Public presentation by honorary doctorate recipient Professor Ronald Deibert, Director of Citizen Lab, University of Toronto

While the Internet and other digital media offer enormous practical benefits to large segments of society, they also create new and unforeseen risks. Over the last decade, the Citizen Lab (based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy) has tracked a growing wave of digital espionage against civil society, including journalists, human rights advocates, academics, lawyers and humanitarians. This wave of attacks is the product of several underlying causes: the spread of authoritarian practices; the emergence and growth of unregulated commercial surveillance technologies; and a lack of capacity and resources across civil society to defend themselves. Should these attacks continue to spread, they could lead to a crisis of democracy. In this presentation, Prof. Deibert will outline several prominent case studies from Citizen Lab’s targeted espionage research before addressing what might be done to mitigate the problems outlined.