[Music]
good morning it’s so great to be here on
this stage I’m going to I’m going to
tell you a story about privacy today
because privacy is something that I care
very deeply about and you know as a kid
as a kid reading George Orwell’s 1984 I
was fascinated to see this dystopian
world in which every citizen would be
watched by their government through
these telescreens which were essentially
these fictional devices that were
somewhere in between TV sets and
surveillance cameras and the thing was
every citizen it was mandatory for them
to have such a TV screen in in their
living rooms now when I look around the
world in which we live and nowadays and
the way that we surround ourselves with
smart devices that have microphones that
have cameras and that are always
connected to the Internet I don’t see
much difference between the world we
live in nowadays and George Orwell all
Rus dystopian novel the only difference
being that we were the ones to buy these
TV sets took them to our living rooms
and they stole them there ourselves so
this is going to be a talk about privacy
in the digital age but before we start
talking about privacy I would have to
take you back a little bit into the past
and I’d like to try to make you imagine
a world without borders a world in which
the human beings managed to evolve
because of one main reason which was
migration and of course you all know the
story of the ancient Silk Road it was
this trading route connecting more than
three connecting three continents and
all of the civilizations on the path of
this trading route they managed to
evolve because they had the possibility
the opportunity to exchange goods to
exchange merchandise
even more important than that they had
the opportunity to exchange ideas to
exchange philosophies about you know
things such as religion life or science
so Silk Road was the thing that opened
these long distance political and
economic relationships between these
countries now civilizations and the same
principles of having an open world a
world in which anything can be shared
stood at the core of the internet
because when the internet was founded
when the internet was invented it all
started as a research project made by
people in universities technical people
researchers and what they wanted was a
way in which they could share their
information freely and in a timely
manner to essentially you know take
science to the to the next level now
what happened back then was because this
was a very small project started inside
the universities all of these people
they knew each other and they trusted
each other so when they designed the
Internet they didn’t think of things
such as security and privacy and these
two things were added only later on top
of an already shaky foundation and this
is why we have so many problems with
security and privacy in the world that
we live in nowadays if we fast forward
to the present date we live right now in
a world in which borders are everywhere
borders are ubiquitous and we not only
take these borders for granted but we
got used with them you know every time
we travel we’re used to going through
security checks in Perham in airports
we’re used to staying in queues for
security guards to check our passports
but what gives me hope is that when
looking at the human civilization I see
that we’re not ok with any type of
border that is imposed on us and
sometimes we like to jump over some
walls and sometimes we even take this
walls down and I think that the Berlin
wall is a great example of how
[Music]
people managed to to become free if they
really want it and the thing that
worries me right now is that less than
three decades after the Berlin wall
collapsed and put an end to an era of
division between the East and the West
the world right now seems to be on the
brink of making the same mistakes over
again only this time we’re doing these
mistakes in the cyber space and what I
mean about this is that the internet
right now is going through a process
which is called balkanization
a balkanization is a geopolitical term
and it is used to define the process in
which a certain area is becoming divided
into smaller entities and these smaller
entities are not only hostile to each
other what they usually refuse to
cooperate with each other so of course
the internet naturally has a tendency to
be divided and this is happening because
we all have differences in things like
language or culture so well in this part
of the world where all browsing the
let’s say let’s call it the
english-speaking Internet in other parts
of the world maybe a Chinese speaker
will not use Google to do searches but
they will use Baidu
a russian-speaking person will not use
Google they will use Yandex and this
division is okay because it’s all
natural and the thing is information is
kind of like water it turns the tendency
to you know to leak or to go to any
place which it can reach so just like to
communicating vessels will get filled by
the same source of water the same way
the Internet is helping human
civilization to share knowledge and to
disseminate this knowledge all over the
world but unfortunately not everyone is
ok with this what is happening nowadays
is that more and more countries are
building walls on the Internet and I
think a good example to illustrate this
story is the story of the Great Firewall
of China I’m not sure if many of you
have been to China but if you go to
China nowadays you’ll realize that most
of the websites that you are used with
browsing every day are blocked in
totally not allowed to access them and
this is happening for a long while what
actually happened in China was that the
internet entered China in 1994 and the
Chinese part the Communist Party back
then was very quick to realize that this
new network has the potential and the
power to bring like minded people
together and to make them work together
to to get some changes and of course the
Communist Party has seen this as a
threat to their power so only three
years later in 1997 the Great Firewall
of China is first version actually was
already up and running and operational
filtering traffic and monitoring
people’s access to the Internet and when
there’s a website which they cannot
block what they will do is they will try
to compel that company to remove certain
content or to change the way that
results are being displayed to Chinese
users so for example if you would search
for pictures of the Tiananmen Square
event on the Chinese internet you just
see pictures of a clear blue sky and
some nice you know Asian architecture if
you do the same google search from
anywhere else in the world what happens
is you will see the famous tank man
picture which became a symbol of the of
the revolution and the problem is that
[Music]
the problem is that China is not the
only place in which this is happening
China was just the first country to to
start this trend and what’s worrying me
is that in the past two decades more and
more countries started following this
this trend the problem is that there’s a
real no technical industry that is
fueling the growth of internet
surveillance every year more and more
companies are being started up and the
only thing that they do is they try to
figure out new ways in which governments
can monitor our online communications
and I think this that this is pretty
pretty bad and pretty pretty worth
worrying another interesting
thing is that whenever certain
government cannot use their own mass
surveillance capabilities to get their
hands on certain information what they
will do is they will legally compel
internet-based companies to give them
their data and some of these companies
are actually publishing these requests
and statistics about requests from
governments and what we can see is that
more and more Silicon Valley based
companies which are taking care of the
Internet are very often choosing to
comply with requests coming from
authoritarian regimes or for example
regimes that don’t have a very good
track record when it comes to respecting
the human rights and this is I think a
very worrying trend now maybe the
Chinese example is not something that
will touch you because you know China is
very far away and we don’t really care
about what’s happening there but I’d
like you to try to travel to a place
which is more closer to our home which
is Turkey a country in our area and I’d
like you to meet Boris back live an
irishman live one is an investigative
journalist based in Turkey and he’s a
journalist who’s been very critical of
the government in the past few years now
very recently burisch was released from
prison where he spent more than one year
and a half after his office was raided
and the government found certain
incriminating files on his hard drive
now what actually happened here was that
Boris was not the one to put those files
on his hard drive the weekend before his
arrest somebody broke into his office on
a Friday night when nobody was there
and when his computer was turned off
they physically removed the hard drive
from his computer planted the files
there and put the file the hard drive
back now this was uncovered this these
conclusions were uncovered by cyber
security researchers who did this
forensic investigation on voracious hard
drive and another thing that they
uncovered was that in the previous weeks
before his arrest his computer was
attacked 12 times with octopus which
means octopus in Turkish and it’s one of
the most sophisticated pieces of malware
that the world has ever seen and
cybersecurity researchers are thinking
that the origins of this malware comes
from Turkey but the reason why I wanted
to tell you Boresha story is that I want
you to understand the dangers that there
are when somebody else has access to
your data that somebody else has access
to your computer it’s not just a
question of knowing information about
yourself but it’s also it can be a
question of freedom you know and I think
that this is a very important thing
because nowadays malware is everywhere
and cybersecurity researchers are
analyzing hundreds and hundreds of
thousands of new malicious files every
day now of course only the tip of the
iceberg is represented by malware
designed for governments to attack
Internet users but even the rest of the
malware 90% of the model which is mostly
responsible for you know financial
losses you have to understand that as
long as the computer virus has complete
and total access to the information on
your computer they can essentially
control your lives and it doesn’t have
to be a government who wants to go after
you it can just be a you know a bored
teenager who is your neighbor and wants
to attack you or you know why not even
your spouse who is suspicious or
suspicious on you and they will buy some
of the Shelf commercial commercial
spyware and they will install it on your
phone or on your computer the positive
thing the really good thing is that not
all hackers are bad not all hackers
right malware and want to infect your
computer there’s actually a pretty
decent amount of good hackers out there
we like to call ourselves cyber security
researchers and we like to look hours at
ourselves as being the doctors of the
cyber world and just like doctors don’t
care about borders and whenever for
example there’s a doctor in a conflict
area they will treat that patient no
matter if that patient is a soldier or
civilian they will treat that patient no
matter on which side of the border that
patient is the same thing cyber security
researchers are doing nowadays being
neutral in the
face of cyber threats targeting our
security and targeting our privacy and I
think this is a very important thing
because if you look at the world map of
freedom of the press you can see that
the same areas in the world in which the
Internet is censored and surveilled are
the same areas in which journalism
doesn’t have a very good freedom track
record so to say and you know you don’t
have to read an Oxford study to realize
that whenever a person is being
surveilled they will change their
behavior and I think that this is very
dangerous when it comes to journalists
because the moment when a journalist
starts inflicting self-censorship on
himself then he is depriving all of us
of very good information that we need in
order to make our decisions and you know
even though this studies is available
and I’m sure that none of you will read
it I just want you to spend a moment and
think if you’ve ever had this situation
in which you wrote the facebook status
update and then you decided not to post
it because you just had a quick shot
that maybe somebody will see your status
update and they will think something bad
about you this is I think the very basic
example of self-censorship and it’s a
very dangerous thing now just a
self-censorship affects our intellect
internet censorship can affect our
wallet our economies because right now
the internet is responsible for more
than 21% of growth in GDP in in in
modern countries and I think that we
need not to ignore this this trend the
fact that the Internet can bring
prosperity to to the people and just
like the ancient Silk Road story brought
prosperity to the civilizations that
were on the best trading path on these
three continents the modern Silk Road
brought prosperity to Ross Ulbricht who
was a computer programmer and learn
extreme libertarian and in 2011 this guy
decided that he needs to set up Silk
Road which was an underground
marketplace or anything and everything
could be traded so this was website
essentially
became something like the Amazon of
illegal things Russell Birk really
believed that it’s up to every human
being to choose what things they want to
buy what substances they want to use so
his website is eventually ended up being
the number one go-to place for anyone
who wanted to buy things like guns or
fake IDs or why not dangerous drugs so
of course his website attracted the
attention of law enforcement who seized
his website and arrested rostral briefly
in 2015
once he was arrested everybody realized
that this guy became very rich here in
modern more than 100 millions of dollars
just by taking commissions from all of
these illegal trading that’s happening
there so there’s no doubt that the
Internet is something that we need if we
want to become prosper and if we want
our civilizations to evolve and we need
an internet which is free and open and
everybody can access it but maybe
sometimes you know total freedom is not
what we need because when people have
total freedom they might have bad ideas
the thing is I’m not here to judge I’m
not here to judge if total freedom is
good or bad and I’m not here to judge if
mass surveillance is good or bad
the only thing what that I can tell you
for sure is that we as human beings want
to evolve and the only way in which we
can evolve is if we have real choice if
we can make real choices about what we
want to do with our lives and there
cannot be anything like real choice as
long as we don’t have access to real
information and the reason why I’m very
worried right now is that governments
around the world have already decided
what kind of internet they want for
themselves
they want an internet in which everybody
is monitored and all the content is
controlled and I think that this is the
moment when we have to make the same
choice and we the people have to decide
what kind of internet do we want our
kids to use in the future do we want it
to be like George Orwell’s novel 1984
when everybody’s being watched and
surveilled
the government or do we want our kids to
live in a future in which digital
privacy and security is a basic human
right and it’s something that everybody
needs to have I think this is the
question that I’d like to leave you with
and I’d like to thank you for paying
attention
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause] [Music]
good morning it’s so great to be here on
this stage I’m going to I’m going to
tell you a story about privacy today
because privacy is something that I care
very deeply about and you know as a kid
as a kid reading George Orwell’s 1984 I
was fascinated to see this dystopian
world in which every citizen would be
watched by their government through
these telescreens which were essentially
these fictional devices that were
somewhere in between TV sets and
surveillance cameras and the thing was
every citizen it was mandatory for them
to have such a TV screen in in their
living rooms now when I look around the
world in which we live and nowadays and
the way that we surround ourselves with
smart devices that have microphones that
have cameras and that are always
connected to the Internet I don’t see
much difference between the world we
live in nowadays and George Orwell all
Rus dystopian novel the only difference
being that we were the ones to buy these
TV sets took them to our living rooms
and they stole them there ourselves so
this is going to be a talk about privacy
in the digital age but before we start
talking about privacy I would have to
take you back a little bit into the past
and I’d like to try to make you imagine
a world without borders a world in which
the human beings managed to evolve
because of one main reason which was
migration and of course you all know the
story of the ancient Silk Road it was
this trading route connecting more than
three connecting three continents and
all of the civilizations on the path of
this trading route they managed to
evolve because they had the possibility
the opportunity to exchange goods to
exchange merchandise
even more important than that they had
the opportunity to exchange ideas to
exchange philosophies about you know
things such as religion life or science
so Silk Road was the thing that opened
these long distance political and
economic relationships between these
countries now civilizations and the same
principles of having an open world a
world in which anything can be shared
stood at the core of the internet
because when the internet was founded
when the internet was invented it all
started as a research project made by
people in universities technical people
researchers and what they wanted was a
way in which they could share their
information freely and in a timely
manner to essentially you know take
science to the to the next level now
what happened back then was because this
was a very small project started inside
the universities all of these people
they knew each other and they trusted
each other so when they designed the
Internet they didn’t think of things
such as security and privacy and these
two things were added only later on top
of an already shaky foundation and this
is why we have so many problems with
security and privacy in the world that
we live in nowadays if we fast forward
to the present date we live right now in
a world in which borders are everywhere
borders are ubiquitous and we not only
take these borders for granted but we
got used with them you know every time
we travel we’re used to going through
security checks in Perham in airports
we’re used to staying in queues for
security guards to check our passports
but what gives me hope is that when
looking at the human civilization I see
that we’re not ok with any type of
border that is imposed on us and
sometimes we like to jump over some
walls and sometimes we even take this
walls down and I think that the Berlin
wall is a great example of how
[Music]
people managed to to become free if they
really want it and the thing that
worries me right now is that less than
three decades after the Berlin wall
collapsed and put an end to an era of
division between the East and the West
the world right now seems to be on the
brink of making the same mistakes over
again only this time we’re doing these
mistakes in the cyber space and what I
mean about this is that the internet
right now is going through a process
which is called balkanization
a balkanization is a geopolitical term
and it is used to define the process in
which a certain area is becoming divided
into smaller entities and these smaller
entities are not only hostile to each
other what they usually refuse to
cooperate with each other so of course
the internet naturally has a tendency to
be divided and this is happening because
we all have differences in things like
language or culture so well in this part
of the world where all browsing the
let’s say let’s call it the
english-speaking Internet in other parts
of the world maybe a Chinese speaker
will not use Google to do searches but
they will use Baidu
a russian-speaking person will not use
Google they will use Yandex and this
division is okay because it’s all
natural and the thing is information is
kind of like water it turns the tendency
to you know to leak or to go to any
place which it can reach so just like to
communicating vessels will get filled by
the same source of water the same way
the Internet is helping human
civilization to share knowledge and to
disseminate this knowledge all over the
world but unfortunately not everyone is
ok with this what is happening nowadays
is that more and more countries are
building walls on the Internet and I
think a good example to illustrate this
story is the story of the Great Firewall
of China I’m not sure if many of you
have been to China but if you go to
China nowadays you’ll realize that most
of the websites that you are used with
browsing every day are blocked in
totally not allowed to access them and
this is happening for a long while what
actually happened in China was that the
internet entered China in 1994 and the
Chinese part the Communist Party back
then was very quick to realize that this
new network has the potential and the
power to bring like minded people
together and to make them work together
to to get some changes and of course the
Communist Party has seen this as a
threat to their power so only three
years later in 1997 the Great Firewall
of China is first version actually was
already up and running and operational
filtering traffic and monitoring
people’s access to the Internet and when
there’s a website which they cannot
block what they will do is they will try
to compel that company to remove certain
content or to change the way that
results are being displayed to Chinese
users so for example if you would search
for pictures of the Tiananmen Square
event on the Chinese internet you just
see pictures of a clear blue sky and
some nice you know Asian architecture if
you do the same google search from
anywhere else in the world what happens
is you will see the famous tank man
picture which became a symbol of the of
the revolution and the problem is that
[Music]
the problem is that China is not the
only place in which this is happening
China was just the first country to to
start this trend and what’s worrying me
is that in the past two decades more and
more countries started following this
this trend the problem is that there’s a
real no technical industry that is
fueling the growth of internet
surveillance every year more and more
companies are being started up and the
only thing that they do is they try to
figure out new ways in which governments
can monitor our online communications
and I think this that this is pretty
pretty bad and pretty pretty worth
worrying another interesting
thing is that whenever certain
government cannot use their own mass
surveillance capabilities to get their
hands on certain information what they
will do is they will legally compel
internet-based companies to give them
their data and some of these companies
are actually publishing these requests
and statistics about requests from
governments and what we can see is that
more and more Silicon Valley based
companies which are taking care of the
Internet are very often choosing to
comply with requests coming from
authoritarian regimes or for example
regimes that don’t have a very good
track record when it comes to respecting
the human rights and this is I think a
very worrying trend now maybe the
Chinese example is not something that
will touch you because you know China is
very far away and we don’t really care
about what’s happening there but I’d
like you to try to travel to a place
which is more closer to our home which
is Turkey a country in our area and I’d
like you to meet Boris back live an
irishman live one is an investigative
journalist based in Turkey and he’s a
journalist who’s been very critical of
the government in the past few years now
very recently burisch was released from
prison where he spent more than one year
and a half after his office was raided
and the government found certain
incriminating files on his hard drive
now what actually happened here was that
Boris was not the one to put those files
on his hard drive the weekend before his
arrest somebody broke into his office on
a Friday night when nobody was there
and when his computer was turned off
they physically removed the hard drive
from his computer planted the files
there and put the file the hard drive
back now this was uncovered this these
conclusions were uncovered by cyber
security researchers who did this
forensic investigation on voracious hard
drive and another thing that they
uncovered was that in the previous weeks
before his arrest his computer was
attacked 12 times with octopus which
means octopus in Turkish and it’s one of
the most sophisticated pieces of malware
that the world has ever seen and
cybersecurity researchers are thinking
that the origins of this malware comes
from Turkey but the reason why I wanted
to tell you Boresha story is that I want
you to understand the dangers that there
are when somebody else has access to
your data that somebody else has access
to your computer it’s not just a
question of knowing information about
yourself but it’s also it can be a
question of freedom you know and I think
that this is a very important thing
because nowadays malware is everywhere
and cybersecurity researchers are
analyzing hundreds and hundreds of
thousands of new malicious files every
day now of course only the tip of the
iceberg is represented by malware
designed for governments to attack
Internet users but even the rest of the
malware 90% of the model which is mostly
responsible for you know financial
losses you have to understand that as
long as the computer virus has complete
and total access to the information on
your computer they can essentially
control your lives and it doesn’t have
to be a government who wants to go after
you it can just be a you know a bored
teenager who is your neighbor and wants
to attack you or you know why not even
your spouse who is suspicious or
suspicious on you and they will buy some
of the Shelf commercial commercial
spyware and they will install it on your
phone or on your computer the positive
thing the really good thing is that not
all hackers are bad not all hackers
right malware and want to infect your
computer there’s actually a pretty
decent amount of good hackers out there
we like to call ourselves cyber security
researchers and we like to look hours at
ourselves as being the doctors of the
cyber world and just like doctors don’t
care about borders and whenever for
example there’s a doctor in a conflict
area they will treat that patient no
matter if that patient is a soldier or
civilian they will treat that patient no
matter on which side of the border that
patient is the same thing cyber security
researchers are doing nowadays being
neutral in the
face of cyber threats targeting our
security and targeting our privacy and I
think this is a very important thing
because if you look at the world map of
freedom of the press you can see that
the same areas in the world in which the
Internet is censored and surveilled are
the same areas in which journalism
doesn’t have a very good freedom track
record so to say and you know you don’t
have to read an Oxford study to realize
that whenever a person is being
surveilled they will change their
behavior and I think that this is very
dangerous when it comes to journalists
because the moment when a journalist
starts inflicting self-censorship on
himself then he is depriving all of us
of very good information that we need in
order to make our decisions and you know
even though this studies is available
and I’m sure that none of you will read
it I just want you to spend a moment and
think if you’ve ever had this situation
in which you wrote the facebook status
update and then you decided not to post
it because you just had a quick shot
that maybe somebody will see your status
update and they will think something bad
about you this is I think the very basic
example of self-censorship and it’s a
very dangerous thing now just a
self-censorship affects our intellect
internet censorship can affect our
wallet our economies because right now
the internet is responsible for more
than 21% of growth in GDP in in in
modern countries and I think that we
need not to ignore this this trend the
fact that the Internet can bring
prosperity to to the people and just
like the ancient Silk Road story brought
prosperity to the civilizations that
were on the best trading path on these
three continents the modern Silk Road
brought prosperity to Ross Ulbricht who
was a computer programmer and learn
extreme libertarian and in 2011 this guy
decided that he needs to set up Silk
Road which was an underground
marketplace or anything and everything
could be traded so this was website
essentially
became something like the Amazon of
illegal things Russell Birk really
believed that it’s up to every human
being to choose what things they want to
buy what substances they want to use so
his website is eventually ended up being
the number one go-to place for anyone
who wanted to buy things like guns or
fake IDs or why not dangerous drugs so
of course his website attracted the
attention of law enforcement who seized
his website and arrested rostral briefly
in 2015
once he was arrested everybody realized
that this guy became very rich here in
modern more than 100 millions of dollars
just by taking commissions from all of
these illegal trading that’s happening
there so there’s no doubt that the
Internet is something that we need if we
want to become prosper and if we want
our civilizations to evolve and we need
an internet which is free and open and
everybody can access it but maybe
sometimes you know total freedom is not
what we need because when people have
total freedom they might have bad ideas
the thing is I’m not here to judge I’m
not here to judge if total freedom is
good or bad and I’m not here to judge if
mass surveillance is good or bad
the only thing what that I can tell you
for sure is that we as human beings want
to evolve and the only way in which we
can evolve is if we have real choice if
we can make real choices about what we
want to do with our lives and there
cannot be anything like real choice as
long as we don’t have access to real
information and the reason why I’m very
worried right now is that governments
around the world have already decided
what kind of internet they want for
themselves
they want an internet in which everybody
is monitored and all the content is
controlled and I think that this is the
moment when we have to make the same
choice and we the people have to decide
what kind of internet do we want our
kids to use in the future do we want it
to be like George Orwell’s novel 1984
when everybody’s being watched and
surveilled
the government or do we want our kids to
live in a future in which digital
privacy and security is a basic human
right and it’s something that everybody
needs to have I think this is the
question that I’d like to leave you with
and I’d like to thank you for paying
attention
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause] [Music]
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