TORONTO -- Here in the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, a new breed of hackers is conducting digital espionage.

They are among a growing number of investigators who monitor how traffic is routed through countries, where Web sites are blocked and why it's all happening. Now they are turning their scrutiny to a new weapon of international warfare: cyber attacks.

Tracking wars isn't what many of the researchers, who call themselves "hacktivists," set out to do. Many began intending to help residents in countries that censor online content. But as the Internet has evolved, so has their mission.

Ronald J. Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, calls the organization a "global civil society counterintelligence agency" and refers to the lab as the "NSA of operations."


From the Washington Post
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From CNN

"Some states block access to a wide swathe of content, while others tend to concentrate on one or two narrow baskets. South Korea, for example, tends to block access only to sites related to North Korea," Deibert said.

Although countries such as Iran and China -- home to the 'Great Firewall of China' -- are obvious examples of where filtering is prevalent, other countries are also restricting content for varying reasons.   more »

Two years ago the Citizen Lab released a program called Psiphon, which allows users in countries such as China and Iran to circumvent their governments' Internet censorship. The free software uses computers outside the censoring country - known as proxies - to fetch web pages and send them back over encrypted connections. The technique is also used by a host of other tools, but Deibert says the goal was to make it as user-friendly as possible.

From the Canadian Press

"In terms of the scope and international dimension of this attack, it's a landmark," said Ronald J. Deibert, director of the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab.... "International laws are very poorly developed, so it really crosses a line into murky territory . . . Is an information blockade an act of war?"

From Washington Post

Several projects that I am involved in are bubbling with activity right now. The Information Warfare Monitor Project has been going overtime monitoring the Russia-Georgia cyberwar. We are issuing notices and posting news items as we come across them, and intend on issuing a detailed report soon. Greg Walton, the editor of the IWMP, has been leading up the effort. The OpenNet Initiative is also very actively involved in testing for Internet censorship in China with our researchers in field in several places. You can read about our findings at the ONI blog. Lastly, the psiphon project is in the midst of vigorously developing version 2.0, which we hope to release in the next few months. As we are working on it, we are also actively involved in outreach with psiphon to ensure users in places like China and Georgia are able to access the Internet in an unfettered way.