Hackers accessing your webcam and reading your emails isn't just fiction in today's exposed age of cyber espionage. They're real threats that Ronald J. Deibert and his team work tirelessly to expose.
Deibert is this year's recipient of the Simon Fraser University's Nora and Ted Sterling Prize in Support of Controversy, in recognition of his ongoing battle at the intersection of global security, digital technologies and human rights, and for his counterintelligence work on behalf of civil society.
Photo: Ronald J. Deibert
The founder and director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, Deibert heads a team of digital detectives who expose cyber espionage and uncover threats to human rights in the digital space and hold governments and corporations accountable for their unethical use of information technology.
"I'm very honored to receive this," says Deibert. "It's always good to get recognition for your work, but especially where it's meant to identify people who are doing things that are provocative, that are meant to speak to powerful actors in an unvarnished way and take risks on as part of the research."
Deibert and the Citizen Lab detectives work on behalf of citizens to help better understand information technology threats to individuals and groups, like human rights activists.
"The usual reaction I get when I give a public presentation is that afterwards people say they want to throw their phones in the ocean and never use them again," Deibert says.
"I'm not exaggerating when I say there really is no defense right now. The level of sophistication of some of the most advanced surveillance technologies … allow them to do just about anything when it comes to tracking a person."
The work is rewarding, Deibert adds, but can be unnerving, due to their success exposing bad actors around the world.
"You can't do this type of work exposing cyberespionage by some of the world's most powerful autocratic governments and not have a danger component to it," says Deibert, who was born and raised in East Vancouver. "We engage with at-risk people all over the world. And those people are at risk sometimes to the point of being tracked, harassed, and even murdered."
"Ronald Deibert's work epitomizes the kind of issues the Sterling Prize is meant to highlight," says SFU professor David Zandvliet, chair of the Sterling Prize committee. "His work, while innately controversial, challenges complacency around the unethical use of consumer technologies while also speaking 'truth to power.'
"In its deliberations, the award committee noted that this type of research also involved some personal risk for Deibert and his team. As chair of the Sterling Prize committee, I find his work to be both deeply interesting and courageous."
In the quarter decade that the Citizen Lab has been in operation, Deibert has seen an increase in general awareness from the public that governments or companies could use their computers and smart phones to spy on them. But most are shocked when Deibert describes how powerful the technology is.
Even with a brand new, fully updated device, a government can get into the phone without a person knowing, read their emails and messages, turn on their camera and microphone and track their movements. And there is nothing a person can do to prevent it.
"Just about any government anywhere in the world - no matter where you are - can reach across borders and get inside your personal life, find out everything about you. And unless you completely detach electronically, there's no practical way that you can avoid it."
Which is why solutions to abuse of technology must come at a high-level from governments regulating the sector. Through his team's work, Deibert has seen some great success along that front, including going to the White House with his colleagues to brief former President Joe Biden's National Security Council. This led to the Biden administration signing an executive order to regulate commercial spyware.
However, Deibert warns that the current "authoritarian train wreck" in the United States will have awful consequences in his field, especially for at-risk marginalized groups. It will embolden autocrats, despots and dictators, and the companies that serve them, to act with impunity.
"But when bad things are happening in the world, organizations like mine, that's when our mission becomes more important and we have a job to do," says Deibert.
"All of us at the Citizen Lab share a desire to fight back against bullies. And that really motivates me. I hate bullies, I don't like people who are powerful, picking on smaller people who are vulnerable. And that kind of defines everything that we do."
The 2025 Nora and Ted Sterling Prize in Support of Controversy
SFU strives to create a culture that celebrates robust and vigorous debate within an academic milieu characterized by reason, tolerance, and mutual respect. The Sterling Prize recognizes contributions that explore and help people understand ideas that people disagree on.
