Hackers: not just geeks, but activists

Thanks to Elizabeth Gan for posting this article from the Toronto Star on the ARIN6902 Diigo list. It's about 'white hat' hackers who are helping to make the online world a better place. Of relevance in this article to my little blog about protest movements against internet censorship, is the work of Nart Villeneuve from the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab:

Nart Villeneuve, the chief research officer of Citizen Lab, is a self-taught coding expert. As an undergrad, he used his white hat skills to research Internet censorship by the Saudi Arabian and Chinese governments.

“I didn’t think you could make a living detecting Internet censorship,” Villeneuve says. He’s since unearthed two major cyber espionage rings and continues to study how governments monitor their citizens.

(from http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/791274--hackers-not-just-geeks-but-activists)

On Nart's site, he posts some very interesting articles about internet censorship, well worth a further read, especially his posts tagged 'censorship circumvention'

Meanwhile the Citizen Lab site covers the lab's broader work on "advanced research and development at the intersection of digital media, global security, and human rights".