Instant Bestseller
Like a John Le Carré novel updated for the digital age, Chasing Shadows provides a gripping account of how the Citizen Lab, the world's foremost digital watchdog, has uncovered dozens of cyber espionage cases and protects people in countries around the world. Called "essential reading" by Margaret Atwood, it's a chilling reminder of the invisible invasions happening on smartphones and computers around the world.
In this real-life spy thriller, cyber security expert Ronald Deibert details the unseemly marketplace for high-tech surveillance, professional disinformation, and computerized malfeasance. He reveals how his team of digital sleuths at the Citizen Lab have lifted the lid on dozens of covert operations targeting innocent citizens everywhere.
Chasing Shadows provides a front-row seat to a dark underworld of digital espionage, disinformation, and subversion. There, autocrats and dictators peer into their targets' lives with the mere press of a button, spreading their tentacles of authoritarianism through a digital ecosystem that is insecure, poorly regulated, and prone to abuse. The activists, opposition figures, and journalists who dare to advocate for basic political rights and freedoms are hounded, arrested, tortured, and sometimes murdered.
From the gritty streets of Guatemala City to the corridors of power in the White House, this compelling narrative traces the journey of the Citizen Lab as it evolved into a globally renowned source of counterintelligence for civil society. As this small team of investigators disarmed cyber mercenaries and helped to improve the digital security of billions of people worldwide, their success brought them, too, into the same sinister crosshairs that plagued the victims they worked to protect.
Deibert recounts how the Lab exposed the world's pre-eminent cyber-mercenary firm, Israel-based NSO Group-the creators of the phone-hacking marvel Pegasus-in a series of human rights abuses, from domestic spying scandals in Spain, Poland, Hungary, and Greece to its implication in the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Ronald J. Deibert is the founder and director of the Citizen Lab, a world-renowned digital security research center at the University of Toronto. The bestselling author of Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society and Black Code: Surveillance, Privacy, and the Dark Side of the Internet, he has also written many landmark articles and reports on espionage operations that infiltrated government and NGO computer networks. His team's exposés of the spyware that attacks journalists and anti-corruption advocates around the world have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, and other media. Deibert has received multiple honors for his cutting-edge work, and in 2022 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada-the country's second-highest honor of merit. "[Chasing Shadows] will chill the blood of any journalist, human rights worker, or civil society activist. Or, come to think of it, any ordinary citizen who believes that criticizing your own government does not merit extra-judicial execution, and that private communications should remain private. . . an utterly gripping, petrifying read."
- The Spectator "Essential reading for all those interested in the digiverse, especially its underbelly!"
- @MargaretAtwood on X "For almost a quarter of a century, Ron Deibert and his Citizen Lab team have been in the vanguard of the global struggle to protect the public internet from the schemes of criminals, autocrats, and spies. Deibert's new account of the battle to expose and combat the powerful Pegasus spyware sold by the Israeli firm NSO reads like a cloak-and-dagger spy novel, complete with high drama and a rogue's gallery of villains. Essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of the internet and the fate of freedom."
