Canadian leading cyber sleuth, Ron Deibert, discusses the use of technology to censor, hack and spy. Trevor Cole for The Globe & Mail.

To me [cybersecurity] is a civilian issue, because it impinges on every aspect of our behaviour, our thought, our social networking with one another. There’s nothing that’s not networked today. You walk around with this device [ my iPhone] 24 hours a day. It sits at your bed, it transmits information when you’re sleeping, and yet we are entrusting the security of this domain to the world’s least accountable agencies. This is a disaster, on a number of levels, waiting to happen. ~ Ron Deibert

By Trevor Cole, published by The Globe & Mail on April 3, 2017

University of Toronto professor and counterespionage hacker Ron Deibert has made plenty of enemies—including Canada’s own intelligence service.

Since founding Citizen Lab in 2001, University of Toronto professor Ron Deibert has led a team of counterespionage hackers—he prefers “researchers”—who have uncovered some of the Internet’s deepest secrets. Citizen Lab produced the first report on Chinese cyberespionage when it cracked GhostNet, a network found spying on political targets around the world. More recently, Deibert’s group discovered an exploit in iPhone software that turned the phones into covert data-tracking devices, before even Apple knew about it. Deibert has literally written the book on how authoritarian governments are turning the Internet into a malign force of control, and that book, Black Code, is now the basis for a feature documentary.
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