Tracking the Insidious Creep of Spyware

An interview with The Citizens Lab’s Ronald Deibert on 'Chasing Shadows,' his penetrating account of spyware scandals rocking governments around the world

Ronald Deibert, top sleuth and boss at The Citizens Lab

Edward Snowden and Ronald Deibert wouldn’t seem, on the surface, to have much in common.

Snowden, of course, is the notorious government contractor who leaked massive files of highly classified documents about NSA surveillance, fled to Russia and was widely denounced as a traitor at last week’s Senate Intelligence Committee hearing. 

Deibert, on the other hand, is a mild mannered Canadian academic who runs a Toronto-based cyber research group that, he hastens to emphasize, has “certainly” never disclosed any secret documents.

Yet, they have both played central roles in a running and often rancorous debate over government surveillance that has rattled spy agencies around the globe. Snowden, for better or worse, disclosed documents about NSA snooping that triggered a national debate about privacy and civil liberties. But the largely unheralded Deibert, through painstaking forensic investigations, has exposed abuses that are arguably far more sinister than anything Snowden revealed: In effect, he has uncovered a thriving industry of commercial spyware—developed by Israel’s super secret signals intelligence branch, Unit 8200, and sold to security services and law enforcement agencies around the world—that has been used to harass, suppress, and arrest political dissenters and rivals, triggering Watergate-like scandals in multiple countries.