Ron Deibert (2:37)

We have a cancer within, close to the presidency that's growing.

Dina Temple Raston (2:44)

And he came to the realization that systems don't always erase the truth. Sometimes they just bury it.

Ron Deibert (2:50)

Because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook.

Dina Temple Raston (2:56)

An understanding that would come to define his life's work, because in a sense, Ron actually was built to fight these kinds of things. It stirred something in him, something he learned on the streets of Vancouver.

Ron Deibert (3:09)

I witnessed bullying and intimidation firsthand growing up. I know what it's like. I don't like bullies. I especially don't like bullies, getting away with things and hurting innocent people.

Dina Temple Raston (3:22)

He couldn't have predicted just how important that street sensibility would become for him. I'm Dena Temple Raston and this is Click Here. We tell true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world and today Ron Deibert and the birth of one of the most celebrated Internet watchdog groups in the world. And we look back at the digital world we were promised and the one we actually got.

Ron Deibert (3:52)

You know, there have been great strides made in raising awareness about security risks and some amazing new tools to better communicate securely, like Signal. But against all of that, honestly, it's like we're living in a Philip K. Dick novel.

Dina Temple Raston (4:11)

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Ron Deibert (7:11)

I just was blown away. Reading philosophy, reading history. There's this whole world that was opened up to me.

Dina Temple Raston (7:18)

So he was on track to study Soviet politics, Even planning a Ph.D. when fate intervened, or rather a mentor did. The Cold war is over, he told Ron, so you should probably find a new specialty.

Ron Deibert (7:35)

And he very sagely said, you know, no one's looking at the way he phrased it was the telecommunications revolution. And a light bulb just went off.

Dina Temple Raston (7:46)

It wasn't a turn away from politics that as much as it was moving toward the things starting to shape it. Technology. This was the early 1990s. The Internet was still in the public imagination, at least this boundless utopian space.

Ron Deibert (8:02)

Have you ever borrowed a book from thousands of miles away? The enthusiasm around the Internet was very contagious, and I was caught up in it, too. Across the country, gesture ahead without stopping for directions was one story after another about all of these dramatic improvements in how we access information and communicate with each other. Something that was oriented towards more freedom, more democracy. Serious people were talking about it in that way. It'll be impossible for authoritarian regimes to withstand this, you know, tsunami of information.

Dina Temple Raston (8:49)

But Rowan wasn't so sure. He had a sneaking suspicion governments would one day use this technology against their own people. And an idea sprouted. If governments might one day use technology to watch citizens, why couldn't he turn that around and use that same technology to watch governments right back?

Ron Deibert (9:10)

This is a model that could be appropriated by citizens, by scientists, by even academics to watch what governments are doing and hold them accountable. Let's find out what's going on beneath the surface of the Internet that citizens need to know about.

Dina Temple Raston (9:34)

By then, ron had his PhD. He was teaching at the University of Toronto. And as he went around campus, he started keeping an eye out for a place to set up shop and start working on his idea, somewhere where he'd go unnoticed.

Ron Deibert (9:49)

So I identified a building that was under construction, and I actually smuggled myself in while it was under construction and identified a small basement space.

Dina Temple Raston (10:01)

Every detective has an origin story. For Ron, it started in a basement. He called it their little hacker hothouse. And his first hire, a fellow East Vancouver native named Nart Villeneuve, also a

Ron Deibert (10:16)

bit of a street kid himself, had no computer science training, was a self

Dina Temple Raston (10:21)

taught hacker, a guy who loved computers so much, he didn't even consider this a job.

Ron Deibert (10:27)

I found out from our payroll office that many months had gone by and he had not submitted his timesheet to get paid. He told me he couldn't actually believe that someone was paying him to do the work that he was doing, which he would have gladly done for free.

Dina Temple Raston (10:48)

As Ron and Nart sat in that basement blasting heavy metal, Ron's idea began to take shape. What if this could be more than just a hangout? What if it became a research center? One focused on how power uses to technology to watch, to track, and sometimes to silence. And it wasn't just governments, but corporations and the ultra wealthy. Eventually, Ron gave it a name, the Citizen Lab. It turns out Nart had a special gift for this work because he could move through systems without being noticed. All on his own. He'd figured out a way to connect to computers in China and browse the Internet as if he were inside the country without China knowing.

Ron Deibert (11:33)

Something that we do now routinely in the Citizen Lab. But it was the first time I had seen this presented. And what he was doing there was trying to cross check, you know, what web content is being blocked by China.

Dina Temple Raston (11:47)

And inside China's networks, they found exactly what Ron had suspected so many years ago. A government using technology to crack down on ordinary people, not just at home, but abroad as well. Then Nart started poking around in the networks of other authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia and Iran. And he found the same thing there. They began publishing reports about what they discovered, often things that no one had ever seen before. So people started to watch for whatever the Citizen Lab would uncover next. Which could explain why in 2008, Ron got an unexpected call from a researcher,

Ron Deibert (12:26)

a person named Greg Walton, who worked

Dina Temple Raston (12:30)

with activists and NGOs in Tibet. Greg said this weird thing was happening. The activists in Tibet were being flooded with computer viruses.

Ron Deibert (12:39)

Simultaneously, people in those communities were occasionally being arrested. And it seemed like authorities knew in advance that things that they were planning and doing, suggesting that they were under surveillance.

Dina Temple Raston (12:53)

So Ron's team flew to India to meet with the activists.

Ron Deibert (12:56)

And then, with their consent, we effectively wiretapped their machines.

Dina Temple Raston (13:04)

They saw what Greg had been reporting unfold in real time, and it confirmed an alarming truth, that someone had hacked into the Dalai Lama's computers and was spying on them. At first, it wasn't clear how far the operation reached, but then they stumbled onto a little glitch in the code. The hackers had left a clue, a big one.

Ron Deibert (13:26)

They had left a directory wide open, allowing us to see this very well organized spreadsheet that they maintained online of all of the victims that they had compromised.

Dina Temple Raston (13:43)

This is a moment tech detectives dream about, like finding the notebook of a serial burglar. Not just listing every break in, but carefully explaining how each one of them was done. And what they found inside that spreadsheet shocked them. There were IP addresses for some 1300 computers in 103 different countries, many of them systematically compromised by, it turns out,

Ron Deibert (14:09)

the Chinese government, ministries of foreign affairs, diplomatic missions, ASEAN banks. We were looking over the shoulders of spies who were involved in a global cyber espionage campaign. Pena was truly the first of its kind.

Dina Temple Raston (14:29)

Ron had founded the Citizen Lab for exactly this kind of moment. Still, even he hadn't imagined anything on this scale.

Ron Deibert (14:37)

We just looked at each other like, what the hell? What do we do with this? This is unbelievable.

Dina Temple Raston (14:46)

So they wrote a report and then went back to work. Or at least they tried to.

Ron Deibert (14:51)

Well, when the day of that report came out, journalists flooded to the university. There were trucks parked outside of the building. I remember walking up to the lab that morning and seeing, thinking as I'm walking, geez, I wonder what's going on here today? And it was you and it was us. Yeah, we were the biggest story in the world that day.

Dina Temple Raston (15:13)

Their little basement lab was on the front page of the New York Times. And the thing Ron had long suspected about the Internet, the rest of the world began to understand too.

Ron Deibert (15:23)

You know, a lot of smart people said, wow, I had no idea that this could happen, that my computer, which I see as a window to the world, could also, in the very next minute, be looking back at me.

Dina Temple Raston (15:37)

For some, though, Citizen Lab was a little too effective. When we come back, it turns out that they weren't just making headlines, they were making enemies, too.

Ron Deibert (15:50)

This is the same for any investigative journalist who antagonizes powerful people. There are going to be consequences. And maybe I didn't fully anticipate where that would come from.

Dina Temple Raston (16:04)

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Dina Temple Raston (19:35)

You're listening to click here, I'm dina templerest. In the back of his mind, Ron expected his work would make him some enemies. These days, he can't step foot in China. And lots of other governments, the Saudis and the Jordanians, just to name two, aren't that happy with his team's research either. But what he didn't necessarily anticipate was how uncomfortable he would make democratic governments. Because surveillance isn't just an authoritarian habit, it's a modern one. Every government leverages technology to watch people in the name of security, efficiency, or order. What made the Citizen Lab different was that Ron and his team were turning the lens around. They were putting power itself on notice.

Ron Deibert (20:27)

I'm sure that went through their mind. If we are to believe what diebert is saying, we might be next.

Dina Temple Raston (20:38)

And over the next few years, Ron and his crew made a lot more people in power nervous.

Ron Deibert (20:43)

How truly free is the Internet?

Dina Temple Raston (20:45)

Computer researchers in Canada have created what

Ron Deibert (20:48)

some say is the most advanced tool

Dina Temple Raston (20:50)

yet in helping Internet. It's called Siphon. It's a software program that's been created by university researchers in Toronto.

Recorded Future Advertiser (20:56)

Basement computer lab at the University of Toronto.

Dina Temple Raston (21:00)

The citizen lab would go on to expose hacking campaigns targeting dissidents, journalists, lawyers, teachers, governments, corporations, intelligence agencies. No one seemed to be off limits. And then, in 2016, Ron and his team stumbled on something darker. It was one of the most sophisticated and nefarious spyware programs ever created. It began quietly with a single suspicious text message sent to a human rights activist named Ahmed Mansoor in the United Arab Emirates.

Ron Deibert (21:33)

He received a text message on his iPhone that contained a link. Instead of clicking on that, he shared it with Bill Marsak, the lead technical researcher in the Citizen Lab, who set up a system in the lab that allowed him to capture all of those ingredients, including Pegasus.

Dina Temple Raston (21:55)

Pegasus, A powerful piece of spyware sold by an Israeli company called NSO Group. At the time, Pegasus wasn't widely known. But as Ron's team began to take it apart, they realized this wasn't just another hacking tool. This was an escalation. The digital equivalent of going from conventional weapons to nuclear. Most early spyware relied on human error. You click a link, you answer a text, you open the door yourself. Pegasus didn't need that. It could infect a phone without the user doing anything at all. No tap, no click, no warning. And then just take the device over. It can turn on the microphone. Even when you're not using a phone call, just record what you're doing in the room. It can turn on your camera, it can record what's on your screen? NSO had been marketing Pegasus to governments as a very stealthy, high tech way to battle cartels or track terrorists. But the Citizen Lab found that they were using it to target good guys like that activist as well.

Ron Deibert (23:03)

And so that was August 2016. That was the first time we encountered it.

Dina Temple Raston (23:08)

You went out with a report about NSO a short time later?

Ron Deibert (23:11)

Yes. The Million Dollar Dissident report was the first ever report on Pegasus.

Dina Temple Raston (23:19)

People started bringing their phones to the Citizen Lab to get them checked for spyware. And then in 2021, it even got the attention of the White House. Former President Joe Biden announced he was putting NSO Group on a federal blacklist. He signed an executive order to restrict the use of commercial Spyware by the

Ron Deibert (23:37)

U.S. all of those things that you hope would come out of your research were starting to happen, and I just couldn't believe that there were these outcomes. An executive order being put out there by President Biden on commercial spyware. Phenomenal. This is like the Holy grail.

Dina Temple Raston (24:00)

But his celebration didn't last long. Ron says he's increasingly concerned about what he's hearing from the Trump administration. There are new reports that ICE has reactivated a contract with a spyware company called Paragon Solutions, a contract Biden had previously paused. Federal officers rounding up illegal immigrants are using a facial recognition app to try to identify them. For Ron, the concern isn't just these surveillance tools. It's what it a growing willingness to normalize powerful commercial surveillance technologies, not just for national security, but for everyday law enforcement.

Ron Deibert (24:42)

You know, there have been great strides made in raising awareness about security risks and people, you know, documenting Internet censorship and surveillance and cyber espionage. But the very mission that we set up for ourselves, to act as a counterintelligence for civil society, I think that mission is now at the greatest risk that it's ever been in the last 23 years that we've been around. I could very well foresee aggressive litigation efforts coming at us and other groups to try to shut us down.

Dina Temple Raston (25:17)

But Ron's concern doesn't stop just with the Citizen Lab or even with the United States. He's worried about the signal this sends globally.

Ron Deibert (25:26)

All of the gains that we've made are almost certainly now at risk. But there'll be ripple consequences as well throughout the world because of his behavior. It's going to open up the opportunity for oligarchs and dictators around the world to model themselves on that behavior.

Dina Temple Raston (25:44)

In other words, what happens here doesn't stay here. He and I talked before, federal officers had killed two American protesters in Minneapolis, but it felt like he saw it coming.

Ron Deibert (25:57)

We're in for a very dark period, so you know our mission now. It takes on a new meaning in this current environment. We've got a lot of work to do.

Dina Temple Raston (26:08)

That work doesn't start in labs or courtrooms. It starts with the rest of us paying attention. This is Click Here. If you want to learn more about Ron Deibert and the Citizen Lab, check out his latest book, Chasing Shadows, Cyber Espionage, Subversion, and the Global Fight for Democracy. It's now out in paperback. Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News and prx. Today's show was written and produced by Megan Dietrich, Sean Powers, Erica Gaeda, Zach Hirsch and Casey Giorgi. It was edited by Karen Duffin and Sarah Covedo and Fact Checked by Darren Ancrum. Original music is by Ben Levingston with additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley, our illustrator is Megan Gough, and our sound designers and engineers are Jake Cook and Jesse Niswonger. I'm Dina Temple Raston and thanks for listening.

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Museums are more than places we visit on a field trip across the country. Museums protect our shared history, care for wildlife and collections, strengthen local economies, support job training, and spark curiosity in people of all ages. Right now, you can help make sure museums stay strong for future generations. Museum Advocacy Day is a national moment when people contact Congress to ask for continued support for museums and the federal agencies that fund them. Learn how to take action@aam-us.org and tell your representatives that museums matter to education, to communities, to the economy, and to our democracy.

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