Decentralization and Human Rights - Jonathan Dotan

all right buffalo corns up next we are super excited to be hosting jonathan of the sterling framework he's going to be talking us to us today about decentralization and human rights which is something that we don't get to talk about very much in this space so i'm stoked for this talk jonathan how are you i'm good good morning thanks for having me shannon we're really happy to have you tell us a little bit about what to expect from your talk today without giving too much away what's your background well um i come from the web3 to the web3 space with an interesting background i started off working on decentralized web issues as a writer and producer on the hbo show silicon valley which was a neat entree into this space and as i learned more about it i got super passionate and um so i'm here to talk a little bit about some of the exciting work that we're doing here at the starling project that is awesome we're happy to have you i'll let you take it away sounds good can everyone see my screen okay yep you're great all right wonderful well thanks so much for having me today i'm really excited to be here and um i the ethereum community is such a vibrant place always and colorful uh and in so many different ways so i'm glad to be here and really excited to share with you a little bit about the project that we're doing and this is very much meant to be a conversation starter and an invitation to have people come and join us with our effort so a little bit of background the starling framework for data integrity was created by the usc showa foundation and stanford's department of electrical engineering and we have been working on a variety of solutions that are focused on advancing the causes of human rights by using decentralized technologies and today i'm going to cover a little bit about the context for our work i'll get into the framework so you get a sense of how we do what we do and then i'll take you through a really exciting announcement that we made this morning of the release of our first major case study which is covering 78 days that just finished so let me give you a little bit of context around why we do what we do i think the events in myanmar earlier this month are a reminder that the issues of genocide are very much a present issue when people think about genocide they often think of events that happened in the 20th century beginning let's say with the holocaust and um there is nothing farther from the truth that this is some sort of ancient history um at the end of the day the systematic killing of people is a strategy that is pursued by various governments and even governments that are currently in power the situation in myanmar i think is worse bearing note not only because of its significance in being very recent but also one that it bears the hallmarks of our digital age the the coup that just happened in myanmar is being led by a military regime that was very much adept at using digital tools to whip up ethnic hatred and they use that as part of a systematic campaign in 2017 to repress an ethnic minority in myanmar that effort has been universally condemned and it's one that has in the process of getting very stringent levels of accountability within the international system and what's key to all of this is that the people that are being held to account are being held to account through critical testimony that is being provided by the survivors of this genocide and some of those testimonies were preserved by the usc showa foundation as part of the visual history archive that they maintain this is the largest collection of testimony from the survivors of genocide over 55 000 testimonies have been recorded over the last 25 years it covers not just uh the window crisis but nine other genocides uh beginning with the armenian genocide at the beginning of the 20th century all the way up to the current day and what's extraordinary about this work is that they preserve this testimony and take extraordinary measures to make sure that it is safe for the long haul and in my work with them i realized that the storage facilities that they used while they're state-of-the-art and distributed to some extent in three locations that the preservation of this testimony which is so critical is a perfect fit for distributed ledger technology and so we set the goal of looking at how we could create a framework that could take this testimony and first begin by just decentralizing the storage of it but what we realized was is that actually we could start the chain of custody actually from the very beginning when we take new testimony in the camera itself would we could begin a chain of evidence we can then store it in a decentralized manner and then finally verify that all within an end-to-end cryptographic system that we imagined together with the show foundation's cto sam gusman and stanford's department of electrical engineering and so that really is the essence of the starling framework is that we see to use cryptographic tools at each step as you capture store and verify information our framework is open source we have a root of trust and the hardware itself of the devices that we're working which is critical because it operates outside of android and ios we're using the latest web3 protocols which are some of which i'll cover today and of course we maintain a principle of decentralization which i'll get into later that it's not just about the tech but it's also about the methods in which we collect the information there are a number of different players that have come forward to help us with this cause we've been very grateful to these contributors there'll be some familiar names on here um and um i want to cover a little bit about how we've orchestrated all this tech together so let's begin with a standard mobile phone that you have most phones today if it's the latest generation phone actually have on it very advanced sensor technology so it's not just the camera imaging that you can take but you also have sensors that allow you to establish the time and date and the location of where you took a photo of a video so we take that information and basically we marry it together we take the sensor information about the time date and location of where a photo is taken and we actually marry that with the photographic pixels that come from the camera that package of information is then hashed and then the signature on that hash is done in a secure enclave on the next generation snapdragon chips that are from qualcomm and from there we now have a secure record which we then upload to the decentralized web using a unique cid that we get from ipfs and falcoin and we distribute it to a number of different organizations so ngos academics corporates that want to get involved we've even done proofs of concept on raspberry pi's or uh laptops and uh and on-prem servers the idea is that you really want a diverse range of different storage devices in particular it's worth noting also the advanced cryptography that's used here and so filecoin is particularly noteworthy in looking at how they seal files and there there's a productive proof of replication and proof of space time that's created what that allows you to do is know that over time you have fixed detects to ensure that the data has not been modified or changed in any way that's actually part of the sealing process it's part of the consensus process so like heath it's it's essentially it's meant to be productive in its calculations and so from there the distributed network you know proceeds to build and build and really the concept behind the decentralization is that the more people the more secure the system becomes because it becomes that much more immutable and hard to tamper with so that's capture and storage but finally you need to verify the information and so at the last part of our framework we take attestations that come from experts who review information and each of those attestations are syndicated with a serverless adapter onto a distributed network in this case we're using the hedera hashgraph that's feeding information from a hyperledger fabric instance and what's so cool about this is that now you have a decentralized method to provide attestations to create a web of knowledge so that basically as you have the information now spread apart and then cached onto different front-end servers really what you get is the ability for everybody to be a part of authenticating this information and so using protocols like gun for instance we're able to ensure that this remains something that even as the end reader is reading this information they too are part of the distributed storage network as well so that means that any time that you're looking at an image on the web or on social media in the future we're hoping that that becomes part of a multi-ledger method method of creating consensus so today what i'm excited to talk about is a little bit about how for the first time we've taken what's been primarily a back-end process that we've been working on the last year and now we finally have a way for end users to access this information so using a new set of standards from the content authenticity initiative that adobe has been leading we now are able to have as you can see here a little icon in the corner of a photograph and if you click on that you can now see a record that's embedded within the photograph itself and here you have a front-end tool that allows you to browse that information so in this case we can see here that this is the information around the photographer who took the photo um you can see the location which the photo was taken you can also see signatures from the various providers of the information so in this case reuters who took the photo and now you see the starling integrity field so the file coin cid the ipf scid the hedera transaction and etc etc all of those things are there and available so um that's all pretty exciting stuff because now what we're looking at here is that a photograph becomes not just the container of pixels but it also has all of this array of different information that's linking back onto various different ledgers and ultimately the decentralized web so i want to start the last part of this presentation by coming back to where i began and looking at the situation in myanmar i think it's easy often to think of these types of crises as ones that exist under very different conditions from ones that we are living and that's really false when you think about it it's not just that we share a common humanity but there's a lot of things that go on even in this country that bear uncomfortable resemblances to the types of actions that are going on in places like myanmar in particular it's worth highlighting the brave work that reuters has done in documenting genocide and um there were two reporters that did incredible work in documenting mass execution in myanmar and they were jailed in for over 500 days for their work and they were finally freed after a lot of international pressure and this effort to delegitimize the press which was very carefully orchestrated in myanmar is one that i think it's has an unfortunate resonance within our current day and age trust in the media is at an all-time low here in the united states and that's a cause for tremendous concern when you look at the situation that happened on january 6 just a little over a month ago there are many things that were disturbing but perhaps one of the most was that the press were directly targeted in this attack and they were incited directly by the president united states to delegitimize the efforts of the media and that is a cause of tremendous concern scrolled onto the doors of the capitol was the phrase murder the media and i think that it doesn't matter on what side of the aisle you're on um phrases like that go to the really are an attack on the fundamental pillars of democracy and they should be caused for tremendous concern and so we certainly had no idea what would happen on january 6th but heading into the presidential election we were concerned about the crisis of trust in the media and so we preemptively began a process to deploy our technology with reuters and very proud to release today a case study that we've just put up on our website it's startinglylab.org 78 days and what we did is for each of the 78 days between the inauguration uh sorry between the election and the inauguration we committed photos from the reuters newswire two various distributed ledgers and created this next generation archive called the 78 days and within it i think it's a it's a microcosm of all the challenges that exist in our our age when you think of things like even the taking donald trump off of twitter you know there are a variety of different arguments as to the legitimacy of that action but i think the thing that everyone can agree on is that twitter is placed in an almost an unmatched position of power in in determining what information goes on and off of twitter and while they have within section 230 the rights to make those decisions the centralization of that type of power is a cause of tremendous concern and it's one in which it really feeds into this narrative around the demonization of the press because ultimately when you think about the inauguration that just happened um it and you go back to four years ago when the last inauguration started there was an unfortunate similarities between how the press was portrayed and if i think that the efforts that we document here are really important to commit to the chain precisely because they are so vulnerable if we do not attempt to protect them so what does all this mean for for folks here i think it's important to recognize that although our process involves advanced technologies that each of them have their own strength what we want to emphasize is that multiple ledgers are needed in order to complete this process because ultimately you want to bring as many experts as possible to the table and each of those experts should be maintaining their own decentralized systems and this is a somewhat difficult concept to grasp when i explain it to people in the technology world because it seems inefficient to keep distributing and distributing and distributing but yet this is what's critical because if you give an open source autonomous and independent way for people to continue to verify information and publish their attestations it's the plurality of all of this information that really provides the most resilient solution overall and that's essentially what we've been advocating is that we want to orchestrate all these different platforms together to create a fully distributed system that remains distributed because ultimately the web 3 at its core needs this interoperability and that's why keeping diverse cryptographic features diverse performance characteristics and diverse methods of preservation are really our way out of the challenges that we have in our age so um pause here to take questions about what we've done but i i you know i say to the eve community our journey with you is just beginning and we're very excited to learn more about the applications and things that we can uh use together and collaborate together with you all um we've been big fans uh for years of everything that's been going on in this community and i'm really excited to bring all these different ledgers together for this collaboration thanks so much that was so cool thank you so much jonathan what an exciting project and use of decentralized technology there's going to be increasing a bunch of attention to this and a bunch of questions about how do people get involved are you participating in hackathons how can people contribute to what you're doing well we're definitely playing some hackathons later on this year um so that will be a great place to begin um i suggest um to start off with keep in touch with us we're i'm startling lab.org's launch today and there's a variety of ways to keep up with all the things that we're doing expect some more announcements in the next quarter of some exciting new projects and um yeah stay tuned i think hackathons will be a great opportunity for us to begin with the community that's so great you're such a perfect fit for some of the impact tracks and different ways that people can create technology that really moves the needle um my background is international development and finding ways that we can help each other and so you know the situation with rohingya in myanmar is near and dear to my heart and finding ways that this technology is really going to impact people that are low on resources right now is something that i'm super excited about and want to see more of so thank you for all you're doing i'm sure there's a lot of people who are really excited about this right now i can't wait to share this talk far and wide so any parting words before we move on no all set thank you again for having me you're wonderful have a great rest of your day thanks