John Scott-Railton

John Scott-Railton is a senior researcher at Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. His work focuses on technological threats to civil society, including targeted malware operations, cyber militias, and online disinformation. His greatest hits include a collaboration with colleague Bill Marczak that uncovered the the systematic use of Pegasus spyware to target civil society in several countries, including Mexico and the UAE. These investigations, and others, have served as the basis for criminal investigations and lawsuits. Scott-Railton has also investigated the successful manipulation of news aggregators such as Google News, and privacy and security issues with fitness trackers. Recently, Scott-Railton was a fellow at Google Ideas and Jigsaw at Alphabet. Scott-Railton has undergraduate degrees from the University of Chicago and a master's from the University of Michigan. He is completing a PhD at UCLA.