 Excellent, thank you so much everyone for joining. I'll just wait for a few more seconds before we get started. Make sure that all the attendees are logged in and able to join us. Excellent. Hello and welcome everyone to today's panel, part of King's College London School of Security Studies annual conference titled Order and Disorder Navigating Global Crisis. My name is Dr. Hassan El-Bahtimi. I'm Senior Lecturer of War Studies Department and Co-Director for the Center of Science and Security Studies, CEEE-TRIPLE-S. It gives me great pleasure to share this panel. This panel was organized by the theme of science, technology, health, and security in the School of Security Studies. And the theme includes academics and researchers drawn from the School of Security Study that look into the interface between science, technology, health, and global security broadly defined. Today's panel addresses international investigations and accountability. International investigations have recently emerged as a key contested ground in international politics on the back of COVID-19 but also frequently features in all aspects and different aspects of international practice. And the panel takes a look at the conduct of investigations and their significance to practices of global governance. The panelists will address efforts to investigate the origin of COVID-19, chemical weapons use in Syria, illicit arms procurement networks, and the role of health intelligence and outbreak investigations. I'm very delighted we have four speakers addressing four different aspects of this topic with us today. We have Dr. Jeffrey Chapman, a research associate from the Center for Science and Security Studies, the Department of War Studies. And he's going to talk about investigating chemical weapons use, open source intelligence in a contested space. This will be followed by Dr. Daniel Sosbury, who is a research fellow at the Center for Science and Security Studies at the Department of War Studies. He's going to talk about investigating North Korea's arms trafficking. And then we have Rose Bernard, who is a PhD researcher, part of the Conflict and Health Research Group at the Department of War Studies. She's going to talk about health security intelligence and evolving paradigm for outbreak investigations. And finally, we have Dr. Philippa Lentos, senior lecturer in science and international security at the Department of War Studies and co-director for the Center of Science and Security Studies at King's. And Philippa is going to talk about investigating the origins of COVID-19 pandemic. So a few organizational notes before we get started. So we are going to have the individual presentations by the panelists. This will be around 10, 15 minutes each. And then we are going to follow that with a question and answer session with all the panelists and our audiences. So if you have any questions while the presentations are delivered, please take note of them and write them in the question and answer box. I will keep an eye on them and collect them and bring them to the panel at the end for a discussion. If you want to follow the broader discussion around the conference and if you're social media inclined, you can use the Twitter hashtag order and disorder, which we've been using for the conference. Please be aware that this panel is live streamed and is recorded, and the video will be available for later viewing on our YouTube channel. Thank you once more for joining us today. And I now give the floor to Jeffrey Chapman, who is going to talk about investigating chemical weapons use, open source intelligence in a contested space. Jeff, the floor is yours. Thank you very much. I'll just set up the slides. Hopefully everyone can see that now. OK, great. Thank you very much for the kind introduction, Hassan. As introduced, my name is Jeffrey Chapman. I'm a research associate at the Center for Science and Security Studies, and I've been investigating use of open source intelligence in regards to chemical weapons use in the Syrian conflict over a number of years. So it almost goes without saying that the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Civil War has proven to be a atomic issue within the conflict. Following Obama's red line comments, chemical weapons have been one of the few issues to provoke Western intervention in the conflict. Therefore, making judgment calls over whether a chemical weapons attack has taken place or not has geopolitical consequences. Resultingly, these judgments have proven divisive on multiple levels, both in international organizations, within government, and for wider civil society. In this presentation, I argue that open source intelligence, or OSINT, has matured in tandem with the Syrian Civil War and that the potential transparency that OSINT offers has posed different challenges and opportunities in attempting to investigate the use of chemical weapons use in Syria. These can vary across different actors, whether it be states, NGOs, or international organizations. Therefore, I will cover how each has responded to the use of open source intelligence from the outset of the conflict. To give my talk, I must emphasize that the collection and use of OSINT as a medium is not new. Organizations such as the US's foreign broadcast information service and BBC monitoring have been collecting openly available information since the Second World War. However, the Syrian conflict and the Arab Spring more broadly coincided with the maturity of smartphones that enabled the first-hand collection of footage to be widely collected and routinely distributed. This was twinned with the rise of online platforms that allowed users to relatively easily access and share and pass through this data. It was for these reasons that in 2013, on Bakr, writing for Time Magazine, dubbed the Syrian conflict the YouTube War. In terms of investigating chemical weapons attacks in Syria, gaining physical access decides to conduct investigations through challenging both journalists and international investigations. Therefore, open source intelligence has played a prominent role for all of those wanting to investigate chemical weapons use, where videos of incidents and other information can be used to indicate where attacks have taken place, what agent was involved, how many were affected, to what degree, and so on. Access to these often graphic videos has been cited by Western governments in their initial investigations of whether chemical weapons attacks have occurred. These determinations come under intense time pressures where the impetus to conduct a kinetic response to a suspected chemical weapons incident will be measured in weeks at most. These times frames mean that decisions will occur in the absence of international investigations, which can take many months to compile. France, Britain, and the United States have all cited the widespread availability of open source videos in their determinations of whether chemical weapons attacks have taken place in Syria in their intelligence assessments that they've released in the public. While the purpose of intelligence may have traditionally been to inform decision makers, the legacy of the 2003 Iraq conflict means that further public scrutiny will be given to whether intelligence is both convincing and demonstrably reliable. These criteria are attempting to be filled by citing open source intelligence as it offers the potential for a greater degree of transparency. For instance, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2013 made the videos by which it determined that chemical weapons use had occurred in Ghouta available to the public. Even so, there are limitations to this transparency. How the information was collected and verified remains ambiguous and reliance, or lack their role, on other modes of intelligence collection have not been made explicit. Nonetheless, the ability to use open source intelligence to indicate to the wider public and political opposition how determinations are being made over whether chemical weapons use has occurred is a step forward in terms of transparency in the state-orientated intelligence process. However, the role and nature of open source intelligence in state-based decision making has been criticized. Given that Hayat Tahir al-Sham has controlled territory where chemical incidents have occurred in Syria, the then labor of shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, cautioned in 2018 not to rely on so-called open source intelligence provided by prescribed terrorist groups, and that it was an unacceptable alternative to international investigations. The body charged with such international investigations is the organization for the prohibition of chemical weapons or the OPCW. Specifically, their fact-finding mission which establishes whether a chemical weapon incident has occurred and the investigation identification team which can establish which parties are responsible for conducting attacks. However, the interstate nature of the Syrian conflict has posed numerous difficulties for the OPCW with the main issue being the difficulty in assessing the majority of alleged chemical weapons incident sites. For instance, an OPCW fact-finding mission team was attacked in 2014 when attempting to get to Qafazita. This has led to an increased reliance on open source intelligence where it has been used in conjunction with more traditional forms of documentary evidence such as inspecting medical records and medical samples. How the OPCW uses open source intelligence has evolved over time. Initially, open source intelligence was recognized for how it could be used to establish local context before on-site activities were undertaken, but it's evolved into a form of data incorporated into reports as a form of tertiary evidence or supporting information. However, a further challenge faced by the OPCW has been the ad hoc way in which the mechanisms that is used to investigate chemical weapons attacks in Syria have been created and the length of time involved and the differing nature of incidents in question. As a result, their reports come with varying degrees of transparency. Some reports highlight what open source information has been used and how it has been analyzed while others are more protective of means and methods. The forensic analysis of open source intelligence within the OPCW has been particularly contested due to the level of opacity afforded to these analyses to protect the anonymity of experts for their personal safety and for treaty requirements, the confidentiality. These issues have provided an outlet for states opposed to the OPCW's findings in regards to Syrian chemical weapons use to suggest that the core principle of the OPCW's investigative mechanisms are being undermined. The use of open source intelligence is cast as an innovation that laps the chain of custody that physical evidence collected by inspectors on the ground will be able to establish and is therefore inherently illegitimate. Opacity within the analysis afforded by the OPCW reports is used to suggest for literalization and allow space for alternate theories to be constructed around. While it appears that open source intelligence only plays a supporting role in OPCW investigations and that the denouncements of the organization appeared to be largely unconvincing to state parties, the organization could be more proactive in establishing clear principles for how OZENT will be collected, documented, and analyzed going forward. If open source intelligence has posed problems to establish international investigative mechanisms, then it has also empowered a new wave of civil society actors. The remote availability of information online has democratized a novel approach to open source intelligence that emphasizes transparency and is unconstrained by formalities. In civil society open source intelligence, in its ideal form, the exclusively public nature of the sources used means that they can be scrutinized to establish their authenticity. The author can then provide the reader with access to full details of their analysis, making peer-review possible. Epistemic authority for these works is not derived from institutional authority but by the transparency of method involved. As previously established, the confluence of information coming from Syria and the nature of the conflict have lent rise to practitioners of such methods, such as Bell and Cat and forensic architecture who have risen to prominence, particularly with their investigations into chemical weapons use. Compared to the OPCW, these investigations can be conducted relatively swiftly and can take account of emerging information. In doing so, they can establish with reasonable confidence that circumstances in which chemical weapons incidents took place in. A further role in which civil society OZENT can play a role is within criminal proceedings relating to chemical weapons use in Syria. Organizations such as the Syrian Archive have played a role in preserving information for such an event. For years, they've been collecting, verifying and preserving user-generated content from platforms where it might otherwise have been deleted from. Although most routes to criminal accountability for the use of chemical weapons are blocked by United Nations Security Council vetoes, court cases within France and Germany are underway to prosecute the Assad regime for chemical weapons use. How open-source intelligence and user-generated data will be weighed in these court cases as an area of ongoing development. Within established precedent, analysis provided by open-source investigations can serve to back up witness testimony and any documentary evidence. While the use of chemical weapons in Syria seems to have halted in the last few years, investigations into their use carry on and the role of open-source intelligence continues to be disputed. This presentation has highlighted how the use of open-source intelligence has enabled greater transparency in judgments over chemical weapons used by various actors, which in turn poses a series of new challenges and opportunities. While some level of adaption is inevitable, it should be noted that this is true of countervayern forces. Platforms can algorithmically remove content fast that can be downloaded in the archive. Increasingly sophisticated disinformation can disseminate false narratives to confuse and disrupt investigative efforts. And these counter narratives can be constructed in less time than it takes to debunk them. While the transparent use of open-source information plays an increasingly vital role in the state-based intelligence cycle about formal and non-governmental organizations move forward towards accountability for chemical weapons use, they do so in a contested space where disinformation efforts will also evolve too. Thank you very much and I will now hand over to Dan. Thank you. Okay, thank you, Geoff. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Daniel Salisbury. I'm a researcher at the Center for Science and Security Studies. I'm gonna talk to you this afternoon briefly about my work on North Korea's arms trafficking networks, particularly trying to take a focus on investigations and accountability along with the team for this session. And so this is basically what I'm gonna hopefully cover. Just basically give some insights into my research in this area, provide a little bit of background as to how I ended up here looking at this topic, provide a bit of rationale as to why I think it is important. And then I'll look at some different facets of investigation, the key challenge of accountability as I see it, and then extract some lessons. So just to provide a little bit of background here. So my main research interest over the past few years has been in WMD-related illicit trade. So these are networks that are supplying the nuclear weapons programs and missile programs of countries like Iran and North Korea. I was recently awarded a Laber-Hume Early Career Fellowship to look at arms embargoes and particularly how target states, so that's the embargoed states, how they respond to these restrictions. And I am conducting a multi-year study looking at this mostly historical. So I'm spending a lot of time at the National Archives at Q at the moment, but hoping to get to some archives overseas as well to look at different national embargo cases, but also looking at some contemporary cases such as the North Korean one. So why should we care about North Korea's arms exports? Well, the country has been subject to an arms embargo since 2006. So this followed its first nuclear weapons test. It's conducted a number of these tests. Since then missile tests and other kind of concerning behavior for those who support the non-proliferation regime. And this embargo has been breached persistently by North Korea. And basically the reason that it is going back to arms, beyond being the sort of normal behavior of states to do so is there's a hard currency that they can earn in this area, funds the WND programs and secures the regime. So why should we care about this? Well, obviously if we care about non-proliferation that's not a problem, but also at the sort of tactical level, the spread of North Korea's conventional weaponry around the world does feed conflict zones and stability in places like the Middle East and Africa. And I guess there is also concern here for networks to evolve. So the more resilient networks that North Korea is able to build, I mean, there are concerns that it could be used in other regards. We've already seen North Korea transfer chemical weapons related items to Syria, for example, and several examples of them willing to trade in nuclear technology as well. So what do these networks look like? And I'm not going to give you a reading list or a book to go and read a little, but I think the best kind of example of this in popular culture is a recent documentary that the BBC put together with Danish film producer Mats Brugge. It is available iPlayer and it is a very interesting and quite entertaining watch as well. But basically Mats Brugge sends the guy on the top left who's a retired Danish chef to Pyongyang to try and deal some arms. And he also hires the guy there on the bottom left as a sort of a fake investor. They travel around the world to a bunch of different places and basically strike up a deal to build an arms factory on the Ugandan Island. And this is a really sort of long documentary, a really interesting tale here involving an oil shipment to pay for this and various other sort of hints of weapons moving to, hints of them looking for people to move weapons to Syria as well. So if you're interested in the topic, I'd really recommend this film. But what does it really say about North Korea's networks? Well, I think it kind of shows that they're entrepreneurial and they really need the hard cash. And it's not just arms. They also look at a meth as another means of raising this cash, but also there's an element of naivety around these networks. So, they really get caught in this kind of a sting. Very transnational, meeting around the world, business around the world, very deceptive and also consequential. I mentioned the conflict in Syria earlier. So while this kind of shows a lot of the network like, I guess this is kind of an investigation in itself, a form of investigative journalism, but kind of run almost like a private intelligence operation involving a lot of undercover filming at great risk. And it's something that unfortunately we were unlikely to get ethical approval for from came so sad face. But while these kinds of investigations are going on, we're also seeing a lot of investigations by states in this kind of game of cat and mouse. So states such as the U.S, especially the U.S but also allies are working to track these networks around the world. And we're seeing investigation in terms of intelligence collection. We're seeing law enforcement investigations both domestic and transnational. And I think what really captures what was going on here is a form of competitive adaptation. So, you have the organizations and the agencies that are trying to track these networks, not just the CIA, but others. And the arms traffickers kind of adapting in competition with each other, trying to constantly outwit each other and find ways to get around these restrictions. And one thing that I will note here is that adaptation takes longer and is more bureaucratic for the cats, so the government agencies, then it tends to be for the mice, the North Korean arms traffickers. But we're also seeing investigation at the international level. So along with the sanctions regime, which started in 2006, around 2009, the UN created a panel of experts. So this is a panel of seven members usually taken from the P5 and a couple of other countries, Japan or Germany or Australia. And they're usually government experts, but they are drawn on by the UN to work in a personal capacity. And the resolution of 2009 states that should gather, examine and analyze information from states, relevant UN bodies and other interested parties regarding the implementation of sanctions. So they released reports a couple of years now are looking at this. And this investigative process is, I guess, heavily shaped by politics. So this is the politics of the P5, even though these experts are acting in an independent capacity, the ANA reports require consensus. And I'd imagine that the Russian and the Chinese panel members, for example, are often in close contact with their capitals and the process is frequently delayed, although the reports itself are very, very useful, very rich in information. But then you also have another sort of layer of politics here. Sanctions are fairly Western centric still and you get mixed levels of collaboration from countries that are hosting the sanctions busters. And so Jeff talked a little bit about open source as well. And I think there's another layer of investigation going on here amongst NGOs and the research community. So open source information provides many opportunities here. When you're looking at these networks, you can look at things like company websites, corporate registries, sanctions listings, all these kinds of things to build a picture of these networks. And you may say, well, these next works are probably highly, highly secretive. How are you able to know anything about them? Well, when it comes to arms, North Korea is looking for customers. They constantly have to advertise. So the images on the right are kind of a case that I found very interesting. And this was from a YouTube video, supposedly a Malaysian company that builds boats. The first video was very, very boring. It was about their customers, which did include some Malaysian government agencies, but also some very sort of mundane boats that the Coast Guard or lifeboats or the kind of thing might use. The second half of the video, that was far more interesting and culminated, it was basically a catalog of North Korean weapons, the types of things that you only really see in North Korea and Iran. And it culminated with the image on the top right there, which is a Yonong-class miniature submarine, which was the one that North Korea allegedly used to sink a South Korean battleship. I mean, not a battleship, the naval historians are probably fidgeting there, but I think it was a frigate in 2010. And the weird kind of looking sense below, it took me a while to work out what that was, but then I hopefully found a picture of President Ahmadinej out of Iran posing right next to a very similar looking piece of equipment. So if you've got time and you know, in types of places to look, you can find a lot of this information in the open sources. So now to move on to the second theme that I wanted to talk a little bit about, and that is accountability. And particularly here, I'm interested in the role of the DPRK's missions. So these are diplomatic missions, embassies, consulates, trade offices, that kind of thing. So when it comes to accountability and promoting accountability and dealing with these arms dealers, I'd say you get some private dealers in here, a bit like our fake friend, I showed you on an earlier slide in the documentary, but the networks tend to be heavily state connected. So I think across these private dealers and these state connected aspects is very difficult to bring arms dealers to justice. You know, there's a whole host of difficulties, evidential difficulties, difficulties in transnational investigation and jurisdiction and all that kind of thing. But what I found, and I think what a lot of people are looking in this area of found is that the embassies and the diplomats and the intelligence officers based there really acts as key nodes in these networks and they're essentially North Korea's arms brokers. And I'd say it's not novel to the DPRK, I'm sure there are British officials around the world flogging arms. But I think maybe on the side of procurement for the nuclear program, there are a number of countries as well like Pakistan, Iran and Iraq that have used their embassies in this way. So this is sort of drawing on a recent paper which I heard is gonna be published in a journal in the past couple of days, which I'm really pleased about. And what I do in the paper is really try and break down and provide a typology of the different roles of diplomats play. So the vast majority of them I say are brokering, whether it's arms broking, procurement of WMD related and Jewish goods, WMD related and Jewish exports, you see a lot less of that. And then also brokering of technical assistance and expertise. So North Korea and diplomats are going around basically sending us services and renovating, Soviet era kit like this very old looking make here in the picture. We've also seen roles in terms of espionage, embassies and spies have gone together as long as they've existed. I've seen several cases where diplomats have gone to try to steal information and intangibles from various sources. There was a case a couple of years ago in Belarus where they were trying to steal a secret PhD thesis on rocketry and got caught in the sting. And then there's also facilitation role. So arranging for transportation and financing of these transactions. So how big is this problem? When I looked at the cases, tried to really pull together how many there are. This map tries to kind of showcase it. So every country that is blue or red does have an North Korean embassy based there. And the countries that are red are actually where diplomats have been involved in arms trade or procurement or exports of various kind of technologies for the weapons programs. And why might you use embassies? Well, so something to look at in paper as well. I think the first reason is basically convenience. In North Korea's overseas trading networks have been stripped out to the extent that there's not really much left there. They have these outposts in these various countries and might as well use them. But there's also a story here about diplomatic immunity and this comes back to the accountability angle. So the Vienna Convention of 1961 suggests that you can't arrest diplomats in the only way you can really deal with them is PNG and making a percent unknown cross. That has happened a couple of times, I think in Germany and Myanmar for this very issue. You might also use other diplomatic privileges. So being able to move things around in diplomatic pouches, you know, there's less evidence of that for obvious reasons. And some might say secrecy, operational security and sort of loyalty, but there are a number of cases as well where diplomats are defected and that kind of thing. So you've got to weigh that in there. And really perceptions of legitimacy, I think this might be a reason why you would use these in the early stages, but now I think, you know, the North Korean diplomats have become so synonymous with this kind of activity and other kinds of activities like drug dealing or transferring endangered species, all kinds of types of things that actually this works in reverse now. So what has been done so far, a number of steps have been taken. You know, a lot of countries have expelled diplomats and closed missions, but a lot of this relates to various other things like the provocations of the nuclear tests and missile tests, you know, endangered species smuggling, for example, but less so in terms of the arms trafficking. But, you know, a number of UN resolutions over the recent years have talked about this, saying that states should be vigilant. They've expressed concern about the abuses. They said they should expel diplomats for sanctioned busting limits on various banging counts. They're also sharing investigators here as well. So obviously there's a role for states in the new panel, but, you know, at King's a few years ago, a colleague of mine actually stumbled upon a case where, you know, a North Korean middleman, seemingly was openly advertising lithium-6, which is a kind of a key ingredient, the thermonuclear weapons in an online advert. And it actually had, the contact number listed was the phone number for the third secretary at the North Korean embassy in Beijing. So just to conclude now, lots of investigation ongoing. You know, I think it just reflects some of the political and power balances here. And the investigation itself has been crucial to uncovering sanctions of Asian and sanctions violations. Open source, again, like Jeff mentioned, has been important in this. And accountability I think remains very difficult, just generally in terms of holding transnational arms, traffickers to accountability, but also because a lot of the people who are doing it have diplomatic immunity. So, you know, it's a real wicked problem in that sense. So I'm gonna pass over to Rose now for her presentation. Thank you very much. Hi, everyone. So I'm afraid that you're, I don't have a presentation for you today. So you're just gonna have to deal with me. I tried to do a presentation earlier and it sucked up all of the bandwidth on my computer. So I was stuttering away, but I'll try and make this as interesting as I possibly can. So what I'm gonna talk about today is health security and health intelligence and its use as an evolving paradigm for outbreak investigation. So what the COVID-19 pandemic has done is it's exposed critical failures in the global public health response. Despite being exposed to increasingly widespread and what seems like increasingly timely epidemics and pandemics in the last 20 to 30 years, we haven't integrated lessons learned either from the real world or from modeling that has been done after them. We've known about these threats for a really long time and the global health security community has repeatedly stressed the crosscutting impact of a pandemic, but in governments, in particularly governments in the global North, health and health crises have remained a siloed sector and as such have not been able to adequately respond to the political, economic and medical requirements of such a pandemic. COVID-19 has demonstrated the impact of the disease beyond straightforward epidemiological data, but in particular the UK's over politicized statements and narrow technical definition of the science has meant that we haven't been able to respond in an agile or adequate manner to mitigate against the impacts of COVID-19. We've also faced a context where there are challenges of interstate hostilities, economic bailouts, social media misinformation, disinformation and they've all undermined global governance in the response. So we now have to confront this and say, how do we respond to this in a way that is agile and multidisciplinary? And we suggest the way to do this is integrate intelligence processes into pandemic response. There has been some overlap with the increasing adoption of the health security doctrine, health, biosecurity and intelligence, but they've tended to remain technically distinct. Furthermore, public health organizations have resisted the integration of intelligence techniques such as human, SIGINT and SOCMENT because of negative associations and their associations with the military. Nevertheless, there's a much broader conception of intelligence and intelligence-driven processes which is applicable in this context. Largely, intelligence is conceptually information which has been collected, processed and analyzed to meet specific intelligence requirements. This process is governed by the intelligence cycle and that encompasses a number of domains depending on who you're talking to, but they are all largely direction in which people set intelligence requirements and the parameters of the collection and analysis, collection which gathers the data, processing and analysis in which the information is analyzed and assessed by specialists against the intelligence requirements to produce actionable answers and dissemination in which the intelligence is provided to those who need it. This is key in its title, a cycle, the disseminated intelligence is used to drive new IRs and the cycle begins again. What the failed UK response to the COVID-19 pandemic has showed is that it's partly a failure of intelligence, the lack of identified intelligence requirements at the beginning and that comes from largely the failure to learn the lessons of previous pandemic planning exercises, but it also has some connection with the narrow framing at the beginning of the pandemic as purely a health emergency. This led to an ad hoc collection process which produced disparate reports on health equipment, infrastructure, epidemiology, economic impact. They were all produced by different departments, they often contradicting each other, they were not based on full data collection, they didn't get to need them and so they didn't answer any of our intelligence requirements. That lack of direction and a lack of collection plan led to the lack of analysis, surprisingly. The repeated focus on this concept of a science led response and the production and publication of sage products, modelling data and clinical data as if these are finished intelligence products led to a failure to make clear any assessment of threat and risk. I'm not saying that these parts aren't necessarily a part of the whole and they're not important because clearly they are important but they are not just the only pieces of data that we needed to make a full intelligence assessment here. Therefore, there could be no sense of the casual and causal and consequential links between public health, economic, social and governmental policy. We therefore need a health intelligence framework, one which describes in a clear way the wide range of factors that inform public practices during health crises. A process driven and intelligence led framework which is unlikely to sit within discrete bodies but which synthesize the contribution of other bodies within the framework and therefore is necessarily a whole of government and a whole of society approach. I also want to talk briefly about the use of some of these intelligence techniques that are not being adequately exploited at the moment. One of these is human intelligence. It's a really, really contested source for health organisations because of the connotations of its youth, its association with national security and there's often no distinction in public minds between human and the use of undercover resources. Whereas in fact, human just needs any information that you get from human sources that you have analysed and validated and one of the places that we really see the impact of the failure to use human adequately is in the Ebola crisis in 2014 to 2016 and we see that through five failures of humans essentially. So one, there was no initial contextual reporting on socio-cultural factors affecting the infection rate. So early responders to the crisis were unaware, they were insufficiently briefed on the particular cultural context of the event both in terms of things like funerial practices and the political context and hostility to government workers. This incomplete assessment of the operational environment prevented adequate modelling of the severity of outbreak and also inhibited later deployments of responders both civilian and military. We also have collection of case numbers. So despite there were or despite publications of a sharp decline in cases, infections increased during August. So a declining case numbers is commenced through it with previous Ebola outbreaks, but we also know that they typically increase in August and that should have been highlighted by an intelligence overview. It's now also apparent that the decline in cases was not in fact a decline, but it was a decline of recorded cases because healthcare workers were chased out of towns and villages, there was misinformation circulating about the origins of the disease and the consequences for people who reported to Ebola treatment units. So again, given the bias of previous outbreaks, the lack of socio-cultural assessment and the lack of anthropological and human investigation, there was an assumed decline in numbers which led to the withdrawal of researchers. Finally, next disease modelling was limited. So original modelling in Operation United Assistant didn't account for social practices that increased exposure to and affected the rate of transmission. They attempted to model the transition but they didn't take into account socio-cultural factors. So they looked at previous epidemiology but then didn't look at anything like regular routes and destinations of people moving in infectious borders, maps of human mobility and data on human population distributions. We also have the fact that they didn't share information across borders. So individuals had been exhibiting Ebola-like symptoms for months, particularly between the borders of Guinea and Sierra Leone, but they didn't report that and people didn't share that information. So this unreported outbreak was likely responsible for the speed with which Ebola spread in Sierra Leone and for the second wave of cases in Liberia. Finally, there was little communication between respondents at the outbreak. There were a number of rumours regarding the potential of mutation of the virus prevalent among rest responders but they suggested that it had caused a change in its basic reproduction number and that led to fear and confusion in the initial response. Lessons from previous epidemics were not communicated, population movements which had been a known issue in tracking Ebola epidemics were not incorporated into strategic planning and that's what we mean when we talk about human in terms of health. It's a standard ethnographic or anthropological assessment that largely comes from just asking people, asking people what movements are, asking people about things. It's not undercover, it's just a different type of information but because it is not technically connected into health we often lose sight of it. In the COVID-19 pandemic that has translated into a lack of incorporation of views from frontline healthcare workers taking case numbers from hospitals looking at where we can track other things like a drop in hospital admissions and has that contrasted against a rise in COVID-19 cases. We've then got sock mint, so social media information. We've briefly had a, well not briefly but we've been lucky enough to have a brief talk about OSINT. I want to be clear about the difference between OSINT and sock mint although it's very interchangeable but the definitions are often granular but specifically social networking sites have a series of attributes that are things like forced status updates, non-user curated or any partially curated feeds in that they force interaction and a social flow. So users are limited in their ability to prevent this beyond blocking and barring certain other users functions. So Twitter, it's a microblogging site but it's actually primarily considered a social networking site as it forces status update to a user feed. There has been lots of talk about incorporating social media into digital disease detection. There have been lots of things about how can we use it to look at or forecast early outbreaks. Again, the problem with this is it's one piece of the picture and we also have the fact that a lot of it doesn't take into account how a lot of people use the internet. My favorite example of this is when the CDC mistakenly announced an outbreak of cholera in the United States because they were tracking the hashtag cholera and Google searches for cholera but it was in fact because Oprah Winfrey had announced that her book of the week was love into the time of cholera. So again, we need to be able to incorporate it into this wider framework of how we think about intelligence. Fundamentally, what we're trying to examine and put in place is a system of intelligence processes which is a framework. So we make people aware that it is not just epidemiological data and modeling that needs to be taken into account when we are discussing the impact and severity of a health crisis. We need to put this in place now so we can use it for the next time a pandemic or an epidemic happens to us. It needs to be systematic. It needs to be organized and it needs to have adequate collection and intelligence requirements. Otherwise, we are going to consistently see these intelligence gaps in our response. And thank you for that. I hope that looking at my face for that like the time wasn't too onerous and I'm going to hand over to Philippa for the next, next piece of the next talk. Thank you so much, Rose. And thank you to all my wonderful C-Triple S colleagues. It's been great to listen to you all. And thank you to Hassan for organizing the panel. Like Rose, I don't have slides so I'm not gonna have to watch my face instead I hope that's all right. I'm hoping to be fairly short. I'm going to be talking to you about investigating the origins of the current pandemic. Already last year at the school's annual conference I spoke about the need for an origin investigation of the COVID-19 pandemic. A couple of weeks prior to that in May 2020 the World Health Assembly pushed by the EU, Australia and other countries had agreed to an origin investigation. And leading up to that World Health Assembly meeting I had elaborated what I felt a credible investigation would need to entail. So from my perspective, it made sense to anchor an investigation in a World Health Assembly mandate. This would link it to an existing international framework with established rules and procedures of operation. And as the world's premier forum for dealing with public health the World Health Assembly was also an obvious choice. Sure the institution is politicized but it is fairly science-driven and it's certainly less politicized than other international forums like the UN General Assembly, the UN Human Rights Council and the UN Security Council where as a matter of course it seems as though one country or another is frequently or continually blocking international action on any given issue. So going through the World Health Assembly also meant that an investigation could be mandated in a timely fashion as well as funded through assessed contributions from the World Health Assembly's 194 member states. And this would mark it as a collective effort rather than one of a few select states. Importantly, it was also the most politically feasible approach to get China on board and cooperation from Beijing was crucial for an in-country investigation. I believe and I still believe that a genuine effort to query origins cannot solely rely on answers from the natural and medical sciences from virology, from infectious disease genomics, from genome science, epidemiology. Of course, obtaining case histories, obtaining epidemiological data and viral samples from different times and places including the earliest possible samples from infected individuals and samples from wildlife is paramount, but in and of itself, it's not sufficient. Forensic investigation would additionally involve auditing and sampling viral collections at the relevant labs that had been studying coronaviruses in the vicinity of which there are several in Wuhan as well as examining the types of experiments that are carried out in the viruses that are used and reviewing the safety and security practices in place in these various facilities. Key data would therefore come from documents including standard operating procedures at the labs during fieldwork, risk assessments of individual experiments, experimental logs, fieldwork logs, training records, waste management records, accident and infectious infection records, facility maintenance, access logs, security camera footage, communication logs, all these kinds of documents and records that a lab of this kind would normally keep and I'm sure Wuhan has the Wuhan Institute of Virology as well as those other labs in Wuhan. And in addition to those documentary sources, interviews with facility personnel and observation of lab facilities and fieldwork sites would also be important sources of data. Now, what we got in the end from the joint WHO China Global Study, as they called it, was very different to a forensic investigation. The joint team didn't have the mandate, they didn't have the independence and they didn't have the necessary accesses to carry out a full and unrestricted investigation into the origins. So the terms of references for the study, these are what govern the exact objectives and duties and responsibilities of the team with the investigation. They were negotiated by the WHO and China with very little transparency in July of 2020. They were then only made public after a considerable delay in November of 2020 when it became clear to outsiders that those terms of references were significantly limited. The selection process of international experts to be on the team itself did not adequately screen for conflicts of interests and the skills represented in the team members were purely focused on public health and su noses to the detriment of forensic skills that are suitable for investigations of lab or research related accidents. And when the joint WHO China report finally came out at the end of March, 2021, after again much delay, it became clear that the joint study team only saw its priorities seeking a zoonotic origin, not as fully examining all possible sources of the pandemic. The published data that supported the report mostly presented reviews of Chinese studies that had not been published, shared with or reviewed by the international scientific community and well over a year after the initial outbreak, critical records and biological samples that could have provided essential insights into the pandemic origins remained inaccessible and had not been accessed by the team during its two weeks on the ground. I mean, there were actually four weeks on the ground in Wuhan, but two of those weeks were spent in quarantine in their hotel rooms. So in actual fact, they were just on the ground in two weeks. So what the international team members had to do by their own admission was to often rely on verbal assurances given to them by their Chinese counterparts rather than independent investigation. And this was particularly the case when it came to the possibility of a research related accident or lab leak. And the final process that was used by the joint study team for assessing the likelihoods of a natural spillover or a research related accident, which that process basically had mounted to a show of hands by the team members based on a very superficial review. That process failed to reach some of the most basic standards of credible analysis and assessment. And it's also unclear whether the Chinese team members had the leeway to express their fair evaluation of the origin theories as they were in the presence of Chinese government minders at all times. And finally, or just a final point I'll make here on the report and on that process is that the joint team used different evidentiary standards. So they use different standards of evidence for the origin theories that it assists. So he used one standard for the natural spillover theory and he used another standard for the lab leak theory. So on the day that the report came out, the WHO director general Dr. Tedros distanced himself and the WHO from the team's findings in a statement released literally just an hour or two before the report, he said that all origin hypothesis must still be examined, including the possibility of a lab related incident. He also said that China must be more forthright in sharing essential data and biological samples and that the WHO was prepared to send additional missions and experts to China to thoroughly examine all origin hypothesis. China responded of course that it felt it had been open and forthright and transparent and now it was the turn of other countries to open their facilities and field sites for investigation. On the same day, there was a joint statement by 14 countries that was led by the United States which was also critical of the report. It underscored the need for a transparent and independent analysis free from interference and undue influence and it voiced the country's shared concern that the joint study lacked access to complete original data and samples. And a similar sort of statement, a little less bold came from the EU. Now possible steps at that point would have been to revise the existing terms of reference of the joint WHO China study or to pass a new World Health Assembly resolution for a more credible investigation. Neither of these have come to pass. An alternative would be to establish a parallel international investigation. Though getting to a credible international investigation in practice is well-nigh politically impossible at this point. And even if we did, it's far from certain whether it could come to any conclusive findings particularly in light of the time that's now passed since the spillover event happened and then likely without on-site access, right? So let me conclude. As it stands, a credible international investigation doesn't seem feasible, but there's a big question here. Do we actually need an investigation? Isn't the key takeaway from the pandemic origins debate that while we don't know how the virus first spilled over into humans, it could have been either a natural spillover or a spillover resulting from scientific research. So to better prepare for pandemics in the future, we need to address both possibilities. We need to continue surveillance of potential natural spillovers and to develop zoonotic risk assessment tools. We need to promote behavioral change in high-risk populations. We need to fund research into universal vaccines. And we also need to address lab by safety and by security. I think that that argument is right in theory. In theory, it doesn't actually matter what the origin was because we should be preparing for both instances in the future. But in practice, I think it matters a great deal. If it turned out to be a lab leak or an accident in the course of regular scientific research, then I think the scientific community would have a very different reaction than if it was a natural spillover. It would really bring home the message about the importance of biosafety and biosecurity as well as of the broader societal responsibilities of scientists in carrying out inclusive risk assessments of their work. I think it would also impact the wider public differently. If it turned out to be a lab leak, it would be a forceful instigator or amplifier of bigger societal debates that need to be had about the sorts of risks we're willing to take in the name of research. Does the majority of stakeholders feel that lab manipulations or potentially pandemic pathogens is justified? Do the benefits of virus hunting actively going into caves and trying to find viruses that we don't know about? Does that outweigh the risks? And can we even do adequate risk benefit assessments when both the risks and the benefits are uncertain? And these are some of the bigger questions that I think are coming out of the pandemic origin discussion and that need some serious engagement. I'll leave it there for now. Thank you so much to all of you for joining us here today. It's great to see so many of you who showed up and I'll hand over to you, Hassan, thank you. Excellent, thank you so much, everyone. Jeff, Dan, Rose, and Philippa for your excellent presentations and interventions. We will now have 30 minutes, well, slightly less than 30 minutes, 29 minutes to be exact for questions and answer. So I'm going to start off with a question but I also encourage everyone from our audiences to think about questions, comments that they want to share with us. We are hoping to have like a lively discussion about what we covered today. Actually, one of the motivations or impulses perhaps about looking at such a diverse set of topics is an invitation to think laterally and connect some of the common themes about how investigations are being done internationally in different topics. And there seems to be an expectation, a growing expectation, perhaps more than ever before that we now expect competent investigations on issues of security concern to take place. But I guess as this excellent survey has showed is that that is not necessarily easy. We have not really cracked yet or figured out how that can be done. And there are a lot of method questions that keep come up and pop up in all these different contexts. So my starting question for everyone on the panel is one that actually comes from the arms control community and the practices of verification, arms control community. And again, the purpose here is to do some form of cross-fertilization between these different fields. But for a long period of time, physical access is really key part of arms control and arms control treaties. That is inspectors having boots on the ground, seeing things. And this is usually some of the most contentious in terms of negotiations of multilateral agreements or treaties and also in their implementations, very contentious. And I wonder and I'll ask everyone on the panel to think in the context of their topic of what they've shared with us, whether that still holds, whether physical access, that key core feature of arms control investigations or assessments or verification does really still hold in all these investigations or whether in some magical way we've managed to sort of bypass it. Does it still really a core feature problem issued to be resolved in all these international investigations and efforts? Whether that's an arms trafficking, whether that's in chemical weapons use in Syria, whether that's in assessing health security and using intelligence, whether that in COVID investigations. I mean, in all these different settings, does access, physical access still play a key role? So that is my question for the panel. And again, I invite everyone from our attendees to think about questions and thoughts and comments to share with us. You're more than welcome to do so. You can use the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen and I will collect these questions and then bring them to the panel. But as you collect your thoughts and questions, I'll just pose that question to the panel and then come back to the audience and take more questions. All right, perhaps we can go with the order through which we made the presentation. So I don't know, like if Jeff, Dan, Rose, Philippa, in that order, you can provide us with your insights on that. Sure, so I'll go first. Well, I think what I tried to convey in my presentation is that the issue of physical access impacts different actors to a varying degree. I think of course it has enabled this new wave of civil society, open source intelligence that don't need for their reports, their reports, their authority is not based on physical access, it's their analysis of the collected open source intelligence and that authority is stemmed from its openness, the fact that it can theoretically be peer reviewed. It is a talking point of criticism against them, but the kind of counter point is that, look, we have all this information, we have laid it all out to you, this is our analysis, you can assess it. They would defer to international investigations with access to either confidential or physical information, but it is a way of providing insight into a chemical weapons incident relatively quickly and early on outside of kind of formal institutions. For the OPCW, as stated, it's been a really significant issue access to chemical weapons sites, the access to different chemical weapons incidents has been, well, highly contested in terms of are they being blocked? Are things being covered up? It's highly contentious and has undermined their authority when they have not been able to access these sites because then it becomes a point of, oh, well, they haven't gone to these sites, therefore it undermines their findings going forward or at least that's an allegation made against you when they haven't gone to various places. But for states, obviously, they potentially hostile to the Syrian regime, obviously they can't get physical access, but then it's not an unequivocal investigation, it is an intelligence determination and that sense, open source intelligence is making that process more transparent and therefore probably should be welcomed. Thank you. That's a great question, Hassan. You can really see the verification background, your verification background coming out. Just a few thoughts, particularly focusing on the UN panels in this. Is physical access needed? Well, it's definitely helpful. In the past, these panels have had very, very heavy travel schedules traveling around the world to inspect, physically inspect, interdicted and seized goods, crit containers of explosives found on dock sides or things taken out of airplanes. This was something that we really saw a lot of, I think in the sort of past 10 years, but more recently as it has dropped off of it, I think. And I think that there is an issue here with the pandemic and COVID and the benefits of taking those risks to do this. But also these investigations are, these investigators are sometimes putting themselves at risk. There was a case in 2017 in the DRC where a couple of UN investigators were tragically killed. So I think we are seeing more reliance on other areas and less physical access. People who talk about this is almost armchair investigation, being able to do this from afar. And we've got a lot of interesting sources and methods for doing this, coming out alongside the sort of new emerging information landscape. One of the areas that I think has seen a lot of work in this area is the maritime sanctions on North Korea. And having various bits of shipping data and transponder data means that you can track ships from your armchair and you can employ things like machine learning and AI to do that. But obviously there is behind the scenes of reliance on states providing information. And this is part of the picture that we don't always see. So we don't really know what kind of access they have. And it's obviously in their interest to keep sources and methods very secretive. So I would also say that, this reliance on other means and doing things from afar brings with it a whole host of new political, ethical and practical issues as well, which we can talk about. Yeah, I think those are some really interesting points and I would particularly agree with the points around new methods and cybersecurity. So I work in cybersecurity. So there is a very cynical part of me that says as long as somebody's been there, I can get at that information somehow. You might not like it, but I can get it. So I think that we now have so many different sources. Does that rule out physical investigations? No, it just gives us another way that we can verify it and look at the results of those investigations. I also worked with somebody a very long time ago who did physical investigations into arms trafficking. And his sense was, well, he actually said, physical investigations are like tequila. It depends on who's doing it. So I think that we have to be aware that this is just one source of information and we have to be prepared to verify, assess and look at the answers that get it independently amongst a wealth of other sources. Thanks, Rose. We're all actually terrified of your capabilities. My answer, Hassan, is I think it depends. So for COVID-19, for instance, there has also been a fair, COVID-19 origins. There's also been a fair bit of open source investigation going on. There's this group called Drastic that essentially became a conglomeration of individual researchers that sort of met online because they were all interested in finding out more about the origins and they've done some incredible digging up of old PhD theses or database records from the lab and all these kinds of things that bring up difficult questions that you think should be answered by some of the facilities involved. But at the same time, I do think the biological field especially when it comes to weapons is a little bit different maybe than others because so much of the equipment, the material, the knowledge is dual use. And so how can you assess what the intent is without being on the ground? There are some ways of trying to get at that of course that doesn't involve on the ground monitoring but we did have a very good case of this in the 1990s when Anscom went into Iraq and set up a kind of monitoring capacity of all the various dual use facilities and got to this baseline of what is normal activity because that's really the only way you can judge if something's starting to change. And there was I think very good information coming out of those inspections and investigations with boots on the ground. It was when the Anscom team was withdrawn from Iraq when the eyes on the ground or boots on the ground sort of disappeared that the intelligence got really, really shaky about what was going on. We all know how that ended in 2003 with the Iraq invasion. And so I think it's important to stress that both aspects, both open source and boots on the ground or remote and boots on the ground and they don't even have to be boots, they can be heels, they can be other forms of, they could be lab coats on the ground or they're different metaphors we could use here but in-person on-site inspections, I think still forms at least in the biological field a really important aspect of inspections and investigations. Over to you, Heather. Great, thank you so much everyone for your thoughts and insights on this. I have now a list of questions that I will share with you. I think the best perhaps approach here is to maybe collect them in groups and then share them with the panel. So I'll start with some of the cross-cutting questions. So there is, so I'll start with this one from Paul Schulte. He's asking, at the most general level, aren't we witnessing a widespread reaction against the political, military, reputational risks of transparency with consistent sometimes coordinated pressures from many states to return to Cold War levels of privileged Westphalian opacity. So dynamics of transparency and opacity and the push and pull between transparency and opacity now and who's supporting what and to what end. I think that's a cross-cutting question. There's a question from Alexandre Kille, trying to connect the first and last presentation. What are the implications of the COVID origins discussion for the BWC and possible violations thereof? So let's maybe start with these two questions and then I'll come back and collect two. So I'll go back in the same order. I don't know, Jeff, if you feel you want to respond to this, but like basically anyone from the panel who wants to, like you don't necessarily have to respond, but like if you have something to say, you're more than welcome to, obviously. Tough question as ever from Paul, but appreciated nonetheless. Am I qualified to talk about transparency on a global level? Probably not, but in regards to transparency and how different states have reacted to it in regards to chemical weapons use, I think there's a very clear political split depending on state parties and how they react in terms of their finding towards chemical weapons use in Syria. And that often reflects in how they view open source intelligence. But I just also nuance kind of the question is even if there is a move towards opacity, various technological factors, even with very authoritarian measures do make imposing such levels of opacity really rather difficult. Remote sensing, even of very authoritarian countries. I mean, Dan is researching with open source intelligence on North Korea. So there is going to be a limit on the opacity that can be reimposed. I think I'll leave it at that. Thank you. So it's a big question. Just having a single thought on that, that it is not just states that are pushing back on transparency in the case that I've talked about, but we're seeing also non-state actors pushing back on transparency there. So it definitely includes things like businesses, transnationalised criminal organisations as well. You know, they also don't like this transparency. Is Rose still with us? Yeah. Jeff, I agree. Yes, I think we are living in a world where there's this incredible dichotomy between the availability of information, information that we have access to, if you think about all of the documents that have been released on WikiLeaks, you think all of the documents that have been released, PacoLeaks, MilicoLeaks. So we have this huge amount of transparency, but we also have an incredible amount of obfuscation, and it's particularly by large companies, people with political and economic interests in that. So it's not necessarily solely a geopolitical reaction, but it's also two opposing ends and an economic and social reaction as well. So I'll address Alex's question. Hi, Alex. It's really good to have you with us. What were the implications of COVID for the BWC? The BWC has kind of kept a low profile in this whole discussion or in this whole, in the whole pandemic. The security community, not the intelligence community, the international security community has had a fairly low profile. This is the left to the health community, which to a large extent I think is right, but of course it hasn't gone unnoticed that if this had been deliberate, it could have caused even more havoc if you had something worse come out. And so I think to that extent, it has reinvigorated discussions in the BWC. It's also shown how damn difficult it would be to get an investigation going if there was an allegation of an attack. You would sort of need the agreement from the state for an investigation to come in, right? But I think there are also some good points. There are there's, you know, some silver lining here that we should also point out is so easy in our field to always point out the difficulties and challenges and risks and threats and things. But it is equally important for us to highlight some of the positives. And I think in this particular pandemic, one of the remarkable things is how quick a vaccine or several vaccines have been developed, which should act as somewhat of a deterrent that will only get better in terms of developing vaccines. We can also see how some of the strongest measures against COVID are things, you know, are things that don't rely on high tech. Washing your hands and staying away from people or keeping a distance, wearing a mask, those are really important things that have come out. I did want to quickly kick this question back to Rose, though, because one of the things we have seen in that's been very unique so far in this pandemic is the use of biological information warfare. And it's one of the things that I've been talking about a lot in different fora, but of course the brains behind that idea is you, Rose. So I'll just kick that back over to you so you can present it. Thank you. And yeah, that's a really good point. So one of the things that we've been investigating in the COVID-19 pandemic is the use of disinformation and its impact on public health. And one of the arguments that we've been making is that actually the impacts of disinformation campaigns in a pandemic and an epidemic are in fact equivalent or analogous to those of biological warfare because they increase morbidity and mortality in a population and they undermine economic and socio-political systems. So even if the extent is not to cause morbidity or mortality, it is to potentially take advantage of a global catastrophe for political or economic reasons. You are still achieving that aim using biological disinformation and you are still causing persistent disease circulations. And we've consistently looked at the way that states are using these kind of disinformation campaigns. And one of the most interesting facets of that is the audience doesn't necessarily have to be foreign. It's not always the actions of an adversarial state against you. It's sometimes in misinformation and disinformation provided by one's own government meant to impact economics or politics but which cause increased morbidity. And they say it in full knowledge of its falsehood. And it gives us another framework with which to engage with this phenomena. Great. Thank you so much. So we've got eight minutes left. So we plan to end promptly in eight minutes. So I'll just ask for very quick telegraphic sort of answers. And I'm afraid we won't be able to cover all the questions but I'll try to send them to the panelists later. So a question I think that is best addressed by you Dan at the link between money, laundry and state sovereignty. And ultimately there is a relationship between illicit markets and globalization and how to unpack that. It might be challenging to unpack in a telegraphic fashion but we can try. I think Leslie is asking about the ethics of scientific research and should scientific projects and curiosity be sort of pursued with all the attendant risks? Do we need an international body like the IAEA that can investigate things like that? And I find a question from Luisa. And again, I apologize for everything I said. And again, I apologize for everyone who posted a question. We won't be able to cover them all. A question from Luisa about the relationship between international and national investigations and whether the national can undermine the international in some instances. Right, back to the panel. Okay, so the first one for me I'm only wondering. So I guess my only wondering is about basic levels about hiding the origin of funds. North Korea has to do a lot of this. It's not just about the role of illicit activities in its revenue generation but also because it's just subjected to the most extensive sanctions regime of all time. So we've seen a lot of the kind of issues surrounding this transferred to the non-proliferation in a sense through the counterproliferation financing agenda. North Korea has found a lot of different ways to pay for things and move money around especially using banks outside of the country and also using things like double ledges. When it comes to sovereignty and the connection there, North Korea is quite unique in a sense. The concept of state criminality is quite an interesting one to look at here and there's a whole spectrum between fake criminal aspects of a state to full on criminal sovereignty and North Korea is often talked about as being one of the only countries that really as this kind of criminal sovereignty is almost a soprano state and I'd recommend or just make note of the the mole documentary that I mentioned where one of the sort of agents basically said look North Korea rules don't apply you can do anything here you know if you basically pay us enough so yeah it's a few interesting strands to put on there. Excellent thanks Dan. So the question about a body like the IAEA for biological research and the ethics of bioresource should anything be pursued if it's possible or or interesting I think what's was this perhaps Philippa and Rose would be might be interested in answering that taking that on. Yeah I mean I would actually combine G. Leslie's question on the need for some kind of international body with the anonymous attendees question on the need do we need a rotating health inspector in labs all over the world because I do feel that there is a need for some kind of international oversight of high risk facilities or high containment facilities whether that is best place in something like a separate institution like the IAEA or whether that should be a function that goes within the WHO or whether that should be a function of international standards inspected through certified third parties I think those are all open questions at the moment but certainly we do need to have some sort of international tracking of the number of these labs to date there are now approximately 60 BSL4 labs like the Wuhan Institute of Virology across the globe they're in all countries from North America in all continents North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia we have done a recent study and we had a launch very recently providing a map of where these high containment facilities are globally and we also produced a policy paper talking a little bit about the sort of virus management practices that need to be in place so I would urge you to go to that all of that is on my Twitter feed so thanks for the questions and over to you Rose Yeah I'd completely agree with everything you just said I think we need a way to monitor all of these high risk projects not just from a biological perspective but also from an information government governance perspective we need to make sure that there is enough security around the documentation and research that these labs are doing that it's protected that there is a standardized way for communicating this intelligence and these research results as well Excellent Well thank you all I'm afraid we won't be able to take any more questions because we need to end promptly so I sincerely apologize for this but want to thank all our great panelists for their presentations and insights and thoughts that they shared with us today and thank you all as well our audience for your engaging questions The school conference continues till the 10th so please check the full program there are still events that you can sign up to and attend the details on that is on our website and finally I want to thank you all for joining us today and hopefully we can meet again perhaps physically in our beautiful campus hopefully soon but then till then I hope you all take very good care of yourselves