Book Report: Chasing Shadows

It's a history of The Citizen Lab, a team of academics and hackers at U. of Toronto who investigate when bad guys hack the phones of journalists, activists, and the like. It's also a history of the rise of hack-for-hire mercenary groups. I'd read about about a lot of this in individual articles over the years. But this book put it all together and pointed out some long-term trends. When the Lab started out, they didn't think they'd be tangling with hack-for-hire groups. They thought they'd be detecting when governments blocked off access to parts of the internet. I guess that's back when China's Great Firewall was in the news. If China was blocking net access to some some sites, maybe other countries would do the same? Maybe there was some of that going on. But when Lab folks actually went and talked to journalists, activisits, etc—net access wasn't their urgent tech problem. Activists' phones were acting funny; their friends were getting arrested. Activists wanted to know: were they…