Readers of even the most outlandish fiction are likely to be incredulous and deeply unsettled by the hair-raising stories unspooled by digital sleuth Ronald Deibert in Chasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion, and the Global Fight for Democracy. 

“Every day we interact with victims of espionage or some kind of harassment, usually coming from bad government actors or corporations,” Deibert, the founder and director of Citizen Lab, says in an interview about his seventh book. “Our job is to investigate those cases.”

Deibert and his team work in a sinister and dangerous world where authoritarian states target people they deem troublemakers, like human rights activists, political dissidents, and investigative journalists. 

The lab, a digital security research centre at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, “lifts the lid on the internet,” Deibert writes in Chasing Shadows, with a team of researchers who “document patterns and practices of information control: censorship, surveillance, information warfare.” 

Among other tasks, it monitors companies that sell sophisticated “mercenary spyware” to countries that are ostensibly countering terrorism through surveillance, like Pegasus, the infamous spyware from the Israeli company NSO Group, which Deibert says has “God-like capabilities.” 

In an ominous 2018 case detailed in the book, Deibert’s group identified Pegasus spyware in a phone hack of Saudi-born Canadian student Omar Abdulaziz, which Deibert suggests abetted the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist.

As Deibert illustrates throughout his book, spyware manufacturers aren’t especially selective about who they’re selling to or how their products are used, even when their own intelligence alerts them to impropriety. That’s because the market is largely unregulated, and profits can reach into the billions. 

“This has a chilling effect on human beings,” says Deibert, who is also a political science professor at U of T. “When your phone has been hacked or you’re harassed on social media by various entities, you retreat into silence. And that’s the most pernicious thing. Activists and human rights defenders are being silenced and cowed into submission by the relentless attacks they experience.”

The Citizen Lab works with groups and individuals who are surreptitiously watched by “the world’s worst despots known for targeted killings,” as Deibert says, and face harassment, detention, torture and even death. The Lab scours their digital devices and those of others in their orbit, like family members, while publicly outing bad actors through published reports disseminated by major news outlets like The New York Times and NGOs such as Amnesty International. 

It’s the kind of work that earns powerful enemies. For example, Deibert writes that, in 2021, the U.S. Department of Commerce added several mercenary spyware companies to a “designated entity” list after the lab helped expose their malfeasance, including NSO Group. “While the designation is mostly symbolic, it’s also a kind of scarlet letter signaling to all concerned that doing business with these firms is now taboo. NSO Group’s valuation dropped by about a billion dollars after that.”

But, Deibert says, “NSO Group has lobbied furiously to get off that list. The Trump administration has close ties to the Israeli government and oligarchs in the Gulf region. [Donald Trump’s son-in-law] Jared Kushner has a private equity firm with massive investments from Saudi Arabia. I think there will be a lot more things for us to do.”

Indeed, the recently minted U.S. administration is a source of much fear and consternation for Deibert and his cohorts, not least because of its cozy relationship with Silicon Valley honchos like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg (“spineless,” says Deibert) and Elon Musk, “who has turned his platform [X, formerly Twitter] into a toxic nightmare while showing his preferences for far-right political figures and giving Nazi salutes.

“Social media is always promoting sensational, extreme, and conspiratorial content to capture and retain users’ attention. That’s the nature of the business model,” Deibert says. “Around 2016 and during the pandemic, all the platforms came under pressure to better moderate their content. But that pressure has completely evaporated. Today, they are relaxing rules in ways I believe will encourage political violence. These platforms are being turned into giant rage incitement machines.”

Deibert is similarly frank in Chasing Shadows, deftly illustrating his argument that social media is being used as a weapon. In a chapter titled “The Coolest Dictator in the World,” Deibert outlines how Nayib Bukele, the “mercurial, authoritarian-leaning” president of El Salvador, has used X to viciously troll and smear critics. “[His] account is full of fans from the alt-right illuminati, such as Roger Stone and Michael Flynn. Jack Posobiec, a notorious alt-right, white-supremacist political activist, gushed to his two million followers that Bukele should be named ‘Man of the Year.’ He is, in the words of journalist Zach Beauchamp, ‘the MAGA movement’s new favorite autocrat.’”

Deibert, 60, a self-described “street kid from east Vancouver,” was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2022 – an enormous honour he wishes his parents had been alive to see. He and his Citizen Lab staffers take considerable personal risks to ensure corporate transparency while combatting “targeted espionage against civil society,” as the website says.

“It’s always dangerous when you’re pushing back against powerful elites, oligarchs, and bad authoritarian regimes. But that’s a choice we made,” Deibert says. “There are some NGOs out there doing similar work, but nothing at the university level.”

Deibert says those who want to safeguard their digital data can check out Security Planner, a safety guide the Citizen Lab publicly launched in 2017 that now lives on the website of Consumer Reports, an American nonprofit.

“We can’t take liberal democracy or the rights and justice system that we have for granted. Those are human creations, but they are historically fragile,” he says. “All of us must be vigilant and courageous against what we’re facing now.”