Alex Gillis

U of T students head to Jordan to study iris-scanning ATM initiative for refugees

ullahnor — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 21:55:52 +0000

U of T students head to Jordan to study iris-scanning ATM initiative for refugees

ullahnor Thu, 06/08/2017 - 17:55

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Employees from Cairo Amman Bank showed students how the iris-scanning ATMs work. From left to right, Elizabeth Assefa, Rawan Habanbeh, Adam Sheikh and Dojanah Jaafreh

Alex Gillis

Author legacy

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Global Lens

Joseph Wong

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Getting cash assistance to refugees can often pose a problem for social service organizations, with issues ranging from debit card loss to fraud.

The UNHCR has partnered with Cairo Amman Bank and other organizations to launch the world’s first refugee, cash-assistance program that uses iris-scan technology. A group of students from U of T traveled to northern Jordan to see how iris-scanning ATMs are making it easier for Syrian refugees to access the cash-assistance program.

The trip was part of the Munk School’s Reach Project, an initiative led by Professor Joseph Wong, a political scientist in the Faculty of Arts & Science and associate vice-president and vice-provost, international student experience. The project focuses on researching cases that demonstrate successful delivery of social services to hard-to-reach populations, and the Jordan program is a good example of that.

“A lot of that has to do with giving refugees more autonomy,” says Marin MacLeod, a second-year master's student at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. “Giving cash is more efficient than giving items because refugee families know better than anyone what they need.”

Elizabeth Assefa, a recent graduate from the Munk School of Global Affairs' master's degree program, has also worked with refugees in South Africa. Previous cash-assistance programs that relied on debit cards presented problems, such as card loss and fraud, she said.

The students found that with the iris-scan technology, approximately 95 per cent of cash donations are going directly to refugees.

“It makes it easier and more cost-efficient to identify and transfer the cash to those who are most vulnerable,” Assefa says.

Supported through a partnership with the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth, the Reach Project began in 2015 with students – both grads and undergrads – travelling to Brazil and then to South Africa in 2016. Four trips have been planned this year to India, Thailand, Rwanda and Jordan, where students study best practices that can be used in other settings.

Read about students travelling to India for a Reach Project

Is the world really falling apart? Experts from U of T's Munk School weigh in for CBC's Ideas

geoff.vendeville — Fri, 16 Dec 2016 16:31:27 +0000

Is the world really falling apart? Experts from U of T's Munk School weigh in for CBC's Ideas

geoff.vendeville Fri, 12/16/2016 - 11:31

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Scholars from the Munk Centre debated the fate of the world for a CBC Ideas episode that will be broadcast on Dec. 19. From left to right: Randall Hansen, Janice Stein, Michael Blake, Stephen Toope (photo by Lisa Sakulensky)

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Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Political Science

Global

International

From the murder of activists in Turkey, India and Russia to the racism amplified by Brexit in the UK to the extremism of Trump in the U.S., the world seems to be in deep trouble. The sudden, sharp turn to the far right (or to the “alt right,” as it’s now called) has shaken people in the West to their cores.

How can we understand these global changes? What are the solutions, if any? These were some of the questions that experts tackled at the Munk School of Global Affairs during recent a live taping of a panel discussion for CBC Radio One's Ideas.

On December 19, Ideas will broadcast the episode, called “Reflections on Global Affairs: Is the world really falling apart?” This is the fifth event organized by the Munk School and Ideas, a partnership that began in 2015. Past episodes, broadcast twice a semester, included “Big Data,” “Global Justice,” and “Much Ado about Magna Carta.”

More than a million listeners in Canada and the U.S. tune in to Ideas each week.

Listen to a panel discussion at the Munk Centre about "Big Data" in an episode of CBC Ideas that aired this year

The upcoming discussion focuses on the idea of the “centre,” or “liberal democracy,” falling apart. It also presents the idea of “progress” as a possible hope or solution.

“Things are a mess,” began moderator Stephen Toope, director of the Munk School and an expert on human rights, international dispute resolution and legal theory, during the taping of the event. “Things do seem to be falling apart.” It’s as if anarchy were loosed on the world, he told the live audience of 130 people.

Panellist Janice Gross Stein, founding director of the Munk School and political science professor, disagreed, stating that liberal democracies aren’t falling apart. She argued that swaths of people in Western countries work at precarious jobs, live with “economic anxiety,” and blame globalization and immigration for their economic woes. She explained that elites are benefitting from globalization and other processes while non-elites aren’t. “It’s possible the U.S. election is a correction – a turn to a segment of the population that feels deeply unheard,” she said, citing one example.

“They might feel unheard, but the idea that for the last eight years, nothing was done for them is ridiculous,” countered panellist Randall Hansen, director of the Centre of European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at the Munk School and political science professor. He referred to the multi-billion-dollar bailout of the auto sector, provision of health care for those who had none and to other U.S. policies for those who feel unheard. He argued that never has the straight, white male been more powerful, yet the racists among them have been told that they’re patriotic. “Their anger is absurd,” he said.

Panellist Michael Blake, professor of philosophy, public policy, and governance at the University of Washington, pointed to deeper issues, such as hatred and rage, that go beyond economic and policy debates. “Progress mixes with horrors,” he said during the second half of the discussion, which was about technological and human progress. He added that every great invention, such as the Internet, contains the best and worst of our species.

“We can’t innovate away human weaknesses,” he explained. In the U.S., more people die from toddlers with guns than from terrorists, yet the demonization of Muslims continues, he said.

“People are unashamed of hatred,” he said. We need to examine that, and we need look at words like “fairness” and the rise of racism and the far right. We need to “understand the emotions and attitudes that have given rise to these phenomena in the first place,” he said.

“Reflections on Global Affairs: Is the world really falling apart?” will be broadcast across Canada on Ideas, CBC Radio One on December 19 at 9:05 p.m. (in each time zone), and 9:35 p.m. in Newfoundland. Use the hashtag #MunkIDEAS on Twitter to share your thoughts on the discussion.

Curbing carbon: Toronto can learn from Copenhagen, contends Munk School's Matt Hoffmann

lavende4 — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 15:40:42 +0000

Curbing carbon: Toronto can learn from Copenhagen, contends Munk School's Matt Hoffmann

lavende4 Thu, 09/01/2016 - 11:40

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Copenhagen is a world leader in decreasing reliance on fossil fuels (Photo by Francis Dean/Corbis via Getty Images)

Alex Gillis

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City & Culture

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Environment

Cities

Environment Governance Lab

Critics of bike-lane networks in North American cities can sometimes be heard complaining that Toronto or New York is not Copenhagen. But as Matt Hoffmann, a professor of political science and co-director of the Environment Governance Lab at the Munk School, likes to point out, Denmark’s capital was equally reliant on cars and fossil fuels in the 1960s and 1970s. Now, Copenhagen has pledged to be the first major capital to go carbon neutral, by 2025.

Hoffmann recently spent three months there as part of a five-year project to study transformations towards “decarbonization,” which refers to decreasing the reliance on fossil fuels. He and the lab’s co-director, Steven Bernstein, lead the project’s international team that’s examining about 30 cases of similar initiatives around the world by governments, international organizations and non-governmental groups. As Hoffmann points out, cities like Copenhagen force you to completely re-imagine your own city and visualize a society that moves beyond carbon.

Copenhagen is now a world leader in decreasing its reliance on fossil fuels in every part of the city – they have decreased carbon use in buildings, the energy sector and in transportation systems. “One goal is to generate all electricity through renewable energy sources, and to change institutions and lifestyles – and to transfer those successes to other cities,” says Bernstein, also a professor of political science. “Copenhagen is attempting to re-orient its entire economic base so that it’s sustainable – with low-carbon construction, clean energy, low-carbon living and a deep change in norms and the common sense of what counts as living the good life” Hoffmann says.

Their “Policy Pathways to Decarbonization” project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, focuses on how potential successes like Copenhagen develop and scale up to generate change in other places. A key part of the EGL’s mandate is to understand the trajectories and processes that lead to more sustainable societies.

Hoffman and Bernstein started the EGL three years ago with two goals in mind. First, they wanted to build a research hub within U of T to support projects exploring the challenges of environmental and sustainability governance that do not respect borders. Other projects based in the lab include research on accountability in global environmental governance, led by the Munk School’s Teresa Kramarz and Susan Park at University of Sydney in Australia, and a project on how international institutions work together or at cross purposes in promoting sustainable development. The lab producesworking papers and reports, as well as academic studies, but the directors are keenly aware that there is a crucial ongoing public conversation about climate change and sustainability, and they gear the lab’s activities and workshops to engage beyond academia.

Their second goal is to catalyze community building around environmental governance, internationally and here at U of T. Affiliated faculty include geographers, political scientists and computer scientists, and they come from universities in Canada, the United States, the UK and Sweden. The EGL is also one of 12 research centres of the Earth System Governance network, the world’s largest social science research network in the area of governance and global environmental change.

Closer to home, the EGL hosts brown bag lunches every 2-3 weeks where faculty, graduate students and occasional visitors present works in progress in an informal setting. While the topics are varied, many address transitions to more sustainable societies and disrupting fossil-fuel-based ways of living and seeing the world. “You have to disrupt the common sense that a fossil-fuel-driven economy and energy system is the norm,” Hoffman says.

Reaching the poorest of the poor in South Africa: U of T undergrads

lanthierj — Thu, 04 Aug 2016 17:03:20 +0000

Reaching the poorest of the poor in South Africa: U of T undergrads

lanthierj Thu, 08/04/2016 - 13:03

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Kim Stead (rear left of vehicle) Professor Joseph Wong (front row, left) and students in South Africa (photo by Kourosh Houshmand)

Alex Gillis

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Global Lens

Students

Current Students

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Faculty of Arts & Science

Joseph Wong

This summer, travelling through South Africa with the ��Ƶ's Munk School of Global Affairs, Kim Skead drove past an informal settlement outside of Cape Town.

The recent U of T graduate and four other student-researchers were on their way to meet government workers who were working with some of the poorest communities in the country.

As the students drove past the sheet-metal huts and parched shrubs, Skead found it sobering to witness that much deprivation. She’d been raised in South Africa, and educated in Canada, but the settlement was still a shock.

“How do we alleviate such poverty?” she asked herself. “How do we reach the communities that need it most?”

Skead has a Bachelor of Science in Global Health and Genome Biology and her week-long fieldwork was part of a six-country research project by the Munk School’s Professor Joseph Wong, the Ralph and Roz Halbert Professor of Innovation. Called “Reaching the Hard to Reach,” the project is supported by the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth and focuses on how social services successfully reach communities that need them most.

Read about how the students prepared for 10 months for this trip

The South Africa part of the project was a unique experience for Skead and student-researchers, who focused on how and why South Africa has been so successful in providing birth registration for its citizens. In just 20 years, the country leapfrogged from registering only 20 per cent of its population to registering nearly everyone, providing its citizens with access to health services, education, voting rights and other services.

Skead and her co-researchers conducted 30 research interviews in four cities to reveal the factors that went into this success, interviewing representatives from Lawyers for Human Rights, the Children’s Institute and other groups.

She and Wong explained that one reason for the success was South Africans’ newfound freedom after the end of apartheid. People wanted to be part of a democratic political process and wanted access to government services, which required birth registration.

“What really stood out for us was how the very same mechanisms used to enforce apartheid (registration) became the mechanism to ensure inclusive citizenship,” Wong explained. “It really gave us perspective on the importance of politics and the promise of democracy – and that reach is not only an administrative matter.”

Another reason for the success has been the country’s mobile outreach units and outreach workers travelling to remote areas.

“Success in providing access to health care in rural environments boils down to two things: making resources more readily available and doing the legwork to make citizens aware of – and encouraging them to use – the resources,” added Aditya Rau, another of the five researchers. He’s a recent graduate of U of T’s department of political science.

But the research trip wasn’t without challenges.

“Our first meeting did not go well,” Wong said. “But instead of throwing in the towel, the team regrouped, reworked our interview questions and went at it again. That’s real research, and the student-researchers got to experience that first-hand. They were tenacious, and they hustled, and most importantly they came to appreciate the process.”

Rau says that he learned a great deal when things didn’t go as planned. “Perhaps the most powerful insights we had were when we stopped asking questions and, instead, simply listened,” he says.

For more from Aditya Rau, Kim Skead and the students in the “Reaching the Hard to Reach” project, follow their work on Facebook, Twitter, and www.reachprojectuoft.com. They’ll also post blogs to the Insights section of the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth website.

Reaching the hard to reach: Munk students in South Africa

lavende4 — Mon, 20 Jun 2016 12:56:05 +0000

Reaching the hard to reach: Munk students in South Africa

lavende4 Mon, 06/20/2016 - 08:56

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Children in South Africa: the U of T students are trying to find out why the country is so successful in registering births and how to transplant that success elsewhere (photo by Danny via flickr)

Alex Gillis

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Global Lens

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

South Africa

Global

Joseph Wong

Kourosh Houshmand and four other U of T undergraduates are in South Africa this week for some intense field research into birth registration and human rights.

They’ve been preparing with the Munk School of Global Affairs’ Professor Joseph Wong for 10 months on “Reaching the Hard to Reach,” a research project in six countries, including South Africa, that focuses on how social services can reach the poorest of the poor. Chosen from 140 applicants, the five student-researchers are in South Africa to examine how and why the country’s birth registration was so successful, and more broadly, how that success can be transplanted to other communities. This work has been supported through a partnership with the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth.

“There are people in this world who need help but are invisible, and this study is essentially about how to make them visible,” says Houshmand (left), who’s in his fourth year of study in Ethics, Society and Law and who also runs an international non-profit called Solar for Life and is a recipient of Canada’s Top 20 Under 20 Award for his work in entrepreneurship, journalism and international development in Africa.

After apartheid, South Africa went from registering 20 percent of births in previously segregated communities to registering nearly all of them in only 20 years. Houshmand and the other students will interview experts in birth registration in Johannesburg and elsewhere to find out how and why this success took place so quickly and broadly.

The implications are enormous. Today, the births of more than 200 million children around the world aren’t officially recognized. The consequences of invisibility are devastating: people have no access to official healthcare services, education and political rights, and they’re susceptible to human trafficking and exploitation. The Sustainable Development Goals, the global roadmap for building the world we want, launched by the United Nations in September 2015, calls for all countries to provide legal identities for all people, including birth registration, by 2030.

To find out more about solutions to invisibility, the U of T students will interview South Africans working in rural health clinics, NGOs and children’s rights groups, among others. “Our goal is to shadow mobile units that go deep into the countryside to register births,” Wong explains. The students will start in Cape Town, and travel to communities in Johannesburg and Durban.

Last December, Wong, who’s the Roz and Ralph Halbert Professor of Innovation at the Munk School, took a different group of students to Brazil. (Read about their visit here). They interviewed policy makers and families about Bolsa Familia, a remarkably successful program that provides cash transfers for education and health services to 14 million hard-to-reach underprivileged families. Wong plans four more such trips to other countries in the next year, all involving student researchers.

Stephanie Lim, a fourth-year student studying Peace, Conflict and Justice, says that she read widely about birth registration to prepare for the South Africa trip. For 10 months, she’s attended meetings, worked on a hypothesis for the research questions and prepared with Wong and her co-researchers.

As an undergrad, I’m excited by this great opportunity to conduct field research outside of courses,” Lim (right) says. She interested in gaining insights about issues of personhood and the law. One day, she’d like to be an academic, merging a law degree with her current U of T studies.

During the research trip, she and the others will blog and tweet about their experiences. Afterwards, they’ll write blogs, insight essays and a report summarizing their findings – the second volume in a series for “Reaching the Hard to Reach.” They hope that these resources will influence policy-makers, NGOs and academic networks – with the goal of turning research into action.

Follow the hashtag #How2Reach on Twitter to see highlights from this research trip.

The original of the photo at top can be found at Flickr

Hellenic studies program launched with $1.75 million endowment

lavende4 — Mon, 02 May 2016 16:18:07 +0000

Hellenic studies program launched with $1.75 million endowment lavende4 Mon, 05/02/2016 - 12:18

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A protester holds a Greek flag during the recent economic crisis. The new program will include courses on contemporary Greek politics and current affairs (Pacific Press/Getty Images)

Alex Gillis

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Our Community

Global

Hellenic Studies

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Faculty of Arts & Science

The ��Ƶ is launching a new Hellenic studies program, thanks to a $1.75 million endowment fund established by the Hellenic Heritage Foundation.

The program, announced on April 28, is designed to build an understanding of Hellenism in Canada and overseas and build bridges between Canada and Greece. The new courses will be housed in the Munk School’s Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (CERES).

“Establishing an Hellenic studies program is a milestone for the Munk School and U of T, as it provides the opportunity, in perpetuity, for students to study the Greek language, along with Greek history and politics and the importance of Greece in European affairs,” said Randall Hansen, director of CERES. “The Munk School and our students thank the Hellenic Heritage Foundation for this opportunity to deepen the world’s understanding of Hellenism.”

The Hellenic Heritage Foundation is a charitable organization with a mission to preserve, promote and advance Greek culture and heritage in Canada.

“The foundation was established 20 years ago to make a difference in the lives of our community,” said its president, John Dagonas. “Establishing a fund for Hellenic studies at U of T is doing just that. As Pericles once said, ‘What you leave behind is not what is engraved on stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.’”

Anticipation for the new Hellenic studies program began in 2014, when U of T’s Greek Students’ Association helped to restore Greek language courses at the university, part of a three-year pilot project backed by the foundation. The courses had one of the highest enrollment rates among North American universities. Also on offer were courses about contemporary Greek politics and Greece’s role in the Balkans and European Union.

Learning Greek is a cornerstone of the program now, but Hellenic studies is also devoted to Greece’s history, culture, politics and current affairs — and the program gives students the chance to study in Greece.

“The program offers international opportunities, which is different from other programs of its kind in Canada,” said associate professor Robert Austin, coordinator of the program. “The past two academic years, for example, featured a new course that took place in Athens, Greece, plus this summer we added a five-week program in Thessaloniki, with trips throughout Greece. That kind of experience is unique to any undergraduate degree.”

Karolina Dejnicka, a second-year Master’s student at the Munk School, participated in the recent course in Athens. “Travelling to Greece showed me the disconnect between foreign media reports and what is actually happening on the ground in Athens,” she said. “My research project focused on the alarmist overtones of mass media in reporting Greek-Turkish relations, whereas sentiments are much more subdued within both of these countries.”

“The research trip was incredible,” said Maria Alexiou, an undergraduate student who also participated. “Travelling to Athens with our professors and conducting interviews with politicians, NGOs, academics and government agencies was eye-opening. It pushed me to rethink what I had read about Greece.”

Left to right: Stephen Toope, Director, Munk School of Global Affairs; David Cameron, Dean, Faculty of Arts & Science; Randall Hansen, Director, Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies; Taiyan Liu, student in the Hellenic studies program; John Dagonas, President, Hellenic Heritage Foundation; John Sotos, VP, Endowments & Major Projects, Hellenic Heritage Foundation; and Steve Mirkopoulos, VP Fundraising, Hellenic Heritage Foundation.

Citizen Lab researchers find privacy problems in popular Baidu browser

sgupta — Tue, 23 Feb 2016 09:12:55 +0000

Citizen Lab researchers find privacy problems in popular Baidu browser sgupta Tue, 02/23/2016 - 04:12

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Android and Windows versions of the Baidu browser have been found to have security risks. (Photo by Jon Russel via flickr)

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Global Lens

Fitness tracker flaws exposed by U of T's Citizen Lab and Open Effect

sgupta — Tue, 02 Feb 2016 07:02:40 +0000

Fitness tracker flaws exposed by U of T's Citizen Lab and Open Effect sgupta Tue, 02/02/2016 - 02:02

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The Apple Watch was the only device tested that had no issues, researchers said (photo by LWYang via flickr)

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Read the complete report

The report is a collaborative effort between Open Effect, a non-profit applied research group focusing on digital privacy and security, and the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at U of T. Open Effect previously published research on the security of ad tracking cookies. It also developed Access My Info, an application that makes it easy for Canadians to file legal requests for access to their personal information.

“I hadn’t thought about the issues too much,” said Gormley, “that somebody could find me using my watch.”

“The upside is they’re so great,” she said. She uses a Garmin device. “I guess we’re maybe a bit blind that there could be a downside.”

The downside, said Andrew Hilts, one of the report’s authors, stems from the fact that each device has a unique identifier emitted constantly via Bluetooth, even after users think they’ve stopped using it.

Hilts, the executive director of Open Effect and a research fellow with the Citizen Lab at the Munk School, said that means anyone – from savvy analytics firms or just someone in a coffee shop – could collect that unique identifier and, in some cases, collect your location and a whole lot more.

“The perception might be, ‘Okay, I’m done with this. I’m turning off Bluetooth,’ but your tracker is still emitting this unique identifier, even if your phone has Bluetooth turned off,” Hilts explained.

“There is a Bluetooth privacy standard in place that provides specifications on how device manufacturers can protect the privacy of their users,” Hilts said. “We’re trying to encourage fitness tracking companies to adopt this standard.” Most devices mentioned in the report do not implement Bluetooth privacy, leaving users vulnerable to location-based surveillance.

“We hope our findings will help consumers make more informed decisions about how they use fitness trackers, help companies improve the privacy and security of their offerings, and help regulators understand the current landscape of wearable products.”

Their findings come on the heels of a report by Professor Guy Faulkner and master's student Krystn Orr of U of T's Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education that examined the reliability of smartphone pedometer applications.

Released at the end of 2015, that research found an “unacceptable error percentage” in all apps compared with actual pedometers and urged “caution in their promotion to the public for self-monitoring physical activity and in their use as tools for assessing physical activity in research trials”.

Read: Stuck in traffic? These apps think you're walking

The Citizen Lab and Open Effect researchers sought contact with the seven fitness tracker companies whose products exhibited security vulnerabilities. Fitbit, Intel (Basis), and Mio responded and engaged the researchers in a dialogue. Fitbit further expressed interest in exploring the topic of implementing Bluetooth privacy features in its communications with the researchers. Out of the devices studied, only the Apple Watch adopted the Bluetooth privacy standard.

The report’s authors, Hilts, Christopher Parsons and Jeffrey Knockel, reveal a third issue that arose in the Withings and Jawbone devices: users can falsify their own activity levels. The findings cast doubt on the reliability of data for insurance or other purposes.

“Maybe I’m naïve,” Gormley said. “Maybe an insurance company is conducting top-secret research on me and decide they don’t want to give me insurance?”

“Should I be worried?”

(Visit flickr to see the original of the photo used above)

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Why Canada needs U of T's Citizen Lab: Ben Wizner, lawyer for Edward Snowden

sgupta — Tue, 02 Feb 2016 04:03:26 +0000

Why Canada needs U of T's Citizen Lab: Ben Wizner, lawyer for Edward Snowden sgupta Mon, 02/01/2016 - 23:03

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Photo courtesy Arts & Science Students' Union.

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When it comes to spy agencies, Canada needs independent courts, strict government oversight and “strong civil-society organizations like the Citizen Lab,” the lawyer for Edward Snowden says.

Ben Wizner, the lawyer for the exiled American computer analyst and whistleblower, made the comments at a Jan. 26 event organized by the Arts and Science Students Union and the Centre for the Study of the United States at the ��Ƶ’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

Nearly 250 people packed U of T’s Innis Town Hall to hear Wizner in conversation with Professor Ron Deibert, director of Citizen Lab and one of the world’s leading experts on digital technologies, global security and human rights.

Their conversation followed a screening of Citizenfour, the Academy-Award-winning film which takes its title from the pseudonym Snowden used when he first contacted filmmaker Laura Poitras with explosive revelations about government surveillance.

After the film, Wizner told the audience that Snowden is still in hiding in Russia and that the U.S. court case against him is unjust.

Audience members wanted to know about Canada’s role in covert operations. And Deibert asked Wizner about Canada’s Bill C-51 which will increase surveillance by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Communications Security Establishment, both of which are part of the surveillance web that Snowden revealed.

“We have one retired judge, the CSE commissioner, who once a year does a review to confirm that the CSE is acting in accordance with the government’s interpretation of the law,” Deibert said. “Clearly this is a faulty system.”

He asked Wizner for advice for Canada and Canadian citizens.

“The problem is that this fight has to be fought once a generation,” replied Wizner, who is also the director of the Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Wizner told the audience that countries like Canada need independent courts (not judges who turn a blind eye to mass surveillance) and need strong members of government who have oversight over spy agencies.

“And we need strong civil-society organizations like the Citizen Lab,” he added.

The Citizen Lab at U of T aims to monitor, analyze and impact the exercise of power in cyberspace.

Alex Gillis

U of T students head to Jordan to study iris-scanning ATM initiative for refugees

Read about students travelling to India for a Reach Project

Is the world really falling apart? Experts from U of T's Munk School weigh in for CBC's Ideas

Listen to a panel discussion at the Munk Centre about "Big Data" in an episode of CBC Ideas that aired this year

Curbing carbon: Toronto can learn from Copenhagen, contends Munk School's Matt Hoffmann

Reaching the poorest of the poor in South Africa: U of T undergrads

Read about how the students prepared for 10 months for this trip

Reaching the hard to reach: Munk students in South Africa

Hellenic studies program launched with $1.75 million endowment

Citizen Lab researchers find privacy problems in popular Baidu browser

Fitness tracker flaws exposed by U of T's Citizen Lab and Open Effect

Read the complete report

Read: Stuck in traffic? These apps think you're walking

Why Canada needs U of T's Citizen Lab: Ben Wizner, lawyer for Edward Snowden

Read more about Citizen Lab

Read more about the Munk School of Global Affairs