The Digital Age and The Citizen Lab
They’re our digital guardian angels, but do we really know who they are?
BY: CLAUDIA MINARDI
Art by Citizen Lab
The Citizen Lab resides in a sector of our very own University of Toronto. Located downtown, U of T’s Munk School of Global Affairs houses the interdisciplinary laboratory. Founded in 2001, the Citizen lab has a specific agenda when conducting their research on “digital technologies, human rights, and global security.”
In simpler terms, the Citizen Lab is a group of hackers that are “for the people.” They identify the risks with living in a society with a reliance on technology and solve the problems that pose a risk to our digital freedom.
Their main focus when it comes to their research is that it is evidence based, meaning their findings are credible. The Citizen Lab takes practices from different disciplines, such as law, area studies, and computer and political sciences, and implements them into their research process.
An important thing to note is the Citizen Lab is not affiliated with any government organizations. This allows them to take an ethical and independent stance on their reports.
The Citizen Lab covers a variety of topics within their research, including targeted threats, free expression regarding online activity, transparency and accountability, and apps and privacy controls.
There are a number of reports the Citizen Lab has done that relate to our own personal safety and privacy in the digital age.
One that I find particularly interesting relates to a platform that has experienced a surge in popularity during the pandemic: Zoom. When work meetings and online classes started migrating to online mediums, Zoom was a common choice. In the news, however, the platform was coming under fire for being prone to hacking. It didn’t take long for the Citizen Lab to catch wind of this problem and with some investigation, they discovered a glitch that enabled users in the waiting room to spy into the main meeting, even if they hadn’t yet been admitted.
After uncovering this problem, The Citizen Lab alerted Zoom directly, who immediately fixed the hack and the platform was made secure again.
Another case the Citizen Lab worked on involves the platform “Whatsapp” and NSO Technologies, a group famous for their spyware. Whatsapp had speculated that their app was being used by NSO to hack into people’s phones, and worked alongside the Citizen lab to determine if their suspicions were true. After conducting research, the Citizen Lab came to the conclusion that NSO was exploiting a hole in the app's security for their own surveillance on unsuspecting individuals. Whatsapp followed this with a lawsuit against NSO and patched up their security to prevent hacks like these from occurring in the future.
Art by New York Times
An additional relevant report the Citizen Lab conducted revolves around the concept of censorship in the world of Covid-19. They analyzed how China monitored and censored certain words pertaining to the virus on social media platforms such as WeChat and YY. This study focused on activity between the months of December 2019 and March 2020, The Citizen Lab found that YY began heavily censoring content on YY around December 31, a day after doctors made an official announcement on the seriousness of the virus.
WeChat, on the other hand, was consistently censoring information that pertained to the virus, even if it was framed in a neutral way. Around February of 2020, the platform expanded the censorship range to include any criticisms targeting the government and any rumours that circulated about the virus.
The Citizen Lab concluded that this rigorous censoring actually does more harm than good, as citizens are cut off from the flow of information relating to the epidemic at the time. Doing so reduces the amount of communication about this topic.
The main takeaway of the Citizen Lab is that they serve the people and exist because of the social and digital problems our era has birthed. As a result of these issues, the Citizen Lab takes action and works to make our society a safer place with the complexity of technology.
Art by Deloitte
To truly understand the Citizen Lab’s impact on the world and why they matter, I spoke to UTSC’s own Jeffrey Dvorkin, who is quite familiar with media in the digital age.
When discussing the topic of security in today's society, he recounted a time when he began his class by asking the following question: How many people in the room have a Gmail account? When every single hand went up, he announced that, “Google now knows everything about you.”
This isn’t necessarily a surprising statement though. There are countless times when I’ve mentioned needing a product out loud and suddenly, I come across an ad for it on Instagram. Sure, it is startling, but like anything, we get used to it and it becomes less surprising and more normal. And that’s exactly why it’s such a problem.
It’s so easy to just brush off this new way of living with the comfort that we haven’t committed any crimes or partaken in illegal activities. I comfort myself by thinking “Why should I care if Google has my data? I live a boring life, they can’t gather anything against me.”
“But the principle of privacy in the digital age is gone.” Dvokrin says. “There is no privacy.”
Dvokrin himself has experienced a violation of his privacy when covering the Somalia Affair in the 90’s. What was supposed to be kept under wraps due to the horrific behaviour of the Canadian military was leaked and Dvorkin found himself cautiously putting together a story that deserved to be told. Unfortunately, this led to his privacy being breached when he discovered his phone line was tapped by the Canadian Military. What’s worse is that it was completely legal for the military to do so without a warrant. To fix this, Dvokrin filed a formal complaint that resulted in the law being changed.
Who knows how that situation could have gone differently had the Citizen Lab already been formed at that time.
Art by Wired
The Citizen Lab holds an extreme level of importance in today’s day in age. Through their work and reports, everyday people are able to recognize what is happening behind the scenes and how we shouldn’t take everything at face value.
“That’s the value of having something like the citizen lab,” Dvorkin says. “[They are] willing to talk about who is bending the law and occasionally breaking the law in making these kinds of illegitimate inquiries on citizens.”
Dvorkin’s own research on media in the digital age relates heavily to the Citizen Lab’s mission. He emphasises the importance of, “how should the public regard things they hear, see, read in the media that may be too good to be true. How do we develop a better sense of suspiciousness and be more critical?”
He continues, saying, “To me, the value of Citizen Lab is it is promoting this healthy, skeptical inquiry”
So here we are, living in a “surveillance culture” with the Citizen Lab as our hacker guardian angels, and yet, we still don’t know anything about them.
Art by Harvard Business Review
For an organization that spends its time ensuring our safety in a world without privacy, they work in the shadows. In fact, I had never even heard of the Citizen Lab until I had begun conducting research for this article.
“They’re not big on publicizing their discoveries,” Dvorkin points out. “And I think that they may need to become more open about who they are and what they’re doing”
It’s almost paradoxical how the Citizen Lab conducts some of the most important research and yet remains under the radar. Perhaps this is to reduce the risk of their work being compromised or eliminate any biases. Maybe they simply want to remain a mystery to the public eye.
It begs the question of whether the world would benefit more if they were in the spotlight, or maybe laying low is the right choice. Whatever the reason, the Citizen Lab is doing its part to combat the lack of privacy in the world. Issues like hacking, spying, data breaches and information collecting are apparent in our society, and although the Citizen Lab is protecting us, I think we should also educate ourselves on digital safety and media in the digital age.