WWW- The University of Toronto's Citizen Lab is part of a project that has been awarded $3 million US from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to study Internet censoring and filtering worldwide.
The OpenNet Initiative, a joint project among the University of Toronto, Harvard Law School, and Cambridge and Oxford Universities, has been reporting on - and challenging - governmental filtration and surveillance practices since 2003.
"Over the last several years, the OpenNet Initiative's careful and intensive research has put a spotlight on Internet censorship and surveillance practices worldwide, raising serious questions about the transparency and accountability of states and corporations who participate in them," said Professor Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab and one of the OpenNet Initiative's principal investigators. "The McArthur Foundation's support for the project will help to sustain this research in coming years."
The grant will allow for an expansion of the OpenNet's research efforts, including the development of new tools used to map Internet filtering. The initiative will produce an open-access database for researchers to make use of the project's findings, as well as annual reports on states that practise filtering.
"We all read the news reports last week about Google's compromises with China's censorship regime," said Deibert, who holds faculty appointments at U of T in the Department of Political Science and the Knowledge Media Design Institute. "As the number of countries and companies around the world who engage in this type of Internet censorship and surveillance increases, the mission of the OpenNet Initiative will become even more important."
Professor John Palfrey of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, another principal investigator on the project, says the grant will also allow for findings to be translated into policy. "As new information technologies become increasingly important tools for political activism, the Internet has also become a battleground between those who seek to promote freedom of expression and those who aim to restrict it. This grant will put much more information about filtering into the hands of policy-makers, corporate leaders, activists and citizens with a stake in the future of the Internet."
Deibert and Palfrey are joined by two other principal investigators: Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School and Oxford University, and Rafal Rohozinski of the Cambridge Security Programme at Cambridge University.
The Citizen Lab, which is a founding member of the OpenNet Initiative, is housed at U of T's Munk Centre for International Studies. It is an interdisciplinary laboratory focusing on the intersection of digital media and world civic politics with researchers drawn from computer science, political science and peace and conflict studies.
Visit www.opennetinitiative.net/ for more information about the OpenNet Initiative or www.citizenlab.org/ for more information about the Citizen Lab.
