In April 2025, Ronald Deibert left all his electronic devices at home in Toronto and boarded a plane. After landing in Illinois, he took a taxi to the mall and headed straight to the Apple Store to buy a new laptop and iPhone. He wanted to minimize the risk of his personal devices being confiscated because he knew his job made him a prime target for surveillance. “I travel believing I'm being watched, right up to where I am at any given moment,” Deibert says.
Deibert runs Citizen Lab, a think tank he founded in 2001 that serves as “counterintelligence for civil society.” The laboratory, located at the University of Toronto, operates independently of governments or corporate interests, relying instead on research grants and private philanthropy for financial support. It is one of the few agencies that investigates cyber threats solely in the public interest, and in doing so it has identified some of the most egregious digital abuses of the last two decades.
For many years, Deibert and his colleagues considered the United States to be the standard of liberal democracy. But that's changing, he says: “The foundations of democracy in the United States are under attack. For many decades, despite their shortcomings, they have adhered to norms about what constitutional democracy looks like or what it should strive for.” [That] is now under threat.”
Even though some of his fellow Canadians avoided traveling to the US after Donald Trump's second election, Deibert relished the opportunity to visit the country. In addition to meeting with human rights activists, he also documented active surveillance at Columbia University at the height of student protests. Deibert photographed drones over campus and noted the exceptionally strict safety protocols. “It was unusual to go to the United States,” he says. “But I really gravitate towards worldly problems.”
Deibert, 61, grew up in East Vancouver, British Columbia, a tough area with a vibrant counterculture presence. Vancouver was full of draft dodgers and hippies in the '70s, but Deibert points to American investigative journalism – the COINTELPRO surveillance program expose, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate – as the seeds of his respect for anti-establishment sentiment. However, he did not imagine that this hobby would develop into a career.
“My outlook was quite low because I came from a working-class family and there weren’t many people in my family—nobody, in fact—who went to university,” he says.
Deibert eventually enrolled in graduate school in international relations at the University of British Columbia. His doctoral dissertation led him to an area of research that would soon explode: the geopolitical implications of the nascent Internet.
“In my field, a few people started talking about the Internet, but it was very superficial, and that upset me,” he says. “Meanwhile, computer science was very technical, but not political…[politics] it was almost like a dirty word.”
Deibert continued to explore these topics at the University of Toronto when he was appointed to a tenured professorship, but it was not until he founded Citizen Lab in 2001 that his work gained international renown.
With the 2009 “Tracking GhostNet” report that made the lab famous, Deibert said it uncovered a digital espionage network in China that hacked the offices of foreign embassies and diplomats in more than 100 countries, including the office of the Dalai Lama. This report and its follow-up in 2010 were among the first to publicly expose real-time cyber surveillance. Over the years, the lab has published more than 180 such analyses, drawing praise from human rights activists ranging from Margaret Atwood to Edward Snowden.
The lab has extensively researched authoritarian regimes around the world (Deibert says both Russia and China have his name on a “list” banning his entry). The group was the first to uncover the use of commercial spyware to spy on people close to the Saudi dissident and Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi before his murder, and his research directly informed G7 and UN resolutions on digital repression and led to sanctions on spyware providers. Despite this, in 2025, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement renewed its $2 million contract with spyware provider Paragon. The contract, which the Biden administration previously put on hold, is reminiscent of steps taken by European and Israeli governments that have also used domestic spyware to address security concerns.
“It literally saves lives,” Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said of the lab’s work. “Civil Laboratory” [researchers] were the first to truly focus on technical attacks on human rights and democracy activists around the world. And they're still the best at it.”
In recruiting Citizen Lab's new employees (or “lubbers” as they call each other), Deibert ditches boring, obsessive scientists in favor of brilliant, colorful individuals, many of whom have personally experienced repression at the hands of some of the same regimes the lab is now investigating.
Noura Aljizawi, a researcher of digital repression and a survivor of torture at the hands of the Assad regime in Syria, examines the clear threat that digital technologies pose to women and gay people, especially when used against citizens in exile. She helped create Security Plannera tool that provides personalized, peer-reviewed recommendations for people looking to improve their digital hygiene, for which the University of Toronto awarded it the Excellence through Innovation Award.
Working in a laboratory is risky. For example, Citizen Lab employee Elis Campo was followed and photographed after the lab published a report in 2022 that revealed digital surveillance of dozens of Catalan citizens and members of parliament, including four Catalan presidents, who were targeted during or after their terms of office.
However, Deibert said the lab's reputation and mission make recruiting much easier. “This good job attracts a certain type of person,” he says. “But they're also usually drawn to the investigation. It's detective work, and it can be very intoxicating and even addictive.”
Deibert often turns his attention to his Lubbers colleagues. He rarely discusses the group's accomplishments without mentioning the two senior researchers, Bill Marczak and John Scott-Railton, and other collaborators. And in the event that someone decides to leave Citizen Lab for another position, that appreciation continues.
“We have a saying: once a lubber, always a lubber,” says Deibert.
While in the US, Deibert gave a seminar on the work of the Citizen Lab to students at Northwestern University and gave talks on digital authoritarianism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Universities in the US have been subject to funding cuts and increased scrutiny by the Trump administration, and Deibert wanted to be “in the know” about such institutions to respond to what he sees as encroachment on the authoritarian practices of the US government.
Since Deibert's return to Canada, the lab has continued its work identifying digital threats to civil society around the world, but now Deibert must also contend with the United States, a country that was once his benchmark for democracy but has become another focus of his attention. “I don’t believe an institution like Citizen Lab could exist right now in the United States,” he says. “The type of research we started is under threat like never before.”
He is particularly alarmed by the growing pressure facing federal regulators and academic institutions in the United States. In September, for example, the Trump administration defunded the Inspector General's Council on Integrity and Efficiency, a government organization dedicated to preventing waste, fraud and abuse in federal agencies, citing partisan concerns. The White House has also threatened to freeze federal funding for universities that fail to comply with administration directives related to gender, DEI and speech on campus. Such actions, according to Deibert, undermine the independence of watchdog bodies and research groups such as Citizen Lab.
Cohn, the EFF director, says the lab's location in Canada allows it to avoid many of these attacks on accountability institutions. “Having a Citizen Lab based in Toronto that can continue to operate largely independently of what we see in the U.S.,” she says, “could be extremely important if we are going to return to a land of the rule of law and the protection of human rights and freedoms.”
Finian Hazen is a journalism and political science student at Northwestern University.
