Office Location
MU 254S
Phone Number
416-946-8916
Fax Number
416-946-8915
Email Address
Website
Area Group(s)
- International Relations
Education
- MESc, University of British Columbia
- M.A., Queen's University
- Ph.D., University of British Columbia
Ronald Deibert
Professor
Director, Citizen Lab
Biography
Ronald J. Deibert is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. The Citizen Lab undertakes interdisciplinary research at the intersection of global security, ICTs, and human rights. He is a former founder and principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative (2003-2014) and a founder of Psiphon, a world leader in providing open access to the Internet. Deibert is the author of Black Code: Surveillance, Privacy, and the Dark Side of the Internet (Random House: 2013), Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society (House of Anansi Press: 2020), which was also delivered as the 2020 CBC Massey lectures, as well as numerous books, chapters, articles, and reports on Internet censorship, surveillance, and cyber security. He was one of the authors of the landmark Tracking Ghostnet cyber espionage (2009) and Great Cannon (2015) reports, and co-editor of three major volumes with MIT Press on information controls (the “Access” series). The reports of the Citizen Lab are routinely covered in global media, including 13 separate reports receiving front page exclusive coverage in either the New York Times, Washington Post, Globe and Mail, or Financial Times over the last eight years. He is on the steering committee for the World Movement for Democracy and the board of advisors for Pen Canada. In recognition of his own work or that of the Citizen Lab, he has been awarded the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer award (2015), the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity (2014), the Advancement of Intellectual Freedom in Canada Award from the Canadian Library Association (2014), the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression Vox Libera Award (2010), and the Northrop Frye Distinguished Teaching and Research Award (2003). In 2013, he was appointed to the Order of Ontario and awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee medal, for being “among the first to recognize and take measures to mitigate growing threats to communications rights, openness and security worldwide.”
Research Interests
- Internet Censorship and Surveillance
- Exercise of Power in Cyberspace