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Ronald Deibert | |
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![]() Deibert at re:publica conference, 2014 | |
Alma mater | The University of British Columbia (BA, PhD) Queen's University (MA) |
Occupations |
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Employer | University of Toronto |
Ronald James Deibert OC OOnt [1] (born 1964) [2] is a Canadian professor of political science, philosopher, founder and director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. [3]
He was a co-founder and a principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative and Information Warfare Monitor projects. [4] Deibert was one of the founders and former VP of global policy and outreach for Psiphon.
As founder and director of the Citizen Lab, Deibert has overseen and been a contributing author to more than 170 reports [5] covering research on cyber espionage, commercial spyware, Internet censorship, and human rights. The Citizen Lab has been remarkably effective in holding governments and private-sector firms accountable for using information technology to endanger people. Researchers from the Citizen Lab contribute to the global understanding of spyware abuse through their expertise. Writing for the Guardian in 2021, John Naughton said "Deibert has built a formidable team that functions as a kind of National Security Agency for civil society." [6]
In 2020, he gave the annual Massey Lectures for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and they were published in book form under the title Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society. [7] The book won the 2021 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. [8] [9] [10]
Deibert presently serves on the editorial boards of the journals International Political Sociology , [11] Explorations in Media Ecology, [12] Review of Policy Research , [13] Journal of Global Security Studies , [14] and Astropolitics. [15] He has served on the advisory boards of Access Now, Privacy International, the technical advisory groups of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and is currently on the advisory boards of PEN Canada [16] and the Design 4 Democracy Coalition, the steering committee of the World Movement for Democracy, the advisory board for the Citizen Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-chair of the University of Toronto's Information Security Council.
Deibert's work has been widely recognised and respected.He has been awarded the University of Toronto's President's Impact Award [17] (2017), Foreign Policy's Global Thinker Award [18] (2017), the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer award [19] (2015), the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity [20] (2014), the Advancement of Intellectual Freedom in Canada Award from the Canadian Library Association [21] (2014), the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression Vox Libera Award [22] (2010), the Carolyn Tuohy Award for Public Policy [23] (2010), the Northrop Frye Distinguished Teaching and Research Award (2003), and the University of Toronto Outstanding Teaching Award (2002). [24] He was a Ford Foundation research scholar of information and communication technologies (2002–2004). [25] In 2019, he received an honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Guelph. [26]
He was named a Global Thinker by Foreign Policy (2017), one of Motherboard website's "Humans of the Year" [27] (2017), listed among SC Magazine's top "IT Security Luminaries" [28] (2010), and Esquire magazine's Best and Brightest List of 2007. [29]
In 2013, he was made a Member of the Order of Ontario [30] and awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, for being "among the first to recognize and take measures to mitigate growing threats to communications rights, openness and security worldwide." [30] He was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2022, with the rank of Officer. [31]
Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society won the 2021 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. [8]
The Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, Canada. It was founded by Ronald Deibert in 2001. The laboratory studies information controls that impact the openness and security of the Internet and that pose threats to human rights. The organization uses a "mixed methods" approach which combines computer-generated interrogation, data mining, and analysis with intensive field research, qualitative social science, and legal and policy analysis methods. The organization has played a major role in providing technical support to journalists investigating the use of NSO Group's Pegasus spyware on journalists, politicians and human rights advocates.
James Jude Orbinski is a Canadian physician, humanitarian activist, author and leading scholar in global health. Orbinski was the 2016-17 Fulbright visiting professor at the University of California, Irvine, and as of September 1, 2017, he is professor and inaugural director of the Dahdaleh Institute of Global Health Research at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He was previously the CIGI Chair in Global Health Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and Wilfrid Laurier University (2012-2017), Chair of Global Health at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health (2010-2012) and full professor at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto (2003-2012), where he was the founding Saul Rae Fellow at Massey College. Orbinski's current research interests focus on the health impacts of climate change, medical humanitarianism, intervention strategies around emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, and global health governance.
The Joseph L. Rotman School of Management is the University of Toronto's graduate business school, located in Downtown Toronto. The University of Toronto has been offering undergraduate courses in commerce and management since 1901, but the business school was formally established in 1950 as the Institute of Business Administration. The name was changed to the Faculty of Management Studies in 1972 and subsequently shortened to the Faculty of Management in 1986. The school was renamed in 1997 after Joseph L. Rotman (1935–2015), its principal benefactor.
The Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing is a Canadian literary award, presented by the Writers' Trust of Canada to the best nonfiction book on Canadian political and social issues. It has been presented annually in Ottawa at the Writers’ Trust Politics and the Pen gala since 2000, superseding the organization's defunct Gordon Montador Award.
Peter Munk was a Hungarian-Canadian businessman, investor, and philanthropist. He was the founder and chief executive officer of a number of high-profile business ventures, including the hi-fi electronics company Clairtone, real estate company Trizec Properties, and Barrick Gold, the world's largest gold-mining corporation.
Janice Gross Stein is a Canadian political scientist and international relations expert. Stein is a specialist in Middle East area studies, negotiation theory, foreign policy decision-making, and international conflict management.
The Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto is an interdisciplinary academic centre. It offers various research and educational programs related to the field of globalization. It is located in Toronto, Ontario, offers master's degrees in global affairs and public policy, and a master's degree in European, Russian and Asia-Pacific studies. This school is a member of the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs (APSIA). It also works in group of schools that educate students in international affairs. The Munk School's Master of Global Affairs program typically receives 500 and 600 applicants per year and offers 80 students entry into its program.
Sandvine Incorporated is an application and network intelligence company based in Waterloo, Ontario.
The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) was a joint project whose goal was to monitor and report on internet filtering and surveillance practices by nations. Started in 2002, the project employed a number of technical means, as well as an international network of investigators, to determine the extent and nature of government-run internet filtering programs. Participating academic institutions included the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto; Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School; the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at University of Oxford; and, The SecDev Group, which took over from the Advanced Network Research Group at the Cambridge Security Programme, University of Cambridge.
Psiphon is a free and open-source Internet censorship circumvention tool that uses a combination of secure communication and obfuscation technologies, such as a VPN, SSH, and a Web proxy. Psiphon is a centrally managed and geographically diverse network of thousands of proxy servers, using a performance-oriented, single- and multi-hop routing architecture.
UC Browser is a web browser developed by mobile internet company UCWeb, a subsidiary of the Alibaba Group. It was the most popular mobile browser in India, Indonesia, and Mali, as well as the second-most popular one in China as of 2017. Its world-wide browser share as of May 2022 is 0.86% overall according to StatCounter.
Mark Dubowitz is a South African-born Canadian-American attorney and former venture capitalist, currently serving as CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a non-profit think-tank and lobbying institute part of the Israel lobby in the United States, that advocates for hawkish foreign policy. He is a proponent of sanctions against Iran and was a leading critic of the Iran nuclear agreement, officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. According to The New York Times, “Mark Dubowitz’s campaign to draw attention to what he saw as the flaws in the Iran nuclear deal has taken its place among the most consequential ever undertaken by a Washington think tank leader.”
Relations between Canada and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea are very limited, as Canada suspended full diplomatic relations in 2010 over North Korea's destabilizing nuclear activity. Travel and commerce with North Korea are discouraged by the Canadian government and there is very little trade or diplomatic contact due to Canada's perspective that North Korea plays a destabilizing role in the Asia Pacific region.
The Information Warfare Monitor (IWM) was an advanced research activity tracking the emergence of cyberspace as a strategic domain. Created in 2003, it closed in January 2012. It was a public-private venture between two Canadian institutions: The SecDev Group, an operational think tank based in Ottawa (Canada), and the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. The Principal Investigators and co-founders of the Information Warfare Monitor where Rafal Rohozinski and Ronald Deibert. The Information Warfare Monitor as part of the Citizen Lab’s network of advanced research projects, which include the OpenNet Initiative, the Fusion Methodology Centre, and PsiLab.
FinFisher, also known as FinSpy, is surveillance software marketed by Lench IT Solutions plc, which markets the spyware through law enforcement channels.
The Great Cannon of China is an Internet attack tool that is used by the Chinese government to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks on websites by performing a man-in-the-middle attack on large amounts of web traffic and injecting code which causes the end-user's web browsers to flood traffic to targeted websites. According to the researchers at the Citizen Lab, the International Computer Science Institute, and Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy, who coined the term, the Great Cannon hijacks foreign web traffic intended for Chinese websites and re-purposes them to flood targeted web servers with enormous amounts of traffic in an attempt to disrupt their operations. While it is co-located with the Great Firewall, the Great Cannon is "a separate offensive system, with different capabilities and design."
The Canadian Council on International Law (CCIL) is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1972 by Sir Ronald St. John Macdonald. The mandate of the organization is to further the worldwide discussion of international legal issues including public and private international law. The organization brings together all four sectors of law, namely private practitioners, scholars, NGO's, and government lawyers, through various events and an annual Conference held at the Government of Canada facility of foreign affairs, currently known as Global Affairs Canada.
Pegasus is a spyware developed by the Israeli cyber-arms company NSO Group that is designed to be covertly and remotely installed on mobile phones running iOS and Android. While NSO Group markets Pegasus as a product for fighting crime and terrorism, governments around the world have routinely used the spyware to surveil journalists, lawyers, political dissidents, and human rights activists. The sale of Pegasus licenses to foreign governments must be approved by Israeli defense ministry.
Grace Skogstad is a Canadian political scientist and professor at the University of Toronto. and a cross-appointed affiliate faculty in the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
CatalanGate is a 2022 political scandal involving accusations of espionage using the NSO Group's Pegasus spyware, against figures of the Catalan independence movement. Targets of the supposed espionage included elected officials, activists, lawyers, and computer scientists; in some cases, families of the main targets were also purportedly targeted.