Ronald Deibert

As Director of the Citizen Lab, Deibert has overseen and been a contributing author to more than 120 reports covering path breaking research on cyber espionage, commercial spyware, Internet censorship, and human rights. These reports include the landmark Tracking Ghostnet report (which uncovered an espionage operation that infiltrated the computer networks of hundreds of government offices, NGOs, and other organizations, including those of the Dalai Lama), China’s Great Cannon (an offensive tool used to hijack digital traffic through Distributed Denial of Service attacks), the Kingdom Came to Canada (an investigation of a Canadian permanent resident, Saudi dissident, and Khashoggi colleague who was targeted with commercial spyware), and the Reckless Series (an investigation into the abuse of commercial spyware to target journalists, anti-corruption advocates, and public health officials in Mexico). These reports have been cited widely in global media, garnering 25 front page exclusives in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other leading outlets, and have been cited by policymakers, academics, and civil society as foundational to the understanding of digital technologies, human rights, and global security.

In recognition of his own work or that of the Citizen Lab, Deibert has been awarded the University of Toronto's President's Impact Award (2017), Foreign Policy's Global Thinker Award (2017), 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), the Carolyn Tuohy Award for Public Policy (2010), the Northrop Frye Distinguished Teaching and Research Award (2003), and the University of Toronto Outstanding Teaching Award (2002). He was a Ford Foundation research scholar of information and communication technologies (2002–2004). In 2019, he received an honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Guelph.

He was named a Global Thinker by Foreign Policy (2017), one of Motherboard website's "Humans of the Year" (2017), listed among SC Magazine's top "IT Security Luminaries" (2010), and Esquire magazine's Best and Brightest List of 2007.

In 2013, he was made a Member of 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.”

He is a co-editor of three major volumes with MIT Press: Access Denied: The practice and policy of Internet Filtering (2008), Access Controlled: The shaping of power, rights, and rule in cyberspace (2010), and Access Contested: Security, Identity, and Resistance in Asian Cyberspace (2011). He is the author of Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia: Communications in World Order Transformation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) and Black Code: Surveillance, Privacy, and the Dark Side of the Internet, published in May 2013 by Penguin Random House and turned into a feature-length documentary by Nick De Pencier in 2017.

Ronald J. Deibert OOnt (born 1964) is a Canadian professor of political science and director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. The Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary laboratory focusing on research, development, and high-level strategic policy and legal engagement at the intersection of information and communication technologies, human rights, and global security. He is a co-founder and a principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative and Information Warfare Monitor projects. Deibert was one of the founders and former VP of global policy and outreach for Psiphon.