SecTor 2026 – Toronto — Citizen Lab director Ron Deibert had a stern warning for the world about the rise of commercial spyware and surveillance, and how the US government and technology companies are driving it.
During his keynote address at the SecTor 2026 conference, Deibert opined that the Trump administration and the technology leaders that have allied themselves with the US president are pushing an authoritarian agenda and “techno-fascism” movement.
“I’ve been studying authoritarianism my entire life. Political science is my area of expertise. And what is going on in the United States ticks every single box,” he told the audience.
Deibert spent much of his time outlining the various commercial spyware cases that Citizen Lab researchers have investigated and uncovered over the past decade. These include the infamous use of NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware against friends and family members of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist and political dissident who was murdered in 2018 by agents allegedly working on behalf of the Saudi Arabian government.
He criticized many foreign governments for documented abuse of spyware technology against human rights activists, journalists, and dissidents, from Italy to the United Arab Emirates. But Deibert reserved his most scathing critiques for Canada’s neighbor to the south, highlighting what he described as “the precipitous descent into authoritarianism in the United States” as the government expands a broad surveillance net over the country and uses AI technology to spread what he calls “slopoganda.”
Trump Administration Warming to Spyware Firms?
Deibert noted some of the progress made by the US government against commercial spyware firms in recent years. These include the 2024 sanctions from the Biden administration against spyware company Intellexa and many of its executives. But Deibert suggested that those achievements may be a thing of the past under President Trump, which other spyware opponents have also expressed concern about this year.
First, Deibert said President Trump has “ingratiated himself and propped up a lot of the world’s oligarchs, dictators and autocrats that he seems to have a fascination with,” while also ending US government support and foreign aid for global civil society organizations.
But Deibert said he’s more concerned about what’s happening domestically in the US. “Notice how most of the big American tech platforms have actually sidled up to Donald Trump,” he said, highlighting how former Apple CEO Tim Cook gave an expensive gold plaque to Trump last year.
And many of the tech leaders, he argued, are propagating some “pretty disturbing things” about how their technology should be used by the government. Deibert singled out Alex Karp, CEO of AI analytics firm Palantir, who has promoted his company’s involvement with expansive government surveillance as well as use of its AI in military strikes abroad.
“These are people who are holding explicitly anti-democratic views, that are talking about fascism in ways that they find desirable,” he said during his presentation, which included a slide titled “Techno-Fascism” that featured photos of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.
Deibert argued these companies are supporting an oppressive surveillance state and the use of technology that Citizen Lab has investigated for years to not only support what he called “a really brutal mass deportation regime” but to crack down on democratic dissent.
Additionally, Deibert noted internecine ties between President Trump’s inner circle and the spyware community: NSO Group, for instance, after being acquired by a group of US investors led by Hollywood producer Robert Simonds, appointed David Friedman, President Trump’s former bankruptcy attorney and former US ambassador to Israel, as its executive chairman.
“We know they’re lobbying furiously to get off the sanctions list,” he said.
Deibert also noted that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reactivated its contract with Paragon Solutions earlier this year; the contract was previously paused by former President Biden amid a crackdown on commercial spyware use within the US government.
Government Use of AI & ‘Slopoganda’
Unfortunately, spyware and mass surveillance aren’t the only things the Trump administration is embracing, Deibert warned. He also called out the president for his penchant for posting AI-generated videos and deepfakes, which may seem to some like harmless attempts are humor but he said point to something more insidious.
“This is straight out of the authoritarian playbook,” Deibert said, referring the mocking of critics and demeaning public discourse.
And AI is also being used to push disinformation and “slopoganda.” Much like with the commercial spyware industry, Deibert said, Citizen Lab is now seeing former intelligence and military personnel creating private companies that specialize in disinformation and influence operations.
“All of the threats that the Citizen Lab has investigated for the last 25 years are suddenly now being super-charged thanks to AI,” he said, and many of those attacks are directed at civil society organizations and vulnerable groups like immigrants, refugees, and political activists.
“There’s so much AI B.S. out there now that it’s not a surprise that [the Trump administration] is leveraging it,” one SecTor attendee, who requested anonymity, tells Dark Reading. “It’s so easy now to generate slop and confuse or mislead people.”
