John Scott-Railton
Citizen Lab researcher in Toronto who specialises in finding government spyware on the phones of journalists and activists.
In August 2016 the Emirati human-rights activist Ahmed Mansoor received a text message with a suspicious link. He forwarded it to Citizen Lab, where Scott-Railton and Bill Marczak traced it to NSO Group's Pegasus spyware and a chain of three iOS zero-days. Apple shipped a patch within ten days. It was the world's first look at Pegasus in the wild.
Since then the lab, under Ron Deibert, has documented similar cases in dozens of countries. The work has made Scott-Railton a target himself: in 2019 a man using a false identity tried to coax him into saying something compromising over lunch in New York. Scott-Railton brought a recorder, and a reporter was sitting at the next table.