However you use telecommunications technology — and billions use it for everything from routine daily tasks and entertainment to seeking help, sharing confidential information or organizing civil actions — your communications are all running on decades-old network protocols with gaping vulnerabilities that can enable cybercrime and security breaches. High-risk individuals and organizations, in particular, are vulnerable, not only to surveillance but to targeted retaliation by autocratic states who use these security holes to abuse their power. But democratic countries have also exploited these weaknesses in, for example, law enforcement.

In this episode of Big Tech, Taylor Owen speaks with Ronald J. Deibert, founder and director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and the author of Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society. Citizen Lab has worked for many years monitoring communication networks for state-run surveillance. Their 2018 report Hide and Seek: Tracking NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware to Operations in 45 Countries uncovered how mobile phone spyware has been used to target individuals, including Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Deibert believes that we need to rethink how telecommunications equipment and protocols are built, to ensure privacy and security. Until we have these safeguards, malicious actors, whether states or private individuals, will continue to hack the vulnerabilities in the communications ecosystem, leaving citizens unsafe, and civil society to suffer.