports include the landmark Tracking Ghostnet report (which uncovered an espionage operation that infiltrated the computer networks of hundreds of government offices, NGOs, and other organizations, including those of the Dalai Lama), China’s Great Cannon (an offensive tool used to hijack digital traffic through Distributed Denial of Service attacks), the Kingdom Came to Canada (an investigation of a Canadian permanent resident, Saudi dissident, and Khashoggi colleague who was targeted with commercial spyware), and the Reckless Series (an investigation into the abuse of commercial spyware to target journalists, anti-corruption advocates, and public health officials in Mexico). These reports have been cited widely in global media, garnering 25 front-page exclusives in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other leading outlets, and have been cited by policymakers, academics, and civil society as foundational to the understanding of digital technologies, human rights, and global security.