Privacy Highlight: On the Front Lines

back once everyone takes their seats let them go down the line and introduce themselves it was a great introduction we've heard from technologists and subject matter experts and now we're going to hear from practitioners who've been putting this Tech to use in the field so please kick us off Alex and we'll go down the line and then we'll get right into it uh yeah sure hi everyone I'm Alex Pruden I'm the CEO of elio Alias building a new ZK layer one focused on on using zero knowledge proofs to protect consumers and ensure privacy hi my name is ABDO I work with ideas Beyond borders to fund underground schools in Afghanistan translate banned books and transform the Middle East yeah you have some supporters um hi my name is Jarrell James uh that's the name I'm using right now uh I come from tigray Ethiopia is a region in Northern Ethiopia I'm also on the founding seam of entropy.xyz which is a permissionless a decentralized signer and I come from Tigra internet Freedom dial which is here to create Mass amounts of awareness and urgency from the cypherpunk community to help us alleviate the internet shutdown that we've experienced for the last two and a half years from an authoritarian regime determined to try and wipe us from the face of the Earth so hello and thank you for having me hello I'm Jordan velina I'm the technical lead at polygon Hermes and mainly I am here because I'm Catalan and I'm fighting for Catalonia Independence and I've been I'm inspired by the Spanish government proven and yeah that's the thing and I'm Harry Halpin I'm the CEO of nim a privacy project before that I worked on Indie media and giving vpns to activists I'm also a proud member of fish s a European government Blacklist and have been put in jail by the US government multiple times [Music] so I want to zero in on exposed Communications and the risk that surveillance poses to any kind of social movement to do that let's begin in Syria Circa 2011. Harry today you're building a decentralized mixnet to end Mass surveillance but before we get into that I was hoping you could share with us a bit more about your experience working with a technologist in Syria yeah so we we had contacts actually through Mozilla in Syria with Basel Safari who was a ordinary programmer who when the Syrian Revolution took off became a organizer and they needed VPN access and we were provisioning vpns we were provision you know we did encourage people to use tour of course and what happened is that they were doing most of their communication over Skype to my understanding what happened is there was a back door in Skype given to the Iraqi government by the U.S via Microsoft then given to the Syrian regime which then used it to imprison torture and eventually murder Basel Safari and uh currently in Syria a nominal U.S alley Ally turkey is currently kind of like a monitoring all the communication and using that for targeted drone strike assassinations again against the people that defeated Isis the Kurdish and Arab SDF and so I became very interested in fighting adversaries that can actually monitor every single byte that's sent over the internet from a kind of God's eye perspective and so tell me now like building upon that experience for what going back 12 years how what tools are you are you building today are you actually putting into use in the field today yeah I mean right now uh in terms and I'm I'm there in two weeks uh right now what we primarily do in terms of activism is we encourage people to hide their phone imis and MC numbers uh that's not something which is heavily commercialized we don't see much blockchain Tech being used per se although there is a lot of interest in Bitcoin and uh Financial transactions of course and um what we're building today is this thing called Nim who's in who which essentially takes some of the model of tour and tries to add mixing packets and fake packets so that a global adversary that can watch the entire communication Network can't use that information to locate someone and their communication pattern to arrest them and their friends or to launch a drone strike so staying in Syria Alex you spent almost a decade with the U.

S army and you said that it was when you were working with Syrian refugees in 2015 2016 that you first became interested in cryptocurrency and blockchain Tech tell me about that yeah first of all I just want to say it's an incredible honor to be on this panel with um the my fellow panelists you know who are Freedom Fighters and many rights and also uh people have put way more on the line than I have up to this point in this struggle um and my perspective I've actually been on the other side you know I've been on the other side where the information goes and um you know and I think that experience before we talk about the you know kind of my experience working with the Syrian refugees which which inspired me to get into the space you know that experience itself inspired me to get you know not only did I want to go into crypto but I wanted to work in privacy because I I don't think people realize the extent to which um their information is being gathered and the extent to which that that can be used against them it seemingly enough things can be aggregated and you know and and depending on the cert and the circumstances be turned and used against you so to me that's something that like a Liberty is a value is a principle that I care very deeply about and I think we should all care more about it in a digital sense but getting back to my story yeah I spent a decade in the Army I worked in Afghanistan I worked in Iraq and I worked in Syria all places that um you know experienced tragedies um you know possibly in no small part to the American armed forces intervention there and the you know I was struck in particular working with Syrian refugees and what what inspired me to join join the space and and kind of pursue this as a career path was you know this you know for as bad as digital Technologies can be in terms of you know enabling governments to collect information and maybe you know you do bad things with it cryptography is an amazingly powerful tool to empower individuals right and Bitcoin the the way I learned about Bitcoin was you know Syrian refugees who had spent the whole or syrians who had spent their whole lives playing by the rules in many cases like you know this computer programmer that Harry mentioned I'm sure you know was you know playing by the rules his whole life and one day the rules just changed and everything Turns Upside Down and to me the power of Bitcoin at the time was the first thing I was exposed to is this concept where like even in that moment this is a technology that you and uniquely you can't you know hold in your hand and and it's a power that you and uniquely hold in your hand if so if you know if you've worked your whole life as a doctor or saving for your kids college and you know suddenly you're cut off to access from the from Syrian the Syrian banking system you can go to Turkey and start over again with your wealth that's that's something that is an American with the Bennett growing with the benefit of the US dollar I never had an appreciation for but when I saw that with my own eyes I was like wow this is a technology that's going to not only change the world but more specifically it's going to improve the lots of people who we don't who it's easy to forget about Abdul we've talked about how the use of cryptography can play a huge role in advancing the work that you do with ideas Beyond borders in order to protect the identity of vulnerable individuals and move resources to people in need I'd love to hear more about your experience and work uh in I mean spanning Syria Afghanistan Iraq thank you so much first of all thank you for inviting me here and thank you for the panelists this is a great opportunity so um I was born in Iraq when I was born Saddam Hussein was the leader talk about unlucky if you don't know Saddam Hussein well lucky you um so from a young age I understood the importance of information and the thing is guys like Saddam Hussein also understand the importance of information and privacy and hence he had banned all sorts of entertainment radio TV information anything that has remotely to do with Liberty Freedom democracy forget about it and and it's not only Saddam Hussein we see that Trend in other places if you look at the Syrian Revolution the very first thing Assad did was go after digital activists they need to make sure that the world doesn't go out then you look at places like Iraq again 2020 the government shut down the internet once there was protests you look at Iran today the very first thing the government does is shut down the internet to stop the flow of information now in the context of my work at IDs Beyond borders we have an extensive underground network of activists and translators all across the Middle East and Afghanistan we need to keep those people safe and that's why that's where we rely on on you guys to provide that cryptography to provide that security so for instance with our working mobile coin we've been able to provide digital security campaigns in the Middle East and Afghanistan with our work with Lantern we've been able to help in in Iran and so that's that's really important for us the liberty world in the crypto world to to to work together because we're we're really aiming for striving for the same future here um and for us you know privacy is not negotiable for the underground school teacher in Afghanistan who's teaching young girls you know in secret from the Taliban privacy is not negotiable for the translators I know for young uh women from Syria who is translating for us and was beaten up by our family for translating for us because we translate things that have to do with science critical thinking um and democracy thinks that you know the other side doesn't want us to to translate and so yeah privacy is not negotiable for us now that now that we have we are moving in the right direction in terms of vpns and making sure that those people are not only safe but with the use of VPN they can um access information that otherwise isn't accessible so we do the work of translation but then there are thirterians don't want that information to be available and so the next step is to be able to create an economic system that is independent of those authoritarian regimes and that's where we need cryptocurrency so I would love for our underground school teacher in Afghanistan to be able to be paid in the privacy of her house using cryptocurrency and not have to leave her house to receive her compensation to can you to continue educating those young girls um so yeah I just think this work is really important I'm just glad that I'm speaking to hear about it so yeah thank you drrell you've been combating human rights violations in East Africa and I'm going to leave this question open-ended but I'm wondering if you can share with us a bit about your personal first-hand experience and how that's informed the work that you've been doing with activists still on the ground and who are a part of the diaspora who face risks yeah so uh everyone up here well everyone but a lot of the discussion has actually talked about uh Syria as an internet shutdown and I want to highlight that I come from tigray and a space in a region in Northern Ethiopia and we just erupted from the longest internet shutdown in the history of humanity uh with which was uh used as a barricade to carry out an absolute confirmed genocide uh where 800 000 lives were lost and uh current estimates of 200 000 conflict-related sexual violence survivors but all of this was actually put into place and I want to highlight this as a uh timeline and how how authoritarian governments actually learn this was actually enacted by the Ethiopian Elite in Addis Ababa because they watched Syria they watched the West's uh apathy in some ways towards uh not in some ways a lot of ways towards Syria and the internet lockdown and they said then we're in a similar leveraged and advantageous position as a country of color dealing with the west and their interests around the planet so they have systematically watched what happened in Syria and tried to recreate that exact same Playbook to attack the uh to grian ethnic minority in the north of Ethiopia for whatever reason nobody really understands Psychopaths and I don't really try to I do however support people who are actively staying against them uh people like this woman right here in the front who was actually been on the front lines and worked with the survivors coming out of uh tigray underneath this internet shutdown and hearing the stories of what's coming out and there's a quote by Edward Wilson that is incredibly poignant here which is you know the issue with humanity is the fact that we have Paleolithic emotions medieval institutions and Godlike technology and it's all coming to a point of Crisis which is obviously terrifying and the funny fact about that is I think that quote is only applied to Western Nations and their adaptation towards privacy Tech because I'm here to tell you from the voice of seven million to Guardians that tigray with regards to internet shutdowns privacy Tech is way past the point of Crisis and while we are discussing the merits of cryptocurrency and its ability to ensure privacy uh affirming privacy protecting services we are also not gatekeeping who's building these crypto systems and everybody wanted users in the early 2017s and the 2018s and a lot of these uh communities a lot of these vanguards helped create god-like technology and I would like to explain what that looks like when crypto is used as a tool of genocide and that tool of genocide this is the first time this isn't the first time it's happened but it's the second time it's happened and it's been incredibly efficient because it's been refined and this is where the UN and the world food program and other institutions like that worked with us and folks like in this space for years to try and build these Refugee tracking systems and sure we can maybe give them the benefit of the doubt that they thought they were doing in the best best of way however I know developers that worked inside of these programs who have confirmed they were very very aggressively pressured to shut up about the fact that they were creating centralized databases that were storing the biometric Information Tracking these refugees and then creating basically third-party search engines that could whitelist and track those addresses to individuals the information that's contained in that bio tracking is their genetic information their health status a roadmap where they've been their family members The Village they're from this is not like a hypothetical when they rolled out this pilot in Myanmar the uh the people who had been chased out of their the rohingya people who had been chased out of their regions when they returned home the government used this information shared with them by the UN and the world food program and other entities to track down these individuals and murder them and this is the reality that faces the future of seventy thousand refugees sitting into in the western side of Sudan in refugee camps they are potentially and at risk and their family that's still in country is at risk of being tracked down by these uh more secret gestapo type forces because let's not forget this was a confirmed by multiple third parties including the Holocaust Museum and Foundation a confirmed genocide that killed eight hundred thousand people s estimate and 200 000 sexual violence survivors completely destroyed the the infrastructure of the health system and the infrastructure as a as a whole and it is still in place there is a secession of hostilities that does not mean the genocide is over that does not mean the internet capacity has been re-regained and what I'm here to do and what I do when I represent the people of Tigris and their in their technology and privacy data sovereignty efforts is here to say that internet should be a human right data sovereignty shouldn't be a first class second-class citizenship opportunity and this is something that's actively being supported by western eastern powers and not being challenged and I would like to challenge Western communities and anyone who's really involved in positions of Leverage to start thinking about internet as a human right as a point of sanctionable Leverage you are constantly only using sanctions as your tools for keeping human rights in check well declare internet as a human right if 800 000 people dead and 200 000 people uh raped and millions displaced doesn't get us digital Geneva Convention and this isn't direct evidence of atrocity and genocide able to be supported by internet shutdowns and privacy then nothing is going to get us something like a digital Geneva Convention and Tigra is here to try and make that happen no take right here to make that happen that uh Jordy I want to move on to you and dive into some of the limitations that still exist despite the rise and proliferation of some of this privacy preserving Tech now you and I were chatting about the fact that you have to use existing infrastructure to access a lot of these tools whether it's the hardware or the the networks and I wonder whether you can walk us through the questions that you had I know you're a bit of a skeptic around the efficacy of some of these privacy tools but what are your thoughts well um yeah um yes a little bit you know my story I was aspired by the Spanish government together with like 70 at least documented uh personal series 70 documented spies what it is this is a mainly some software companies in this case an important software company from Israel that's selling this spying software as a service so that any government and probably somebody else can buy and they have this is a very easy with a nice interface it's like a software as a service they just select One telephone number and they just download all the information in there so mainly what they did is they just took the okay this is the government this is a it's a a movement that wants independence of Catalonia in this case so they took all the politicians lawyers activists anybody that was somebody in there and they just attacked their iPhone and they collect all the information just by by that okay at this and this software so mainly it's it relies on undocumented bugs and how these things works you know is when some developer around the world finds a back they can do two things actually it's report to the regime and try to fix that or there is a Black Market where they can sell this back to one of these companies they pay a huge amount of money and they use this exploitation that's known to spy these people in the world okay and this is happening this starts to happen in the first world here we are not we are talking we are talking in Spain it's historically syrup okay so that's the thing and this is something that's happened and well uh in this case uh this could be documented just by uh back in the iPhones that put attack in general when they attack to you so they are putting all these they installed use this software and they try to remove that software because they don't want to protect this this vulnerability so they are doing using this kind of techniques to do that so my thoughts is when you see that and when you discover how this industry works is that I mean you cannot do much because you never have the warranty that the software that you're using the the the the phone that you're using is reliable uh you don't know if there are bugs even I mean if there is so if it's open source I mean at least you know the warranty that many people can look at that but even that you don't have the warranty because you know somebody isn't there if it's and if it's private Source the things even gets worse so in my case is I just decided okay you have to live with that this is hard but this is what it is I don't see a easy solution for that you know earlier we were talking about defense Camp volunteer that are Building Technology to counteract a lot of the tools that we've been featuring today and how they're being used on the ground and and so many of you have also taken on this role of not just practitioner but developer and you're creating tools because your first hand experience of what it's like to deal with uh the The Fallout under these authoritarian regimes my question to you is how are you staying ahead of this like what is the tech that's in the pipeline now that maybe people aren't talking about but it's in development uh just just to keep pace well I would say one thing is we're increasing our threat model so for 10 years 10 years ago it seemed crazy that you would have an adversary that monitors the entire internet but then Snowden showed the US government could indeed do so and then all of a sudden now you know Russia can do so cyber criminals can do so many companies can do so people with Microsoft level budgets can do so so we need to up our threat model so it covers things like an adversary that could watch every single packet sent over the internet and that's what we're doing with the Nim mixnet to be honest and I think we're also increasing the tools for Financial Freedom as well in a privacy preserving way but I'll leave that for other people Alex I know you've been on both sides of this yeah I mean look I think there's there's a there's a technological angle to that but there's also a social angle to that right I think the social angle I'll maybe just start with is you know I think it's become a norm almost out of resulting from apathy where people would just kind of like okay well what am I gonna do I'm just gonna like you know that they've already got all my data like my credit score has been hacked 15 times you know like what are we going to do and I think I would really encourage everyone in this room you know again leaving the technical part aside for a minute to just remember that these things are important and it's not just important just for you but it's important for everyone in society because you know we have people on this panel who you know like I said earlier it's like we're playing by the rules as they knew them and when the rules change like you know the suddenly you're in that Spotlight right or people you love are in that Spotlight and so I think just caring and and making your voice heard about how important these issues are and and that that just even a little bit can help change how we as a society view these things and therefore how policies change around around this and how laws and ultimately you know how our laws will ultimately Define what's okay and what's not now on the technology on the technological side I mean at Elio one thing we care very deeply about is making everything private by default right so it's important for us to make it so the norm is privacy and the norm is consumer protection and the norm is you only choose to share what you want to share now I think it's the one last thing I'll mention here is I I do want to just call out that there's a lot of governments around the world and a lot of centralized entities that do bad things but there are also so very bad people in the world who who are also doing bad things and sometimes you know like there's there is a balance that I think we need to find as a society but in general right now I think overwhelmingly we've given far too much weight to the centralized authorities wherever they are and we really need to encourage and promote this digital Liberty for all this individually and the great thing about that is that it can lead to a more hopeful future where we can interact without fear because fundamentally what all this is about is fear right why do people why do governments pay for these Technologies like you know the Israeli company that we're not naming um it's fear it's fear right and fundamentally though this technology can help us interact in ways where we don't have to be afraid right it can Empower us as individuals can make us feel like there's a new form of human interaction that then we can benefit from and and reimagine how we interact so um with our last minute here I and I I put this to drill ABDO um there is this narrative promulgated by authoritarian regimes I think of countries like Russia Iran and the dprk that all crypto and and web 3 tools are synonymous with crime when before we came up here there was a panel speaking to the ofac uh sanctions on tornado cash you have a developer in a Dutch jail right now for working on open source code so I think that there is this regulatory Crackdown and and I've spoken to some people who are you know Going Underground because they don't feel comfortable doing uh the work that they were once uh you know they don't feel comfortable doing work out in the open and my guess my question is how do you navigate the legal risks whether it's in within the local uh you know local context or if it's when you're you know a part of the diaspora living in the U.S and you're facing um you know new regulations here um I'll set you up you smack it down okay uh we've already been talking as because our work is so similar in the fact that we are representing people's look like us who are being afflicted by these technological like uh limitations and sieges uh for us I think it's becoming when you talk about new things new technology I think yeah a lot of other like Western countries are going to try and develop new technology to battle this like militant private privacy violating movement happening I think from our perspective what we're looking at is what's happening on the side of Coalition and actually treating this idea of privacy with as much as an urgency as we saw uh island nations treat climate change where they came to the table and said hey we are the ones that are going to get screwed by this this two degree limitation doesn't work for us the same should come from Afflicted populations around the planet making coalitions going to the igf standing in the same rooms as these power hungry dictators and ask swipes and saying this is the standard of which we expect to be treated we expect the same privacy preserving technology that you are so eager to give the developed world stop treating us like secondhand citizens stop enabling your allies and the leaders of these countries to create the second-hand citizenship and this uh this blockade of our rights and start treating internet as a human right because that I think even though everything else in the world seems like it's on fire if we don't address the fact that there is a definitive move by authorities that be to create almost separate levels of of of of ability on the internet that's something that we are all going to wake up one day and realize oh I was tigray I was Syria I was Afghanistan it was me and I think that's where we want to talk about like going forward and getting people on our side yeah I mean if I was gonna if I would add anything it would be that we are not the norm sitting here in this room you know um when the Taliban first took over or you know just in the last few months they banned over 23 million websites so the best thing that we can do sitting here is you know keep empowering people living in these situations situations that we were living in and that's the best and only thing we can do um yeah I mean it's just it's important to remember that we do this for the greater good we're not the norm here it you know for most people in this world they've never even experienced banking like when I came to the US and and found out about the miracle of banking and and found my passion for the Broncos and just it's just a whole new it's just a different League you know Financing Credit all of that so to make these tools available for people who are living in these Australian regimes could could be a game changer you know in their efforts and their activism and changing their regimes one day for for more democratic um free you know a future of Liberty essentially thank you so much this incredible lineup of panelists and for sharing your stories I'm so grateful to every one of each of one of you and thank you to the audience for joining us for this conversation uh and that's that thank you