 Welcome everybody. Thank you for being here at the Human Rights Foundation Hack North Korea program. It's Hack North Korea, it's part actually of a larger program that HRF has that has been proven around the world in different dictatorships and authoritarian regimes. So in order to give some context to what we're doing right now in North Korea, which is our most well-known program and how you guys can get involved in and how the technology community gets involved and to answer your questions, I have to give you some background on the work that we do. And basically the Human Rights Foundation was started ten years ago by a Venezuelan defector, Cousins with Lopoldo Lopez, his name is Thor Halverson. When he saw the injustice happening in Venezuela under the Chavez regime, he had to flee the country because of political persecution. He was a political activist there as well. And the first thing that always gets attacked is free speech. So we try to focus always on, it's not your typical human rights activism group, it's more based on freedom, in giving activists what they need, journalists, any type of political dissident around the world including cartoonists, creative dissent, videos, hackers. We work with every single person that wants to help us including designers. You're going to see an amazing video by Leo Burnett who did our program, Flash Drive for Freedom. And we basically go by the Human Rights Act of 1976 and we believe in the freedom of self-determination, what you consider basic human rights also here in Europe, but you have to consider that most, over half of the world doesn't live in a free country or a free system. Most of them live under authoritarian regimes like in Bahrain where one of our speakers was just jailed a couple of years ago for speaking poem written by her father who was a political dissident. And she was 17. So, like I told you, we support our dissidents, it started with Venezuela with a global guide of your human rights, because basically what we've learned and what our former chairmen have told us because all of our chairmen have been former political prisoners, like Armando Vazadares who was 22 years political prisoner in Cuba. Then we've had, now it's Gary Kasparov, we've had Vaslav Havel, Gary hasn't been in jail yet. But he's number Russian political dissident number one. What we've also focused is in trying to educate the common people and the everyday people into not buying into the government programs, the socialist government programs or just giving away money to shut you up programs and just giving you a free and basic knowledge of what your rights are. These are some of the countries that we work in right now with the Human Rights Guides programs. There's some countries we can't even come with the human rights through like normal means, which normal means for us are like people smugglers or drones, balloons. You're going to see some of the other work that we've done with even slingshots. But what we did with Cuba is mostly we partnered with all the fishermen around the area that delivered these human rights guides into these countries by sea. We have discovered that technology can either be the largest tool for oppression or can be the largest tool for helping people become free. So we are launching programs all over the world, like the North Korea one, which is going amazingly well. And I hope you brought your flash drives to donate if you didn't see it today. And what we're trying to do is basically give all these activists like Manala Sharif in the Middle East in Saudi Arabia, who's launching an app for Saudi women so that Saudi women are being able to drive. It's like a ways but of like where is the moral police looking for women who are driving. And she's also funding through that program and donations, licenses given out in the United States in Delaware to Saudi women in order to create that type of creative descent. So there's always ideas and we found that the hacker community has become one of our most valued allies. We go to DEF CON, WIRED, MOSFEST, most of the hacker conferences in order to get your ideas because that's how flash drives for freedom was born. We work for example with Nico Sell from the Wicker Foundation. She's also helped us do now other than Wicker. It was an idea that it was through the Human Rights Foundation, but also she's now doing Whistler, which is an app that is just designed for journalists and whistleblowers and dissidents around the world so that they can share with us their videos. And we can put them in the United Nations and all the international organisms that we work with in order to bring attention to these issues. So like I told you, we started in Cuba by bringing information in first with libraries. A lot of the hacking community does work with libraries with remote Raspberry Pis. We've created a mesh network in North Korea of the last hackathon. They created a mesh network of very small Raspberry Pis inside North Korea that would actually share libraries and content that we send now in the flash drives. But in Cuba we started with the library as well. And one of our first dissidents who got a hold of the library was Danilo Maldonado. He's a Cuban artist who read George Orwell's Dynamo Farm in one of our libraries and decided to do an artist artistic protest against the Cuban regime by painting two pigs. One with Fidel, one with Raul, and releasing them into Havana Square where he was arrested, obviously, and tortured for three years. He kept in solitary confinement, kept in different ways of psychological torture. He was told every day that he would be shot, that his mother was already dead, different types of authoritarian psychological destruction. We started in 2006. Until this day three of our main dissidents have been assassinated in Cuba. Our North Korean dissidents, one of them got just repatriated to North Korea voluntarily. And that's where our lawyers come in. The Human Rights Foundation has to support all of this legally. Be it the hacking, be it the production of apps, be it the fund raising, be it everything that we do has to be based on lawyers and international law so that we can oblige with everything on our donors and especially the US government because the Human Rights Foundation is based in New York. And we fall under the legal framework of the United Nations as an international NGO. We are also a special reporter to the Commission on Human Rights and the United Nations which now has become useless, and I'll tell you in a little bit why. These are the countries in gray that are considered authoritarian to these days. What do we consider authoritarian? Where laws and freedom of speech have been determined, have been shut down, dissidents have been jailed, political opposition, it doesn't exist. Right now a great example is Rwanda. A great example is always China, Singapore. All these countries that one would think no, but they have economic freedom, we always get these questions, but economic freedom doesn't mean actual freedom. When you go into a little bit more into detail of what is considered real freedom, it's basically the freedom to express yourself and to your self-determination as whatever you want to be. That's when we launched Speaking Freely, where mostly there's now more and more countries in Turkey becoming the latest one on clamping down on free speech, passing laws that jail journalists, jail opposition leaders, jail anyone because of blasphemy laws, because of defamation. Ecuador is a great example as well of Venezuela. All these authoritarian regimes immediately go to the honor of themselves or the glorification of the leader and his honor and the people supporting him that if you offend me, you're offending everybody. And that's when you started Us vs. Them, which one of our speakers, Vladimir Karamursa, I don't know if you're familiar with him, he's also one of Putin's main opposition leaders. He's been poisoned twice, he's been in coma already a couple of times, and Putin just plays with him like a little toy because he speaks his mind and he actually is achieving some type of change in Russia. He organizes all the protests and his colleague Boris Nemtsov was murdered outside of parliament also for speaking his mind recently, like two years ago. Obviously Saudi Arabia, and then we have the problems of that arise on how if Europe and the United States have to do business with Saudi Arabia and all these oil-golf countries or isolate them, because we don't support actually isolationism, because what we know and what has been studied by the Albert Einstein Institute for Peaceful Protest by 198 methods that have brought down successfully authoritarian regimes and dictatorships is that the flow of free information is what brings down these regimes, especially the main examples, the USSR and the DDR, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, because the influence of Michael Jackson, the influence of all the 80s movies and everything did bring a freer sense in Bosnia and Herzegovina and a couple of the eastern lying countries of the Soviet Union. At the United Nations, like I told you, we do have a seat at the Human Rights Commission because people always ask us, but why aren't you doing more against North Korea? We actually started with past laws, I'll explain in a little bit, but whenever we try to act against North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, any one of them, they bond together and they are actually running the Human Rights Council right now. To us, it's incredible that Saudi Arabia, who flugs their women for bringing out the trash without a male companion, is insane that they can be actually considered human rights defenders, even worse Venezuela these days. One of the main, our main program where we educate people and we let people know and we do tech labs and everything is the Freedom Forum. It's called the Oslo Freedom Forum. It was done 10 years ago. It's always held in May and what we do is we had the idea of doing TED Talks, TED Talks-style talks by political dissidents and by technologists and by people who are trying to help political dissidents free the world in the country that we work in. So basically, what we do every year is it's 20 to 25 speakers depending on the most authoritarian areas of the world. Obviously, the Middle East is a big player. This year we had Viandakil from the Yazidi Genocide and we've also had, you guys should mark this down, September 19th we're having the New York Freedom Forum. We're bringing the experience of the other Freedom Forum to New York where the North Korean defector Jisung Ho will talk to you guys about how he escaped North Korea 6,000 miles on crutches. Then these are our speaker statistics where they come from. Every country has been represented in the U.S. as well. We've had over 3 million video views every year about the Freedom Forum. These are 2016 statistics. 2017 was just this May but it was the most successful yet. What we're trying to do with this is basically mainstream what's going on in the dissident community. Let the unplugged housewife living in the Upper East Side of New York know that there's a girl who is the daughter of a revolutionary whose father got killed or we need to do something. So that's why we've gotten the media involved, like Vogue, for example, did a spread on the daughters of the revolution which included Yomi Park, our most prominent North Korean program and we've also done the San Francisco Freedom Forum. This is Kimberly Motley who also is one of our speakers but runs our pro bono legal advisory team. She was the one that actually got Danilo out of prison but she was in prison herself in Cuba for trying to get him out and she uses now an app mostly in Afghanistan. She has a huge legal program in Afghanistan that you should see. She also has a documentary called Motley's Law. It's on Netflix and it's on how she uses technology in prisons in Afghanistan to let her know about unjustness or cases on the Taliban. So she goes into the prisons and finds out and actually frees all these unjust jailed people. Then we come to the program that I'm here for now that you know a little bit about what we do globally. Flash threats for freedom started in February 2016 out of a hackathon that we did at the San Francisco Freedom Forum and basically for us hackathons more than actually talking to you about codes or what we're going to do or the more technological side of it although I do know a little bit of that. We focus on giving you all the questions we have, all the problems we're having and we've gotten so many people from DEF CON and from the South by Southwest that have helped us fix bugs and for example the satellite, how they tracked the satellite, the USB satellite sticks. And this is what I wanted to show you. The campaign we've done is the article. New and unconventional effort aimed at undermining the dictatorship in North Korea. Human rights activists are now collecting old USB sticks which will be smuggled into North Korea. Getting content from the modern world into the hands of North Koreans kept in the dark by a repressive regime. In a country where total censorship is used to brainwash its people. Outside information is an effective tool to make North Koreans question the government's propaganda and actions. When I saw movie Titanic, in this movie man can die for love and I think that really gave me some taste of freedom. Flash drives for freedom is an effort to collect flash drives. The drives are erased, filled with films, books and Wikipedia and smuggled into North Korea using drones and other means then viewed on USB media players owned by most North Koreans. We encouraged donations with an interactive installation where audio from Kim Jong-un's speech was silenced whenever a USB drive was inserted. While on tour, an odd thing happened. Our installation was stolen while more expensive items were left untouched. But we built it again and it continues to travel the world. Drives were also donated by a USB manufacturer every time our hashtag was used. Millions of hours from the outside world are already in North Korea turning your flash drive into someone else's freedom. That's basically what we do with flash drives for freedom. So what we did out of this idea, sure. I didn't hear. On what information is put on the USB stick. So basically what we do is we are the part that collects the money and the flash drives. So we make the connections and everything for the dissident groups in North Korea. Like I'll tell you in a minute, you're going to see here, we've been working with North Korean defectors since the beginning of HRF and we've made a group of North Korean defectors, a network of North Korean defectors and they're the ones who determine what's going to go on the stick. It's not us. No, it's basically out of what we did going to... We went to South Korea to work with them and we took Jimmy Wells with us, that's why Wikipedia is there, because most of the people that most of our donors are Silicon Valley companies like the Sergey Brin Foundation, the Schmidt Family Foundation, Jack Dorsey, Jimmy Wells, a couple of these people who are interested in information getting into countries because obviously that also means more money for them. But Jimmy Wells didn't... What he did was he put all of the Wikipedia in Korean and eight gigabyte flash drive. So that's how it started. For us it was more of like get to know everything unbiased with Wikipedia, open source, you know, but yeah, they're the ones who put it on. For example, Yomi Park who you saw in the video who saw the Titanic, she didn't see it in one of her flash drives but it was a VHS that her sister had bought in the black market when she unknowfully crossed into China. So the problem that we have mostly into how to get the drone, how to get the flash drives after we've erased them, we've put in depending on the size of what the media, the songs, everything that we've put on there, we grab and we send them with slingshots literally from one side of the river into certain areas where they're waiting for us. And actually an interesting fact is that most of the people who distribute our flash drives inside North Korea are Korean officials, are North Korean officials. They run the black market on information in North Korea. And so they're waiting for the flash drives. What happened with the balloons? This has all been trial and error over a period of five years where we've actually pushed laws into action in North Korea. Like you see here, we started March 2016. This is Yomi who you saw from the Titanic. And so basically we've been working step by step by uniting the dissidents, which all of them used to hate each other in the first place. And that happens a lot in the dissident community. They're very separated. Everybody knows what's right for their country. For example, the Cuban example is very obvious that the Miami community, one of them wants to be, everybody wants to be the next president of Cuba, which is insane and they separate themselves and that's why we're bringing into action these get-together tax forces and stuff like that. So when we got them together, it's her. It's Ji Sung-ho. Ji Sung-ho, I'll tell you his story in a little bit. It's... He on sale Lee. And all these people decided that, okay, they're gonna fight just into getting information into North Korea. That's it. Because everybody else wanted... there was even like plots into murdering Kim Jong-un or Kim Jong-il in the... Kim Jong-il in that time. There's been different types of plans by the dissident community that never work, including we've even seen the huge speakers that they have from South Korea and to North Korea that blasts music, rock music, American rock music all day. And when they turn on the speakers, it's when you know that it's a real tension that's happening in the North... the two Koreas, which now they have more than 70 years of being separated. So what we've done in activism, like I told you, is we united the North Korean defector community and we passed... we helped pass lawyers, we used all of our lawyers and our legal team internationally to draft a law that would support the South Korean government into giving the North Koreans asylum. There was no type of support or no type of dissident support from the South to the North Koreans that were arriving in their country that were most of them making a 6,000 mile journey through China, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Burma, and one of them did it on crutches. When he... after the famine of the 1990s, when the Americans... American sanctions and U.N. sanctions started in North Korea, a huge famine was created, where more than 4.5 million people died out of hunger just in the North of Korea that borders with China. The problem is that when they... China has an act that in order to not escalate the situation with North Korea, they won't interfere with the dissidents leaving their communities. So what they do is if you're a North Korean, you're stateless basically. There's over 2 billion people that are stateless right now with Syria and it's even more. But what it means is that you don't have a name, you don't have a passport, you don't have an ID, you don't have anything. That's another great question that we always ask the technology community. And we've had now answers like BitNation and who's gonna provide passports for these people and for other types of rights based on blockchain. And we actually need to find the legal framework to try to do that. And apparently Iceland is gonna give their legal system as support but it's all still very new, very fresh because all of these people are moving because of wars and famines and floods and global change and climate change. They're just moving through borders without any type of identification. So they're always being mistreated, mishandled and they end up either being prostituted or sold for their organs like in North Africa with the Eritrean community. So what we've wanted to do with... It went off again. Oh, there we go. What we've wanted to do with the North Korea Human Rights Act and what we've done with the whole human rights program in North Korea is also expanded to other countries like Eritrea which is just mentioned which is called the North Korea of Cuba and even his dictator was like, no, we're not the North Korea... I'm sorry, the North Korea of Africa. We're the Cuba of Africa with great pride. So what we're trying to do is popularize the human rights situation from all over the world and we get a lot of help from social media companies again in San Francisco that provide us with funds in order to spread our message especially the talks that you can watch online followfreedomforum.com All of the talks from our speakers are there. There's over 350 speakers. Most of them, like the biggest largest group is North Korea so you can find their personal stories but basically what happens with the people in North Korea is that their mind is already so changed by the time that they come out that they have such a difficult time and actually getting into normal life in South Korea that most of them commit suicide, most of them defect back, there's a couple that defect back, others are forced back and they're always fearing for their freedom all around the world. Even Hyunmi Park which is the most famous one she fears for her life in New York and she told me once, she's like, whenever I came out of North Korea she came to school in South Korea and the teacher asked her what her favorite color was and she literally had a nervous breakdown because she was never asked even what her opinion was on anything. In North Korea you have to have, the best way to describe North Korea is like the Hunger Games and a more extreme way of Hunger Games because what happens there is that you have to steal to survive for food because your grandparents said that the haircut on the Supreme Leader looked silly you are literally put away into the furthest away of the small towns of North Korea that border China and you are kept in the most miserable of conditions with only a bag of rice, a handful of rice for a month, for a person. So you have to survive out of eating grass, out of eating mud or out of stealing carbon that's the only export that goes into China and they steal from the train in order to sell it to the same corrupt North Korean government officials for another handful of rice and Ji Sung Ho who's another North Korean defector he was so hungry when he was a teenager that he passed out on top of the train fell under the train and that's how he loses his arm and his leg but instead of getting help or medical or anything what actually kept him alive were his brothers because his parents had already died his mother had already died his sisters and his brothers kept him alive with tourniquets given their portions of rice to him they were eating grass and their growth was actually stumped because of the food double nourishment that they were having one of them also died and Ji Sung Ho never lost hope because he would always get information from the same corrupt officials that Kim Jong Un is going to fall any day now that Kim family will fall and they keep playing these mind games on people that if we can actually break that mind spell that what flash drive for freedom does that's when like Yomi said I watched the Titanic and I couldn't believe that a man could profess his love for a woman that's insane because in North Korea you can only profess your love for the supreme leader and that's the only person that you're allowed to love and if you have a potato growing in your ground that's not your potato that's a supreme leader's potato and if somebody finds you eating that you'll get gulagged, killed, shot the stories are immense and the disgrace of the government is so shameful that the government hasn't acted in the way that they should so we think that instead of actually combined with our work supranationally in the international organisms we are working with the people on the ground because they're the only change makers and we've seen it now with our program in Venezuela that's now actually giving fruits as well with Mesa de Unidad Democrática which is the main opposition party with Lopoldo López and the Venezuelan dissident community so... wait a second this... we do have tech labs at the Oslo Freedom Forum where we always have the big privacy and security companies work because that's one of our main issues trying to protect political dissidents and journalists who are always hacked who are always... their websites are always brought down our flashlights for freedom program as you saw it's also been stolen a couple of times two times out of the storage lots of the hotels that it's been on and... it's this systematic type of malware bugging that we have now from especially North Korea coming into the US because... the new way of making money for North Korea now that the sanctions have increased is by stealing money from banks so they have a very sophisticated hacker community inside North Korea who is actually hacking banks you've seen now the HBO hack the Sony hack and it's mostly the same type of Russian, Chinese and North Korean influence in the coding it's incredible also that the FBI is just putting this together when this has been already announced a couple of years ago DEF CON 2014 on the Russian... on the Russian hackings that were happening and they all share hackers including the Cubans and we just found out this from the German parliament that they can't do anything mostly in Cuba because Cuba supported so well by the Russian hacking community as well that the... all their... all the... all the information that comes into Cuba is only these news channels that the oppressive regimes have have created which brings us again to media media controls the mind of the individual media is what gives you the freedom to see of what you could achieve what you could get, what you could buy how you could live what you attempt to achieve on but then you have Russia Today which is a very... a Russia state-owned media company which just basically makes with its real news does very... pro-Russian covering of the of the media as well as Telesur for example in South America very communist media outlet and we're countering that with for example real Russia Today where we respond to every single fake news story from Russia Today and... then we have the... if there's anybody of you guys that are still in college or that are still out there we do have an Oslo Scholars Program where you can come to Oslo and act... volunteer with the political dissidents from around the world and help them spread their message for example another... we just hooked up some people with Abdulaziz Alhamza who uses technology in order to spread to bring awareness to the crimes of ISIS in Syria as the founder of Raqqa is being slaughtered silently we also put him in contact with David Heineman who is now the... who produced his... who produced his documentary which you should go and see it's called City of Ghosts which resumes what we do very well because the information is what we've also used in the fight in Syria against ISIS we've used the same ideas of flash drives and the raspberry pies in order to achieve a network between Turkey and Syria with another dissident group that we work in Turkey called Turkey Blocks because Turkey is falling into a authoritarian regime very fast as well and so this is the Oslo Scholars we do bring the college... the forum to colleges we've done it at Yale, Stanford MIT and a couple of others and we're located in the Empire State Building this is our board as you can see it's Gary Kasparov and then we have various dissidents from around the world from different parts of the world and most of us, most people ask me how can I get involved, what can we do what we look for is basically your time your money or your time one of the two or if you have an idea on how to make us money for example we go to people also in Norway and they are basing now all of this on Bitcoin and I was like okay donate like one Bitcoin you know give me something that I can actually support these people for because the problem with dissidents is that they have no money no money at all and every single dissident will tell you that they spend all of their income and just helping people get over out of the human rights abuses be it child rights in Nepal be it Eritrean survivors so we're looking for your time your expertise, your ideas a way to hack the problems that we have in North Korea which one of the main ones is if you get caught with a flash drive you mostly risk death so what we've done from another hackathon is that they've encoded the information into a game like Snake like the basic Snake inside of the flash drive so when they'd open it that's the game but then we have the other problem that if they've never even seen that basic technology how do you know that the little game holds information and how do you extract it so how do we make all these technological situations in mind so common in human rights basic that people can use it in order to help free themselves and access information they're nortels they use nortels, you saw it in the film as well where they put the flash drives and what happened was China in order to make good by the UN regime after siting with the US in a UN resolution in 1998 basically bought the popular favor in North Korea even in that so they literally imported into the country all these stuff to promote North Korean media so that people could watch in their homes North Korean media but one area they did it that they did and see is that they came with a flash drive oh no no they do detect it of course, yeah, we've gotten so the response from the North Korean government the response from the North Korean government is to send drones and balloons back for information so we've had yes because it's not only the flash drives we send little boxes it's like little help boxes so in the box you find a map on how to escape escape routes money and all this stuff and of course if one of the boxes gets found at least you're going to know where your country is where you're at these people have no idea where they're even located or if there's anything else outside of this it's incredible when you talk to these people like you have Jisung Ho's family for example they were tortured and murdered and left in their house just because they stepped into the Chinese territory and without papers and they were brought back and since he is disabled he was tortured because he's a disgrace to the supreme leader it's stupid it's stuff like that so what the Korean government is also the leaflets, we send plastic leaflets that have the information on it and they send them back they've captured some of our drones as well we do get a lot of death threats but they're not the only ones so yeah, there's different ways because we work with every single person that has something to say and we will defend your right to say it always for example we work with Charlie Hebdo head columnist and she's the most persecuted woman in the world by ISIS but she has the right to say her talk is called the right to offend you should see it, it's very good and it's also a technology base to protect freedom of speech yeah you would say that prevention is better than anything in let's say all of us where they're now kind of drifting off in a more authoritarian space yeah we work with Turkey the thing is we've just started the first task force imagine the problem with us is that we need the money to fund every single program we're a medium sized organization it's only 18 people and we do have specially legalized teams on sections of the world but for every person you have to hire you need to have the money, you need to have the program our most basic program costs around $60,000 but we have to go through a rigorous system of like justifying why Poland should be in our countries of authoritarianism so we do have like the free speech index that I showed you that we did where we measure authoritarianism mixed with like transparency and where those levels are and Ecuador is the first country that we're actually educating people before it falls into more authoritarianism it's like midway Venezuela and now yeah Colombia is also starting and Mexico is also starting and it's expanding everywhere the United States, everybody ask me why are you gonna start in the United States the United States is not considered at least there is separation of powers in the United States, it's been proven once and over again and this administration and other administrations as well because Obama administration also executive orders and everything obviously not that insane but yeah, so the United States still has excuse me visa court you call that separation of powers what's happening right now in the US with the visa systems for the Middle East FISA, the secret courts the secret courts I don't know much about that I couldn't tell you about that but you still have separation of powers it's not stopped it's not when you compare it it should have been just put down as president a long time ago and he's not but it's also a system it's bureaucracy and I do agree with you that for example that's another whole conversation but the electoral college or all this underrepresentation Trump didn't win actually the Americans are not that stupid do you have two? new sources and when you find out how Fox actually reported all of it it's even more disgusting because he's been doing it in England for a while and it's been in Europe for a while as well you have looked at all over Europe you have all these magazines and everything but that's freedom of speech when you don't have start wearing when you don't see like the nudie magazines and all the crazy stuff and all the trash information that they put on front of you that's also freedom you are allowed to say stupid shit you are allowed and you are also allowed to offend the North Koreans they argue that the American propaganda is so insidious so infectious and so poisonous