re:publica 2016 - Opening Keynote
Moglen, Eben
Choudhary, Mishi
During the period from 2016 – 2025, the "other half" of the human race will be connected to the Net. Providing connection to the world's poor is the greatest act of social justice, educational opportunity and economic equalization within our power.
 It's my really, really great pleasure to announce the opening keynote of this year's Republic. In the program team, when we were thinking about how to open our 10th anniversary, who should speak first, we thought maybe it's a good idea to have somebody who's spoken of the past and can help us work with the motto and reflect on the last 10 years but also look ahead. So we started going through all the speakers that we had on this amazing stage and on of course the Swedish that part of stage in the last 10 years and we stopped at 2012. 2012 was a really important year for Republic. It was a year where we transitioned into this wonderful location to the station and really made that jump from having a location that allowed us to have that campus feeling to come together more strongly as a community and build this event. 2012 was also a very, very important opening keynote for us. We decided that we wanted to have a very strong political keynote after having ventured out into other topic areas in the past years. So we invited Eben Moghlin, the inventor of the Freedom Box, and thought he was the perfect choice for this opening keynote and he was. His keynote in 2012 included such legendary senses as the day Steve Jobs died was a good day, at which point at least half the room dropped their iPhones. Eben has been fighting for free and open software for over 20 years. For instance by defending free software developers such as Richard Storman and Philip Zimmerman, the inventor of PGP. Eben Moghlin is also the founder of the Software Freedom Law Center that offers licensing and legal support for free and open source projects. But when we were thinking about this keynote we thought okay but he shouldn't be alone and we feel that this is the absolute perfect combination. He will be joined today of the veteran by a Republican noob, somebody who's never spoken on our stage before, the most wonderful Mishie Kaldre. She's a technology lawyer and an online civil liberty activist who's also working at the Software Freedom Law Center together with Eben. Mishie is originally from India, the country that managed to take a really strong stand for net neutrality and shove internet.org against the wall last year and together they are here to examine the state of internet freedom in the world today. Please give a really really warm welcome and a huge applause to Eben Moghlin and Mishie Kaldre, the last kilometer, the last chance. Good morning. It's a great pleasure to be back at Republica. I can't thank the organizers enough for the honor of starting out this 10th anniversary conference. I want also to thank the German Foreign Ministry for agreeing to give my law partner a four-day visa to enter Germany after demanding real-time access to her bank accounts in order to allow us to be here together today. So thank you to the government of this very Democratic Republic of Germany. By 2025 we will have wired up or wireless up the remaining half of the human race. This should be the greatest moment of educational liberation, the greatest moment of social justice making, the greatest economic opportunity in the history of humankind, but it won't be. Because the net we are making is a net that we don't want, a net of surveillance, data mining, and despotism. When you grow up in India there are a few things you cannot avoid, cricket, Bollywood, and some very good poetry. Growing up I read this poem where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, where knowledge is free, where the world has not been broken into fragments by narrow domestic walls, where words come from the depth of truth, where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection, where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way, into the dreary desert of dead habit where the mind is led forward by thee, into ever widening thought and action, into that heaven of freedom my father let my country awake. Where the inventors of internet reading to gore is what I thought, but I was only naive and young and to find a cure I just started hanging out with smarter people like the one on this stage. The net that we are building now, the one that the rest of the human race will soon be caught in, is a net which watches us more than we watch it. Everything we do, everything we say, everything we buy, everything we search for is remembered forever and we are becoming the objects of experimentation. We are becoming the subject of the net to which we are joined. Our net now experiments with human behavior, giving a new way of thinking about the human race adjuncts to a machine which experiments with us, stimulus and response, stimulus and response. Billions of times a day an experiment is conducted on a human being, show us something, swipe left, swipe right, click, don't click, buy, don't buy. The machine is a behaviorist, like BF Skinner and the 20th century psychologists who followed him, the machine has no need for a concept of human mind. Only correlation, only mathematics, only the modeling and prediction of our behavior, everything we do, teaches the machine. By 2025, it won't be Scarlett Johansson taking your orders, but your favorite voice in your language, your personal customized chatbot which learns by crunching data. Balloons, playing loony tunes, would hover alongside drones, beaming the greatest opportunity for humankind, the net. Unparalleled troves of data will get collected and studied to make farming more productive and control the temperature in your living room, while your fridge refuses to put in an order for a pizza and sugar-rich ice cream. Siri or Cortana will ensure that you never have to look up and engage in that awkward activity, talk to another human being. Who runs the world, they say, apps. My augmented reality will have more tickers. I have a developing country passport, that's why. Swipe right, swipe left, click or think. Someone will anticipate all our needs and also be our shrink. By 2025, everything that is deemed basic by Silicon Valley would have been offered for free. My retina and fingerprints will ensure that cashless will also make me cost less and my Uber pool can have more people bent over screens as the driver seat is empty. The political economy of networking now dictates that it is cheap for the platform companies to move your packets for you in return for the ability to surveil them. Therefore, suddenly it is in the interest of the machine to give access to everyone, which really means to have access to every mind. Building out the net to embrace the other half of the human race poses itself as charity, but it's actually the perfection of spying. Access to the net belongs to everyone means we belong to everyone's mind and we are calculating everybody. To add another billion minds to experiment with for Facebook is cheaper than leaving them alone and so suddenly the net we do not want is the net we are supposed to wish on the other half of the world, a poor net for poor people. The World Bank thinks that around 70% of the bottom fifth of the population in developing countries has a feature phone. That feature phone is soon going to become the smartphone because right now it is very profitable to get those packets. We will create an enormous system of consumption where we all will be turned into nodes for further consumption. In exchange of my boring data, I'm gonna get security, convenience and a ton of services. Bad hair, good hair, don't care but perfect filters, primetime delivery and also the fun to ask Siri what does she think of Google or is a Yula commitment enough that I don't need a partner in my life. All this fun brought to you next door in your developing country free basics or basics all that are free. So the network we are building, the network we don't want, the network we struggled against, the one that deprives us of freedom of thought by operating on us while giving us the impression we operate on it, that network now controls the pace of the human mind. Our space is small, our room is little and our time is nonexistent. The greatest word of importance to the greatest of the platform companies nowadays as one of its executives was telling me last year is latency. But the latency they're talking about is not the time it takes for a human being to learn after the presentation of an idea. The latency they're talking about is not the years we spend growing up becoming something we've invented out of the machinery of freedom and the opportunity to learn the latency they're talking about is the milliseconds it takes for a smartphone to display an advertisement stimulus and response calculation of human possibility not by humans but by the machine. The calculating our computers do is not our thinking. The calculating our computers do is the prediction of us. This network which we're talking about this network is getting and giving what Silicon Valley designs it for but it isn't delivering the promise because it isn't promising honestly and the great problem with all this altruistic talk to get the next billion online or three billion online is an honesty problem. There hasn't been any candor about it anywhere and then the states show up and you certainly cannot expect any candor from them. This network is not delivering what it promises and it could just get lost by greed nationalism ill temper or just laziness. It doesn't mean that fishermen's incomes go up just because it exists. It does not mean that rural health care is better delivered or developed just because it's there. That's not a guarantee. What is guaranteed to occur is the rendering of ads on smartphones which get quicker, swifter, smarter and we're all being tied to this network which we don't understand the purpose or or the behavior of. What is happening with us is not what we want the promise to be delivered to us. We already imitate this machine or it imitates us. Remember the TAI bought by Microsoft? It recently got a crash course in racism, Holocaust denial, sexism, curtsy the Twitter users and that's what we are getting from the network as we talk about it. Four years ago I said here that freedom of the mind depends on freedom of the media which depends on free technology which depends on free hardware free software and free bandwidth. Here today ten years into Republic I tell you before we get to 20 time will have run out. We are no longer capable of building the net we want. We are only capable of resisting the net we do not want now. We lost our chance to do it right the first time. Now we are in the place where we must decide instead to hold off to resist to fight against the machine on behalf of the machine we need to struggle against the system that predicts us to become unpredictable enough that we can relieve the room for freedom of the mind or we lose our struggle forever. In at least 38 countries Facebook wants to provide free internet how do they want to provide it is by buying the packet movements from the telecom service providers and put them through their own proxy servers they can offer this way poor internet to the world's poor towards whom they have actually acquired quite an odd case of white man's burden as they tell us this in their own words. We stop them in India we stop them by telling the telecom regulator of India that breaking the security of the web eliminating authentication for poor people turning untrusted potentially dangerous net into trust us because we know it and we are only here to help who could be against it is not the route to universal connection to the Indian society but nobody's receding from here neither is Facebook nor other platform companies some of it is only a desire by a CEO who wants to do this but most of it is just this raw energy of the business right now right now let's get all of these people online because their data is what works for us. And then and then what happens to it once they've gathered it once Google AI has the data of tens of millions of people from the UK National Health Service what happens to it once we have taken our system of money and turned it into other people's bit streams what happens to it the mystery of the back end is becoming the mystery of human freedom have we lost it where is it where does it go instead of storing it ourselves we're allowing other people to store it for us and to whom do they give it everyone is so struck with the convenience of the front with the beauty of the top with that which lies above the waterline and of course there's nothing to see before the waterline move along nothing to see nothing to know nothing to guess because below the waterline it's all guessing about you. Did we all get told that this is going to increase democracy but we've also discovered that democratization of technology does not necessarily mean democratizing of the society itself what the net has democratized is the ability to self promote through Twitter through Instagram through Snapchat or any other new big app because the world is run by apps what has happened is the democratization of the ability to be surveilled or surveil but at the end of it what we have delivered is the advertisements to eyeballs but not autonomy to the society the promises of all this free speech and expression have also now met with an outpouring of the harassment and coercion of which the platform companies themselves are scared they're all now rushing to study this find out what is this online harassment and also find a solution a technical solution but really what it means is that we've empowered people to be ill-tempered who are constantly engaging in now making an actual opposition to the way things are so what we find is a lot of sentiments in the net lot of opposition people are using this form of social mobilization which is harassment of the net mostly for reactionary purposes look what the Turkish mafia did to the university professors or the religious fanatics who are rewriting or trying to rewrite and say I would talk about the history in my country you have everybody everybody beating against women who are whether they are video game players or they are sports writers or feminist activists everywhere this man's planning everyone is talking about made about rape murder doxing all the time that's not exactly an increase in democracy this is just unleashing of a tool that enables many to one ways of communication as a way of coercing thought and opinion this is democratizing totalitarianism what we call social media these days has a single emotion it's designed to elicit and that emotion is envy post the segment of your life the best part make other people envy your vacations your beautiful children your accomplishments leave out all the struggle all the doubt all the negative all the pain and hurt let other people envy you and the social media that build envy in order to increase desire in order to make an advertisement suitable for you to receive I want that life here click swipe done that envy breeds resentment which breeds anger which breeds that resentment of the street which is now in everybody's eyeballs and eardrums all the time so as we build this net we do not want as we summon people to the platforms offering the poor a discount come and be measured will help you to have access to what we get from you as we do that everyone gets interested suddenly in privacy because they must so let us think a moment about what we mean by the privacy we want to have in this net we do not want privacy is three things it's secrecy that is our ability to speak and think only in partnership with those we actually trust it's anonymity that is our ability to use the public space to think and act and experiment and try out without the association of identity with what we try and its autonomy that is the ability to make our decisions and effectuate our lives without the interference with our secrecy and our anonymity and this our autonomy this route of our democracy is what is attacked by the net that constantly measures tracks and experiments with us all this and we want to add another three and a half billion people to the surveillance organism and then and then the states show up when we move to this net we do not want this monitored net this surveillance system we empower social control in the state like never ever ever before I stood here four years ago and spoke about the possibility of the end of freedom of the mind in 2012 and somewhere in Fort Meade Maryland there is a secure there is an intelligence analyst asking at which date and time a young man in Hawaii named Edward Snowden watched my speech because of course by the summer of 2013 what I had said here in 2012 had gained some news thanks to mr. Snowden what he told us was what we all feared and he substantiated that the states had moved inside this data mining tracking surveilling net we do not want of course they did how could they not from the middle of the 20th century the most powerful societies on earth assumed that signals intelligence was the true secret of social power in the world they spied on everyone and others militaries and every government and eventually they began spying on all international commerce that they could reach because what they knew the Soviet Union the United States the People's Republic of China and all their satellites what they knew was access to information is power but when they have a net that measures everybody and great big piles of everybody's behavior taken from the machine which is experimenting always with everyone what they gain is power to run totalitarianism on the cheap 20th century totalitarianism didn't scale very well it needed lots and lots of people and it needed lots and lots of fear which could only be produced by episodes of serious violence people had to disappear they had to be broken people had to be afraid 21st century totalitarianism solves those problems you don't need so many people anymore because the platforms do the work for you you don't need to create so much fear because envy works so much better because everybody informs on everybody so they can watch everybody else and the next thing you know power has leapt higher than power could ever leap before with that increasing power naturally comes an increase in ambition the state decides that what it needs as a guy working in the White House told me only a few weeks after the last time I was here in the summer of 2012 says the man in the White House you know we've decided that we need a robust social graph of the United States that meant the United States government wishes to keep a list of everybody every American knows the robust social graph of the society you govern has now become the first level of ambition of the states and you can get it if you deal with the platform companies particularly if you help them wire up the rest of all your society bring the poor to the poor people's net thus generating the robust social graph of everywhere and don't expect the largest states to be content to leave that information in the hands of the smallest ones no no it's a robust social graph of the human race now what does one do with such a graph what does one make of the power one acquires when one carries an entry to every subjects mind of course it will depend upon the nature of the political ideology of the state each forming the net to suit itself each using the information provided by the surveillance of everyone all the time everywhere for its own purposes of course as we were shown by mr. Steven Spielberg in minority report last decade a beautifully imaginative evocation of how this works commercial surveillance is the basis upon which this new experience of state power rests we accept the commercial surveillance because it is fundamentally only being carried out for profit which is such a thin motive so lacking in malevolence that we can accept that we should go along with it after all they're like us they're only trying to make a living of course mr. Zuckerberg spends 30 million dollars buying all the houses around his own because he needs more privacy of course he says he's not going to allow his precious child to use Facebook in childhood of course mr. Jobs didn't allow iPads in his family but we think that that motive of profit is a sufficient reason to allow what we would never have allowed the states if they had come to us and said in the first place we wish to build these things we would have said it is without on any question the evil that we fought in the 20th century that for which we died or suffered or sent millions of others to die to prevent that from happening but to piggyback that on top of an advertising business what a beautiful form of camouflage that is so now we have the states in the position to benefit at the business intelligence layer from the data warehouses assembled by the platform companies Facebook contains information about the human race a sixth wide or maybe a third Facebook contains experiments with everyone's behavior generates a social graph of who everyone knows and why they know them then from there the state begins to put some code in those terms of service that you sign without reading they say of course that Facebook or any similar company may run any code it wants to improve the experience it isn't the data comes out of those businesses it's that code goes in and when that code goes in you have no idea what it is or what it does that's the whole point you're not supposed to what mr. Snowden showed us was that the governments the most powerful governments my own first among equals what mr. Snowden showed us is that those governments will push their way into those platforms will they nil they buy beg steal hack tap it doesn't matter in they'll go and once they're there how will you get them out what will you do I don't need to explain of course to anyone in Germany that there are people all around the world under pressure for uns insulting the little salt on I don't need to explain that a disposition to insult the little salt on can get you in great trouble the Turkish state doesn't have to use its own police they can use yours the Turkish state doesn't have to predict that Professor Chomsky or I might say something bad about the little salt on they can just wait and then reach out preemptively or not as local law permits we are building perfect despotism and we think we're only improving the efficiency of advertising regimes all over democratic or authoritarian want a kind of a legislated history manufactured image of the past glorifying certain aspects which appeal to them while hiding others while all this is going on Europeans have actually not forgotten their absurd demand for right to be forgotten paving the way for others to rewrite history and here again naively I thought that the only forgetting that happens on internet is that it feels like perpetually going into a room and forgetting what you came in for but as again I was naive about all of this so surveilling and predicting human behavior is the net of the new economy or economy of the new net some states support their local data miners I'm talking about by do neighbor etc to try to regulate the net and other try to regulate intermediaries or other people to express their own values and everyone spies predicts and resist radicalization states get their pushing around now by the eggheads on Twitter and not people in uniform they can turn civil society against itself with help from telecommunications service providers who are devoted to scrutinizing and memorizing the behavior of customers governments are building these robust social graphs everywhere this is for the purpose of perfect social control it can mean better subsidy better payments better social welfare programs no corruption and also means more effective tyranny and increasingly in escapeable prison for the human race look at bluff tail Utah where big love and big brother have become uneasy neighbors or this perfect storm of the terrible administered by Alibaba and Tencent in China there is the universal reputation score it's tied to the national ID of each person in the country and is based on factors like political compliance hobbies shopping and whether you play video games it's also generated not just by your your activities but by the activities of the friends in your social graph so you can imagine there's negative points for mentioning Tiananmen Square or speculating on official corruption or participating in activities from which state wants to nudge you away like playing video games adhaar the digital identity this biometric base unique identification number in my country to provide public distribution services and building a centralized database of over a billion human beings what could go wrong there Apple versus FBI saga is far from over all the policymakers and the governments around the world are watching what's going to come out of it because everybody wants to find a way to magically break mathematics so that math works differently for good guys and the bad guys all this solves the problem which we had in earlier centuries despotism was hard difficult to scale now there is a solution for all of it now everything this just it just tells us so everything that the net can give the states can just take away from raw connectivity itself to freedom of the market when cashless arrives when we go cashless we make the free market obsolete in every sense everything we buy everything we sell everything that moves becomes subject to bitstream signed by trust which can be blocked at the point of transactions in real time do you want to buy a train ticket that's very nice but we might not let you buy one there's no cash under the mattress because there is no cash there's no money in a safe deposit box just in case because there is no money everything has become a transaction at the will of a third party who can withhold approval anytime when we go cashless the day after tomorrow as society's race to eliminate the money that makes freedom in my neighborhood in Amsterdam the best grocer and the best baker no longer take money you have to use your pin card in the United States it's a little harder because we have legal tender laws that say that money is good for buying things India is rushing for cashlessness faster than any society on earth and when cashlessness arrives what we called the free market has disappeared forever what happens to all of us when this is happening around us what we do is we internalize this totalitarianism we organize our internal self so that we can fit into the score hunger games actually becomes a reality we internalize the hypnotic sayings war is bees freedom is slavery ignorance is strength the governments have also caught up with the social media platforms they know how effective usage of this can change their own fate they invest very heavily in their web based propaganda infrastructure the bots are created by the minute spamming weapons including armies of trolls now drown out Genwin online discourse common section or Twitter news feed where you go if you want to lose your faith in humanity now are crowded by propagandists some people are more sophisticated than the others the Chinese political weathermen as this Harvard's research study shows comments which are critical of the leadership they're allowed what is not tolerated our posts that may spur collective action those are blocked complete blackout now is becoming a common practice during elections many African Union member governments have recently adopted look at Burundi look at Egypt in February of this year as many people in Uganda were headed to the polls of the presidential election come and cut off into net services no Facebook no Twitter but this is because there is a threat to public order and safety and when as telcos they crawl in January of this year at this allowed shut down access to internet services in Egypt before in Morocco they blocked web services in 2016 since it started five states in India have seen a complete mobile internet shutdown everywhere on earth the governments are exhaustively destroying all forms of privacy and today unfortunately most of them believe that people who are followers of religion of Islam have no rights to keep secrets anymore quite honestly that's disgusting whatever free speech they are trying to prohibit by a prohibiting secrecy there in the end prohibiting freedom for all of us and there is no government on earth that any longer considers itself bound by principle to respects secrecy of its own citizens all that is left is our ability to encrypt if we lose that we will no longer live in a free society anywhere on earth so what do we do how do we deal we are no longer in a place where we can construct the net we want we can only resist the net that we don't want we can no longer accept network neutrality we are compelled to resist network hostility in such a world we must concentrate ourselves now on the piece of the network closest to us in that last kilometer that last mile that last hop lies the barricade that we must erect if we mean to keep a zone of freedom around ourselves the telecommunications service providers of the world are the entry point and first locale for all the tracking surveillance and spying in that anonymous beige cube at the corner of your street is deep packet inspection running its way for the maximization of telecommunications service provider profit a little super computer on a street corner measuring everything you're doing in order to figure out how the TSP could make more profit slowing down that which isn't profitable to it and speeding up the special services that are but that cube on the corner that little piece of the entering wedge of surveillance that business of retailing by the telecommunication service provider is where our barricade must go so what do you want us to do you want us to cut our cells off from the internet and just not use any of these services and sit in a small corner never using the internet no we're going to have to build a net that begins in privacy for us imagine at the top of a pole in every village every hamlet every farmstead every rural community every city neighborhood a little box whose job is to route for everyone with privacy you could call it a freedom box but you don't have to it should mix everybody's packets up masquerading as we say about routers so that everybody's packets in the village are indistinguishable upstream and cryptid made private linked only to the places that they need to go if we route in common everywhere if we encrypt everything all the time if we carry for one another and keep them from seeing anything we make the telecommunications service providers mere wholesalers of transport services they just move our packets and that's all but if we do that how do we actually get any security we terrorism is a real thing so is ISIS you don't want us to be secure and only talk about privacy everywhere we fear we fear things of which we ought to be afraid but everywhere we fear we fail to fear the things we should fear most which are the things we cannot see when we have made our technology strong enough to defend us from the strongest then we can start to worry about how to defend ourselves against weaker criminals but if we leave the largest powers uncontrolled their effort to protect us against the smallest evils will do us little good well it's all great to say this but what is it really going to do Snowden told us much but what has really changed everything has become legal now the governments know how to go around this nothing really changes everything goes on and anyway even if we do all of this what are we going to get out of the net those candies are not going to crush themselves and who will keep up with the Kardashians we don't need all this thing about education and everything we just let us just use the net and go on doing our business the way we do it it's true of course that what mr. Snowden did in the first instance was to bring us knowledge and the most organized parties in response were the secret worlds in every country and it's true that what they did was they went to their legislatures and they said please immunize us for everything we did wrong in the past and let us move directly to what we really want mr. Snowden proved that the strongest governments on earth were scraping everything listening to everything analyzing it later after taking it now and what the governments did whether the military platforms bill in France or the Snoopers Charter in the United Kingdom what they did was to say okay let's go straight to the real-time monitoring of everybody which is what we really want and every act of public violence only reinforces them in their certainty this is true on the other hand while we were on our way over here thanks to the German foreign ministries willingness to give her a visa if they gave her real time if she gave them real-time access to her bank accounts while we were on our way here the US House of Representatives voted unanimously to strengthen the privacy of email in the United States politics is working two ways now but we can't wait for politics and law we need technology first it's time for us to create facts on the ground Marshawn is on fall it's the young people of the planet who must save us now they have to write free code they have to use cheap free hardware they have to make the routing of privacy work we can do it we've spent 30 years making the code we need we've spent decades pushing for free or hardware we have unlicensed spectrum we can all use the Internet of Things should be the Internet of People first and we can do that the choices that we make in the technology we use will affect the politics is everybody gonna keep up with the Kardashians well I don't know I don't I've not got a Google ID or a Facebook account I've never used Twitter I live a life in the net it works pretty well you can do it too we have to get off the platforms yes yeah but I still want to share my pictures with everyone and also want to talk with everyone it's funny you don't share them with me I think you mean you want to share your pictures with your friends and what that means is we need sharing that works without a super friend in the middle we can do that surely we can do that in fact we've done it many times we just haven't promoted it the way they promote it and we want to make the net free and accessible to everybody too but we want to do it in a different way I wouldn't push you about this I wouldn't be confronting your desire for convenience and your need for security if there were time but there isn't time by 2025 it will be over technology is path dependent we can't reverse it later we made a great mistake when we made the TCP IP stack in the middle 1970s we didn't engineer anonymity in then and to engineer anonymity in afterwards meant making tour which is terrific but it's cumbersome and awkward and it's vulnerable and it can fail we need to architect the net we want and lay it on top of the net we do not want so that there is a choice if we don't give people a choice we will run out of choices one of the most important engineers in the making of the internet in that 1970s period of immense scientific optimism a man who now works at the fringes of the secret world in the United States he says and I agree with him this is the last generation in which the human race gets a choice most of the human race doesn't know what the choice is and if we here who do know don't help them to understand if we don't give them proof of concept plus running code the revolution becomes impossible time is running out I'm glad you're here thank you very much well before you all leave if this is the last generation that gets to make that choice then this is the decade for that choice to be made the components of our technological freedom with whether it's free software free hardware or free bandwidth they are differently concentrated and constituted people pushing for them have to get together one single concerted effort the free software movement the movement for free hardware the maker power the people outside inside bathrooms everywhere the ones who are individuals who actually empower technology or improve the ones who campaign for the unlicensed spectrum to stay fully free these are all different corners of the world but we all have to come together in a single movement quickly for the net we want for a system of technological relations that does not study us that does not surveil us data mine us thus prohibiting our secrecy and our anonymity thus eliminating our autonomy we are all separate strands of this technical and social thoughts we all come from different geographies have different colors of skin and other things different fields different worlds software makers access campaigners lawyers now telecom engineers hardware engineers all of you all of you if you are my age or younger you all know and understand this technology and you know what we are talking about you cannot afford to spend your youth any other way a world in which your children will live will otherwise be an unfree world it's very easy to mobilize citizens if it's war you put a propaganda machine you put up recruiting center and then you just go what we do need is a moral equivalent of a war but a moral movement not an immoral one it's not about violence but it is about technologies of freedom and we need to enlist everyone everybody so I hope you are all with us here thank you thank you so much Mishi thank you so much even for this perfect opening and this call to action we have time for one or two questions and there's a hand going up right there and there's a microphone coming to you thank you for a wonderful talk and I have a question for Mr. Mowgli and besides encryption what other solution is there to move packets freely across the infrastructure of the telecommunication providers I mean is encryption the only other only possibility do you think there's like a convention or something else that could impose the free movement of masqueraded packages across the infrastructure that is being owned and dominated according to the surveillance dynamics that you just sketched so what is there besides encryption we are completely dependent upon encryption the way we are completely dependent upon electricity we are not talking in this case about the the final product of our technology but a component which is indispensable to it everything is made of packets in our network those packets can be taken by anyone with infinite money and all the computing power they need and there are enough such parties that we cannot assume that any legal regulation or any form of technological design which leaves those packets open to be read is safe for human thought encryption is simply part of the way that we make it possible for to hear ourselves think without being overheard encryption is what creates the space within which we arrange to do our own thinking and save our own souls encryption is to the 21st century what literacy was to the 16th without the written word no reformation without no reformation no freedom of thought in the European world without encryption no human autonomy by century 22 and we have one more question up here in the front row thank you the two of you for this wonderful speech I have a question is there something else but encryption like legal possibilities for example that you must not depend on predictive technologies when you get health insurance that you have laws that these predictive technologies should not be used to get a certain government service or a public service or a service which is really necessary for your life well international covenant of civil and political rights does say something about right to privacy but each national jurisdiction is now using it to perhaps erode away which are the existing rights some of the jurisdictions actually are not even certain whether they want to give a right to privacy to their citizens or not but yes a lot of lawyers are understand sensitive to the fact that legal instruments are will have to work in tandem with technology to get those civil liberties back and to enforce such rights so various such efforts are going on the UN has appointed a repertoire to study right to privacy but yes they're much slower they move much them they move with so many components along and national security or other people always want to give us or present it in two binary forms you either get privacy or you get security that nuanced conversation is definitely happening where legal people or the legal forces sit but I do not say that it's gonna be that fast until people actually get together and make it a public movement it is happening small but it's at a much lower pace meantime in India you cannot get a propane cylinder to light or heat your house without an ad-harn number which is referenced to your retinal pattern and soon to your genome sure we can say that there may be legal restriction in one direction against the use of predictive technology for one government benefit but all other government benefits and most of the operation of economic life will soon be subject to precisely the predictive activity in the social graph to which you object the kinds of legal regulations you're talking about and that are more exceptions than they are the rule and always will be once we've made a change we cannot readily undo thank you so much to both of you can we have another really big round of applause even in Mishie so and now we are going to kick off the program and all the rest of our stages as you heard there are many we spent many many hours putting it together so we really hope you enjoy the program of course many of you will also be being in playing an active role in that I see many faces in whole one here who are going to be speaking throughout the three course of the day so thanks so much for handing in sessions to the call for papers thank you so much for coming here and being a part of the show just to highlight a couple of things that are happening today the track relearn so the track that focuses on education educational initiatives is going to be happening all day on stage 8 today we're about to kick off our music day on stage L in the laboratory you heard Andreas introduce in the opening a new location that we've expanded to this year Republica and and today's the focus on music but there's going to be a focus on a creative industry in arts track every day tomorrow focus on immersive arts and on Wednesday on fashion tech we have one of our annual returning highlights the sketch note session happening in after the break so if you want to learn how to draw along to conferences and develop your practical skills that way I recommend you visit that and of course we also have the media convention program starting in a couple of minutes I really look forward to seeing you back here at 1215 our next speaker is going to be our very own Marcus Becquedal thank you very much
 It's my really, really great pleasure to announce the opening keynote of this year's  Republic. In the program team, when we were thinking about how to open our  10th anniversary, who should speak first, we thought maybe it's a good idea to have  somebody who's spoken of the past and can help us work with the motto and  reflect on the last 10 years but also look ahead. So we started going through  all the speakers that we had on this amazing stage and on of course the  Swedish that part of stage in the last 10 years and we stopped at 2012. 2012 was  a really important year for Republic. It was a year where we transitioned into  this wonderful location to the station and really made that jump from having a  location that allowed us to have that campus feeling to come together more  strongly as a community and build this event. 2012 was also a very, very important  opening keynote for us. We decided that we wanted to have a very strong political  keynote after having ventured out into other topic areas in the past years. So  we invited Eben Moghlin, the inventor of the Freedom Box, and thought he was the  perfect choice for this opening keynote and he was. His keynote in 2012 included  such legendary senses as the day Steve Jobs died was a good day, at which point  at least half the room dropped their iPhones. Eben has been fighting for free  and open software for over 20 years. For instance by defending free software  developers such as Richard Storman and Philip Zimmerman, the inventor of PGP.  Eben Moghlin is also the founder of the Software Freedom Law Center that offers  licensing and legal support for free and open source projects. But when we were  thinking about this keynote we thought okay but he shouldn't be alone and we  feel that this is the absolute perfect combination. He will be joined today of  the veteran by a Republican noob, somebody who's never spoken on our stage  before, the most wonderful Mishie Kaldre. She's a technology lawyer and an  online civil liberty activist who's also working at the Software Freedom Law Center  together with Eben. Mishie is originally from India, the country that managed to  take a really strong stand for net neutrality and shove internet.org  against the wall last year and together they are here to examine the state of  internet freedom in the world today. Please give a really really warm welcome  and a huge applause to Eben Moghlin and Mishie Kaldre, the last kilometer, the last chance.  Good morning. It's a great pleasure to be back at  Republica. I can't thank the organizers enough for the honor of starting out this  10th anniversary conference. I want also to thank the German Foreign Ministry for  agreeing to give my law partner a four-day visa to enter Germany after  demanding real-time access to her bank accounts in order to allow us to be here  together today. So thank you to the government of this very Democratic  Republic of Germany. By 2025 we will have wired up or wireless up the remaining  half of the human race. This should be the greatest moment of educational  liberation, the greatest moment of social justice making, the greatest economic  opportunity in the history of humankind, but it won't be. Because the net we are  making is a net that we don't want, a net of surveillance, data mining, and  despotism. When you grow up in India there are a few things you cannot avoid,  cricket, Bollywood, and some very good poetry. Growing up I read this poem where  the mind is without fear and the head is held high, where knowledge is free, where  the world has not been broken into fragments by narrow domestic walls,  where words come from the depth of truth, where tireless striving stretches its  arms towards perfection, where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way,  into the dreary desert of dead habit where the mind is led forward by thee, into  ever widening thought and action, into that heaven of freedom my father let my  country awake. Where the inventors of internet reading to gore is what I  thought, but I was only naive and young and to find a cure I just started  hanging out with smarter people like the one on this stage. The net that we are  building now, the one that the rest of the human race will soon be caught in, is a  net which watches us more than we watch it. Everything we do, everything we say,  everything we buy, everything we search for is remembered forever and we are  becoming the objects of experimentation. We are becoming the subject of the net  to which we are joined. Our net now experiments with human behavior, giving a  new way of thinking about the human race adjuncts to a machine which experiments  with us, stimulus and response, stimulus and response. Billions of times a day  an experiment is conducted on a human being, show us something, swipe left,  swipe right, click, don't click, buy, don't buy. The machine is a behaviorist, like  BF Skinner and the 20th century psychologists who followed him, the  machine has no need for a concept of human mind. Only correlation, only  mathematics, only the modeling and prediction of our behavior, everything  we do, teaches the machine. By 2025, it won't be Scarlett Johansson taking your  orders, but your favorite voice in your language, your personal customized chatbot  which learns by crunching data. Balloons, playing loony tunes, would hover alongside  drones, beaming the greatest opportunity for humankind, the net. Unparalleled  troves of data will get collected and studied to make farming more productive  and control the temperature in your living room, while your fridge refuses to  put in an order for a pizza and sugar-rich ice cream. Siri or Cortana will  ensure that you never have to look up and engage in that awkward activity, talk to  another human being. Who runs the world, they say, apps. My augmented reality will  have more tickers. I have a developing country passport, that's why. Swipe right,  swipe left, click or think. Someone will anticipate all our needs and also be our  shrink. By 2025, everything that is deemed basic by Silicon Valley would have  been offered for free. My retina and fingerprints will ensure that cashless  will also make me cost less and my Uber pool can have more people bent over  screens as the driver seat is empty. The political economy of networking now  dictates that it is cheap for the platform companies to move your packets  for you in return for the ability to surveil them. Therefore, suddenly it is in  the interest of the machine to give access to everyone, which really means to  have access to every mind. Building out the net to embrace the other half of the  human race poses itself as charity, but it's actually the perfection of spying.  Access to the net belongs to everyone means we belong to everyone's mind and  we are calculating everybody. To add another billion minds to experiment with  for Facebook is cheaper than leaving them alone and so suddenly the net we do  not want is the net we are supposed to wish on the other half of the world, a  poor net for poor people. The World Bank thinks that around 70% of the bottom  fifth of the population in developing countries has a feature phone. That  feature phone is soon going to become the smartphone because right now it is  very profitable to get those packets. We will create an enormous system of  consumption where we all will be turned into nodes for further consumption. In  exchange of my boring data, I'm gonna get security, convenience and a ton of  services. Bad hair, good hair, don't care but perfect filters, primetime delivery  and also the fun to ask Siri what does she think of Google or is a Yula  commitment enough that I don't need a partner in my life. All this fun brought  to you next door in your developing country free basics or basics all that  are free. So the network we are building, the network we don't want, the network we  struggled against, the one that deprives us of freedom of thought by operating  on us while giving us the impression we operate on it, that network now controls  the pace of the human mind. Our space is small, our room is little and our time is  nonexistent. The greatest word of importance to the greatest of the  platform companies nowadays as one of its executives was telling me last year  is latency. But the latency they're talking about is not the time it takes  for a human being to learn after the presentation of an idea. The latency  they're talking about is not the years we spend growing up becoming something  we've invented out of the machinery of freedom and the opportunity to learn the  latency they're talking about is the milliseconds it takes for a smartphone to  display an advertisement stimulus and response calculation of human possibility  not by humans but by the machine. The calculating our computers do is not our  thinking. The calculating our computers do is the prediction of us. This network  which we're talking about this network is getting and giving what Silicon Valley  designs it for but it isn't delivering the promise because it isn't promising  honestly and the great problem with all this altruistic talk to get the next  billion online or three billion online is an honesty problem. There hasn't been  any candor about it anywhere and then the states show up and you certainly cannot  expect any candor from them. This network is not delivering what it promises and  it could just get lost by greed nationalism ill temper or just laziness.  It doesn't mean that fishermen's incomes go up just because it exists. It does not  mean that rural health care is better delivered or developed just because it's  there. That's not a guarantee. What is guaranteed to occur is the rendering of  ads on smartphones which get quicker, swifter, smarter and we're all being tied  to this network which we don't understand the purpose or or the behavior of.  What is happening with us is not what we want the promise to be delivered to us.  We already imitate this machine or it imitates us. Remember the TAI bought by  Microsoft? It recently got a crash course in racism, Holocaust denial, sexism,  curtsy the Twitter users and that's what we are getting from the network as we  talk about it. Four years ago I said here that freedom of the mind depends on  freedom of the media which depends on free technology which depends on free  hardware free software and free bandwidth. Here today ten years into  Republic I tell you before we get to 20 time will have run out. We are no longer  capable of building the net we want. We are only capable of resisting the net we  do not want now. We lost our chance to do it right the first time. Now we are in  the place where we must decide instead to hold off to resist to fight against the  machine on behalf of the machine we need to struggle against the system that  predicts us to become unpredictable enough that we can relieve the room for  freedom of the mind or we lose our struggle forever. In at least 38 countries  Facebook wants to provide free internet how do they want to provide it is by  buying the packet movements from the telecom service providers and put them  through their own proxy servers they can offer this way poor internet to the  world's poor towards whom they have actually acquired quite an odd case of  white man's burden as they tell us this in their own words. We stop them in  India we stop them by telling the telecom regulator of India that breaking the  security of the web eliminating authentication for poor people turning  untrusted potentially dangerous net into trust us because we know it and we are  only here to help who could be against it is not the route to universal  connection to the Indian society but nobody's receding from here neither is  Facebook nor other platform companies some of it is only a desire by a CEO  who wants to do this but most of it is just this raw energy of the business  right now right now let's get all of these people online because their data  is what works for us. And then and then what happens to it once they've gathered  it once Google AI has the data of tens of millions of people from the UK  National Health Service what happens to it once we have taken our system of money  and turned it into other people's bit streams what happens to it the mystery  of the back end is becoming the mystery of human freedom have we lost it where  is it where does it go instead of storing it ourselves we're allowing other  people to store it for us and to whom do they give it everyone is so struck with  the convenience of the front with the beauty of the top with that which lies  above the waterline and of course there's nothing to see before the waterline  move along nothing to see nothing to know nothing to guess because below the  waterline it's all guessing about you. Did we all get told that this is going to  increase democracy but we've also discovered that democratization of  technology does not necessarily mean democratizing of the society itself  what the net has democratized is the ability to self promote through Twitter  through Instagram through Snapchat or any other new big app because the world  is run by apps what has happened is the democratization of the ability to be  surveilled or surveil but at the end of it what we have delivered is the  advertisements to eyeballs but not autonomy to the society the promises of  all this free speech and expression have also now met with an outpouring of the  harassment and coercion of which the platform companies themselves are scared  they're all now rushing to study this find out what is this online harassment  and also find a solution a technical solution but really what it means is  that we've empowered people to be ill-tempered who are constantly  engaging in now making an actual opposition to the way things are so what  we find is a lot of sentiments in the net lot of opposition people are using  this form of social mobilization which is harassment of the net mostly for  reactionary purposes look what the Turkish mafia did to the university  professors or the religious fanatics who are rewriting or trying to rewrite and  say I would talk about the history in my country you have everybody everybody  beating against women who are whether they are video game players or they are  sports writers or feminist activists everywhere this man's planning everyone  is talking about made about rape murder doxing all the time that's not exactly  an increase in democracy this is just unleashing of a tool that enables many  to one ways of communication as a way of coercing thought and opinion this is  democratizing totalitarianism what we call social media these days has a  single emotion it's designed to elicit and that emotion is envy post the  segment of your life the best part make other people envy your vacations your  beautiful children your accomplishments leave out all the struggle all the doubt  all the negative all the pain and hurt let other people envy you and the social  media that build envy in order to increase desire in order to make an  advertisement suitable for you to receive I want that life here click swipe  done that envy breeds resentment which breeds anger which breeds that  resentment of the street which is now in everybody's eyeballs and eardrums all  the time so as we build this net we do not want as we summon people to the  platforms offering the poor a discount come and be measured will help you to  have access to what we get from you as we do that everyone gets interested  suddenly in privacy because they must so let us think a moment about what we  mean by the privacy we want to have in this net we do not want privacy is three  things it's secrecy that is our ability to speak and think only in partnership  with those we actually trust it's anonymity that is our ability to use  the public space to think and act and experiment and try out without the  association of identity with what we try and its autonomy that is the ability  to make our decisions and effectuate our lives without the interference with  our secrecy and our anonymity and this our autonomy this route of our  democracy is what is attacked by the net that constantly measures tracks and  experiments with us all this and we want to add another three and a half billion  people to the surveillance organism and then and then the states show up when we  move to this net we do not want this monitored net this surveillance system  we empower social control in the state like never ever ever before I stood here  four years ago and spoke about the possibility of the end of freedom of  the mind in 2012 and somewhere in Fort Meade Maryland there is a secure there  is an intelligence analyst asking at which date and time a young man in Hawaii  named Edward Snowden watched my speech because of course by the summer of 2013  what I had said here in 2012 had gained some news thanks to mr. Snowden what he  told us was what we all feared and he substantiated that the states had moved  inside this data mining tracking surveilling net we do not want of course  they did how could they not from the middle of the 20th century the most  powerful societies on earth assumed that signals intelligence was the true  secret of social power in the world they spied on everyone and others  militaries and every government and eventually they began spying on all  international commerce that they could reach because what they knew the Soviet  Union the United States the People's Republic of China and all their  satellites what they knew was access to information is power but when they have a  net that measures everybody and great big piles of everybody's behavior taken  from the machine which is experimenting always with everyone what they gain is  power to run totalitarianism on the cheap 20th century totalitarianism didn't  scale very well it needed lots and lots of people and it needed lots and lots of  fear which could only be produced by episodes of serious violence people had  to disappear they had to be broken people had to be afraid 21st century  totalitarianism solves those problems you don't need so many people anymore  because the platforms do the work for you you don't need to create so much fear  because envy works so much better because everybody informs on everybody so they  can watch everybody else and the next thing you know power has leapt higher  than power could ever leap before with that increasing power naturally comes  an increase in ambition the state decides that what it needs as a guy working  in the White House told me only a few weeks after the last time I was here in  the summer of 2012 says the man in the White House you know we've decided that  we need a robust social graph of the United States that meant the United  States government wishes to keep a list of everybody every American knows the  robust social graph of the society you govern has now become the first level of  ambition of the states and you can get it if you deal with the platform companies  particularly if you help them wire up the rest of all your society bring the  poor to the poor people's net thus generating the robust social graph of  everywhere and don't expect the largest states to be content to leave that  information in the hands of the smallest ones no no it's a robust social graph of  the human race now what does one do with such a graph what does one make of the  power one acquires when one carries an entry to every subjects mind of course  it will depend upon the nature of the political ideology of the state each  forming the net to suit itself each using the information provided by the  surveillance of everyone all the time everywhere for its own purposes of course  as we were shown by mr. Steven Spielberg in minority report last decade a  beautifully imaginative evocation of how this works commercial surveillance is  the basis upon which this new experience of state power rests we accept the  commercial surveillance because it is fundamentally only being carried out for  profit which is such a thin motive so lacking in malevolence that we can  accept that we should go along with it after all they're like us they're only  trying to make a living of course mr. Zuckerberg spends 30 million dollars  buying all the houses around his own because he needs more privacy of course  he says he's not going to allow his precious child to use Facebook in  childhood of course mr. Jobs didn't allow iPads in his family but we think  that that motive of profit is a sufficient reason to allow what we  would never have allowed the states if they had come to us and said in the  first place we wish to build these things we would have said it is without  on any question the evil that we fought in the 20th century that for which we  died or suffered or sent millions of others to die to prevent that from  happening but to piggyback that on top of an advertising business what a  beautiful form of camouflage that is so now we have the states in the position  to benefit at the business intelligence layer from the data warehouses  assembled by the platform companies Facebook contains information about the  human race a sixth wide or maybe a third Facebook contains experiments with  everyone's behavior generates a social graph of who everyone knows and why  they know them then from there the state begins to put some code in those terms  of service that you sign without reading they say of course that Facebook or any  similar company may run any code it wants to improve the experience it  isn't the data comes out of those businesses it's that code goes in and  when that code goes in you have no idea what it is or what it does that's the  whole point you're not supposed to what mr. Snowden showed us was that the  governments the most powerful governments my own first among equals what  mr. Snowden showed us is that those governments will push their way into  those platforms will they nil they buy beg steal hack tap it doesn't matter  in they'll go and once they're there how will you get them out what will you do  I don't need to explain of course to anyone in Germany that there are people  all around the world under pressure for uns insulting the little salt on I don't  need to explain that a disposition to insult the little salt on can get you  in great trouble the Turkish state doesn't have to use its own police they  can use yours the Turkish state doesn't have to predict that Professor Chomsky  or I might say something bad about the little salt on they can just wait and  then reach out preemptively or not as local law permits we are building  perfect despotism and we think we're only improving the efficiency of  advertising regimes all over democratic or authoritarian want a kind of a  legislated history manufactured image of the past glorifying certain aspects  which appeal to them while hiding others while all this is going on  Europeans have actually not forgotten their absurd demand for right to be  forgotten paving the way for others to rewrite history and here again naively I  thought that the only forgetting that happens on internet is that it feels  like perpetually going into a room and forgetting what you came in for but as  again I was naive about all of this so surveilling and predicting human  behavior is the net of the new economy or economy of the new net some states  support their local data miners I'm talking about by do neighbor etc to try  to regulate the net and other try to regulate intermediaries or other people  to express their own values and everyone spies predicts and resist radicalization  states get their pushing around now by the eggheads on Twitter and not people  in uniform they can turn civil society against itself with help from  telecommunications service providers who are devoted to scrutinizing and  memorizing the behavior of customers governments are building these robust  social graphs everywhere this is for the purpose of perfect social control it can  mean better subsidy better payments better social welfare programs no  corruption and also means more effective tyranny and increasingly in  escapeable prison for the human race look at bluff tail Utah where big love and  big brother have become uneasy neighbors or this perfect storm of the  terrible administered by Alibaba and Tencent in China there is the universal  reputation score it's tied to the national ID of each person in the  country and is based on factors like political compliance hobbies shopping  and whether you play video games it's also generated not just by your your  activities but by the activities of the friends in your social graph so you can  imagine there's negative points for mentioning Tiananmen Square or speculating  on official corruption or participating in activities from which state wants to  nudge you away like playing video games adhaar the digital identity this  biometric base unique identification number in my country to provide public  distribution services and building a centralized database of over a billion  human beings what could go wrong there Apple versus FBI saga is far from over  all the policymakers and the governments around the world are watching  what's going to come out of it because everybody wants to find a way to  magically break mathematics so that math works differently for good guys and the  bad guys all this solves the problem which we had in earlier centuries  despotism was hard difficult to scale now there is a solution for all of it now  everything this just it just tells us so everything that the net can give the  states can just take away from raw connectivity itself to freedom of the  market when cashless arrives when we go cashless we make the free market  obsolete in every sense everything we buy everything we sell everything that  moves becomes subject to bitstream signed by trust which can be blocked at the  point of transactions in real time do you want to buy a train ticket that's  very nice but we might not let you buy one there's no cash under the mattress  because there is no cash there's no money in a safe deposit box just in case  because there is no money everything has become a transaction at the will of a  third party who can withhold approval anytime when we go cashless the day  after tomorrow as society's race to eliminate the money that makes freedom in  my neighborhood in Amsterdam the best grocer and the best baker no longer  take money you have to use your pin card in the United States it's a little  harder because we have legal tender laws that say that money is good for buying  things India is rushing for cashlessness faster than any society on earth and  when cashlessness arrives what we called the free market has disappeared  forever what happens to all of us when this is happening around us what we do  is we internalize this totalitarianism we organize our internal self so that we  can fit into the score hunger games actually becomes a reality we internalize  the hypnotic sayings war is bees freedom is slavery  ignorance is strength the governments have also caught up with the social media  platforms they know how effective usage of this can change their own fate they  invest very heavily in their web based propaganda infrastructure the bots are  created by the minute spamming weapons including armies of trolls now drown out  Genwin online discourse common section or Twitter news feed where you go if you  want to lose your faith in humanity now are crowded by propagandists some people  are more sophisticated than the others the Chinese political weathermen as this  Harvard's research study shows comments which are critical of the leadership  they're allowed what is not tolerated our posts that may spur collective action  those are blocked complete blackout now is becoming a common practice during  elections many African Union member governments have recently adopted look  at Burundi look at Egypt in February of this year as many people in Uganda were  headed to the polls of the presidential election come and cut off into net  services no Facebook no Twitter but this is because there is a threat to public  order and safety and when as telcos they crawl in January of this year at this  allowed shut down access to internet services in Egypt before in Morocco they  blocked web services in 2016 since it started five states in India have seen  a complete mobile internet shutdown everywhere on earth the governments are  exhaustively destroying all forms of privacy and today unfortunately most of  them believe that people who are followers of religion of Islam have no  rights to keep secrets anymore quite honestly that's disgusting whatever free  speech they are trying to prohibit by a prohibiting secrecy there in the end  prohibiting freedom for all of us and there is no government on earth that  any longer considers itself bound by principle to respects secrecy of its  own citizens all that is left is our ability to encrypt if we lose that we  will no longer live in a free society anywhere on earth so what do we do how  do we deal we are no longer in a place where we can construct the net we want  we can only resist the net that we don't want we can no longer accept network  neutrality we are compelled to resist network hostility in such a world we  must concentrate ourselves now on the piece of the network closest to us in  that last kilometer that last mile that last hop lies the barricade that we must  erect if we mean to keep a zone of freedom around ourselves the telecommunications  service providers of the world are the entry point and first locale for all  the tracking surveillance and spying in that anonymous beige cube at the corner  of your street is deep packet inspection running its way for the maximization of  telecommunications service provider profit a little super computer on a  street corner measuring everything you're doing in order to figure out how  the TSP could make more profit slowing down that which isn't profitable to it  and speeding up the special services that are but that cube on the corner that  little piece of the entering wedge of surveillance that business of retailing  by the telecommunication service provider is where our barricade must go so  what do you want us to do you want us to cut our cells off from the internet and  just not use any of these services and sit in a small corner never using the  internet no we're going to have to build a net that begins in privacy for us  imagine at the top of a pole in every village every hamlet every farmstead  every rural community every city neighborhood a little box whose job is  to route for everyone with privacy you could call it a freedom box but you  don't have to it should mix everybody's packets up masquerading as we say about  routers so that everybody's packets in the village are indistinguishable  upstream and cryptid made private linked only to the places that they need to go  if we route in common everywhere if we encrypt everything all the time if we  carry for one another and keep them from seeing anything we make the telecommunications  service providers mere wholesalers of transport services they just move our  packets and that's all but if we do that how do we actually get any security we  terrorism is a real thing so is ISIS you don't want us to be secure and only talk  about privacy everywhere we fear we fear things of which we ought to be afraid  but everywhere we fear we fail to fear the things we should fear most which are  the things we cannot see when we have made our technology strong enough to  defend us from the strongest then we can start to worry about how to defend  ourselves against weaker criminals but if we leave the largest powers uncontrolled  their effort to protect us against the smallest evils will do us little good  well it's all great to say this but what is it really going to do Snowden told us  much but what has really changed everything has become legal now the  governments know how to go around this nothing really changes everything goes  on and anyway even if we do all of this what are we going to get out of the net  those candies are not going to crush themselves and who will keep up with the  Kardashians we don't need all this thing about education and everything we just  let us just use the net and go on doing our business the way we do it it's true  of course that what mr. Snowden did in the first instance was to bring us  knowledge and the most organized parties in response were the secret worlds in  every country and it's true that what they did was they went to their  legislatures and they said please immunize us for everything we did wrong in  the past and let us move directly to what we really want mr. Snowden proved  that the strongest governments on earth were scraping everything listening to  everything analyzing it later after taking it now and what the governments  did whether the military platforms bill in France or the Snoopers Charter in the  United Kingdom what they did was to say okay let's go straight to the real-time  monitoring of everybody which is what we really want and every act of public  violence only reinforces them in their certainty this is true on the other hand  while we were on our way over here thanks to the German foreign ministries  willingness to give her a visa if they gave her real time if she gave them  real-time access to her bank accounts while we were on our way here the US  House of Representatives voted unanimously to strengthen the privacy of  email in the United States politics is working two ways now but we can't wait  for politics and law we need technology first it's time for us to create facts  on the ground Marshawn is on fall it's the young people of the planet who must  save us now they have to write free code they have to use cheap free hardware  they have to make the routing of privacy work we can do it we've spent 30 years  making the code we need we've spent decades pushing for free or hardware we  have unlicensed spectrum we can all use the Internet of Things should be the  Internet of People first and we can do that the choices that we make in the  technology we use will affect the politics is everybody gonna keep up with  the Kardashians well I don't know I don't I've not got a Google ID or a  Facebook account I've never used Twitter I live a life in the net it works pretty  well you can do it too we have to get off the platforms yes yeah but I still  want to share my pictures with everyone and also want to talk with everyone it's  funny you don't share them with me I think you mean you want to share your  pictures with your friends and what that means is we need sharing that works  without a super friend in the middle we can do that surely we can do that in  fact we've done it many times we just haven't promoted it the way they  promote it and we want to make the net free and accessible to everybody too but  we want to do it in a different way I wouldn't push you about this I wouldn't  be confronting your desire for convenience and your need for security if  there were time but there isn't time by 2025 it will be over technology is  path dependent we can't reverse it later we made a great mistake when we made  the TCP IP stack in the middle 1970s we didn't engineer anonymity in then and to  engineer anonymity in afterwards meant making tour which is terrific but it's  cumbersome and awkward and it's vulnerable and it can fail we need to  architect the net we want and lay it on top of the net we do not want so that  there is a choice if we don't give people a choice we will run out of choices  one of the most important engineers in the making of the internet in that 1970s  period of immense scientific optimism a man who now works at the fringes of the  secret world in the United States he says and I agree with him this is the  last generation in which the human race gets a choice most of the human race  doesn't know what the choice is and if we here who do know don't help them to  understand if we don't give them proof of concept plus running code the  revolution becomes impossible time is running out I'm glad you're here thank  you very much  well before you all leave if this is the last generation that gets to make that  choice then this is the decade for that choice to be made the components of our  technological freedom with whether it's free software free hardware or free  bandwidth they are differently concentrated and constituted people  pushing for them have to get together one single concerted effort the free  software movement the movement for free hardware the maker power the people  outside inside bathrooms everywhere the ones who are individuals who actually  empower technology or improve the ones who campaign for the unlicensed spectrum  to stay fully free these are all different corners of the world but we all  have to come together in a single movement quickly for the net we want for  a system of technological relations that does not study us that does not  surveil us data mine us thus prohibiting our secrecy and our anonymity  thus eliminating our autonomy we are all separate strands of this technical and  social thoughts we all come from different geographies have different  colors of skin and other things different fields different worlds software  makers access campaigners lawyers now telecom engineers hardware engineers all  of you all of you if you are my age or younger you all know and understand this  technology and you know what we are talking about you cannot afford to  spend your youth any other way a world in which your children will live will  otherwise be an unfree world it's very easy to mobilize citizens if it's war  you put a propaganda machine you put up recruiting center and then you just go  what we do need is a moral equivalent of a war but a moral movement not an  immoral one it's not about violence but it is about technologies of freedom and  we need to enlist everyone everybody so I hope you are all with us here thank you  thank you so much Mishi thank you so much even for this perfect opening and  this call to action we have time for one or two questions and there's a hand  going up right there and there's a microphone coming to you thank you for  a wonderful talk and I have a question for Mr. Mowgli and besides encryption  what other solution is there to move packets freely across the infrastructure  of the telecommunication providers I mean is encryption the only other only  possibility do you think there's like a convention or something else that could  impose the free movement of masqueraded packages across the infrastructure that  is being owned and dominated according to the surveillance dynamics that you  just sketched so what is there besides encryption we are completely dependent  upon encryption the way we are completely dependent upon electricity we  are not talking in this case about the the final product of our technology but  a component which is indispensable to it everything is made of packets in our  network those packets can be taken by anyone with infinite money and all the  computing power they need and there are enough such parties that we cannot  assume that any legal regulation or any form of technological design which leaves  those packets open to be read is safe for human thought encryption is simply  part of the way that we make it possible for to hear ourselves think without  being overheard encryption is what creates the space within which we arrange  to do our own thinking and save our own souls encryption is to the 21st century  what literacy was to the 16th without the written word no reformation without  no reformation no freedom of thought in the European world without encryption no  human autonomy by century 22 and we have one more question up here in the front  row thank you the two of you for this wonderful speech I have a question is  there something else but encryption like legal possibilities for example that  you must not depend on predictive technologies when you get health  insurance that you have laws that these predictive technologies should not be  used to get a certain government service or a public service or a service which  is really necessary for your life well international covenant of civil and  political rights does say something about right to privacy but each national  jurisdiction is now using it to perhaps erode away which are the existing rights  some of the jurisdictions actually are not even certain whether they want to  give a right to privacy to their citizens or not but yes a lot of lawyers are  understand sensitive to the fact that legal instruments are will have to work  in tandem with technology to get those civil liberties back and to enforce  such rights so various such efforts are going on the UN has appointed a repertoire  to study right to privacy but yes they're much slower they move much them  they move with so many components along and national security or other people  always want to give us or present it in two binary forms you either get  privacy or you get security that nuanced conversation is definitely happening  where legal people or the legal forces sit but I do not say that it's gonna be  that fast until people actually get together and make it a public movement  it is happening small but it's at a much lower pace meantime in India you cannot  get a propane cylinder to light or heat your house without an ad-harn number  which is referenced to your retinal pattern and soon to your genome sure we  can say that there may be legal restriction in one direction against the  use of predictive technology for one government benefit but all other  government benefits and most of the operation of economic life will soon be  subject to precisely the predictive activity in the social graph to which  you object the kinds of legal regulations you're talking about and that  are more exceptions than they are the rule and always will be once we've made a  change we cannot readily undo thank you so much to both of you can we have  another really big round of applause even in Mishie  so and now we are going to kick off the program and all the rest of our stages  as you heard there are many we spent many many hours putting it together so we  really hope you enjoy the program of course many of you will also be being  in playing an active role in that I see many faces in whole one here who are  going to be speaking throughout the three course of the day so thanks so much  for handing in sessions to the call for papers thank you so much for coming here  and being a part of the show just to highlight a couple of things that are  happening today the track relearn so the track that focuses on education  educational initiatives is going to be happening all day on stage 8 today we're  about to kick off our music day on stage L in the laboratory you heard Andreas  introduce in the opening a new location that we've expanded to this year  Republica and and today's the focus on music but there's going to be a focus  on a creative industry in arts track every day tomorrow focus on immersive  arts and on Wednesday on fashion tech we have one of our annual returning  highlights the sketch note session happening in after the break so if you  want to learn how to draw along to conferences and develop your practical  skills that way I recommend you visit that and of course we also have the  media convention program starting in a couple of minutes I really look forward  to seeing you back here at 1215 our next speaker is going to be our very own  Marcus Becquedal thank you very much
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It's my really, really great pleasure to announce the opening keynote of this year's Republic. In the program team, when we were thinking about how to open our 10th anniversary, who should speak first, we thought maybe it's a good idea to have somebody who's spoken of the past and can help us work with the motto and reflect on the last 10 years but also look ahead. So we started going through all the speakers that we had on this amazing stage and on of course the Swedish that part of stage in the last 10 years and we stopped at 2012. 2012 was a really important year for Republic. It was a year where we transitioned into this wonderful location to the station and really made that jump from having a location that allowed us to have that campus feeling to come together more strongly as a community and build this event. 2012 was also a very, very important opening keynote for us. We decided that we wanted to have a very strong political keynote after having ventured out into other topic areas in the past years. So we invited Eben Moghlin, the inventor of the Freedom Box, and thought he was the perfect choice for this opening keynote and he was. His keynote in 2012 included such legendary senses as the day Steve Jobs died was a good day, at which point at least half the room dropped their iPhones. Eben has been fighting for free and open software for over 20 years. For instance by defending free software developers such as Richard Storman and Philip Zimmerman, the inventor of PGP. Eben Moghlin is also the founder of the Software Freedom Law Center that offers licensing and legal support for free and open source projects. But when we were thinking about this keynote we thought okay but he shouldn't be alone and we feel that this is the absolute perfect combination. He will be joined today of the veteran by a Republican noob, somebody who's never spoken on our stage before, the most wonderful Mishie Kaldre. She's a technology lawyer and an online civil liberty activist who's also working at the Software Freedom Law Center together with Eben. Mishie is originally from India, the country that managed to take a really strong stand for net neutrality and shove internet.org against the wall last year and together they are here to examine the state of internet freedom in the world today. Please give a really really warm welcome and a huge applause to Eben Moghlin and Mishie Kaldre, the last kilometer, the last chance. Good morning. It's a great pleasure to be back at Republica. I can't thank the organizers enough for the honor of starting out this 10th anniversary conference. I want also to thank the German Foreign Ministry for agreeing to give my law partner a four-day visa to enter Germany after demanding real-time access to her bank accounts in order to allow us to be here together today. So thank you to the government of this very Democratic Republic of Germany. By 2025 we will have wired up or wireless up the remaining half of the human race. This should be the greatest moment of educational liberation, the greatest moment of social justice making, the greatest economic opportunity in the history of humankind, but it won't be. Because the net we are making is a net that we don't want, a net of surveillance, data mining, and despotism. When you grow up in India there are a few things you cannot avoid, cricket, Bollywood, and some very good poetry. Growing up I read this poem where the mind is without fear and the head is held high, where knowledge is free, where the world has not been broken into fragments by narrow domestic walls, where words come from the depth of truth, where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection, where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way, into the dreary desert of dead habit where the mind is led forward by thee, into ever widening thought and action, into that heaven of freedom my father let my country awake. Where the inventors of internet reading to gore is what I thought, but I was only naive and young and to find a cure I just started hanging out with smarter people like the one on this stage. The net that we are building now, the one that the rest of the human race will soon be caught in, is a net which watches us more than we watch it. Everything we do, everything we say, everything we buy, everything we search for is remembered forever and we are becoming the objects of experimentation. We are becoming the subject of the net to which we are joined. Our net now experiments with human behavior, giving a new way of thinking about the human race adjuncts to a machine which experiments with us, stimulus and response, stimulus and response. Billions of times a day an experiment is conducted on a human being, show us something, swipe left, swipe right, click, don't click, buy, don't buy. The machine is a behaviorist, like BF Skinner and the 20th century psychologists who followed him, the machine has no need for a concept of human mind. Only correlation, only mathematics, only the modeling and prediction of our behavior, everything we do, teaches the machine. By 2025, it won't be Scarlett Johansson taking your orders, but your favorite voice in your language, your personal customized chatbot which learns by crunching data. Balloons, playing loony tunes, would hover alongside drones, beaming the greatest opportunity for humankind, the net. Unparalleled troves of data will get collected and studied to make farming more productive and control the temperature in your living room, while your fridge refuses to put in an order for a pizza and sugar-rich ice cream. Siri or Cortana will ensure that you never have to look up and engage in that awkward activity, talk to another human being. Who runs the world, they say, apps. My augmented reality will have more tickers. I have a developing country passport, that's why. Swipe right, swipe left, click or think. Someone will anticipate all our needs and also be our shrink. By 2025, everything that is deemed basic by Silicon Valley would have been offered for free. My retina and fingerprints will ensure that cashless will also make me cost less and my Uber pool can have more people bent over screens as the driver seat is empty. The political economy of networking now dictates that it is cheap for the platform companies to move your packets for you in return for the ability to surveil them. Therefore, suddenly it is in the interest of the machine to give access to everyone, which really means to have access to every mind. Building out the net to embrace the other half of the human race poses itself as charity, but it's actually the perfection of spying. Access to the net belongs to everyone means we belong to everyone's mind and we are calculating everybody. To add another billion minds to experiment with for Facebook is cheaper than leaving them alone and so suddenly the net we do not want is the net we are supposed to wish on the other half of the world, a poor net for poor people. The World Bank thinks that around 70% of the bottom fifth of the population in developing countries has a feature phone. That feature phone is soon going to become the smartphone because right now it is very profitable to get those packets. We will create an enormous system of consumption where we all will be turned into nodes for further consumption. In exchange of my boring data, I'm gonna get security, convenience and a ton of services. Bad hair, good hair, don't care but perfect filters, primetime delivery and also the fun to ask Siri what does she think of Google or is a Yula commitment enough that I don't need a partner in my life. All this fun brought to you next door in your developing country free basics or basics all that are free. So the network we are building, the network we don't want, the network we struggled against, the one that deprives us of freedom of thought by operating on us while giving us the impression we operate on it, that network now controls the pace of the human mind. Our space is small, our room is little and our time is nonexistent. The greatest word of importance to the greatest of the platform companies nowadays as one of its executives was telling me last year is latency. But the latency they're talking about is not the time it takes for a human being to learn after the presentation of an idea. The latency they're talking about is not the years we spend growing up becoming something we've invented out of the machinery of freedom and the opportunity to learn the latency they're talking about is the milliseconds it takes for a smartphone to display an advertisement stimulus and response calculation of human possibility not by humans but by the machine. The calculating our computers do is not our thinking. The calculating our computers do is the prediction of us. This network which we're talking about this network is getting and giving what Silicon Valley designs it for but it isn't delivering the promise because it isn't promising honestly and the great problem with all this altruistic talk to get the next billion online or three billion online is an honesty problem. There hasn't been any candor about it anywhere and then the states show up and you certainly cannot expect any candor from them. This network is not delivering what it promises and it could just get lost by greed nationalism ill temper or just laziness. It doesn't mean that fishermen's incomes go up just because it exists. It does not mean that rural health care is better delivered or developed just because it's there. That's not a guarantee. What is guaranteed to occur is the rendering of ads on smartphones which get quicker, swifter, smarter and we're all being tied to this network which we don't understand the purpose or or the behavior of. What is happening with us is not what we want the promise to be delivered to us. We already imitate this machine or it imitates us. Remember the TAI bought by Microsoft? It recently got a crash course in racism, Holocaust denial, sexism, curtsy the Twitter users and that's what we are getting from the network as we talk about it. Four years ago I said here that freedom of the mind depends on freedom of the media which depends on free technology which depends on free hardware free software and free bandwidth. Here today ten years into Republic I tell you before we get to 20 time will have run out. We are no longer capable of building the net we want. We are only capable of resisting the net we do not want now. We lost our chance to do it right the first time. Now we are in the place where we must decide instead to hold off to resist to fight against the machine on behalf of the machine we need to struggle against the system that predicts us to become unpredictable enough that we can relieve the room for freedom of the mind or we lose our struggle forever. In at least 38 countries Facebook wants to provide free internet how do they want to provide it is by buying the packet movements from the telecom service providers and put them through their own proxy servers they can offer this way poor internet to the world's poor towards whom they have actually acquired quite an odd case of white man's burden as they tell us this in their own words. We stop them in India we stop them by telling the telecom regulator of India that breaking the security of the web eliminating authentication for poor people turning untrusted potentially dangerous net into trust us because we know it and we are only here to help who could be against it is not the route to universal connection to the Indian society but nobody's receding from here neither is Facebook nor other platform companies some of it is only a desire by a CEO who wants to do this but most of it is just this raw energy of the business right now right now let's get all of these people online because their data is what works for us. And then and then what happens to it once they've gathered it once Google AI has the data of tens of millions of people from the UK National Health Service what happens to it once we have taken our system of money and turned it into other people's bit streams what happens to it the mystery of the back end is becoming the mystery of human freedom have we lost it where is it where does it go instead of storing it ourselves we're allowing other people to store it for us and to whom do they give it everyone is so struck with the convenience of the front with the beauty of the top with that which lies above the waterline and of course there's nothing to see before the waterline move along nothing to see nothing to know nothing to guess because below the waterline it's all guessing about you. Did we all get told that this is going to increase democracy but we've also discovered that democratization of technology does not necessarily mean democratizing of the society itself what the net has democratized is the ability to self promote through Twitter through Instagram through Snapchat or any other new big app because the world is run by apps what has happened is the democratization of the ability to be surveilled or surveil but at the end of it what we have delivered is the advertisements to eyeballs but not autonomy to the society the promises of all this free speech and expression have also now met with an outpouring of the harassment and coercion of which the platform companies themselves are scared they're all now rushing to study this find out what is this online harassment and also find a solution a technical solution but really what it means is that we've empowered people to be ill-tempered who are constantly engaging in now making an actual opposition to the way things are so what we find is a lot of sentiments in the net lot of opposition people are using this form of social mobilization which is harassment of the net mostly for reactionary purposes look what the Turkish mafia did to the university professors or the religious fanatics who are rewriting or trying to rewrite and say I would talk about the history in my country you have everybody everybody beating against women who are whether they are video game players or they are sports writers or feminist activists everywhere this man's planning everyone is talking about made about rape murder doxing all the time that's not exactly an increase in democracy this is just unleashing of a tool that enables many to one ways of communication as a way of coercing thought and opinion this is democratizing totalitarianism what we call social media these days has a single emotion it's designed to elicit and that emotion is envy post the segment of your life the best part make other people envy your vacations your beautiful children your accomplishments leave out all the struggle all the doubt all the negative all the pain and hurt let other people envy you and the social media that build envy in order to increase desire in order to make an advertisement suitable for you to receive I want that life here click swipe done that envy breeds resentment which breeds anger which breeds that resentment of the street which is now in everybody's eyeballs and eardrums all the time so as we build this net we do not want as we summon people to the platforms offering the poor a discount come and be measured will help you to have access to what we get from you as we do that everyone gets interested suddenly in privacy because they must so let us think a moment about what we mean by the privacy we want to have in this net we do not want privacy is three things it's secrecy that is our ability to speak and think only in partnership with those we actually trust it's anonymity that is our ability to use the public space to think and act and experiment and try out without the association of identity with what we try and its autonomy that is the ability to make our decisions and effectuate our lives without the interference with our secrecy and our anonymity and this our autonomy this route of our democracy is what is attacked by the net that constantly measures tracks and experiments with us all this and we want to add another three and a half billion people to the surveillance organism and then and then the states show up when we move to this net we do not want this monitored net this surveillance system we empower social control in the state like never ever ever before I stood here four years ago and spoke about the possibility of the end of freedom of the mind in 2012 and somewhere in Fort Meade Maryland there is a secure there is an intelligence analyst asking at which date and time a young man in Hawaii named Edward Snowden watched my speech because of course by the summer of 2013 what I had said here in 2012 had gained some news thanks to mr. Snowden what he told us was what we all feared and he substantiated that the states had moved inside this data mining tracking surveilling net we do not want of course they did how could they not from the middle of the 20th century the most powerful societies on earth assumed that signals intelligence was the true secret of social power in the world they spied on everyone and others militaries and every government and eventually they began spying on all international commerce that they could reach because what they knew the Soviet Union the United States the People's Republic of China and all their satellites what they knew was access to information is power but when they have a net that measures everybody and great big piles of everybody's behavior taken from the machine which is experimenting always with everyone what they gain is power to run totalitarianism on the cheap 20th century totalitarianism didn't scale very well it needed lots and lots of people and it needed lots and lots of fear which could only be produced by episodes of serious violence people had to disappear they had to be broken people had to be afraid 21st century totalitarianism solves those problems you don't need so many people anymore because the platforms do the work for you you don't need to create so much fear because envy works so much better because everybody informs on everybody so they can watch everybody else and the next thing you know power has leapt higher than power could ever leap before with that increasing power naturally comes an increase in ambition the state decides that what it needs as a guy working in the White House told me only a few weeks after the last time I was here in the summer of 2012 says the man in the White House you know we've decided that we need a robust social graph of the United States that meant the United States government wishes to keep a list of everybody every American knows the robust social graph of the society you govern has now become the first level of ambition of the states and you can get it if you deal with the platform companies particularly if you help them wire up the rest of all your society bring the poor to the poor people's net thus generating the robust social graph of everywhere and don't expect the largest states to be content to leave that information in the hands of the smallest ones no no it's a robust social graph of the human race now what does one do with such a graph what does one make of the power one acquires when one carries an entry to every subjects mind of course it will depend upon the nature of the political ideology of the state each forming the net to suit itself each using the information provided by the surveillance of everyone all the time everywhere for its own purposes of course as we were shown by mr. Steven Spielberg in minority report last decade a beautifully imaginative evocation of how this works commercial surveillance is the basis upon which this new experience of state power rests we accept the commercial surveillance because it is fundamentally only being carried out for profit which is such a thin motive so lacking in malevolence that we can accept that we should go along with it after all they're like us they're only trying to make a living of course mr. Zuckerberg spends 30 million dollars buying all the houses around his own because he needs more privacy of course he says he's not going to allow his precious child to use Facebook in childhood of course mr. Jobs didn't allow iPads in his family but we think that that motive of profit is a sufficient reason to allow what we would never have allowed the states if they had come to us and said in the first place we wish to build these things we would have said it is without on any question the evil that we fought in the 20th century that for which we died or suffered or sent millions of others to die to prevent that from happening but to piggyback that on top of an advertising business what a beautiful form of camouflage that is so now we have the states in the position to benefit at the business intelligence layer from the data warehouses assembled by the platform companies Facebook contains information about the human race a sixth wide or maybe a third Facebook contains experiments with everyone's behavior generates a social graph of who everyone knows and why they know them then from there the state begins to put some code in those terms of service that you sign without reading they say of course that Facebook or any similar company may run any code it wants to improve the experience it isn't the data comes out of those businesses it's that code goes in and when that code goes in you have no idea what it is or what it does that's the whole point you're not supposed to what mr. Snowden showed us was that the governments the most powerful governments my own first among equals what mr. Snowden showed us is that those governments will push their way into those platforms will they nil they buy beg steal hack tap it doesn't matter in they'll go and once they're there how will you get them out what will you do I don't need to explain of course to anyone in Germany that there are people all around the world under pressure for uns insulting the little salt on I don't need to explain that a disposition to insult the little salt on can get you in great trouble the Turkish state doesn't have to use its own police they can use yours the Turkish state doesn't have to predict that Professor Chomsky or I might say something bad about the little salt on they can just wait and then reach out preemptively or not as local law permits we are building perfect despotism and we think we're only improving the efficiency of advertising regimes all over democratic or authoritarian want a kind of a legislated history manufactured image of the past glorifying certain aspects which appeal to them while hiding others while all this is going on Europeans have actually not forgotten their absurd demand for right to be forgotten paving the way for others to rewrite history and here again naively I thought that the only forgetting that happens on internet is that it feels like perpetually going into a room and forgetting what you came in for but as again I was naive about all of this so surveilling and predicting human behavior is the net of the new economy or economy of the new net some states support their local data miners I'm talking about by do neighbor etc to try to regulate the net and other try to regulate intermediaries or other people to express their own values and everyone spies predicts and resist radicalization states get their pushing around now by the eggheads on Twitter and not people in uniform they can turn civil society against itself with help from telecommunications service providers who are devoted to scrutinizing and memorizing the behavior of customers governments are building these robust social graphs everywhere this is for the purpose of perfect social control it can mean better subsidy better payments better social welfare programs no corruption and also means more effective tyranny and increasingly in escapeable prison for the human race look at bluff tail Utah where big love and big brother have become uneasy neighbors or this perfect storm of the terrible administered by Alibaba and Tencent in China there is the universal reputation score it's tied to the national ID of each person in the country and is based on factors like political compliance hobbies shopping and whether you play video games it's also generated not just by your your activities but by the activities of the friends in your social graph so you can imagine there's negative points for mentioning Tiananmen Square or speculating on official corruption or participating in activities from which state wants to nudge you away like playing video games adhaar the digital identity this biometric base unique identification number in my country to provide public distribution services and building a centralized database of over a billion human beings what could go wrong there Apple versus FBI saga is far from over all the policymakers and the governments around the world are watching what's going to come out of it because everybody wants to find a way to magically break mathematics so that math works differently for good guys and the bad guys all this solves the problem which we had in earlier centuries despotism was hard difficult to scale now there is a solution for all of it now everything this just it just tells us so everything that the net can give the states can just take away from raw connectivity itself to freedom of the market when cashless arrives when we go cashless we make the free market obsolete in every sense everything we buy everything we sell everything that moves becomes subject to bitstream signed by trust which can be blocked at the point of transactions in real time do you want to buy a train ticket that's very nice but we might not let you buy one there's no cash under the mattress because there is no cash there's no money in a safe deposit box just in case because there is no money everything has become a transaction at the will of a third party who can withhold approval anytime when we go cashless the day after tomorrow as society's race to eliminate the money that makes freedom in my neighborhood in Amsterdam the best grocer and the best baker no longer take money you have to use your pin card in the United States it's a little harder because we have legal tender laws that say that money is good for buying things India is rushing for cashlessness faster than any society on earth and when cashlessness arrives what we called the free market has disappeared forever what happens to all of us when this is happening around us what we do is we internalize this totalitarianism we organize our internal self so that we can fit into the score hunger games actually becomes a reality we internalize the hypnotic sayings war is bees freedom is slavery ignorance is strength the governments have also caught up with the social media platforms they know how effective usage of this can change their own fate they invest very heavily in their web based propaganda infrastructure the bots are created by the minute spamming weapons including armies of trolls now drown out Genwin online discourse common section or Twitter news feed where you go if you want to lose your faith in humanity now are crowded by propagandists some people are more sophisticated than the others the Chinese political weathermen as this Harvard's research study shows comments which are critical of the leadership they're allowed what is not tolerated our posts that may spur collective action those are blocked complete blackout now is becoming a common practice during elections many African Union member governments have recently adopted look at Burundi look at Egypt in February of this year as many people in Uganda were headed to the polls of the presidential election come and cut off into net services no Facebook no Twitter but this is because there is a threat to public order and safety and when as telcos they crawl in January of this year at this allowed shut down access to internet services in Egypt before in Morocco they blocked web services in 2016 since it started five states in India have seen a complete mobile internet shutdown everywhere on earth the governments are exhaustively destroying all forms of privacy and today unfortunately most of them believe that people who are followers of religion of Islam have no rights to keep secrets anymore quite honestly that's disgusting whatever free speech they are trying to prohibit by a prohibiting secrecy there in the end prohibiting freedom for all of us and there is no government on earth that any longer considers itself bound by principle to respects secrecy of its own citizens all that is left is our ability to encrypt if we lose that we will no longer live in a free society anywhere on earth so what do we do how do we deal we are no longer in a place where we can construct the net we want we can only resist the net that we don't want we can no longer accept network neutrality we are compelled to resist network hostility in such a world we must concentrate ourselves now on the piece of the network closest to us in that last kilometer that last mile that last hop lies the barricade that we must erect if we mean to keep a zone of freedom around ourselves the telecommunications service providers of the world are the entry point and first locale for all the tracking surveillance and spying in that anonymous beige cube at the corner of your street is deep packet inspection running its way for the maximization of telecommunications service provider profit a little super computer on a street corner measuring everything you're doing in order to figure out how the TSP could make more profit slowing down that which isn't profitable to it and speeding up the special services that are but that cube on the corner that little piece of the entering wedge of surveillance that business of retailing by the telecommunication service provider is where our barricade must go so what do you want us to do you want us to cut our cells off from the internet and just not use any of these services and sit in a small corner never using the internet no we're going to have to build a net that begins in privacy for us imagine at the top of a pole in every village every hamlet every farmstead every rural community every city neighborhood a little box whose job is to route for everyone with privacy you could call it a freedom box but you don't have to it should mix everybody's packets up masquerading as we say about routers so that everybody's packets in the village are indistinguishable upstream and cryptid made private linked only to the places that they need to go if we route in common everywhere if we encrypt everything all the time if we carry for one another and keep them from seeing anything we make the telecommunications service providers mere wholesalers of transport services they just move our packets and that's all but if we do that how do we actually get any security we terrorism is a real thing so is ISIS you don't want us to be secure and only talk about privacy everywhere we fear we fear things of which we ought to be afraid but everywhere we fear we fail to fear the things we should fear most which are the things we cannot see when we have made our technology strong enough to defend us from the strongest then we can start to worry about how to defend ourselves against weaker criminals but if we leave the largest powers uncontrolled their effort to protect us against the smallest evils will do us little good well it's all great to say this but what is it really going to do Snowden told us much but what has really changed everything has become legal now the governments know how to go around this nothing really changes everything goes on and anyway even if we do all of this what are we going to get out of the net those candies are not going to crush themselves and who will keep up with the Kardashians we don't need all this thing about education and everything we just let us just use the net and go on doing our business the way we do it it's true of course that what mr. Snowden did in the first instance was to bring us knowledge and the most organized parties in response were the secret worlds in every country and it's true that what they did was they went to their legislatures and they said please immunize us for everything we did wrong in the past and let us move directly to what we really want mr. Snowden proved that the strongest governments on earth were scraping everything listening to everything analyzing it later after taking it now and what the governments did whether the military platforms bill in France or the Snoopers Charter in the United Kingdom what they did was to say okay let's go straight to the real-time monitoring of everybody which is what we really want and every act of public violence only reinforces them in their certainty this is true on the other hand while we were on our way over here thanks to the German foreign ministries willingness to give her a visa if they gave her real time if she gave them real-time access to her bank accounts while we were on our way here the US House of Representatives voted unanimously to strengthen the privacy of email in the United States politics is working two ways now but we can't wait for politics and law we need technology first it's time for us to create facts on the ground Marshawn is on fall it's the young people of the planet who must save us now they have to write free code they have to use cheap free hardware they have to make the routing of privacy work we can do it we've spent 30 years making the code we need we've spent decades pushing for free or hardware we have unlicensed spectrum we can all use the Internet of Things should be the Internet of People first and we can do that the choices that we make in the technology we use will affect the politics is everybody gonna keep up with the Kardashians well I don't know I don't I've not got a Google ID or a Facebook account I've never used Twitter I live a life in the net it works pretty well you can do it too we have to get off the platforms yes yeah but I still want to share my pictures with everyone and also want to talk with everyone it's funny you don't share them with me I think you mean you want to share your pictures with your friends and what that means is we need sharing that works without a super friend in the middle we can do that surely we can do that in fact we've done it many times we just haven't promoted it the way they promote it and we want to make the net free and accessible to everybody too but we want to do it in a different way I wouldn't push you about this I wouldn't be confronting your desire for convenience and your need for security if there were time but there isn't time by 2025 it will be over technology is path dependent we can't reverse it later we made a great mistake when we made the TCP IP stack in the middle 1970s we didn't engineer anonymity in then and to engineer anonymity in afterwards meant making tour which is terrific but it's cumbersome and awkward and it's vulnerable and it can fail we need to architect the net we want and lay it on top of the net we do not want so that there is a choice if we don't give people a choice we will run out of choices one of the most important engineers in the making of the internet in that 1970s period of immense scientific optimism a man who now works at the fringes of the secret world in the United States he says and I agree with him this is the last generation in which the human race gets a choice most of the human race doesn't know what the choice is and if we here who do know don't help them to understand if we don't give them proof of concept plus running code the revolution becomes impossible time is running out I'm glad you're here thank you very much well before you all leave if this is the last generation that gets to make that choice then this is the decade for that choice to be made the components of our technological freedom with whether it's free software free hardware or free bandwidth they are differently concentrated and constituted people pushing for them have to get together one single concerted effort the free software movement the movement for free hardware the maker power the people outside inside bathrooms everywhere the ones who are individuals who actually empower technology or improve the ones who campaign for the unlicensed spectrum to stay fully free these are all different corners of the world but we all have to come together in a single movement quickly for the net we want for a system of technological relations that does not study us that does not surveil us data mine us thus prohibiting our secrecy and our anonymity thus eliminating our autonomy we are all separate strands of this technical and social thoughts we all come from different geographies have different colors of skin and other things different fields different worlds software makers access campaigners lawyers now telecom engineers hardware engineers all of you all of you if you are my age or younger you all know and understand this technology and you know what we are talking about you cannot afford to spend your youth any other way a world in which your children will live will otherwise be an unfree world it's very easy to mobilize citizens if it's war you put a propaganda machine you put up recruiting center and then you just go what we do need is a moral equivalent of a war but a moral movement not an immoral one it's not about violence but it is about technologies of freedom and we need to enlist everyone everybody so I hope you are all with us here thank you thank you so much Mishi thank you so much even for this perfect opening and this call to action we have time for one or two questions and there's a hand going up right there and there's a microphone coming to you thank you for a wonderful talk and I have a question for Mr. Mowgli and besides encryption what other solution is there to move packets freely across the infrastructure of the telecommunication providers I mean is encryption the only other only possibility do you think there's like a convention or something else that could impose the free movement of masqueraded packages across the infrastructure that is being owned and dominated according to the surveillance dynamics that you just sketched so what is there besides encryption we are completely dependent upon encryption the way we are completely dependent upon electricity we are not talking in this case about the the final product of our technology but a component which is indispensable to it everything is made of packets in our network those packets can be taken by anyone with infinite money and all the computing power they need and there are enough such parties that we cannot assume that any legal regulation or any form of technological design which leaves those packets open to be read is safe for human thought encryption is simply part of the way that we make it possible for to hear ourselves think without being overheard encryption is what creates the space within which we arrange to do our own thinking and save our own souls encryption is to the 21st century what literacy was to the 16th without the written word no reformation without no reformation no freedom of thought in the European world without encryption no human autonomy by century 22 and we have one more question up here in the front row thank you the two of you for this wonderful speech I have a question is there something else but encryption like legal possibilities for example that you must not depend on predictive technologies when you get health insurance that you have laws that these predictive technologies should not be used to get a certain government service or a public service or a service which is really necessary for your life well international covenant of civil and political rights does say something about right to privacy but each national jurisdiction is now using it to perhaps erode away which are the existing rights some of the jurisdictions actually are not even certain whether they want to give a right to privacy to their citizens or not but yes a lot of lawyers are understand sensitive to the fact that legal instruments are will have to work in tandem with technology to get those civil liberties back and to enforce such rights so various such efforts are going on the UN has appointed a repertoire to study right to privacy but yes they're much slower they move much them they move with so many components along and national security or other people always want to give us or present it in two binary forms you either get privacy or you get security that nuanced conversation is definitely happening where legal people or the legal forces sit but I do not say that it's gonna be that fast until people actually get together and make it a public movement it is happening small but it's at a much lower pace meantime in India you cannot get a propane cylinder to light or heat your house without an ad-harn number which is referenced to your retinal pattern and soon to your genome sure we can say that there may be legal restriction in one direction against the use of predictive technology for one government benefit but all other government benefits and most of the operation of economic life will soon be subject to precisely the predictive activity in the social graph to which you object the kinds of legal regulations you're talking about and that are more exceptions than they are the rule and always will be once we've made a change we cannot readily undo thank you so much to both of you can we have another really big round of applause even in Mishie so and now we are going to kick off the program and all the rest of our stages as you heard there are many we spent many many hours putting it together so we really hope you enjoy the program of course many of you will also be being in playing an active role in that I see many faces in whole one here who are going to be speaking throughout the three course of the day so thanks so much for handing in sessions to the call for papers thank you so much for coming here and being a part of the show just to highlight a couple of things that are happening today the track relearn so the track that focuses on education educational initiatives is going to be happening all day on stage 8 today we're about to kick off our music day on stage L in the laboratory you heard Andreas introduce in the opening a new location that we've expanded to this year Republica and and today's the focus on music but there's going to be a focus on a creative industry in arts track every day tomorrow focus on immersive arts and on Wednesday on fashion tech we have one of our annual returning highlights the sketch note session happening in after the break so if you want to learn how to draw along to conferences and develop your practical skills that way I recommend you visit that and of course we also have the media convention program starting in a couple of minutes I really look forward to seeing you back here at 1215 our next speaker is going to be our very own Marcus Becquedal thank you very much
liberation, the greatest moment of social justice one that the rest of the human race will soon be the net to embrace the other half of the human the world's poor towards whom they have actually the route to universal connection to the Indian is the ability to make our decisions and