Ron Deibert is a political science professor and director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. The Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary research and development laboratory working at the intersection of the Internet, global security, and human rights.

Deibert was  a co-founder and a principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative and Information Warfare Monitor (2003-2012) projects, and the author of Black Code: Surveillance, Privacy, and the Dark Side of the Internet (Random House: 2013).  He was one of the founders of Psiphon, one of the world’s leading Internet censorship circumvention applications.

Deibert is an accomplished author who has has published numerous articles, chapters, and books on issues related to technology, media, and world politics. The Citizen Lab’s work on digital security and human rights is world renowned.  Its reports are routinely the subject of front page news coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other major media.  

He was named one of Esquire Magazine’s “Best and Brightest List of 2007, and in 2010, he was listed among SC Magazine’s top “IT Security Luminaries.” In 2013, he was appointed to 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.”

Watch Deibert and his colleagues discuss digital threats to civil society activists at the Eighth Assembly.