Selected audio excerpts from Ron Deibert's* lecture "The New Geopolitics of the Internet," Radars and Fences conference, New York University, 07/04/2008.
The Citizen Lab
"On the research side the main project we have been engaged [at the Citizen Lab] is a collaborative project with Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge Universities called the OpenNet Initiative. The purpose of that project is to document patterns of internet censorship and surveillance worldwide. The second project is a development project. There is a piece of software that we created called psiphon that was released last year, and it helps people get around internet censorship..."
The OpenNet Initiative
"The OpenNet Initiative started in 2002 when a group of us got together who shared the same concerns that there was a lot going on beneath the surface of the internet that wasn't being analyzed by researchers. States especially were intervening in the internet environment, this was shrouded in secrecy... [The ONI] is a unique collaboration, a partnership among four universities [Toronto, Oxford, Harvard, and Cambridge]. When we started out each filled a different functional role..."
Civil Society Counter-Intelligence
"We have 80 researchers running tests in 71 countries on each of the main ISPs in those countries... This all model is deliberately borrowed from national intelligence methods. First of all the combination of technical intelligence and human intelligence, the compartimentalization of knowledge. For example, standing at the apex of this operation I don't know personally many of the testers who would research for us in some of the risky countries, and that's deliberate in order to protect them and vice versa... We are in essence a global civil society counter-intelligence operation..."
Psiphon
[With psiphon] we wanted to create a circumvention system that was easy to use, hard to find... difficult to block. The way we did this was by capitalizing on social networks of trust. We realized that there are these tremendous ethnic diaspora communities that span across censored and uncensored countries, that are already communicating with each other through electronic means... We released psiphon last year as a free and open source tool and there have at least 150,000 nodes that have been downloaded since last year..."
"There is an arms race in cyberspace going on. States are developing very effective and offensive means to take down sources of information that they find strategically threatening, and this is opening up a very dangerous frontier in my opinion... The notion of arms race is very important because it makes us think on how to have arms control in cyberspace..."
* Ron Deibert is the Director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and the principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative, a partnership among the universities of Toronto, Oxford, Harvard and Cambridge.