 yourself if you can think of a time when you might have done something that could be construed as a crime. Just I'll give you five seconds to do that. Please raise your hand when you think of something. Okay so I there are some there are many things that we may have or could have done that might be criminal in some place right so all these kinds of examples that everyone brought up they're mostly still fun to think about, sort of cute deviant things. There's also stuff like using encryption. Encryption is illegal in a number of countries. There are all kinds of blasphemy laws, laws against insulting Islam and insulting the king in certain countries. So I want to talk to you about Ethiopia right now. So I work for Global Voices which I think everybody knows is huge international network of bloggers and writers and activists all over the world. And this group of people here, this is our team in Ethiopia. They're all translators. They translate a ton of our content into Amharic and they also run their own blogging collective themselves and they're all the zone nine bloggers. And they have been writing about social and political issues for a few years and because internet penetration in Ethiopia is so low they actually started holding informal sessions where they would talk about civil liberties particularly voting rights and what the Constitution says in Ethiopia which is something a lot of people don't know about. So they were arrested on April 25th all of them along with three other journalists that they're associated with and they were held in prison for 11 weeks without charges and then they were finally charged under the terrorist act which was what everyone expected to happen but it's kind of an amazing story I think and something that I've been I haven't had no choice but to think about this since this happened because this is the largest number of people from our community who've ever been arrested in one incident. So instead of sort of doing like this law helping here or that type of problem there I just sort of had no choice but to be deeply in this. So here the security forces searched their homes confiscated all of their computers mobile phones etc and oh and went into all their counts of course and picked through and these are just some highlights from a 19 page long charge sheet of documents that have been presented as evidence. All the kinds of documents that some of us surely have looked at these two security in the law. Documentation that sounds pretty pretty sort of standard kind of thing that you might find on a computer. Amazingly a number of the bloggers from inside the prison have been writing and so this is a little excerpt from a piece that Beka Kauri had smuggled out recently and this is the most interesting thing about this is what made me think of talking about this is that his interrogator kept asking him so what do you think is your crime and it was kind of fascinating because he was like I don't you know I don't think I committed a crime I've done everything under their real name they they're trying to get people to understand the Constitution. So we've done a bunch of public campaign work on this we've done a bunch of sort of back channel political stuff worked with legal support you know doing all these things to try to figure out how can we change the situation help these people and the thing that I wanted to put to this group today is like what I don't want to be isolated in this anymore I think there is a incredible sort of sense of from people in other parts of the tech community about the issue but they don't it's sort of like wow I'm sorry you have to deal with that and I think it's not an Ethiopia problem I think it's an internet problem and that I want to figure out ways to connect with a lot of you on this issue that seems so hardcore and so like in depth that it's like I don't want to go over there like