A new Snowden leak reported on the CBC reveals that secretive Canadian spy-agency CSEC was illegally spying on Canadians by collecting information from the free Wifi service in major airports and cross-referencing it with intercepted information from Wifi at cafes, libraries and other public places in Canada. — Read the rest

As American telcoms operators take up the practice of publishing transparency reports showing how many law-enforcement requests they receive, Canadian activists are wondering why Canada's telcoms sector hasn't followed suit. Citizen Lab, whose excellent work at the University of Toronto is documented in lab leader Ron Deibert's must-read book Black Code, has issued public letters addressed to the nation's phone companies and ISPs, formally requesting that they publish aggregate statistics on law-enforcement requests.

I reviewed Ronald Diebert's new book Black Code in this weekend's edition of the Globe and Mail. Diebert runs the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and has been instrumental in several high-profile reports that outed government spying (like Chinese hackers who compromised the Dalai Lama's computer and turned it into a covert CCTV) and massive criminal hacks (like the Koobface extortion racket). — Read the rest

The Ontario Teachers Pension Plan (OTPP) has joined a private equity consortium that acquired the notorious Internet surveillance company BlueCoat, yoking teachers' retirement security to the fortunes of a company that has systematically assisted some of the world's most brutal dictatorships to censor and surveil their citizenry. — Read the rest

The CBC's SearchEngine podcast delved into the GhostNet story that broke yesterday, in which the University of Toronto's CitizenLab discovered and revealed a spy-ring (apparently of Chinese origin) that was gathering intelligence from sensitive government, military and NGO computers in over 100 countries. — Read the rest

Earlier today I received my first-ever bona fide piece of fake-Tibetan malware, which appears to have originated in China.

Perhaps my name is on some list somewhere of journalists who've covered stories related to the Tibetan human rights movement.

Screengrab at left, and click for larger size which shows the message in entirety. — Read the rest

The Citizen Lab has a new anti-censorware guide, "Everyone's Guide to By-Passing Internet Censorship for Citizens Worldwide." The 31-page PDF covers a lot of ground, with material for anti-censorware activists and users, and is very handsomely put together.

Circumvention and anonymity are different.

Internet censorship tech-expert Nart Villeneuve reports that Skype's Chinese client (distributed by China-based provider TOM Online) installs censorware on the user's computer without telling. An important point: the international version of Skype available at Skype.com does not include the censorware. Nart says:

Skype's partner in China, Tom Online, has implemented filtering of Skype's text chat for Chinese users.

Reporters Without Borders reports that the communications division of Uganda's government has imposed "mandatory filtering" against a Ugandan news radio station's website. The case is the first known incident of government censorship of the internet in Uganda, and occurred days before presidential and parliamentary elections on February 23rd. — Read the rest