 One and we're live. Hi everyone, welcome back to the third class of this year's MIT IP computational law workshop course. Today we have an exciting agenda for you, where we'll be hearing from two speakers, which you'll hear who you'll hear from shortly so I'm going to just pass it off to Dazza to get the class officially started. Sorry I was on mute. Thank you so much TMA. So during the first half of class today, we are honored to have Senator Chris Rothfuss address the class on the new Wyoming personal digital identity legislation. And we'll probably also hear about the organizational digital identity legislation. This is this is legislation that the select committee that he chairs is currently drafting. And the select committee is also working on other relevant measures including an automated and autonomous LLC, data trusts and another very important emerging legal frameworks and of course, he has been a global leader in creating a legal framework for cryptocurrency and for blockchain in general. So to learn more about Senator Rothfuss's work and the work of the select committee, please take a look at the email sent out yesterday and go ahead and click on the link. And I encourage you to click through the materials for some of their meetings. They also have links to their, their hearings which are incredibly informative. During the second half of class. Well actually let's do one thing at a time but we will hear from you Lila of New America Foundation to talk to us about the future property but I won't give too much of that away just yet so I would like to stand by you Lila and why don't we. Oh, I'm sorry and at the end of class I know many of you, I can see art have elected to do class projects, Brian's going to go a little bit deeper into the process for that and even if you aren't doing the class project yourself, I encourage you to listen. It's, it's a, one of the relatively unique things about how we structure these innovation oriented classes through the media lab, and in conjunction with the Sloan Business School. So we've got a long history of innovation oriented classes and the new media space in the developing economy space and, and, and otherwise and and we follow this general template and we're trying to apply it now to computational law. So, do have a listen and, and with that, without further ado, Senator Rothfuss, if you'd be willing to come off mute, it's my pleasure and as I said honor to introduce you to the MIT computational law course this year. And, and we'd be grateful if you could say a few words about who you are and what you've been working on lately. Absolutely does it and thank you so much for the opportunity to chat with this group I these are the folks that hopefully will be working with over the years ahead and and practicing potentially and these Wyoming digital asset laws that we've been working on and working hard on for the past four years in the state of Wyoming. I'm Senator Chris Rothfuss I'm the Senate Minor Leader in the Wyoming legislature I've been a member of the Wyoming legislature for about a decade. I have a background in science and engineering I'm a PhD chemical engineer and spent time at the US Department of State, working on advanced technology foreign policy for three years is a triple AS science and technology diplomacy fellow. So I've spent a lot of time in advanced technologies, doing advanced technology consulting, both before and while I've been in the Wyoming legislature. And this is a topic that came up a few years ago and as we were working on digital identity. And as we were working on information privacy and working on personally identifiable information and the fact that Wyoming had just rubbish statutes at the time and we were really trying to improve those statutes and learned along the way that point in time Wyoming in fact had probably the worst digital asset and cryptocurrency statutes in the country, just by random coincidence nobody really had any at the time. But the way ours were being used and interpreted really precluded any type of commerce in cryptocurrency space which was obviously emerging. So we decided to take a look at that and try to fix our problems that we identified and then started looking around the country as legislators do right the first thing you do is you look for solutions that somebody else has already come up with and you copy and paste it there's really not a lot of plagiarism, sensitivity in in statutory drafting, you just go and copy and paste and do your best with that if you can get away with it. There was nothing to copy and paste because it turned out that most of the statutes surrounding digital assets were were really just by luck of the draw in however their their statutes were previously drafted and were being utilized. It, it came to us then that this was an open space, and there was a lot of opportunity for setting policy in digital assets in cryptocurrencies and how to treat these types of classes of property. So we started forging that territory and took a leadership position to start creating digital asset governance in a way that enabled it, instead of restricted it some other states that already started to really apply restrictions. Wyoming is is very libertarian and its mindset and tries to keep things open and keep things working. And so we created a task force a few years ago, and now it's a select committee to work on these issues and topics and and try to move them forward so as some of you probably know we, we started off by creating the first definition of a consumer token, as opposed to a security and it was called an open blockchain token at the time, and utilize the how we test which everyone's familiar with to to delineate security from non security in statute. We formally recognized crypto currencies as the equivalent under our statutes of a currency, so they would not be subject to property taxes or ad valorem taxes and would be managed as as a currency. And then we continued to build off of those accomplishments and ended up with a few things that that really were putting us in leadership positions nationally one was custodianship of digital assets, where we effectively took the uniform commercial code. And we mapped digital asset property rights on to the uniform commercial code we didn't change our statutes with regard to the UCC, we simply added on a little section that said, with regard to digital assets, this is how all of the nuances of digital assets will be treated under the UCC to provide clarity in Wyoming statute to provide certainty for industry that was operating in Wyoming, and to provide certainty for our courts of how to treat digital assets with regard to the uniform commercial code. And that was pretty game changing and we actually flew in the face of a lot of the decisions that the Uniform Law Commission was making at the time. So we fought some battles with them because we were doing things in a much more direct ownership, instead of indirect ownership approach. So we took. We took a different path, and I believe it was the correct path and it's been successful at the states have been emulating it. And one of the other primary accomplishments that we pushed forward was a new type of bank charter called a special purpose depository institution speedy bank is what we call it. It's a 100% reserve bank that has the capacity to not be required to to hold FDIC insurance and it's 100% depository which gives it more flexibility gets it out of some federal requirements and allows it to then do some things that FDIC insured banks can't do where right now that means engage in custodianship of digital assets, as well as banking activity. So these are state chartered banks we have two of them currently chartered. And these are our full nationally recognized banking institutions with all banking rights and privileges and the ability to hold and act as a fiduciary for digital assets so it's a it's kind of a new new realm there. We've worked on a lot of other legislation I won't go into those details unless asked to kind of get into the nuances we've actually passed over 20 pieces of legislation over the past few years. But there's a couple of things that we're working on as we're looking forward that are really critical and essential and one of those is digital identity that DASA has been working with Wyoming on trying to draft, and getting to the point where digital identity is sufficiently enabled, such that businesses, individuals, organizations are capable of having their digital identity represent them in contracts in legal agreements in negotiations in whatever else they need it to do. There's authority for property rights for contract rights for privacy rights in a way that really can't be done anywhere else statutorily, and it turns out to be a hell of a challenge. The more you dig in the more questions occur. The more challenges occur. And so this draft language that we have and I'm going to get into a couple of points we don't need to walk through the entirety of, of the first bill draft, but I'm going to share my screen. I'm not a big fan of slides but I do have to just to focus around. So if I may share those which it looks like I'm okay to do. All right, hopefully give me a thumbs up if you can see that. We've got a thumbs up. Excellent. There's just a couple of concepts of this bill I want to go through and then I do want to open for discussion and questions. So we have a draft of this legislation it's already on the website we've worked hard on this draft and it's only three pages long, which tells you how complicated it is when you've got a three page draft and you've probably spent hundreds of hours of human time in getting to those three pages. So we arrived at a few concepts and, and the first that I want to point out is that we focused on definitions so on the right side you see some definitions. And we want to be able to delineate conceptually and legally between personal digital identity and the rights that would be imbued to a personal digital identity of a natural individual and natural human. We've defined that as a personal digital identity means the intangible digital representation of by and for a natural person over which he has dominion we have gendered language and Wyoming statute which is really annoying we've been trying to fix that, we've gotten the bill passed so I'm going to apologize formally on behalf of Wyoming, we are the equality state, we were the first state in 1869 to recognize a woman's right to vote and yet we have gendered language, my apologies. Through which he has dominion and through which he intentionally communicates or acts. A lot of time has gone into that and it is not perfect and if any of you have better words and better approaches I am interested in hearing them work with Daza work with me and and we'll try and master this definition. And then we have a parallel definition for organizational digital identity. It's interesting though that organizations are not going to be granted explicit personhood like they were, for example, through Citizens United we want to be able to delineate separate rights and recognitions for individuals and organizations. So we have different definitions, and we want to make sure that we can hang different rights on those definitions as we proceed. And then you see at the bottom we're not using it yet but digital identity of things. We're going to need that at some point, we're not tackling that quite yet, but we know we're going to need it, and we don't know what those things are going to be. But as we plan for the future that's part of the discussion. So when we look back to how we're structuring this, these definitions are going to be integral into what we do moving forward where we start imbuing rights and authorities on those. So we put these definitions in our title eight where we have general provisions which govern for all statutes. And then we reference them back in title 40 chapter 30 which is a new digital identity act that we're working on through this legislation. And one of the concepts that it's important to contemplate here is the purpose of this type of governance, why are we doing this and what are we trying to achieve. One of the things that Wyoming is focused on through all of our digital asset legislation is the idea that we want to enable through regulation, which sounds counterintuitive but all of you are in the realm where I think you get what I'm getting at here, which is if you provide effective regulation, it actually opens doors instead of closes them, because it provides clarity of governance for corporations industry individuals where they know where they stand. So as long as it's not prohibitive and restrictive but is enabling, then you create value for your people, your constituents, your, your businesses, rather than taking away those rights and that's what we're always focused on through this select committee and the task force is, is adding value, adding capabilities, giving new rights and authorities. And you see we want to provide this corporate certainty, and we want to protect individual rights and recognize individual rights as well as corporate rights and organizational rights, but what we've started to struggle with and we haven't fully tackled yet is the idea of privacy rights versus property rights with regard to digital and organizational identity. So what does that mean we all know privacy rights we all know property rights but with a digital identity a personal digital identity as an example. Privacy rights are going to be rights that are inalienable to you, they're going to be something that you you're not going to sign away you're not going to give up you're going to be able to protect. It gets to what GDPR which I mentioned below you're all familiar with the EU general data protection regulations. California Consumer Privacy Act focuses heavily on privacy rights and protections. These are concepts that we want to be sure to enable through our legislation so that individuals and corporations will have separate but recognized privacy associated with their personal and organizational digital identity that will not be severable will not be assignable or transferable will be inalienable. At the same time, you've got property rights associated with your digital identity information about you that's generated about you that that you sign over that you agree to sell that you agree to lease, perhaps or, or rent out agreements that you enter into where that information, some personally identifiable information, other information you generate photos of you for example where you're going to lose control of them and it'll be very hard to get back that goes more into property law. So we're struggling right now trying to draw those lines and establish those barriers as we draft this and that's one of the things we're working on it's not in the bill yet, but that's one of the directions we want to go. And the last point is going to be where do we want to go I'm going to get back to that in one moment but I just want to go to the next slide quickly, which is, is the entirety of what we've imbued into the first draft of this digital identity legislation. We want to tackle principles of self sovereign identity. We want to do a lot more. But what we've put in so far is effectively a mirror of you Eda. So we're calling out our electronic signatures act and and recognizing that that's uniform, more or less nationwide as a model law from the Uniform Law Commission, and we're calling out the fact that an individual's digital identity. The actual digital identity you see in Roman at one will be recognized such that acts taken through it will be attributed to the natural person, authoritatively in law, our statute will say an act by the digital identity is the equivalent of an act by the person, and then obviously a language for organizations, and then similar you eat a language about the effects which shall be determined from the context which is again taken from you Eda. So it doesn't sound like we're doing a hell of a lot. We're trying to get a definition as perfect as we can. Because once we have that definition. We get to the where do we want to go from here and what are we're going to do to enable it. We're going to add concepts and principles of self sovereign identity we're going to add privacy rights we're going to add property rights. We're going to allow this digital identity to engage on behalf of the individual authoritatively through smart contracts. We're going to recognize these organizational digital identities through the state itself authoritatively where we'll stand behind that digital identity. And we want to create this framework, such that commerce transactions contracts, all of the things that we're used to doing traditionally can authoritatively be accomplished through this digital identity. We probably all see right away that it's a very different approach from how the EU and California have done it, where they're recognizing at the core just the individual and then they're granting and layering privacy rights on. We do that too in Wyoming statute and it's clujie and it's ugly and it's in elegant, and it's not particularly effective we certainly don't have anything magical. We're trying a different approach, where we create this authoritative digital identity, and then imbue it with rights on behalf of the individual organization that stands behind it. And we're enthusiastic about it but it's a hell of a challenge and again I welcome all of your input and would be willing to and happy to take questions and discussion on it at this point as an outstanding thank you so much Senator Rothfuss. I'm so glad we're recording this and we're going to publish this on our site and blast it widely but what you just shared is just so fundamentally important and so there are a couple of questions. There's a few questions so I'm going to group two of them to get us started. Because I think they're two sides the same coin. So first Walter asks, with the language of intentionally communicates. Okay, as part of the definition of personal digital identity. Kick in for cases of deep fakes where for instance YouTube videos are uploaded purporting to be a communication from the person speaking. Or is that actually a violation. So that's one side of the coin and then let me just layer on the second side are all this is from Brian, you listening are all my avatars, some of which might be fantastic like like in center world, or something a personal digital identity for me if I intentionally act through them. I have a couple of thoughts on that but did you want to go or shall I say, well, I think on the first question the of buying for clause really comes into play. If it's a deep fake that is not of buying for, in my opinion, so it fails that test, and that's a pretty rigid test that we put in there. And that was intentional and there was a lot of discussion about the of buying for to get at the concept that if somebody's acting secondhand we don't want that to be truly your digital identity because we don't want that to be authoritatively acting on your behalf. That's the first with regard to the avatar yeah I mean I think to a certain degree if it's acting on behalf of you, your avatar is part of your digital identity but we, it does start to get into the weeds a little bit of the privacy versus property aspect and also when we create an avatar on someone else's system that they also own some of that avatar depending on the terms and conditions, I might not have rights to it, but I might. So, you've just transitioned from privacy into property to some degree there, and welcome to our battle. And so there's another interesting part of the definition that that I think we should highlight, because Walter and Brian you listen these questions. So we certainly did put weight as you say on of buying for and that's supposed to suggest that this is an identity of you by you for you, maybe distinguishing it to some extent from identities assigned to you and that you barely control. We have Google identities we have employee identities we have drivers licenses, you know these are all valid identities but they're not of this type they're not our personal digital identity. There's other word that has evolved and I encourage you to go back to the, you know, there's not a lot of legislative history but if you see the three hearings that we've had on it and the different drafts, you'll see the evolution of how do we capture and distinguish between. You know, on the one side like a deep fake or something that isn't mine on the other side saying it's truly some people actually use the word self sovereign like that's really putting a sharp point on it. So it's that word that we're looking in the current draft center office pointed out dominion over which the person has dominion. And so what does dominion mean well it's such an interesting word partly because you know the definition includes words like control power ownership. Those words raises some you know wrinkles legally, but a word that includes them and connotes all of that really does get at what we're saying so just to apply that for a moment to this novel creative question from Brian you listening about my my center avatar. I mean, as Senator office as it very much seems like that it certainly could be if it's a buy it for you. But now we can ask some of the as you as he was saying the second level questions. I don't know the system but was it set up in a way where every other Tuesday, the service has it announced, you know, advertising messages and promoting their affiliate systems or does it prevent you from saying certain things as are they reserving some dominion over the avatar that you also sometimes act through according to their terms of conditions. The more that's happening the less dominion you have, and therefore it may not be this type that we're talking about. So, I encourage everybody to meditate upon these words I seldom say this about a statute, but actually this is not only is it going to be helpful I believe for the well functioning economy and society of Wyoming but I think that this might in fact be a good example of the kind of pillars for a legal framework to successfully transition to the digital age with our values intact and that special place for human beings. Absolutely and I does I see two other questions that I think are really good and one of them we haven't talked much about actually the first that I see is is the interoperability question from Nadia. How to recognize state to state state to federal and and that is a challenge first mover matters obviously. A lot of what we're doing right now relates to companies that would be corporations and individuals that would be domiciled or residents of Wyoming, we can do a lot with regard to that. But one of our challenges is not to bias any of the digital identity products, not to be technology specific but to be technology general and neutral, and to be framework general and neutral. We're certainly going to try and comply and comport with California's CCPA with a lot of what we do on privacy, but that interoperability is certainly going to be a challenge in the absence of any direct federal guidance and they're reticent to do that I don't expect that to happen soon. The other question that I wanted to address was looks like it's been Bev Corwin's excuse me with regard to legal guardianship power of attorney and particularly for children wards of state disabled persons and other vulnerable persons great question. And my hope is that we can arrive at a point where it's seamless transparent and entirely similar to what we currently have in statute such that the digital identity as a representation of the personal identity would would follow precisely the same legal obligations as representations on behalf of that individual by guardians, attorney ship wards and the state, etc. So you'd end up with the same rights and privileges transferring equivalently so if we do it right I think that's where we would get, but that might be easier said than done so honestly that's the first I've seen of that discussion. And so I appreciate that Bev raising that so that we can contemplate it. May I pop up a, I wish we had. Oh I don't know an entire semester with you, but we will have a few more moments so can I pop up the last question. I'm a person that you know who's been very helpful to your committee and to, I think, Wyoming, and of course is an MIT alum and a valued member leader in the MIT computational community, our own Brendan mar. And my friend. And so he asks what is the vision of the highest best success in like say a five year horizon for your many efforts in in through your committee and for Wyoming. Excellent and Brendan thank you so much Brendan has been instrumental as well he has participated in in our task force and select committee over the last few years and has has contributed his his thoughts and work towards our product and solution as as has NASA so thank you for that and as far as the vision that there are a few things I mean underlying a lot of our vision is a simple desire really to have Wyoming have a relevant future. We are a coal oil and gas state. Those are largely going to be past tense in the not so distant future as things that we do. We don't know what the timelines going to be but we rely on them now and so those of us in the legislature that are forward looking are trying to think all right well what can Wyoming contribute to the future in a way that will help Wyoming to continue to remain relevant and successful as a state to help our economy to produce good jobs and, and to be leaders in the future instead of leaders in the present past. So, from one standpoint success to me will be success from that standpoint where where Wyoming remains relevant, we have industry surrounding this. And we've got a strong industrial presence because we've created this, this regulatory framework that brings the best visionaries in in digital assets to want to be a part of Wyoming. So as far as my, my broader putting on my hat of an advanced technology expert, the, the vision that I see is in five years might not quite get there, but it's getting towards it. The idea where I, I do have knowledge and control of my identity in a way that I don't right now in a capacity where I can protect it. Right. My, my wife's identity was just stolen couple of weeks ago and so we're getting all sorts of great letters of we're sorry but we are not willing to open this bank account for you in Guam or wherever else they're they're using her identity right trying to get past that point where we control our identity and manage it. Get to the point where privacy rights are respected again. You know I'm, there's bipartisan desire to erode privacy right now at the national level and in most states and I'm one that's counter to that. I believe with digital identities, we can get back to the point where we can secure our privacy and have control over our individual privacy better than we do right now and manage it more appropriately. And then third really this is the point where we have more seamless and transparent contract and commerce capabilities that that streamline some of the things that really shouldn't be challenging. Writing a will right now we've been working on that writing a will is a pain. How is that still a pain we've been doing this for thousands of years. It's still awful, you know that there are a lot of things that we can enable through a digital identity that should become seamless that are not right now so five years from now I hope that that we've led the country in that direction and and made a lot of this earlier and and made a lot of it more individually empowering than than what we've got right now where we, we sort of just go and flow with the streams of information around us and lack control of that information about ourselves. And thank you so much, especially for those words. At the end that kind of, you know, signal, you know what the first principles and values are in the guiding lights for this. And, you know, let's all take that on board. We're all not legislators but we all do have our influence or from our own corners of the world and the stitching together of these legal frameworks and, and other fabrics. So, I think I appreciate that what you said, we do need to move on to the next speaker. Can I can I make one closing comment it will be quick. Please do. Thank you. We've gotten where we've gotten, because we've brought in the best minds and the experts. We are not those people in the Wyoming legislature, we've just been clever enough to recognize that if we listen to smart people will go in the right direction. So I invite all of you to please participate and bring your best ideas to us. Thank you, Deza. You're welcome. And let me, I just want to say, Senator Rothfuss means it if again look at the click on the YouTube's of these hearings. This is when I was growing up and learning about civics and how government was supposed to work. I learned that it was a deliberate, you know, fairly intelligent. Well, deliberative, like open discussion, you know, finding out the best way to go for letting a lot of voices be heard. When I worked in politics in various legislators and other places I discovered it what didn't seem that way at all. It was somewhat disillusioned. Well, I have hope again, I'm having worked with this select committee, they're doing it the way I thought it was supposed to be done. They really do listen. And they really do grapple with the ideas and they come up with terrific legislation as a result so go ahead, test, test this challenge and take Senator Rothfuss up on his challenge of, or his invitation to come and participate and contribute and see what he thinks, I think you'll be as pleased as the rest of us. So thank you so much Senator Rothfuss I encourage you to, I invite you to stay if you need to go to other matters we completely understand. And, and now we're going to, I'm going to move forward now with our oops wait who's screen sharing. Oh, I put it on screen share per the back channel chat that we had. I didn't see that. Okay, why don't. Okay, go. Great. Let me get back to you. I've now lost, you know how you can click a button and then lose the screen zoom. Okay. Well, so next we have we have, excuse me, you Lila panful of New America who's going to talk about how do we prove ownership of property in a post disaster context in particular, and this very interesting project that that I've linked to in our notes, called the basically digital footprints. And so it's a I would say it's a very novel. It's a novel approach, and it's one that's particularly needed and it and it really raises a combination of business and operational questions, very much legal questions and absolutely questions for the common good so with that you Lila if you if you'd like to introduce yourself a little bit more and and and what you're working on, I'd be grateful and everyone please listen closely because we're going to offer an opportunity. The end of you Lila's remarks of where everyone enrolled in this class now can get involved in a in a, in a workshop with you Lila and other stakeholders to tackle some of these questions so with that in mind. Thank you again for joining us you Lila and the floor is yours. Great, thanks so much does and thank you to Senator Rothfuss that was fascinating and I wish that we could have listened for another two hours to that discussion it was really remarkable. So, does it for the presentation would you like for me to share my screen to take to go through the PowerPoint or do you prefer that it's done on your end. Oh, am I sharing the screen right now. Sorry, I thought you were excuse me Brian. Would you like to actually you know it might be best if you did share on advance as you like. Yeah, I'll drive. I'll do a quick intro and I'll run. I'll try to run quickly through this PowerPoint. So my name is Julia Panfill. I'm the director of the future of land and housing program at the think tank new America. Our program looks at land and housing rights challenges both domestically and internationally. And actually this research that I'll share with you grew out of some work that we have been doing a couple of years ago at the intersection of self sovereign identity and property. And that research led us to this question of, you know, how can people use some of the data that they're starting to generate through particularly through their smartphone use to help prove where they live. So with that, let me just share my screen. Can you just give me a thumbs up if you can see my screen. Looks good. All right. Great. So let me just slide into present mode. Okay. Is it big. The screen is big you can see all of it. All right. See it's not in presentation mode but it is big. Oh, strange. Hold on. Let me do. Okay, here we go. As I mentioned, our program works on land, housing and property rights globally. And what we know is that nearly half the world lacks any sort of formal documentation to their land and their homes. So titles and things like that. And because of that, they're often locked out of the rights that these documents confer. So most famously, for example, they can't go to a bank and get a loan because the bank needs a title for in order to use your home as collateral. But there's a range of other benefits that you're just not going to qualify for. You don't have proof of home occupancy. And the reason this disconnect exists is that the credentials, the forms of proof that the government requires to issue property documents are often unattainable. So an example we use famously is that in Uganda, there are less than 100 surveyors for the entire country. And in order to get a title, you need to get your land surveyed, right? So it would take Uganda more than a thousand years at this rate to give a home title to everyone. And this has several different impacts. Here in the US in Puerto Rico, after Hurricane Maria, a quarter million Puerto Ricans actually couldn't access FEMA disaster assistance because they couldn't prove to FEMA that they were the legal occupants of the homes that had been destroyed. In India, a quarter of all court cases are land disputes, and they often just languishing the courts because neither party has the documents necessary to prove that the property is theirs. In Colombia, and this isn't unique to Colombia in post-conflict societies all over the world, refugees and IDPs can't return home because they can't prove that the homes they had fled from were theirs. But what we know is that the administrative reality, what we call administrative reality, so the accepted documentation, is not the same as natural reality. So what does that mean? The pieces of paper that you use to prove your home occupancy, for example, a title or an ID document or a survey or a will, are the only ways to prove where you live or that you own or occupy your home, right? There are a myriad of different ways that you can prove that, where your packages are delivered, where you sleep at night, proof that you paid to put up offence around your home, the attestations of your neighbors. The problem is that until very recently, that natural reality, those facts on the ground, occurred in the analog world, right? It was undetected and it was undocumented. But as we know, over the last decade, that's really begun to change. Smartphone penetration is exploding across the world. You know, globally, it's at 40% in the U.S., it's at 81%, 85% right share, e-commerce, digital payments. We're starting to generate this tapestry of evidence of where we go, what we purchase and who we interact with. So that leads us to a question. These billions of people who have been locked out of getting property documentation, can they instead be empowered to harness their own trove of digital evidence to prove where they live? And how do you do that? So I wanted to kind of make this a little bit more concrete. I decided to just test this very quickly on my very rudimentary point across, you know, your Google Maps location history, if you carry a smartphone, is a pretty predictable indicator of where you spend your time, right? So I decided to pull up and map my Google Maps location history between the years 2015 and 2016. I live in Washington, DC. And as you can see, you know, there are three red dots on the map. The one all the way south was my job at the time. I worked my home for most of that period. And then to the north was the new home that I had moved to towards the end of that time. Zooming in a little bit more. You can really see quite clearly a big red bullseye over the exact address of my home. So I lived at 1862 Wyoming Avenue. You can see 1864 to the left, 1868. And you could see right the bullseye over my home. So that's interesting. But of course that can be faked. So what if you start to combine that with other forms of digital proof? So using a website called LifeScope, I pulled up and mapped my social media use, my Facebook and Twitter posts. And, you know, what this site does is it shows where things are being posted from. And indeed this, I pulled it up for the end of the time period. And this was my new address and this cluster of posts all being made from this new address. And perhaps the most interesting was a single post that I zeroed it on, which was this post right here. It was a Facebook post that I had made from that time, telling my friends that my husband and I had bought a house. So what's really interesting is that I've spent some time working in developing developing country settings, helping people register their land. And what they do when they register their land is they put up the proposed registration on a basically a public bulletin board in the center of town for a number of weeks. And people have a few weeks to dispute it or confirm it. And what struck me was that the pieces of information that I had inadvertently put into my own post very closely mirrored what was in these public posts that were being put up in Tanzania and elsewhere. So you can see that, you know, I write a little patch of dirt to call our own. So I'm specifying the type of right, right that it's an ownership right. You see that I've included not just myself but my husband in the picture, right so it's showing the occupants, you see the address of the home behind us, and perhaps most interestingly, you see the sort of likes and comments at the bottom to the post. So that's a representation of my public square my community, affirming that they are on notice that I am claiming this property as my own. So the point here is that each piece of this digital evidence isn't itself dispositive, but combined, they start to form a relatively convincing picture. So this is just an example of, you know, multiple different types of digital evidence that could be combined to form a pretty convincing picture of where someone lives. And, you know, this is something that could be quite a bit more accessible than the traditional means of documenting property. So let me pause here for a second, you know, to let you scan the various questions that of course come up immediately about this proposal, right, there are several technical issues. You know what's the easiest way to collect store and share this information, you know, particularly for people who aren't tech savvy, what are the privacy considerations. Here are the legal questions. I think most importantly, under what conditions, what an administrative agency, or another end user actually trust and accept this data to prove as proof of address. And with that, and I'll end the presentation in a second, I'm going to transition into quickly describing a specific case study for this idea that we're thinking about quite actively, and that is Puerto Rico. So, as I mentioned, at the beginning of the presentation, after Hurricane Maria. 75,000 applications for housing aid in Puerto Rico were denied, because FEMA couldn't prove that the people who were applying for their homes were the rightful occupants. So, FEMA's aid in after Hurricane is governed by the Stafford Act, which provide which allows FEMA to provide money to repair what are called owner occupied private residences. And this is really important, because an owner, you can prove that you are an owner occupant in a few different ways, you can be the legal owner, right, and you can present a title, but you can also be someone who doesn't hold a formal title, but also a pay rent. So, you know, somebody who may have, for example, inherited the home from their parents doesn't have formal ownership, but is the rightful occupant. Right, and that's the third criteria here, somebody who has lifetime occupancy rights, but without formal title vested in someone else. So it's really difficult to prove and in Puerto Rico in particular because of the particularities of their legal system which I won't get into. There's a huge number of people who kind of fall into this in between category of rightful occupant but not legal owner. And as a result, you had this huge amount of applications who were that were denied. So multiple legal aid organizations have called on FEMA to expand what it accepts as proof of owner occupancy. And the question that I want to leave you with and something that we're thinking really actively about right now is, you know, could tapestry credentials could these digital trails be part of that expansion. And if so, what would be the technical and legal requirements for FEMA to take that on board. Outstanding thank you so much for that. So, let me. So if those that have a question. Let's try to at least get to one. And if you could pop them up and Alaska Brian and in our TAs to help select one. And let me just say, for those of you that are that are interested in this and think it's important as I do. Let us know. And I'll send in the follow up email a simple link, probably to our input form, where you can let us know if you would like to join a informal, basically like a workshop session with you Lila that will set up in the, it'll be after this class. It'll be after January, but we'll aim for, we'll find a time but I'm kind of thinking maybe February ish. And, and we can really dig into this and some of the things that one could do might include, you know, taking a close some of you that are legally inclined to take a closer look at the Stafford Act and take a closer look at the legal frameworks that apply here. People could look at things like example affidavits that partners of you Lila have put together to fill some of the gap is part of filings with FEMA, and so forth to prove occupancy and take a look some of the that are technically inclined to take a look at some of the data structures and how to collect and manage and submit some of these digital footprints that we learned about, and we could maybe even think those of you that are government people. You know what could a, you know, process look like for a FEMA or others of the future, where they would, you know, adopt a rule or policies that would permit these types of filings and this is, this is what I would consider a good legal hack session. And we invite you all to join us. And so, and also for the, we don't have a lot of time unfortunately to engage with you. So this will also be a great escape valve and opportunity for people that really want to take this up to go deeper with her on this topic but for now, who won't the one of our class leaders share one of the questions for you Lila to address. So, we have a question from Bruna. What are the motivations for the PSE being realized outside the US, and specifically Uganda and not somewhere else. There's no specific motivation for Uganda. I just brought that up as an example of you know as a really stark example of why the traditional methods aren't working. I think that generally outside of the US, the context in which this would be most applicable are post conflict scenarios for for a specific reason in post conflict scenarios, the typical rules for proving home ownership or property ownership and emergency are relaxed, because it's an emergency situation. And so, instead of being governed by a country's domestic legal framework, oftentimes a country will set up what's called a land restitution tribunal and that restitution tribunal is guided by rules which have much more relaxed evidentiary requirements. So this presents a little bit more flexibility to be able to petition those tribunals to look at a broader range of evidence. Okay. And if we've got time for one more Walter has a question that's kind of a follow up, which is about the potential benefits to the government, as well as for having this system in place so, for instance after disaster governance can more accurately and quickly identify neighborhood occupancy and residential needs. Absolutely. You know, I think that from a humanitarian standpoint of course, a government doesn't want to have a quarter million of its people, which is what happened in Puerto Rico right it was a humanitarian disaster because people for years couldn't get back into their homes, but also kind of zooming one level up. After the earthquakes in Haiti, about a decade ago, the government actually couldn't rebuild the roads, because they didn't know whether people's just where people's destroyed homes had been, and the roads that they were proposing to build, we're going to go right through where somebody's home had one stood. So from an infrastructure and rebuilding standpoint it's really important to identify, you know, who occupies what and get people back in their homes from kind of stepping back and trying to get more people getting property documents to more people. You know, many developing country governments it's a tax motivation, right, it's a way to get people to increase the property tax base so there's definitely a motivation for governments to increase the number of people who have some sort of property documentation. Thank you so much, Julia for for going over that and honestly we did just open the book on this. We barely got to into the dialogue. So, so two things number one, we have another topic, many of you have signed up for projects. We've run out of time and so what I'd like to do if Brian, can you stay with us another five minutes. Wait for another thing, but I can try and pull five minutes. Okay, so we're going to keep the reporting going for five more minutes anyone that can stay with us stay on the line, or you can check the reporting later. And Brian will go over some of the depth of projects on you know the, the what the how the why. And again, for you Leela, excuse me, Leah, forgive me. We did talk about something like what mid or late February for the workshop is that still good for you. That's perfect. Perfect. Okay, so let this be a good beginning and let's come together and and see if we can apply some of the skills we're learning in collaboration with with you Lea to make this much easier this is a solvable problem we can make progress on this. And we can also learn a great deal by by by helping to push the ball forward so let us do that. So with that, I want to just thank you very much for your presentation and the diligence of putting it all together and making yourself available now to the class and let's all thank you Lea. Thank you. Thank you all so much. And yes, please reach out if you're interested in helping we need your brains. So, thanks. You're welcome. You're here. Great. And so with that, Brian, if you would like to. So anyone that has to go, your excuse for anybody that would like to stay and hear about projects we have a special session now that will go about five minutes. And Brian, take it away please. Hey everybody so a lot of you have all submitted some projects. I think we have 22 or 23 so far which is very exciting. And the way that we're going to do the submissions is the way that we've done a lot of stuff for this computational law course which is, we're going to have you fill out a Google form. And in this Google form, there are going to be two places for you to submit something. So we're requesting that each student who wants to do a final submission submits a quad chart. And I'll get into what exactly is in a quad chart here in a moment. And then we'll also have space for students to submit one of either a prototype of paper or pitch deck as we've been kind of talking about earlier on. The reason that we're asking everyone to submit a quad chart is because this is one for one something that is used in numerous classes that are run at the media lab. And with the quad chart, the benefit is to making you concisely clearly know exactly what the innovation is that you're interested in kind of exploring and how you can take it from an idea to something that can be implemented. And so an example that is used quite frequently is this kind of DARPA, you know, single chip terraflop computing slide. You know, you can clearly see the what the kind of basic diagram of how it looks how it works. You can see that here. You have a quick understanding of what the transformative aspects of this technology are, they're condensed into these kind of bullet point style descriptions. Same thing with the impact, you know, how is it actually going to change the space. And so for you, this would be, how is this going to change the computational law space, what innovations are going to take place. And then the final slide is the rollout. So if you're writing a paper, this will look different than if you're doing a pitch deck. And that will look different if you're doing a prototype. But all of these things are really interconnected. And the reason that we wanted to offer each of these three kind of options for you all is because these options are all interconnected in the same way that you take an idea from the idea phase to the phase where it's actually realized as kind of a final object. And we will be sending out in addition to the Google form with the information about how to submit a templatized version of this slide that you can just go in and edit as you would like. And based on the work that you are exploring. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me via email. I know later tonight I'm going to try and get to everybody's responses for a second round of feedback. And so with that, I'll hand it back to Dazza to wrap us up. You bet. Thank you so much, Brian. I know that you had to be a little late, but I think so if you've signed up for a project, keep the momentum going. This is the important part now. And it really, I've done this as a participant in classes I've helped to teach this method. Brian has been involved in it as well. It works. And it's not a big deal to do each step. So just to fill out the quad chart initially doesn't take that much time. It's never perfect. Just give it a try. Send it and it can be iterated. And then that brings you to the next step of answering the right questions for the project. So, so here we go on projects. Now with that, everybody start thinking about space that the next frontier. We're going to go to space next Friday and it's going to be marvelous. So, we're definitely creating new legal framework new legal frameworks are emerging right now. It's the perfect use case for computational law. And we've got some amazing speakers at the forefront of the field so so encourage I'll send out some readings in advance but I just say make sure you're in a quiet place have your lunch and coffee in advance and you know come to play. So, with that, thank you very much and I'd like to hand it back to TMA if you'd be so kind to bring us out. You got it as a. Okay, thank you so much Brian and thank you for everyone who participated today and to our speakers Julia and Center for your office. I know that we have a lot of questions that we weren't able to get to so please don't produce our form or to reach out via telegram, or the office hours actually this week as well so thanks everyone and we'll see you back here next week for our final class. Bye. Bye.