Speaking Freely: Ron Deibert

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Ron Deibert is a Canadian professor of political science, a philosopher, an author, and the founder of the renowned Citizen Lab, situated in the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. He is perhaps best known to readers for his research on targeted surveillance, which won the Citizen Lab a 2015 EFF Award. I had the pleasure of working with Ron early on in my career on another project he co-founded, the OpenNet Initiative, a project that documented internet filtering (blocking) in more than 65 countries, and his mentorship and work has been incredibly influential for me. We sat down for an interview to discuss his views on free expression, its overlaps with privacy, and much more.

York: What does free expression mean to you?

The way that I think about it is from the perspective of my profession, which is as a professor. And at the core of being an academic is the right…the imperative, to speak freely. Free expression is a foundational element of what it is to be an academic, especially when you’re doing the kind of academic research that I do. So that’s the way I think about it. Even though I’ve done a lot of research on threats to free expression online and various sorts of chilling effects that I can talk about…for me personally, it really boils down to this. I recognize it’s a privileged position: I have tenure, I’m a full-time professor at an established university…so I feel that I have an obligation to speak freely. And I don’t take that for granted because there’s so many parts of the world where the type of work that we do, the things that we speak about, just wouldn’t be allowed.

York: Tell me about an early experience that shaped your views on free expression or brought you to the work that you do. 

The recognition that there were ways in which governments—either on their own or with internet service providers—were putting in place filtering mechanisms to prevent access to content. When we first started in the early 2000s there was still this mythology around the internet that it would be a forum for free expression and access to information. I wa

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