Tann, it's got the code. It's going to launch.

It's a unit system. I know this.

It's all the files of the whole park. It tells her everything.

Sir, he's uploading the virus.

The Eagle One, the package is being delivered.

So Citizen Lab tracks governments who do bad things online.

As you can imagine, the human rights watchdog likely pisses said governments off.

Here at Motherboard, a pillar of cybersecurity reporting, we're here for it.

But there are those who aren't.

Recently, a private spy service of some kind was hired to go after Citizen Lab.

But Citizen Lab got them back, and oh so spectacularly.

I'm about to speak to John Scott Raelton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab who helped

entrap in a sting operation, a private spy trying something in the lab.

I'm Ben Maku, and this is Cyber.

So, John, just to start this off, can you tell me what is Citizen Lab?

So Citizen Lab is a research group based at the Monk School at the University of Toronto,

and for more than a decade, we focused on trying to understand the different kinds of digital

threats faced by civil society. So that means hacking attacks against journalists

or attempts to limit the freedom of speech online.

And our interest these days is heavily focused on the growth and proliferation of tools for hacking

and how they get abused to target people like human rights defenders and dissidents

and others. And how many enemies do you have? Well, I think we also have a lot of friends,

...