In April 2025, Ronald Deibert left all digital units at dwelling in Toronto and boarded a airplane. When he landed in Illinois, he took a taxi to a mall and headed on to the Apple Retailer to buy a brand new laptop computer and iPhone. He’d wished to maintain the chance of getting his private units confiscated to a minimal, as a result of he knew his work made him a major goal for surveillance. “I’m touring beneath the belief that I’m being watched, proper down to precisely the place I’m at any second,” Deibert says.
Deibert directs the Citizen Lab, a analysis heart he based in 2001 to function “counterintelligence for civil society.” Housed on the College of Toronto, the lab operates independently of governments or company pursuits, relying as a substitute on analysis grants and personal philanthropy for monetary assist. It’s one of many few establishments that examine cyberthreats solely within the public curiosity, and in doing so, it has uncovered a few of the most egregious digital abuses of the previous 20 years.
For a few years, Deibert and his colleagues have held up the US as the usual for liberal democracy. However that’s altering, he says: “The pillars of democracy are beneath assault in the USA. For a lot of many years, regardless of its flaws, it has upheld norms about what constitutional democracy seems like or ought to aspire to. [That] is now in danger.”
At the same time as a few of his fellow Canadians averted US journey after Donald Trump’s second election, Deibert relished the chance to go to. Alongside his conferences with human rights defenders, he additionally documented lively surveillance at Columbia College throughout the peak of its scholar protests. Deibert snapped photographs of drones above campus and famous the exceptionally strict safety protocols. “It was unorthodox to go to the USA,” he says. “However I actually gravitate towards issues on the planet.”
Deibert, 61, grew up in East Vancouver, British Columbia, a gritty space with a boisterous countercultural presence. Within the ’70s, Vancouver brimmed with draft dodgers and hippies, however Deibert factors to American investigative journalism—exposing the COINTELPRO surveillance program, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate—because the seed of his respect for antiestablishment sentiment. He didn’t think about that this fascination would translate right into a profession, nevertheless.
“My horizons had been fairly low as a result of I got here from a working-class household, and there weren’t many individuals in my household—the truth is, none—who went on to school,” he says.
Deibert finally entered a graduate program in worldwide relations on the College of British Columbia. His doctoral analysis introduced him to a subject of inquiry that will quickly explode: the geopolitical implications of the nascent web.
“In my subject, there have been a handful of individuals starting to speak concerning the web, nevertheless it was very shallow, and that pissed off me,” he says. “And in the meantime, laptop science was very technical, however not political—[politics] was nearly like a unclean phrase.”
Deibert continued to discover these matters on the College of Toronto when he was appointed to a tenure-track professorship, nevertheless it wasn’t till after he based the Citizen Lab in 2001 that his work rose to international prominence.
What put the lab on the map, Deibert says, was its 2009 report “Monitoring GhostNet,” which uncovered a digital espionage community in China that had breached places of work of overseas embassies and diplomats in additional than 100 international locations, together with the workplace of the Dalai Lama. The report and its follow-up in 2010 had been among the many first to publicly expose cybersurveillance in actual time. Within the years since, the lab has printed over 180 such analyses, garnering reward from human rights advocates starting from Margaret Atwood to Edward Snowden.
The lab has rigorously investigated authoritarian regimes all over the world (Deibert says each Russia and China have his title on a “listing” barring his entry). The group was the primary to uncover the usage of business spyware and adware to surveil folks near the Saudi dissident and Washington Put up journalist Jamal Khashoggi previous to his assassination, and its analysis has instantly knowledgeable G7 and UN resolutions on digital repression and led to sanctions on spyware and adware distributors. Even so, in 2025 US Immigration and Customs Enforcement reactivated a $2 million contract with the spyware and adware vendor Paragon. The contract, which the Biden administration had beforehand positioned beneath a stop-work order, resembles steps taken by governments in Europe and Israel which have additionally deployed home spyware and adware to handle safety issues.
“It saves lives, fairly actually,” Cindy Cohn, govt director of the Digital Frontier Basis, says of the lab’s work. “The Citizen Lab [researchers] had been the primary to essentially concentrate on technical assaults on human rights activists and democracy activists all all over the world. And so they’re nonetheless the perfect at it.”
When recruiting new Citizen Lab workers (or “Labbers,” as they refer to at least one one other), Deibert forgoes stuffy, pencil-pushing lecturers in favor of sensible, colourful personalities, a lot of whom personally skilled repression from a few of the identical regimes the lab now investigates.
Noura Aljizawi, a researcher on digital repression who survived torture by the hands of the al-Assad regime in Syria, researches the distinct risk that digital applied sciences pose to ladies and queer folks, significantly when deployed towards exiled nationals. She helped create Safety Planner, a device that offers personalised, expert-reviewed steering to folks seeking to enhance their digital hygiene, for which the College of Toronto awarded her an Excellence By means of Innovation Award.
Work for the lab just isn’t with out danger. Citizen Lab fellow Elies Campo, for instance, was adopted and photographed after the lab printed a 2022 report that uncovered the digital surveillance of dozens of Catalonian residents and members of parliament, together with 4 Catalonian presidents who had been focused throughout or after their phrases.
Nonetheless, the lab’s fame and mission make recruitment pretty straightforward, Deibert says. “This good work attracts a sure kind of particular person,” he says. “However they’re often additionally drawn to the sleuthing. It’s detective work, and that may be extremely intoxicating—even addictive.”
Deibert incessantly deflects the highlight to his fellow Labbers. He hardly ever discusses the group’s accomplishments with out referencing two senior researchers, Invoice Marczak and John Scott-Railton, alongside different staffers. And on the event that somebody decides to depart the Citizen Lab to pursue one other place, this appreciation stays.
“We’ve a saying: As soon as a Labber, all the time a Labber,” Deibert says.
Whereas within the US, Deibert taught a seminar on the Citizen Lab’s work to Northwestern College undergraduates and delivered talks on digital authoritarianism on the Columbia College Graduate College of Journalism. Universities within the US had been subjected to funding cuts and heightened scrutiny from the Trump administration, and Deibert wished to be “within the combine” at such establishments to reply to what he sees as encroaching authoritarian practices by the US authorities.
Since Deibert’s return to Canada, the lab has continued its work unearthing digital threats to civil society worldwide, however now Deibert should additionally take care of the US—a rustic that was as soon as his benchmark for democracy however has turn into one other topic of his scrutiny. “I don’t imagine that an establishment just like the Citizen Lab might exist proper now in the USA,” he says. “The kind of analysis that we pioneered is beneath risk like by no means earlier than.”
He’s significantly alarmed by the growing pressures going through federal oversight our bodies and educational establishments within the US. In September, for instance, the Trump administration defunded the Council of the Inspectors Basic on Integrity and Effectivity, a authorities group devoted to stopping waste, fraud, and abuse inside federal businesses, citing partisanship issues. The White Home has additionally threatened to freeze federal funding to universities that don’t adjust to administration directives associated to gender, DEI, and campus speech. These kinds of actions, Deibert says, undermine the independence of watchdogs and analysis teams just like the Citizen Lab.
Cohn, the director of the EFF, says the lab’s location in Canada permits it to keep away from many of those assaults on establishments that present accountability. “Having the Citizen Lab based mostly in Toronto and in a position to proceed to do its work largely freed from the issues we’re seeing within the US,” she says, “might find yourself being tremendously necessary if we’re going to return to a spot of the rule of legislation and safety of human rights and liberties.”
Finian Hazen is a journalism and political science scholar at Northwestern College.
