TORONTO, ON. – His work enabling people to circumvent Internet censorship is being hailed as an idea that will change the world. Ron Deibert, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto is being recognized as a world changer by Esquire magazine.
Deibert specializes in media, technology, and world politics, and is a Ford Foundation Research Scholar of Information and Communication Technologies (2002-2004). He was named as a “world-changer” by Esquire for his work on a new software program called Psiphon. Launched in 2006, Psiphon is a software tool that enables citizens living in countries with restricted web access to circumvent Internet censorship.
“It’s a priviledge for our project to be recognized amongst other great research projects making significant contributions,” says Deibert. “We wanted to create an easy to use secure program that allows users to access information now currently blocked by their governments – to ensure individuals could exercise their basic human rights.”
In the first version, released in December 2006, users privately send a unique web address to friends or family members living in one of the 40 countries worldwide where Internet use is censored. Those in the censored country then connect to the “server” and use it to access censored websites. The second version, due out this winter, will be a free service open to anyone worldwide that does not have a trusted contact in an uncensored jurisdiction willing to set up a psiphon node for them.
Psiphon is a downloadable program available at http://psiphon.civisec.org/. Deibert is also the co-founder and principal investigator of the OpenNet Initiative (http://opennnet.net/), a collaboration among Toronto, Cambridge, Harvard and Oxford universities to document patterns of Internet censorship worldwide.
The top researchers are featured in “The Best and Brightest 2007” December issue of Esquire Magazine.
For more information, please contact:
Ron Deibert, Associate Professor of Political Science
University of Toronto
416-946-8903
r.deibert@utoronto.ca