[Music]
let me allow you to enjoy the Northern
Lights over Seattle for just a moment
while we talk about how to bring the
Invisibles out of the shadows and into
the light here’s a bold statement we
have the capacity to offer biometric
identification to everybody who doesn’t
currently have an ID so that they can
participate fully in the life of their
nation now here in the West that’s a bit
controversial right yeah black
helicopters agenda21 mark of the beast’
but that’s a very Western perspective
when you are an 11 year old girl sold
into the brothels of Cambodia by your
family your perspectives different when
you’re one of eleven men sleeping on a
sweltering factory floor in the garment
district in Bangladesh your perspectives
a little different we have the ability
to provide a universal ID it is
technically achievable it is socially
responsible and it’s deeply desired by
most urban poor who have ever been asked
in some limited trials we’ve been able
to see that giving a universal identity
is one of the most effective things we
can do to alleviate poverty to reduce
corruption and to improve the
effectiveness of governance and we need
that effective governance the two
billion people that we all know are
going to show up between now and 2050
are in the vast majority going to show
up in the slums of the developing world
and by and large they don’t have any
verifiable identity that leaves them at
the mercy of middlemen who shave off a
little of their remittances of corrupt
employers who shave off a little of
their cash wage distribution and of
criminal gangs who are subjecting them
to trafficking to recruitment and to
slavery let’s talk about those
Invisibles for a moment this young lady
came into my clinic in wartime
Afghanistan wearing her finest it was
heat outfitter she had a problem that we
needed to address and when we checked we
found there was no record whatever of
her birth when she left us she went back
into the shadows and I don’t know where
she is today unfortunately that’s also
true here same clinic same Afghanistan
this young lady had been deliberately
burned by her father for some cultural
infraction that we never fully
understood when we checked there was no
record of her birth when we checked
there was no record of her burns and
when she left us she went back into an
environment that clearly involves abuse
neglect and maybe exploitation I used to
be this young fellow here and such
circumstances bothered me a lot I had
I’m a navy doc right
I had three tours in Bosnia I had two
tours in Afghanistan I spent 10 months
in Iraq and the Navy in their wisdom
said that’s a lot of experience ergh
let’s send you to tsunamis and
earthquakes and cyclones and everywhere
I went I found people that I could treat
absolutely we treated everybody but once
they left me many of them went back into
those environments of abuse and neglect
and maybe exploitation I eventually
retired from the Navy and accepted a
position at Google Larry brilliant had
been awarded a TED Prize and that TED
Prize chose me as its founding CEO
we built a laboratory and Phnom Penh
Cambodia and I walked from my house to
that lab every day 24 hours a day I
would see those sweatshops working 24
hours a day I would see those brothels
with the 11 12 13 14 year old girls who
had been sold by their families into
those brothels so that everybody could
get regular meals I eventually wound up
working in a fair number of refugee
camps
I worked in Kakuma with Sudanese
refugees I worked in Makeba with Angolan
refugees and eventually I started
working here
in Kew Lani one of the largest slums in
Africa that star that you see in the
upper centre is my medical clinic in the
middle of this place and everywhere I go
I see people who are invisible who have
no identity that is recognized by
anybody and we can’t track them at all
we then find that such circumstances are
also present here this is Damascus this
is the yarmulke displacement camp about
three months before the fuel/air bombs
began to be dropped on that street these
are people that do not have any identity
and it doesn’t matter whether they are
climate refugees or they are disaster
survivors or their war casualties being
unable to track who they are is
extremely challenging and we continue
that discussion as you heard mention I
wasn’t appointed to the National Academy
I’m on this committee for Grand
Challenges global development and
identity has come up over and over and
over again because it is truly a grand
challenge we can’t treat people
effectively if we don’t know who they
are so we looked at the possibilities
and we recognized if we could find a
universal ID we could begin to stop a
lot of gender-based murder at birth we
could stop a lot of wage fraud we could
stop a lot of trafficking in human
beings we could stop the invisible lives
and we could stop the invisible deaths
we began looking at what might be
involved in that and unfortunately it
has to be some part of you because
people lose track of things that are
separate to them so that means a
biometric identity and we talked with a
bunch of experts and we found that it’s
possible to do a biometric ID about 15
different ways and those are the six
categories up there that you can look at
yourself but none of us know very much
about any of this
so let’s learn together when we say
biometrics most of us think fingerprints
fingerprints have been around for 2,000
years and about two billion people
currently have their fingerprints on
file somewhere but fingerprints are not
present when you’re born fingerprints
are modified by the trauma of a laboring
life and fingerprints can’t serve really
as a universal ID very well because
they’re not that statistically robust
they are not that different okay gotta
move on fingerprints won’t do so we went
here this is a retinal scan those are
the blood vessels at the back of your
eye pretty good two major problems one
is that those blood vessels change with
disease so sub-optimal but also getting
a retinal scan means you’ve taken a
camera and you’ve looked through the
pupil and illuminated the back of an eye
that takes a lot of tech and it takes a
lot of cooperation between the person
doing the scanning and the person being
scanned makes it slow okay suboptimal
move on I mentioned there are about 15
different ways here’s a bunch more we
can look at your voice we can look at
how you walk we can look at your
keyboard keystrokes we can look at how
you smell we can look at your DNA all of
those have a sensitivity and a
specificity that are appropriate for
some uses but nobody would call them a
universal ID but this might be when we
talk about people having a blue eye or a
brown eye or a green eye we’re talking
about the
coloured part that is known as the iris
this is an iris scan those are small
ciliary muscles that open and close the
pupil in response to light and stimulus
it turns out that that gorgeously
complex pattern is present for months
before you are born which means at the
moment of your birth you could get an
iris scan like this and then somebody
knows you exist you can’t just be
disappeared that’s kind of important now
the other things that I mentioned had
some problems with them let’s look at
the problems associate with iris
scanning well it turns out they’re
really reliable this is a 2001 study
from the UK government that looked at
all kinds of biometrics and you’ll
notice that there’s a pink diamond way
over there that is representing the fact
that in 2 million crossed comparisons
they got 0 errors statistically that’s
astonishing but it’s their report so it
turns out that here in Washington state
we have an NGO a nonprofit that is doing
a lot to put together what might be done
with iris scanning associated with the
poor that downtrodden the invisible
they’re called I respond and in full
disclosure I’m on their board they’re a
non-profit it is a non compensated
position and I haven’t the slightest
hesitation telling you all about what
they’re doing ok got it so what we have
done is develop a method to scan as you
see then we unroll it metaphorically
speaking and we sample just exactly as
if it’s an analogue music going to
digital music we run a Fourier transform
that makes all the values positive look
at all the unique bits and pieces
encrypt the whole thing and make it a
file then we go over to a pool of a
bazillion 12 digit random numbers and we
assign one of those at random to that
file that 12 digit ID
becomes the permanent identity linked to
that unique iris scan
what’s that actually looked like well
this and horn India has done about a
billion of these and we have capitalized
on all that they have learned the young
lady is looking into a camera there are
mirrors in there she looks only at her
own eyes and a mere infrared image
flashed she sees nothing it’s near
infrared we don’t see that turns into a
shades of gray image of her iris that
you see on that laptop that then gets
processed as I explained the digits are
then drawn out and either a 12-digit
green number comes up that says we
already know you you’re coming back for
your paycheck or you’re coming back for
your medical appointment or it comes up
yellow and it’s the first time we’ve
seen you so now we make that link that
is all we need for your identity we
don’t need to know your aim or your age
your name your address and we don’t need
to know your diagnosis because in some
corners of the world a diagnosis can get
you killed
so that’s all we need for identity now
how does that work in the real world
well it’s going pretty well
right now it turns out many of us are
familiar with the raw hanga because the
border problems in Bangladesh this week
those were have been coming across the
border from Myanmar for a while and they
are accumulated in about a dozen camps
on the Thai northwest border the Thai
government has recently recognized that
there are brokers coming in to those
camps and buying young men aged about 15
to 25 for about $400 each they take
those young men down to the coast and
they sell them to fishing boat captains
those fishing boat captains take them
out and often they never return to land
they die at sea of exhaustion or
malnutrition or disease and they’re
dumped overboard
the European Union noticed this version
of modern slavery and slapped some very
severe sanctions on the Thai fishing
industry the Thai government came to I
respond in April and said hmm bad press
bad idea immoral we should fix this any
ideas and we put together a package and
the package looks like this
we now scan every single crew member
going aboard a Thai fishing vessel when
that vessel returns to port we scan
every single crew member coming off if
there is a gap if there is someone
missing an investigation begins and that
investigation can accelerate as callate
through a protocol that says you lose
your catch then you lose your boat then
you go to prison in these six weeks
since we implemented that we have seen
more than 10,000 fishermen go out we are
already seeing a reduction in the people
being bought in the refugee camps of
northern Thailand this is beginning to
look like a win so the Thai government
has come back to us and said the fishing
boat thing that went pretty well now
about those camps we’d like them to
close but we can’t put those people back
into Myanmar that’s against
international humanitarian law we can’t
give them to other nations and we can’t
just let them loose in Thailand but we
have a problem in our labor pool we
don’t have enough workers so what’s
possible and we brought a proposal back
to them two weeks ago that said how’s
about we do the biometric scanning thing
we do the twelve digit ID thing and we
partner with our blockchain colleagues
Evernham to begin to collect information
about their health record their skillset
and their education we wrap that all
and we make it possible because it’s all
in the cloud to have people check in
around Thailand wherever they are and
that would allow you Thailand to let
those hundred thousand refugees become a
part of your worker pool on permanent
foreign worker visas you and I know that
as a green card a hundred thousand
stateless people might have the capacity
to get a green card for
multi-generational presence with all the
rights all the privileges all the hope
that that represents that’s really
interesting
that decision is with the Thai
government this week we’ll let you know
what happens and the timing is good
because this young man was profiled in
the New York Times back in March as a
descriptor of what’s happening in the
slavery of the cigarette industry of
northern India if we were to look behind
the curtains we would also find somebody
like him in the gold mines of Ghana in
the diamond mines of Zimbabwe in the
cane fields of Madagascar and if we can
get a hundred thousand stateless
refugees permanent presence as a part of
a modern nation in Thailand then maybe
just maybe the invisible slaves of the
world are next coming out of the shadows
into the light thank you very much [Applause]
let me allow you to enjoy the Northern
Lights over Seattle for just a moment
while we talk about how to bring the
Invisibles out of the shadows and into
the light here’s a bold statement we
have the capacity to offer biometric
identification to everybody who doesn’t
currently have an ID so that they can
participate fully in the life of their
nation now here in the West that’s a bit
controversial right yeah black
helicopters agenda21 mark of the beast’
but that’s a very Western perspective
when you are an 11 year old girl sold
into the brothels of Cambodia by your
family your perspectives different when
you’re one of eleven men sleeping on a
sweltering factory floor in the garment
district in Bangladesh your perspectives
a little different we have the ability
to provide a universal ID it is
technically achievable it is socially
responsible and it’s deeply desired by
most urban poor who have ever been asked
in some limited trials we’ve been able
to see that giving a universal identity
is one of the most effective things we
can do to alleviate poverty to reduce
corruption and to improve the
effectiveness of governance and we need
that effective governance the two
billion people that we all know are
going to show up between now and 2050
are in the vast majority going to show
up in the slums of the developing world
and by and large they don’t have any
verifiable identity that leaves them at
the mercy of middlemen who shave off a
little of their remittances of corrupt
employers who shave off a little of
their cash wage distribution and of
criminal gangs who are subjecting them
to trafficking to recruitment and to
slavery let’s talk about those
Invisibles for a moment this young lady
came into my clinic in wartime
Afghanistan wearing her finest it was
heat outfitter she had a problem that we
needed to address and when we checked we
found there was no record whatever of
her birth when she left us she went back
into the shadows and I don’t know where
she is today unfortunately that’s also
true here same clinic same Afghanistan
this young lady had been deliberately
burned by her father for some cultural
infraction that we never fully
understood when we checked there was no
record of her birth when we checked
there was no record of her burns and
when she left us she went back into an
environment that clearly involves abuse
neglect and maybe exploitation I used to
be this young fellow here and such
circumstances bothered me a lot I had
I’m a navy doc right
I had three tours in Bosnia I had two
tours in Afghanistan I spent 10 months
in Iraq and the Navy in their wisdom
said that’s a lot of experience ergh
let’s send you to tsunamis and
earthquakes and cyclones and everywhere
I went I found people that I could treat
absolutely we treated everybody but once
they left me many of them went back into
those environments of abuse and neglect
and maybe exploitation I eventually
retired from the Navy and accepted a
position at Google Larry brilliant had
been awarded a TED Prize and that TED
Prize chose me as its founding CEO
we built a laboratory and Phnom Penh
Cambodia and I walked from my house to
that lab every day 24 hours a day I
would see those sweatshops working 24
hours a day I would see those brothels
with the 11 12 13 14 year old girls who
had been sold by their families into
those brothels so that everybody could
get regular meals I eventually wound up
working in a fair number of refugee
camps
I worked in Kakuma with Sudanese
refugees I worked in Makeba with Angolan
refugees and eventually I started
working here
in Kew Lani one of the largest slums in
Africa that star that you see in the
upper centre is my medical clinic in the
middle of this place and everywhere I go
I see people who are invisible who have
no identity that is recognized by
anybody and we can’t track them at all
we then find that such circumstances are
also present here this is Damascus this
is the yarmulke displacement camp about
three months before the fuel/air bombs
began to be dropped on that street these
are people that do not have any identity
and it doesn’t matter whether they are
climate refugees or they are disaster
survivors or their war casualties being
unable to track who they are is
extremely challenging and we continue
that discussion as you heard mention I
wasn’t appointed to the National Academy
I’m on this committee for Grand
Challenges global development and
identity has come up over and over and
over again because it is truly a grand
challenge we can’t treat people
effectively if we don’t know who they
are so we looked at the possibilities
and we recognized if we could find a
universal ID we could begin to stop a
lot of gender-based murder at birth we
could stop a lot of wage fraud we could
stop a lot of trafficking in human
beings we could stop the invisible lives
and we could stop the invisible deaths
we began looking at what might be
involved in that and unfortunately it
has to be some part of you because
people lose track of things that are
separate to them so that means a
biometric identity and we talked with a
bunch of experts and we found that it’s
possible to do a biometric ID about 15
different ways and those are the six
categories up there that you can look at
yourself but none of us know very much
about any of this
so let’s learn together when we say
biometrics most of us think fingerprints
fingerprints have been around for 2,000
years and about two billion people
currently have their fingerprints on
file somewhere but fingerprints are not
present when you’re born fingerprints
are modified by the trauma of a laboring
life and fingerprints can’t serve really
as a universal ID very well because
they’re not that statistically robust
they are not that different okay gotta
move on fingerprints won’t do so we went
here this is a retinal scan those are
the blood vessels at the back of your
eye pretty good two major problems one
is that those blood vessels change with
disease so sub-optimal but also getting
a retinal scan means you’ve taken a
camera and you’ve looked through the
pupil and illuminated the back of an eye
that takes a lot of tech and it takes a
lot of cooperation between the person
doing the scanning and the person being
scanned makes it slow okay suboptimal
move on I mentioned there are about 15
different ways here’s a bunch more we
can look at your voice we can look at
how you walk we can look at your
keyboard keystrokes we can look at how
you smell we can look at your DNA all of
those have a sensitivity and a
specificity that are appropriate for
some uses but nobody would call them a
universal ID but this might be when we
talk about people having a blue eye or a
brown eye or a green eye we’re talking
about the
coloured part that is known as the iris
this is an iris scan those are small
ciliary muscles that open and close the
pupil in response to light and stimulus
it turns out that that gorgeously
complex pattern is present for months
before you are born which means at the
moment of your birth you could get an
iris scan like this and then somebody
knows you exist you can’t just be
disappeared that’s kind of important now
the other things that I mentioned had
some problems with them let’s look at
the problems associate with iris
scanning well it turns out they’re
really reliable this is a 2001 study
from the UK government that looked at
all kinds of biometrics and you’ll
notice that there’s a pink diamond way
over there that is representing the fact
that in 2 million crossed comparisons
they got 0 errors statistically that’s
astonishing but it’s their report so it
turns out that here in Washington state
we have an NGO a nonprofit that is doing
a lot to put together what might be done
with iris scanning associated with the
poor that downtrodden the invisible
they’re called I respond and in full
disclosure I’m on their board they’re a
non-profit it is a non compensated
position and I haven’t the slightest
hesitation telling you all about what
they’re doing ok got it so what we have
done is develop a method to scan as you
see then we unroll it metaphorically
speaking and we sample just exactly as
if it’s an analogue music going to
digital music we run a Fourier transform
that makes all the values positive look
at all the unique bits and pieces
encrypt the whole thing and make it a
file then we go over to a pool of a
bazillion 12 digit random numbers and we
assign one of those at random to that
file that 12 digit ID
becomes the permanent identity linked to
that unique iris scan
what’s that actually looked like well
this and horn India has done about a
billion of these and we have capitalized
on all that they have learned the young
lady is looking into a camera there are
mirrors in there she looks only at her
own eyes and a mere infrared image
flashed she sees nothing it’s near
infrared we don’t see that turns into a
shades of gray image of her iris that
you see on that laptop that then gets
processed as I explained the digits are
then drawn out and either a 12-digit
green number comes up that says we
already know you you’re coming back for
your paycheck or you’re coming back for
your medical appointment or it comes up
yellow and it’s the first time we’ve
seen you so now we make that link that
is all we need for your identity we
don’t need to know your aim or your age
your name your address and we don’t need
to know your diagnosis because in some
corners of the world a diagnosis can get
you killed
so that’s all we need for identity now
how does that work in the real world
well it’s going pretty well
right now it turns out many of us are
familiar with the raw hanga because the
border problems in Bangladesh this week
those were have been coming across the
border from Myanmar for a while and they
are accumulated in about a dozen camps
on the Thai northwest border the Thai
government has recently recognized that
there are brokers coming in to those
camps and buying young men aged about 15
to 25 for about $400 each they take
those young men down to the coast and
they sell them to fishing boat captains
those fishing boat captains take them
out and often they never return to land
they die at sea of exhaustion or
malnutrition or disease and they’re
dumped overboard
the European Union noticed this version
of modern slavery and slapped some very
severe sanctions on the Thai fishing
industry the Thai government came to I
respond in April and said hmm bad press
bad idea immoral we should fix this any
ideas and we put together a package and
the package looks like this
we now scan every single crew member
going aboard a Thai fishing vessel when
that vessel returns to port we scan
every single crew member coming off if
there is a gap if there is someone
missing an investigation begins and that
investigation can accelerate as callate
through a protocol that says you lose
your catch then you lose your boat then
you go to prison in these six weeks
since we implemented that we have seen
more than 10,000 fishermen go out we are
already seeing a reduction in the people
being bought in the refugee camps of
northern Thailand this is beginning to
look like a win so the Thai government
has come back to us and said the fishing
boat thing that went pretty well now
about those camps we’d like them to
close but we can’t put those people back
into Myanmar that’s against
international humanitarian law we can’t
give them to other nations and we can’t
just let them loose in Thailand but we
have a problem in our labor pool we
don’t have enough workers so what’s
possible and we brought a proposal back
to them two weeks ago that said how’s
about we do the biometric scanning thing
we do the twelve digit ID thing and we
partner with our blockchain colleagues
Evernham to begin to collect information
about their health record their skillset
and their education we wrap that all
and we make it possible because it’s all
in the cloud to have people check in
around Thailand wherever they are and
that would allow you Thailand to let
those hundred thousand refugees become a
part of your worker pool on permanent
foreign worker visas you and I know that
as a green card a hundred thousand
stateless people might have the capacity
to get a green card for
multi-generational presence with all the
rights all the privileges all the hope
that that represents that’s really
interesting
that decision is with the Thai
government this week we’ll let you know
what happens and the timing is good
because this young man was profiled in
the New York Times back in March as a
descriptor of what’s happening in the
slavery of the cigarette industry of
northern India if we were to look behind
the curtains we would also find somebody
like him in the gold mines of Ghana in
the diamond mines of Zimbabwe in the
cane fields of Madagascar and if we can
get a hundred thousand stateless
refugees permanent presence as a part of
a modern nation in Thailand then maybe
just maybe the invisible slaves of the
world are next coming out of the shadows
into the light thank you very much [Applause]
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