On April 18, 2017, the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity was honored to welcome Ron Deibert, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, for a lunch seminar presentation entitled “Cyber Espionage and Civil Society: A Silent Epidemic.”
The Citizen Lab undertakes interdisciplinary research at the intersection of global security, information communication technologies, and human rights. Deibert is a former founder and principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative (2003-2014) and a founder of Psiphon, a world leader in providing open access to the Internet. Deibert is the author of Black Code: Surveillance, Privacy, and the Dark Side of the Internet (Random House: 2013), as well as numerous books, chapters, articles, and reports on Internet censorship, surveillance, and cyber security. He was one of the authors of the landmark Tracking Ghostnet cyber espionage (2009) and Great Cannon (2015) reports, and co-editor of three major volumes with MIT Press on information controls (the “Access” series).
In his presentation, Dr. Deibert spoke about the digital threats that facing civil society (e.g. non-profits, non-governmental organizations) as they are targeted by governments, industry, and other actors. Drawing from recent reports and research of the Citizen Lab (including Berkeley’s own Bill Marczak), Dr. Deibert outlined some recent targeted attacks on civil society, including what those attacks look like and what might be done to mitigate them. View the video above or on CLTC’s YouTube Channel.
