Citizen Lab director warns cyber industry about US authoritarian descent

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, Ron 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.

“I think alarm bells need to be rung for this community that, at the very least, they should be aware of what’s going on and hopefully they can not contribute to it, if not help reverse it,” Deibert told TechCrunch.

Historically, at least in the United States, the cybersecurity industry has put politics — to a certain extent — to the side. More recently, however, politics has fully entered the world of cybersecurity. 

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump ordered an investigation into former CISA director Chris Krebs, who had publicly rebuffed Trump’s false claims about election fraud by declaring the 2020 election secure. Trump later fired Krebs by tweet. The investigation ordered by Trump months after his 2024 reelection forced Krebs to step down from SentinelOne and vow to fight back.

In response, Jen Easterly, another former CISA director and Krebs’ successor, called on the cybersecurity community to get involved and speak out.

“If we stay silent when experienced, mission-driven leaders are sidelined or sanctioned, we risk something greater than discomfort; we risk diminishing the very institutions we are here to protect,” Easterly wrote in a post on LinkedIn. 

Easterly was herself a victim of political pressure from the Trump administration when she got the offer to join West Point rescinded in late July. 

Deibert, who this year published his new book, Chasing Shadows: Cyber Espionage, Subversion, And The Global Fight For Democracy, is echoing the same message as Easterly.

“I think that there comes a point at which you have to recognize that the landscape is changing around you, and the security problems you set out for yourselves are maybe trivial in light of the broader context and the insecurities that are being propelled forward in the absence of proper checks and balances and oversight, which are deteriorating,” said Deibert.

Deibert is also concerned that big companies like Meta, Google, and Apple could take a step back in their efforts to fight against government spyware — sometimes referred to as “commercial” or “mercenary” spyware — by gutting their threat intelligence teams. 

These threat intelligence teams are dedicated groups of security researchers that track government hackers, both those working inside government agencies, such as China’s Ministry of State Security, or Russia’s intelligence agencies FSB and GRU, as well as companies such as NSO Group or Paragon. 

These are the same teams that are responsible for detecting hacks against their own users, such as when WhatsApp caught NSO Group hacking more than 1,400 of its users in 2019, or when Apple catches hackers using government spyware to target its customers and notifies the victims of the attacks.

Deibert is concerned that these teams could be cut or at least reduced, given that the same companies have cut their moderation and safety teams. 

He told TechCrunch that threat intelligence teams, like the ones at Meta, are doing “amazing work,” in part by staying siloed and separate from the commercial arms of their wider organizations.

“But the question is how long will that last?” said Deibert.