Certainly. Thank you for that question.
In 2018 we observed that Saudi Arabia was undertaking espionage. We could observe, based on our network monitoring, that there was a hacked device in Quebec. We ultimately discovered that the person whose device was hacked was a Canadian permanent resident named Omar Abdulaziz, who was a very close friend and confidant of Jamal Khashoggi. We published our report on October 1, 2018. The very next day, unfortunately, Jamal Khashoggi was apprehended and brutally executed at the Saudi consulate in Turkey.
We have also documented extensively other Canadian refugees and immigrants who have had their phones either targeted or hacked by foreign governments abroad as part of a growing number of cases that we call “digital transnational repression”.
The long and short of it here is that Canadians are definitely not immune to this worldwide risk that is growing in leaps and bounds, which is precisely why I think we need to be entering into this very serious conversation with a much more comprehensive approach than we have been to date.