Swarm Summer School ‘21, Day 1: Alexis Roussel - On digital integrity

and uh without further ado i'd like to ask alexi to uh introduce himself um there you are hi hello but don't oh wow don't choose him here thank you um actually uh i was introduced to you as um the founder of vegan malik and also the author of the book on digital integrity exactly i'm very anxious to learn about what you have to do and i'm and i'm a founding board member of the of the swarm foundation uh which is uh that's my connection with swarm helping out uh gregor uh victor daniel uh here in new chateau in switzerland to uh make sure swarm has uh a structure which is a fit for a great future like uh we're building right now wonderful um so um yeah so maybe i'll just start sharing my screen it was working before so let's try um and i think that should be working yes uh perfect and yeah just as a small matter of intro so i'm act i'm i'm professionally active in the crypto scene since 2013 i created a broker bt in switzerland now i'm working on i'm the ceo of nim technologies which is creating a mixnet and before that that i was i was always like an activist in uh privacy focused um thematic so um while i was working on the crypto professionally on the crypto side of the brokerage and all the development of the of the ecosystem in switzerland i was also working on this uh thematic which is called digital integrity of the human person and and also i'm working about this since a long time and it's actually a tool for me to better understand the what was happening around me because i couldn't understand why all of this and will go into some details were happening i needed a tool to to for my understanding and actually this tool was pretty interesting it allows allows you to talk about privacy to talk about personal data um in a in a mostly european context and uh and actually now it has some implication in um in existing constitution right now so um i think one of the key things that that experience that i had to live because i come from the privacy network because i come from also like um the um the the the uh the sphere of online activism i mean we were all very much affected by what happened in uh in the pirate bay uh story and uh and what was interesting in that case is a very short scene uh from the pirate bay uh tribunal where um peter sunder is talking to the the the the judge and the judge wants to be in he wants to be connected to peterson and he says oh uh oh you you tried to meet uh our irl and uh and peter's son of this said no no we don't use the expression irl meaning in real life uh we prefer afka away from keyboard because we think the internet is for real and that is that was a kind of like a big confrontation between two generations one was thinking that uh it is just a tool and the other one is that ite and the digital digital space is actually part of life and where you have real experiences the other kind of like event which i was not making sense of it is then when we have people talking about personal data being the oil of the 21st century and that feels always wrong and actually a lot of industrial um strategies in europe or in the world have been built on that principle trying to harvest data and use it extract value out of it and and even if it's uh abusing the individual doesn't matter as long as it provides so much powerful powerful value so so i i didn't feel that personal data was oil because it was touching me personally and um and so um yeah that that was also a core thing so then i when discussing with people i am being myself a lawyer specializing in e-governance um i was looking at um i i noticed that there was a search for a core to digital human right uh something that would that would be um taking all in consideration and until now we have some rights um we have the right for privacy but it's not good enough we have the right for um uh we we have certain right of transparency which are um not good enough in a whole to one to uh to take the whole concept of digital uh human life together and it has to be something which is simple and understood by all so i'll go bluntly in it the the concept of the right to digital integrity is that you have to understand that first we already have a right for physical and mental integrity and so we can extend the this to the digital integrity of the person and basically the integrity in general of a person is it physical or mental is actually a way to guarantee that the autonomy the the liberty the way the the person can make his own decision is is guaranteed so this is something that the society has to provide to the individual not just to um to so that the the not just that the society doesn't hurt the individual but basically the individual has to be in an environment which is safe and in an environment where the individual can make its own decision without any outside pressure and that's super important when you talk about democracy of course i believe that this concept of physical and mental integrity should be extended to the digital space so that's the main concept of it okay so so there is already some work that has been done it doesn't come from nowhere and especially in germany and in switzerland there was a right to digital self-determination which has been rising has been already protected but actually right to self-determination is not it's something that should doesn't need should not be necessary to express us itself we don't have a right we don't have a written right of of non-digital self-determination it is there but in reality it is protected by our physical integrity so if you look at constitution if you look at uh com fundamental rights you don't see that the human person has a right to self-determination you see that the people are protected for their their integrity is protected and that and they have certain liberties and this is actually what effect in effect protects their right to self-determination so again the digital integrity if we add the digital um dimension to the protection of integrity it automatically uh encompasses the digital self determination which we are already seeing being used being enforced by by judges in germany and in switzerland so these are example indeed that in german it's called information that was uh already um set in 2008 in in germany and in switzerland there is an obvious and it just has been confirmed by the federal council that there is a um interpretation of the swiss constitution that within the right for again for in the within the right of privacy and within the right of being protected from the abuses against its own personal data there is a right for self-determination which is included in there but if you don't express it correctly in the in the constitution it's always something which is difficult to construct as a lawyer you should always like try to see what is the importation interpretation and the interpretation is also locked based on where it's it says so right now this principle is within the the the right to date to data privacy or to privacy in general and it's always like a very hard logical step to move it outside of this concept so i was looking for something which was like wider so the idea is where to put this right to digital integrity and it's actually to put it in the right of life right of life is the most important rights that we have and you will see that most constitutions or most human rights declarations you will see the right of life very high it's the first right that the society is trying to guarantee to the the users to the to the individuals because uh if you don't have the right of life then you cannot have all the rights which uh which are uh coming afterwards so the first thing is that a society and the state and all the institutions should not should not just kill you no otherwise you cannot be free in that environment so the right of life in the swiss constitution or in the european charter or fundamental rights is directly combined with the right to protection and physical and mental integrity and [Music] this is exactly where we have a logical space after physical mental we can just add right to digital integrity and that will represent our digital life and it and the digital life is also something that is common right now in our in our um in our language a lot of people talk about their life but in reality our life in mick is is digit our lives are digitally extended uh already and if we would remove imagine that you would have like a moment where all the data which concerns you which are about you which that you did were completely wiped out of the existence of earth then you would not exist anymore in the eyes of the society because everything is recorded in database your existence or your existing is existence is recorded in the database so so basically there is no way to get out of this digital life because the society provides that with you so one of the consequences of it and it goes with the right to self-determination is that the personal data then once we say okay the person has uh digital integrity and has to be protected the question is okay how is this digital integrity made of if i'm talking about physical integrity it's pretty straightforward we say oh the body is is is uh is there you know and and we know what the body is in reality is not that uh easy and the the legal system the jurors the judges have been doing a lot of jurisprudence to try to find out what are the borders of the body and when life starts you know is it is it after a couple of days after two months three months at birth it's very hard when someone is in the coma does it still has a right to digital uh physical integrity has its right to lie to life these are hard questions sometimes and there has been a lot of jurisprudence around it uh mental integrity is even harder because you can have um brainwashing someone is not acceptable as harassment is not acceptable but at the same time making advertisements that's even though it's a it's a it's a kind of abuse of your own mental system that's uh acceptable up to a certain degree you're maybe not allowed to do some subliminal messages so so you see every every um harm every harm uh around this uh can be measured so one of the consequences that that we are trying to do with this is that the the the we are going to consider the personal data of the the person the same way we considered the body it's it's something which is not really defined personal data but but what we know is that they are part of the person and it will be up to the judge to define exactly uh how it is related to the person but it's a it's a kind of blurry thing but which are part of the person which means that they have the same legal characteristic as parts of the body that data should be inaudible that means should not you should not be able to sell your data like you should not be able to sell your your body of course the society that that's a very strong uh statement but at the same time the society will define what is acceptable maybe some part of your bodies can be sold because it's not harming your own person for example your hair your hair is fine it's a part of your body but so it's same in terms of data some data could be collected some data maybe not but the idea is the optics that we're going to uh to push is that we show we are using an optic which is that data is part of the person data by definition cannot be sold and only in certain cases with consent and with um and with certain rules then we might open up these data sure or to to elsewhere so harvesting data itself is something that is harmful not just not just like using the data against the per person but actually harvesting the data and spreading this data uh around like we like is happening right now with 30 party providers collecting our um profile data so they can sell us us advertisement without our knowledge that is something which is actually already uh harming our digital integrity and i think it should be completely forbidden like we could actually enforce some criminal law around that so so it's really a a conscious that that this universe is not something which is parallel like angela merkel say it's neyland it's really something which is an extension and and the hard part of this because it's an extension of life like life in reality we cannot expect everyone to be fully aware and fully conscious of exactly where is my own digital body and my own digital self i mean right now all our legal system is created in with with the the perception that we are in control of our personal data so if we have a problem with someone mistreating our data we just come to see the judge or we see this party and we solve that but it's not true and most of the people and even people within this room who are maybe tech savvy we have no clue how much data is around us and we have no clue how much data is used against us so the system that we are need to design needs to protect us and not in a way where we need to go and to know where the data is so we can defend ourselves so this is also helping to break the nothing to hide logic what is nothing to hide logic you know i mean you might have a lot of discussion in your families and with your friends it's like yeah if i have nothing to hide i have nothing to worry and this is actually also a logic that governments to say state surveillance or business surveillance will push to you saying well if you don't have nothing to hide you have nothing to to worry but that's a misconstruction i think from actually what we try until now today we put the digital rights only within the framework of privacy but and in reality it's not just about privacy privacy is an uh extremely important element of it but in reality the the the the scope of this digital right is about your whole life not just about one of those tools that you have so uh and your whole life is also your digital space you need to have a safe digital space um to be a free person in there uh and it's not about hiding stuff it's just to be able to make your free decision if you have dns [Music] censorship it doesn't affect your privacy because it just blocks you to go somewhere but it does affect your capacity of like getting information and um being more informed for example uh if uh if a government has zero days and is using zero days within a gulf war uh they they could they um they keep the uh the state of the of the network around you in an insecure way because they know flaws that you don't know and this puts you into danger it affects your digital integrity without affecting your privacy so the the we can break out of this logic and talk about digital integrity digital integrity and gdpr very quickly these are like not incompatible it's something that goes higher uh digital integrity is a fundamental right and gdpr is a good example of law that implements data protection so this is one specific tool that will help but what is we are going to try is to give more more scope to the gdpr make it stronger because if it is there to focus on a higher value it will have more effectiveness one of the thing where gdpr is totally not acceptable in reality is that he has it allows the states to um not be part and to not apply uh the the uh the gdpr if there is some kind of reason around uh security and and that's not acceptable because in physical integrity for physical and integrity and digital integrity you still have your rights you're not allowed i mean if you are if you are beaten up by your police by a police officer in in the prison that's normally not something that should be acceptable we could know it's unacceptable it is against your your right physical integrity it does happen but hopefully in good systems we try to avoid that but here basically when it comes to data the uh the gdpr says well if the statism is treating your data for security reason then it's fine you know so no digits or integrity the respect of digital integrity should also apply to states which have a role model to play then towards the industry so so the idea of digital integrity put into our constitution is that it forces our cons our states our organizations social structure which are going to evolve also with time so it's not just a matter of like doing it with our current uh system but it's a matter of like doing it for our social contract basically uh whatever the governance we will have in the future and um and it's to be self-aware that whatever rules that we have around us that we build up with our our institutions they need to respect our digital integrity and so they don't do any actions that we are hot that will harm individuals also in the digital space and normally it should push people to it should it should it should push states to give us education to the kids on how to protect and to um to to live the digital autonomy and to use those those uh interesting new tools uh which which are coming so the basically what i'm trying to explain is that the right to digital integrity is actually the general justification it's the general framework of within of of the right to data protection so we were used to the right of data protection as our only tool but in reality that's just one tool that we're going to use to protect our digital integrity and uh the the way we engage ourselves in bitcoin transactions for example by signing with our digital signature coming from bitcoin this is a very strong sign of autonomy as a human person i'm mastering my digital space and my digital values and digital assets and this is actually also an expression of our right to digital integrity so the possible implementation i have uh saw three of them but two of them are big ones the one is the first one is in the charter of fundamental rights um there is an article three about uh the the right to respect the physical and um mental integrity in the swiss constitution there's article 10 uh two where every person has a right to in particular to personal liberty and particularly to physical and mental integrity and to freedom of movement so so we just need to add the digital world and then suddenly we create a great dimension of like okay the human life has been extended to the digital sphere and we can start protecting the people and we can start allowing the people to express themselves as a human as digital human beings also in their extension and being autonomous and then it favors all the autonomous related tools so it gives a lot a large push here to our community so in switzerland we have already two uh implementation which are ongoing they're not enforced yet but they will be coming soon so in in switzerland we have a federal level so we have local constitutions and some of these constitutions were actually adopting fundamental rights also so now we have to vale in geneva valley has is building a new constitution has nothing to do with it they were cleaning up their constitution and they had the whole process of making a new one and they have added this uh concept first in the in the committee on phenomenal rights and now it's presented in the first public draft of the future ballet uh constitution there is the right to digital integrity which comes with another right which is really interesting it comes with the right to control your own identity and that's really interesting because when i when we presented the right to digital integrity to the um to this comment they had their own vision they they developed their own new things so they tried out they also had the right for anonymity which was set there but they they didn't uh put it there at the end uh okay they could have they would have been bold but they did add the right to control their ui identity which is very important in the framework of self [Music] of self um uh i mean of a digital decentralized digital identities um then the control of geneva they actually pushed at the parliament they presented the constitutional law uh some of the of the the member of parliament and basically the federal continental government is actually preparing the law they call me they're making auditions they're preparing the application because they said well uh we think it's going to pass and the people are going to vote for it and because of the timing and everything people will vote yes so we're already preparing the after the implementation of it uh hopefully locally in the control initiative where i'm located i'm also helping to to push some of the work there so um yeah so that's the debate in valles was was really interesting so the right to control its digital identity there was a right which was not um added sadly is the right to not to be surveilled measure or analyzed i think that was pretty interesting and and one other final right which was put there finally is also to allow the any individual to communicate with the authority with the state without using specific technology um and you shouldn't see this as something which is like anti-technology no it's really really actually uh we shouldn't be in a situation where the state is forcing you to use a certain technology which we can see now some states that force you to use an app and this app actually forces you to use google and to give data and statistical data it like expand your your your your digital footprint without any knowledge you're not in control of this data so so it's very important that um this kind of rule should come we set up wikipedia pages there is no english one there's a french one there's a german one which are very um very um starting to grow uh what is interesting is that as soon as we have the wikipedia page then the subject became start became real we had our first legal publication that was a conference in 2020 last year uh um that was called the right to digital integrity in the law university of nishatan it's all in french i'm sorry there's not much publications right now in english but we focus on the french because this is it was necessary to to move the forces here in the local space because this is a place where we can push the mines um and um and so this this book is really interesting because there's no i put an introduction someone from valleys from the constitution of alice puts its introduction and then there's all the teacher professors from university the civil law criminal law constitutional law who are presenting all their uh different um all their different uh opinions about them much most of them are pretty positive i have to say well now there's already two works in constitution so that doesn't make sense myself i did the work i did the kind of political or like physical philosophical essay in french it's called our my our so precious digital integrity and the idea is to explore a bit all the uh why um i mean more in details one where does this come from this concept come from and actually that there's a lot of sources i mean it's not a concept that just pops up from nowhere there's actually work that has been done towards that direction and it actually um can give some some some also perspective from the future in terms of like how identity is managed how um how the government should behave uh so it's a it's a yeah it's an essay so it's not very precise it doesn't want to be like a very uh like the first one a very rigorous um work and but it's a way for me to continue spreading out the word um we did a lot of events okay um that's okay uh and yeah and so the future work that we're doing right now is that we are spreading out this um this concept there is the first phd seizures which is uh being worked on in the university in czech republic i'm pretty happy about this i had a discussion with the lady who's doing this and it's really great she she she's even sponsored by her university to do so and and hopefully we will have like a federal initiative i also pushed the the subject in in the european level there was a consultation about the digital rights and so we propose this we'll see how it far it goes uh in terms of these um uh these rights so yeah so if you say yourself yeah yeah that's great alexis but what can i do about it well um i think one of the things that is important is is is being able to to to work on your tools you know building those tools and and see if it's helping to to to um uh to for people to protect their digital integrity i myself now work on nim which is a autonomous uh um which is an anonymity layer um network and and it will help our digital integrity swarm is a project i'm also involved in because it will help to protect our digital integrity and how it's built so i think really like we continue to build tools towards this control of ours our data control of our self and and to protect ourselves from the rest are our great things um of course every time if you are in the legal course if you are going through um some some some yeah some legal battles you should say it does hey you are harming my digital integrity it has to be like used and people the judges have to have to be um uh to to be aware of this concept and start working on it like they did for the physical integrity and the mental integrity because this concept will take years and years to be refined by the by the society and through the judge's name and enabled and of course like every time also like if if if you're you're being hurt yourself in the digital digital world you can say hey that's affecting my uh harmony and my digital integrity so that's a good relationship to help also just by using this term when you feel it's appropriate to use it yeah and so for uh some more resources mostly in french sorry uh.ch that means digitallife.ch i think the the certificate is just broken so i will fix it don't worry but there's some there are some um there's some some resources not in mostly in french and uh yeah um if you have questions i'm really happy to uh to listen to you to answer to your questions and i hope you did enjoy my talk thank you very much thank you alexi for the inspiring talk it's uh it's refreshing to see the uh uh the the the battle for these concepts to to become a part of our uh day-to-day life uh as a legal building block for a functional metaverse i would say with the extension of our our rights towards the digital realm yeah you're right that would be totally in the frame of that yes um let's see we'll check to one question that's um our melanie's already here as well um we have projects and startups we have uh currently attending you explain a bit okay you can use software like mim you can visit websites if a startup would like to embrace this concept make sure that it's um reflected in their architecture and design in the way they handle data of users what would you say to them right now so so i think that that that is something we just kind of start like now um really um putting in good words and and i think thanks to to tune in we were able to do so i think what's the important thing is until now we were trying to build privacy we understand that privacy and cryptography and the use of cryptography for privacy is like a key thing that will protect our digital life it's one of the using so that's good so we're trying to use these tools to to make things better but the problem is that we are building this on a transparent layer transparent meaning the web is transparent the tcp is transparent um bitcoin is transparent ethereum is transparent i mean all these all these things that we are using right now are extremely transparent and um and in the name we in name we had this this this discussion how do we build a good privacy system so in order to build a good private system it's a bit like we have to have a system which is first fully anonymous and that's the thing you cannot build privacy on top of transparency because privacy i create privacy is a is a um [Music] how you say it's a it's a communication between two people and you decide how much you disclose to to the other and then you can decide i i want to be private in that discussion but to be private you need to be not seen by the others so if everything is seen if you have a discussion even though we encrypt between the two people then it's not private because we can see the metadata and everything so the idea is to every time you build something is that first you make everything anonymous and then you build your service on top and very when once you open up the the ports i mean you open up the communication between the two you disclose exactly that what you want and it's completely invisible from from the outside and then you achieve good privacy yeah so i would say that would be the that would be a key approach is always build your privacy tools on top of fully anonymous systems thank you thank you very much and for all participants if you'd like to know more about the legal implications of data handling and how to work with this concept in combination with gdpr make sure to be there on thursday as well day four when we have uh several legal speakers as well we'll be going uh in depth more on gdpr and data so thank you again alexi and thank you very much for the invitation