Citizen Lab
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12
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Search complete. 13 mentions across 12 episodes found for "Citizen Lab".
Sep 15, 2026
Lena RieckeGUEST
It's really difficult to identify and detect when it is present on your device.
Lena RieckeGUEST
Overall, I think Ron Deibert, he's the director of Citizen Lab, which is an organization that has done a lot of work in this space for many years.
Lena RieckeGUEST
He puts it quite aptly when he says, commercial spyware is to surveillance really what nuclear weapons were to weapons of mass destruction.
Lena RieckeGUEST
It's a new grade of surveillance and intelligence collection capability with potentially devastating effects for national and international security, as well as the protection of human rights and fundamental democratic principles.
speaker_1HOST
It does.
speaker_1HOST
According to 2023 research by Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, Sogo has a user base of more than 455 million people a month.
speaker_0HOST
That's huge.
speaker_1HOST
Across Windows, Android, iOS, they command roughly 70% of the Chinese input method market.
Patrick GrayHOST
Uh, we've seen Pegasus and another, uh, spyware variant called NovaSpy, uh, pop up on the devices of Serbian activists.
Patrick GrayHOST
This, uh, I think 14 people, uh, in total, according to the Citizen Lab, uh, and this has included a member of parliament and whatnot.
Patrick GrayHOST
The European, uh, some members of the European Parliament have called to, uh, for the, for a slowdown in, uh, Serbia's, uh, entry to the EU over this, so it has actually turned into a pretty bi- big political issue.
Patrick GrayHOST
I mean, this is something we'll, uh, track, uh, as it progresses, but, you know, that's a pretty high con- that's a pretty severe consequence for stuff like this happening.
speaker_0HOST
A member of the student protest movement was infected without clicking a link or opening a file, confirming a targeted surveillance campaign.
speaker_0HOST
Citizen Lab traced the iMessage exploit to NSO Group's Pegasus, identifying high confidence indicators of compromise between December 2025 and January 2026.
speaker_0HOST
This incident underscores the escalating use of offensive cyber tools in political repression.
speaker_0HOST
CVE numbers and other details can be found in the links in the show notes.
speaker_0NARRATOR
Serbian student protesters and civil society figures were targeted in a broad spyware campaign that included a zero-click Pegasus infection on an iPhone and a new NoviSpy variant on an Android device.
speaker_0NARRATOR
according to forensic findings from Citizen Lab, Share Foundation and Amnesty Tech.
speaker_0NARRATOR
At least 14 people have been documented as targeted since early 2026, with Apple threat notifications helping expose the operation and reveal a pattern of surveillance tied to Serbia's election cycle.
speaker_0NARRATOR
The case underscores how mercenary spyware is being used against political dissent, raising urgent concerns about privacy, due process and democratic interference.
LiamCORRESPONDENT
There is no evidence, however, that Vucic or the Serbian government have been involved in the cyber attacks, with the country's parliamentary speaker claiming she did not believe the students had been hacked in the first place.
LiamCORRESPONDENT
Canadian spyware analysis group Citizen Lab believes that the students' movement has been intentionally targeted in advance of 2026 elections in attempts to monitor student activity.
LiamCORRESPONDENT
Ara te kawai pūrongo and that's the news.
speaker_20ADVERTISER
A 95 BFM weather update.
LiamCORRESPONDENT
There is no evidence, however, that Vucic or the Serbian government have been involved in the cyber attacks, with the country's parliamentary speaker claiming she did not believe the students had been hacked in the first place.
LiamCORRESPONDENT
Canadian spyware analysis group Citizen Lab believes that the students' movement has been intentionally targeted in advance of 2026 elections in attempts to monitor student activity.
LiamCORRESPONDENT
Ara te kawai pūrongo and that's the news.
speaker_20ADVERTISER
A 95 BFM weather update.
Decoding TrollsHOST
Even verified troves can carry planted forgeries.
Decoding TrollsHOST
The Citizen Lab documented exactly this, a lie seeded in a forest of facts.
Decoding TrollsHOST
And according to great work by empty wheel the um the the steel dossier had apparently been adulterated by um by um by russian uh disinformation so all of its truth bearing content had been um a solid by being tied in with stuff about golden showers and and the rest of it so but a channel whose business is selling insider scarcity which is the telegram channel that published it would withhold the trove whether or not the trove exists hardly and a release shape identical under both hypothesis carries zero evidential weight however i do use the cyber hunter example because it published an inbox which we could confirm that the leak had happened, whereas Black Mirror published, well, they published a legend.
Decoding TrollsHOST
And so the question is, is the spare bank report, and when I use the term spare bank report with quotes, air quotes, scare quotes, I think people call them, So is it disenfocalor? Yes, but the quiet kind.
Rebekah BrownGUEST
But even if it's the exact same data, the kind of the output of it does influence, I think, whether it's viewed as intelligence or whether it's viewed as reporting or academic research.
Rebekah BrownGUEST
And I mean, I currently am a senior researcher at the University of Toronto Citizen Lab.
Rebekah BrownGUEST
And so we do walk that line between what is intelligence, what is academic research, what is reporting meant to inform the public.
Rebekah BrownGUEST
And there are times when the work that we're doing is actually all three.
23 MINS LATER
Rebekah BrownGUEST
And I also think, you know, you talk about cuckoo's egg and people saying, oh, that was threat intelligence, even though we didn't call it that.
Rebekah BrownGUEST
And I think that there are multiple examples throughout history of the work being done, even though we weren't calling it that.
Rebekah BrownGUEST
You know, the GhostNet report that Citizen Lab put out in, what was it, 2008, 2009.
Rebekah BrownGUEST
For me, that was something that I thought was incredibly interesting because It followed all the intelligence processes and it went through the attacks and it pulled in all of the other interdisciplinary research and it put out the judgments and it called out the biases and it called out like, here's the information we don't have.
Dina Temple-RastonHOST
But those are the easy rules, and then there's a whole set of unspoken ones, too, that could be much harder to pin down.
Dina Temple-RastonHOST
A few years back, Jeffrey and his colleagues at the Citizen Lab in Toronto wanted to see just how much censorship occurred on video games coming out of China.
Dina Temple-RastonHOST
So they collected 200 video games and ran the numbers, and what they found was that the game developers in China had taken to creating their own running list of unacceptable words, and there were 180,000 of them.
Dina Temple-RastonHOST
They actually share the list with their competitors.
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