Ron Deibert, the director of Citizen Lab, one of the most prominent organizations investigating government spyware abuses, is sounding the alarm to the cybersecurity community and asking them to step up and join the fight against authoritarianism.
On Wednesday, Deibert will deliver a keynote at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, one of the largest gatherings of information security professionals of the year.
Ahead of his talk, Deibert told TechCrunch that he plans to speak about what he describes as a “descent into a kind of fusion of tech and fascism,” and the role that the Big Tech platforms are playing, and “propelling forward a really frightening type of collective insecurity that isn’t typically addressed by this crowd, this community, as a cybersecurity problem.”
Deibert described the recent political events in the United States as a “dramatic descent into authoritarianism,” but one that the cybersecurity community can help defend against.