The Predator in Your Pocket: a Multidisciplinary Assessment of the Stalkerware Application Industry
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Submission of the Citizen Lab (Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto) to the United Nations
Submission of the Citizen Lab (Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto) to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression on the surveillance industry and human rights February 15, 2019 For all inquiries related to this submission, please contact: Dr. Ronald J. Deibert Director, the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy Professor of Political Science, University of Toronto [email protected] Contributors to this report: Siena Anstis, Senior Legal Advisor, Citizen Lab Dr. Ronald J. Deibert, Professor of Political Science; Director, Citizen Lab Jon Penney, Research Fellow, Citizen Lab; Associate Professor and Director, Law & Technology Institute, Schulich School of Law Acknowledgments: We would also like to thank Miles Kenyon (Communications Specialist, Citizen Lab) and Adam Senft (Operations Manager, Citizen Lab) for their support in reviewing this submission. 1 Table of Contents Executive Summary 3 About the Citizen Lab 5 Citizen Lab Research on the Use of Private Surveillance Technology Against Human Rights Actors 6 1. NSO Group’s Pegasus 6 The case of Ahmed Mansoor in the United Arab Emirates 7 Targeting civil society, journalists, politicians, and others in Mexico 7 Mapping Pegasus infections and the case of Omar Abdulaziz in Canada 8 Additional cases of targeting 8 2. Cyberbit’s PC Surveillance System 9 3. FinFisher and FinSpy 9 4. Hacking Team’s Remote Control System 10 Common Trends among Private Companies in the Surveillance Industry 11 1. Sales to states with poor human rights records 11 2. -
Mobile Networks and Internet of Things Infrastructures to Characterize Smart Human Mobility
smart cities Article Mobile Networks and Internet of Things Infrastructures to Characterize Smart Human Mobility Luís Rosa 1,* , Fábio Silva 1,2 and Cesar Analide 1 1 ALGORITMI Centre, Department of Informatics, University of Minho, 4710-057 Braga, Portugal; [email protected] (F.S.); [email protected] (C.A.) 2 CIICESI, School of Management and Technology, Politécnico do Porto, 4610-156 Felgueiras, Portugal * Correspondence: [email protected] Abstract: The evolution of Mobile Networks and Internet of Things (IoT) architectures allows one to rethink the way smart cities infrastructures are designed and managed, and solve a number of problems in terms of human mobility. The territories that adopt the sensoring era can take advantage of this disruptive technology to improve the quality of mobility of their citizens and the rationalization of their resources. However, with this rapid development of smart terminals and infrastructures, as well as the proliferation of diversified applications, even current networks may not be able to completely meet quickly rising human mobility demands. Thus, they are facing many challenges and to cope with these challenges, different standards and projects have been proposed so far. Accordingly, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been utilized as a new paradigm for the design and optimization of mobile networks with a high level of intelligence. The objective of this work is to identify and discuss the challenges of mobile networks, alongside IoT and AI, to characterize smart human mobility and to discuss some workable solutions to these challenges. Finally, based on this discussion, we propose paths for future smart human mobility researches. -
The Effectiveness of Application Permissions
The Effectiveness of Application Permissions Adrienne Porter Felt,∗ Kate Greenwood, David Wagner University of California, Berkeley apf, kate eli, [email protected] Abstract cations’ permission requirements up-front so that users can grant them during installation. Traditional user-based permission systems assign the Traditional user-based permission systems assign the user’s full privileges to all applications. Modern plat- user’s full privileges to all of the user’s applications. In forms are transitioning to a new model, in which each the application permission model, however, each appli- application has a different set of permissions based on cation can have a customized set of permissions based its requirements. Application permissions offer several on its individual privilege requirements. If most applica- advantages over traditional user-based permissions, but tions can be satisfied with less than the user’s full priv- these benefits rely on the assumption that applications ileges, then three advantages of application permissions generally require less than full privileges. We explore over the traditional user-based model are possible: whether that assumption is realistic, which provides in- sight into the value of application permissions. • User Consent: Security-conscious users may be We perform case studies on two platforms with appli- hesitant to grant access to dangerous permissions cation permissions, the Google Chrome extension sys- without justification. For install-time systems, this tem and the Android OS. We collect the permission re- might alert some users to malware at installation; quirements of a large set of Google Chrome extensions for time-of-use systems, this can prevent an in- and Android applications. -
Annotated Bibliography Digital Transnational Repression
Annotated Bibliography Digital Transnational Repression By Noura Al-Jizawi, Siena Anstis, Sophie Barnett, Sharly Chan, Adam Sen, and Ronald J. Deibert Last Updated: May 2021 Copyright Copyright © 2021 Citizen Lab, “Digital transnational Repression,” by Noura Al-Jizawi, Siena Anstis, Sharly Chan, Adam Sen, and Ronald J. Deibert. Licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 (Attribution-ShareAlike Licence) Electronic version first published in 2020 by the Citizen Lab. Citizen Lab engages in research that investigates the intersection of digital technologies, law, and human rights. Document Version: 2.0 New changes in this annual update include: ● Change of terminology from “transnational digital repression” to “digital transnational repression” to align with the discourse ● New summaries collected between October 2020 - May 2021 and added to the document The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license under which this report is licensed lets you freely copy, distribute, remix, transform, and build on it, as long as you: ● give appropriate credit; ● indicate whether you made changes; and ● use and link to the same CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. However, any rights in excerpts reproduced in this report remain with their respective authors; and any rights in brand and product names and associated logos remain with their respective owners. Uses of these that are protected by copyright or trademark rights require the rightsholder’s prior written agreement. 2 Acknowledgements The design of this document is by Mari Zhou. About the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Aairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto The Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto, focusing on research, development, and high-level strategic policy and legal engagement at the intersection of information and communication technologies, human rights, and global security. -
Canadian Privacy Law: the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA)
International In-house Counsel Journal Vol. 2, No. 7, Spring 2009, 1135–1146 Canadian Privacy Law: The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) DOMINIC JAAR PATRICK E. ZELLER Legal Counsel Vice President & Deputy General Counsel Ledjit Consulting, Inc. Guidance Software, Inc. Canada United States This white paper provides a general overview of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (“PIPEDA”), and discusses both the privacy requirements imposed by that Act as well as the rules governing the use of electronic documents that it sets out. Overview Introduction to PIPEDA PIPEDA is the federal legislative response to growing concerns over the protection and use of personal information that is accumulated by both public and private organizations in the course of their day-to-day operations.1 The Act sets out rules governing how such information should be handled by the organizations that collect it, and under what circumstances it may be disclosed, either to third parties or to the individual who is the subject of the information. The Act contains two main parts. The first part sets out the rules governing the collection, retention and disclosure of personal information, as well as the remedies available in the event of a suspected breach. In essence, this part of the Act establishes a framework which attempts to balance the privacy rights of individuals with the needs of organizations to collect, use, and disclose personal information in the course of commercial activities. This part of the Act is discussed in sections I and II of this document. The second part of the Act describes the circumstances in which electronic alternatives may be used to fulfill legal obligations, which, under federal laws, require the use of paper documents to record or communicate information or transactions. -
Unauthorised Tapping Into Or Hacking of Mobile Communications
House of Commons Home Affairs Committee Unauthorised tapping into or hacking of mobile communications Thirteenth Report of Session 2010–12 1. This report is strictly embargoed and is not for broadcast or publication, in any form, before 05.00hrs, Wednesday 20 July 2011. 2. This report is issued under the condition that it should not be forwarded or copied to anyone else. 3. Under no circumstances should you distribute copies to anyone else or speak to the media before the publication time about the content of this report. 4. The report is subject to parliamentary copyright and you are not permitted to distribute, replicate, or publish further copies either in hard copy or on the internet either before or after publication. 5. If these instructions are unclear in any way please contact Alex Paterson on 020 7219 1589 or email [email protected] HC 907 Unauthorised tapping into or hacking of mobile communications 3 House of Commons Home Affairs Committee Unauthorised tapping into or hacking of mobile communications Thirteenth Report of Session 2010–12 Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed 19 July 2011 HC 907 Published on 20 July 2011 by authority of the House of Commons London: The Stationery Office Limited £0.00 The Home Affairs Committee The Home Affairs Committee is appointed by the House of Commons to examine the expenditure, administration, and policy of the Home Office and its associated public bodies. Current membership Rt Hon Keith Vaz MP (Labour, Leicester East) (Chair) Nicola Blackwood MP (Conservative, Oxford West -
Off the Grid: Pinpointing Location-Based Technologies and the Law
Off the Grid: Pinpointing Location-based Technologies and the Law Written By: Geoffrey White, Barrister & Solicitor External Counsel The Public Interest Advocacy Centre 1204 - ONE Nicholas St. Ottawa, Ontario K1N 7B7 June 2015 Copyright 2015 PIAC Contents may not be commercially reproduced. Any other reproduction with acknowledgment is encouraged. The Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC) Suite 1204 ONE Nicholas Street Ottawa, ON K1N 7B7 Tel: (613) 562-4002 Fax: (613) 562-0007 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.piac.ca Canadian Cataloguing and Publication Data ISBN 978-1-927707-03-6 Off the Grid? Pinpointing Location-Based Technologies and the Law Off the Grid? Pinpointing Location-Based Technologies and the Law Page 2 of 109 Acknowledgement Financial support from Industry Canada to conduct the research on which this report is based is gratefully acknowledged. The views expressed in this report are not necessarily those of Industry Canada or of the Government of Canada. The author would also like to thank Kent Sebastian, PIAC Student-at-Law 2014-15, Sarah Mavula, PIAC Summer Student 2014, and Jonathan Bishop, PIAC’s Research & Parliamentary Affairs Analyst, for their research and contributions. Any mistakes are solely the author’s. Off the Grid? Pinpointing Location-Based Technologies and the Law Page 3 of 109 Executive Summary Knowledge of the whereabouts of a person, and of a person’s movement patterns, can be very valuable, from a marketing perspective. Indeed, the scale and scope of the business opportunities associated with so-called location-based behavioural marketing and location- based services (collectively, location-based technologies) have been well-documented in the business literature. -
Bibliography
Bibliography [1] M Aamir Ali, B Arief, M Emms, A van Moorsel, “Does the Online Card Payment Landscape Unwittingly Facilitate Fraud?” IEEE Security & Pri- vacy Magazine (2017) [2] M Abadi, RM Needham, “Prudent Engineering Practice for Cryptographic Protocols”, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering v 22 no 1 (Jan 96) pp 6–15; also as DEC SRC Research Report no 125 (June 1 1994) [3] A Abbasi, HC Chen, “Visualizing Authorship for Identification”, in ISI 2006, LNCS 3975 pp 60–71 [4] H Abelson, RJ Anderson, SM Bellovin, J Benaloh, M Blaze, W Diffie, J Gilmore, PG Neumann, RL Rivest, JI Schiller, B Schneier, “The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, and Trusted Third-Party Encryption”, in World Wide Web Journal v 2 no 3 (Summer 1997) pp 241–257 [5] H Abelson, RJ Anderson, SM Bellovin, J Benaloh, M Blaze, W Diffie, J Gilmore, M Green, PG Neumann, RL Rivest, JI Schiller, B Schneier, M Specter, D Weizmann, “Keys Under Doormats: Mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications”, MIT CSAIL Tech Report 2015-026 (July 6, 2015); abridged version in Communications of the ACM v 58 no 10 (Oct 2015) [6] M Abrahms, “What Terrorists Really Want”,International Security v 32 no 4 (2008) pp 78–105 [7] M Abrahms, J Weiss, “Malicious Control System Cyber Security Attack Case Study – Maroochy Water Services, Australia”, ACSAC 2008 [8] A Abulafia, S Brown, S Abramovich-Bar, “A Fraudulent Case Involving Novel Ink Eradication Methods”, in Journal of Forensic Sciences v41(1996) pp 300-302 [9] DG Abraham, GM Dolan, GP Double, JV Stevens, -
Everyone's Guide to Bypassing Internet Censorship
EVERYONE’S GUIDE TO BY-PASSING INTERNET CENSORSHIP FOR CITIZENS WORLDWIDE A CIVISEC PROJECT The Citizen Lab The University of Toronto September, 2007 cover illustration by Jane Gowan Glossary page 4 Introduction page 5 Choosing Circumvention page 8 User self-assessment Provider self-assessment Technology page 17 Web-based Circumvention Systems Tunneling Software Anonymous Communications Systems Tricks of the trade page 28 Things to remember page 29 Further reading page 29 Circumvention Technologies Circumvention technologies are any tools, software, or methods used to bypass Inter- net filtering. These can range from complex computer programs to relatively simple manual steps, such as accessing a banned website stored on a search engine’s cache, instead of trying to access it directly. Circumvention Providers Circumvention providers install software on a computer in a non-filtered location and make connections to this computer available to those who access the Internet from a censored location. Circumvention providers can range from large commercial organi- zations offering circumvention services for a fee to individuals providing circumven- tion services for free. Circumvention Users Circumvention users are individuals who use circumvention technologies to bypass Internet content filtering. 4 Internet censorship, or content filtering, has become a major global problem. Whereas once it was assumed that states could not control Internet communications, according to research by the OpenNet Initiative (http://opennet.net) more than 25 countries now engage in Internet censorship practices. Those with the most pervasive filtering policies have been found to routinely block access to human rights organi- zations, news, blogs, and web services that challenge the status quo or are deemed threatening or undesirable. -
Report of Findings: Joint Investigation of Clearview AI, Inc
REPORT OF FINDINGS Joint investigation of Clearview AI, Inc. by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec, the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia, and the Information Privacy Commissioner of Alberta OPC PIPEDA-039525/CAI QC-1023158/OIPC BC P20- 81997/OIPC AB-015017 Joint Investigation by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC), the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec (CAI), the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia (OIPC BC), and the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta (OIPC AB) into Clearview AI, Inc.’s compliance with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), the Act Respecting the Protection of Personal Information in the Private Sector, the Act to Establish a Legal Framework for Information Technology (LCCJTI), the Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA BC), and the Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA AB) Page 1 / 29 Contents Overview ..................................................................................................................................................... 3 Background ............................................................................................................................................... 5 Issues .......................................................................................................................................................... 6 Methodology ............................................................................................................................................. -
Stalkerware-Holistic
The Predator in Your Pocket: A Multidisciplinary Assessment of the Stalkerware Application Industry By Christopher Parsons, Adam Molnar, Jakub Dalek, Jeffrey Knockel, Miles Kenyon, Bennett Haselton, Cynthia Khoo, Ronald Deibert JUNE 2017 RESEARCH REPORT #119 A PREDATOR IN YOUR POCKET A Multidisciplinary Assessment of the Stalkerware Application Industry By Christopher Parsons, Adam Molnar, Jakub Dalek, Jeffrey Knockel, Miles Kenyon, Bennett Haselton, Cynthia Khoo, and Ronald Deibert Research report #119 June 2019 This page is deliberately left blank Copyright © 2019 Citizen Lab, “The Predator in Your Pocket: A Multidisciplinary Assessment of the Stalkerware Application Industry,” by Christopher Parsons, Adam Molnar, Jakub Dalek, Jeffrey Knockel, Miles Kenyon, Bennett Haselton, Cynthia Khoo, and Ronald Deibert. Licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 (Attribution-ShareAlike Licence) Electronic version first published by the Citizen Lab in 2019. This work can be accessed through https://citizenlab.ca. Citizen Lab engages in research that investigates the intersection of digital technologies, law, and human rights. Document Version: 1.0 The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license under which this report is licensed lets you freely copy, distribute, remix, transform, and build on it, as long as you: • give appropriate credit; • indicate whether you made changes; and • use and link to the same CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. However, any rights in excerpts reproduced in this report remain with their respective authors; and any rights in brand and product names and associated logos remain with their respective owners. Uses of these that are protected by copyright or trademark rights require the rightsholder’s prior written agreement. -
6. from Amateur Video to New Documentary Formats : Citizen
6. From Amateur Video to New Documentary Formats : Citizen Journalism and a Reconfiguring of Historical Knowledge Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans Abstract The Arab Spring of 2011 appeared on the news in countless video testimoni- als shot by participants and bystanders. Yet the sheer amount of such visual data, combined with the untranslatability and poor quality of the footage, delivers an often opaque and ambiguous material. Peter Snowdon’s film The Uprising (2013) appropriates and reassembles this amateur footage. Compared to the 1992 film Videograms of a Revolution by Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujică, The Uprising raises the question of a possible knowledge shift produced and performed by the amateur video maker. In an analysis of these films, this chapter investigates the possibilities of documenting historical events through mobile video footage. Keywords: Documentary, found footage film, Syria, amateur The act of self-immolation by the fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi in December 2010 triggered a wave of demonstrations throughout Tunisia, mobilizing masses of people to oppose the failing government. The spirit of protest quickly spread to other countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Spontaneous demonstrations emerged and expanded not only in the streets but also through an unprecedented use of social media. As a result, virtually anyone in the world could instantly see the events by means of images and mostly mobile phone camera videos, recorded and uploaded to the internet on a massive scale from various epicentres of the protests. Many citizens turned into amateur journalists in protesting against Strohmaier, A. and A. Krewani (eds.), Media and Mapping Practices in the Middle East and North Africa: Producing Space.