John Scott Railton

John Scott-Railton is a Senior Researcher at the Citizen Lab, a research group based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. John leads investigations into targeted threats against civil society, including mercenary spyware and disinformation. This has included collaborative investigations of operations attributed to Russia, Iran, Syria, China, and ISIS, among many others, as well as investigations into the abuse of commercial “mercenary” spyware around the globe. These collaborations, conducted in close partnership with at-risk dissidents, journalists, and human rights defenders, have resulted in the discovery of hundreds of targets of sophisticated hacking, and to the uncovering of zero day exploits against Apple and Microsoft products, among others, resulting in patches to billions of devices worldwide. John has testified to the The House Permanent Select Committee On Intelligence, the European Parliament’s Committee of Inquiry to investigate the use of Pegasus and equivalent surveillance spyware (PEGA), and the Parliament of Poland’s inquiry into Pegasus spyware. He has been a fellow at Google Ideas and Jigsaw at Alphabet. Previously he founded The Voices Projects, collaborative information feeds that bypassed internet shutdowns in Libya and Egypt.