 YouTube channel after the event. We're delighted to have everybody here. We've got another great set of speakers joining us. My name is Henrietta Wilson and I'm really pleased to be part of this project along with Dan Plush and Alameda Samuel and I'm very grateful to Julia Alstenbrinker for helping with the technical aspects of today's webinar. So it's going to follow a similar format to the other webinars we've had. We've got three fantastic speakers. We've got Joseph Byrne from Rusey, Alameda Samuel from SOAS and Scrap Weapons. We're also hoping to have Faye Lezhnevska but what you might have overheard just now was there being some technical difficulties with connecting her. Unfortunately the four speaker that we'd hoped to have today, Joseph Dubey, is unable to be with us unfortunately. He's been enormously helpful to other parts of this project and I hope that he might be able to join us at a later time. He comes from various different contexts in South Africa and it's always really useful to us to capture different geographical and sectorial approaches in these webinars. But thank you, thank you to him, thank you to the other speakers and thank you to everybody for joining us. Before I hand over to the speakers I'm going to quickly say a few words about where we're at with this webinar series. I'm going to start by sharing a slide so that I can, oh so I haven't done that quite right, sorry about that. I shouldn't talk and do this at the same time. Great, thank you for bearing with me on that. So just to recap where we're at with webinars, we're thinking about open source verification and we've got an extremely wide definition for this. We're thinking about any monitoring that takes place using publicly available tools and information. So what that looks like are systems that capture data via satellites or via social media and use various automated or manual analytical tools for processing and analyzing that data. It also looks like people on the ground carefully collecting information through trusted networks of people. It also looks at projects that are scanning the internet for publications via traditional media, print media, broadcast media, anything like that. So open source verification means a lot of different stuff and there's a lot of different projects happening all around the world to do that. So the purpose of this webinar series is really simply to capture some of that variety. We're not going to do this a whole lot. We want to be able to capture the varieties of things that are going on with the recognition that new technologies have completely changed the sorts of people that are able to do this and the sorts of functionalities we can capture with this. So in the past the ability to monitor or see different things around the world was really the domain of governments with their intelligence capturing services or international organizations who have verification regimes tied to particular international treaties but nowadays there's a whole different scale of visibility made possible by technological components. So we're interested in looking at that. We're interested in the non-governmental approaches to this and the governmental approaches to this and ways of which it's been used within global governance systems. So within the Scrap team at So Us we're also thinking about other ways of making this more, other ways of harnessing it in different ways, other challenges implicit in this work. In particular we've been thinking about global tracking systems. Is it possible? Is it desirable to set up a global weapons tracking system? Is it desirable or possible to do more in the field of environmental monitoring worldwide? So thank you. That's just a brief snapshot of the sort of things we've been interested in through this series and how this webinar is going to work now. As I said it's the fourth webinar in a series and follows a very similar format. We'll have three short talks. One from somebody engaged in a monitoring project and two from analysts thinking about the wide significance of open source verification. Throughout the talks I invite everybody to make comments on what they're listening to or ask questions to the speakers and if you could do that via the chat function while the talks are going on and I'll harvest them and put them to the speakers. Please do give your name and affiliation if you can. And then from three o'clock the presentation will be keeping the Zoom space open for an optional 30 minutes for a breakout discussion. We found in the past there's more to say than the first hour allows us for. So we keep the webinar space open for that time. So thank you all for being with me. I'm now going to hand over to Joseph Byrne. Thank you very much Joseph. Hi thanks Henrietta. I'm just going to share my screen here and also apologies I'm going to just turn off my video because internet is not the best. There we go. So good afternoon everyone and thanks thanks again Henrietta for inviting me to speak. This webinar series has had some really excellent people in the field speak rather well so I'm very very happy to speak about mine. Very very briefly my name's Joe Byrne. I work at the Royal United Services Institute on Whitehall and I'm in a proliferation nuclear policy team and within that I work on a project called Project Sandstone which looks at researching and investigating North Korean illicit networks. So in the context in the subject in this webinar we're mainly looking at sanctions of Asian activity and the proliferation angle. So Project Sandstone we're looking to generate open source chains of information and evidence that can create actionable intelligence that would be useful for entities that are looking to support the enforcement of UN Security Council resolutions against North Korea and what you said actually earlier Henrietta was interesting because about the scalability of and the transferability of these methods and I believe what we do here can be transferred to lots of different aspects. We have a methodology and you know this could be used for lots of different use cases but we focus specifically on North Korea. So just a little bit of background about why the project came about and why we're doing it. It mainly focuses on North Korean illicit shipping as I said before isn't it as an extensive sanctions regime against the DPRK which really ticked up in the 216-217 period and a lot of those sanctions focused on the maritime aspects of North Korea's illicit activity. And while in the past that we may have seen possibly North Korea exporting full missile systems such as the Scuds or you know MIG parts. There have been instances of those transfers but we're probably because of the sanctions less likely to see that now for systems being shipped and more likely to see exports of illegal commodities banned under the resolution such as coal or imports of commodities such as petroleum. And really to to assess these activities what we're looking to do is fuse a large amount of data together. We try and use a wide range of open source data streams from satellite imagery in its different forms to shipping databases to mapping tools and corporate records. We have a wide pool of information that we try and draw from. Some of it is open source completely open source free and some of it is paid for but this gives us the ability to understand how these vessels behave, what they're doing and also to map their ownership structures and the chains of accountability for illicit activity that's that we possibly see occurring. And so in this in this on this project I specifically focus on the geo inside. We have my colleagues, my very very talented colleagues have lots of different specialist areas and we have specific language skills and other and other aspects but I mainly focus on satellite imagery, GEOINT and AIS transmissions and anything any geospatial data that you can you can pull together. And satellite imagery is the main the main thing we think about when I think of you know geospatial data it's really vital for our work to provide chains of evidence and eyes on the ground so to speak of images of specific vessels and corroboration of other data such as AIS or other information provided in open source literature such as UN panel of experts reports. And with this we can provide chains of evidence from the different data sources so you know when you have a satellite which you can analyze that and see which vessels are present you know if a ship is transmitting on a certain signal if that ship is who it says it is which is very common in the North Korean case where a lot of vessels transmit on a normal AIS signals. And so we've really tried to branch out our capabilities and we don't just use optical imagery which is kind of the full color images that you see in the top right hand side of the slide but we also try and use other data sources such as synthetic aperture radar which is it's just an amazing tool and it shoots at times when other satellites can't shoot due to light conditions and it can also see through cloud and it is available open source and then additionally further trying to branch out into other new areas of tracking vessels such as radio frequency geolocation that is much less it's harder to get in here in the open source at the minute but there you know the new company is coming up all the time with different innovative solutions and so like I was saying before really what this all pours into is kind of the geospatial intelligence some some would say and it's all that basically means is you know putting geospatial data imagery coordinate data and layering it all together to provide product or to provide a chain of evidence and you can see on the on the right hand side we use mapping software to overlay different data sources you know from satellite imagery to AIS SAR any kind of data sources we can get our hands on this specifically was an image that we found of a North Korean vessel conducting a possible transfer with a Chinese flag vessel and what you can see on the on the top right hand corner there is the AIS of both vessels and what you can see is that if you have a piece of evidence you can go back to where that vessel came from where where they've been and you can do all sorts of data manipulation and assessing where these vessel came from and the chains how they got there in this specific case the North Korean vessel we've got another image of it loading coal a couple days before and then we got a very low resolution image of the other vessel in the Chinese port that's not to say you know it wasn't a the low resolution image isn't a complete you know it didn't fully let us know that the vessel was transmitting and it delivered the commodities there but it let us it's corroborated data for other data sources and especially when we look at so many vessels and especially when we look at satellite imagery we try and have a rigorous methodology for looking at vessels in satellite imagery so we've tried to identify loads of vessels from satellite imagery and we have a as i said try and have a rigorous methodology lots of different data sources such as and maritime databases open source imagery open source reporting so you're in panel reports and and loads of different aspects of that but when you get into the really high resolution imagery you can measure the vessels in geospatial software we use QGIS which is quantum geospatial intelligence and it's a free open source state free open source platform which you can use and can plot coordinate data in and it's really powerful has loads of different uses and it's kind of the industry standard for the open source on GIS systems and this is really important for us monitoring North Korean illicit shipping activity because lots of vessels especially when they're conducting illicit activity they don't transmit on their actual identifiers anomalous AIS signals in a few of our previous reports we've reported on anomalous AIS and using satellite imagery confirmed the densities of vessels that are conducting illicit activity so really when you're looking at this sort of activity it's really important to have that imagery in that eyes on data and so using this methodology there's loads of different applications you know monitoring sanctions evasion investigating vessels of interest and even mapping these illicit networks once you know have vessels of interest that you want to look into. In March we released a piece of the New York Times on how we thought coronaviruses idling a lot these North Korean ships and you can see on the right hand side this is a synthetic aperture radar image of the the anchorage at one of the the main ports in North Korea and we just saw an explosion of vessels anchored there like and many that I've never seen a grounding like that before so it was monitoring this activity you can really see trends and it supplements the information that's on the ground and so then apart from the geospatial side we also look at mapping these entities and mapping the companies behind these entities and vessels we have a large database of North Korean vessels and the people that own them and it's just an amazing tool for looking at typologies and red flags and very often lots of these vessels cross over or ownership structures cross over and they're used over time and we've written several reports on the network mapping and how we look at that we use a custom ontology in a platform called Maltigo so we database information in that and it is free and open source until you get to I think 10,000 entities and then you have to start paying for a subscription but that's another really really great tool for database information and mapping networks and moving on from that you know these techniques can be used in lots of different instances you know elicit networks not just specific to North Korea there's lots of different aspects that you can use this for national security or policing work that's another very common use of Maltigo and mapping software but what this really kind of points to is that open source data is becoming a lot more it's readily available and the cost is decreasing especially in the cases of satellite imagery or and new tools are being created all the time so it's it's kind of about keeping up and finding the new things that are out there but it's becoming more and more accessible to conduct these kind of investigations and here is just a few examples of the work that myself and the team I work with have done this crosses over from shipping looking at networks that provides flags to North Korean vessels a normal SAIS even there was a case of UK companies owning North Korean ships that were busting sanctions which is quite topical considering the incident papers and then we were looking at large-scale breaches of sanctions in Chinese waters many North Korean vessels and then our latest report moved away from the maritime section I looked at lots of trade data which is based in the city of Dandong in China so that was a really quick rip through I tried to keep it to 10 minutes but I'm very happy to answer any questions and thank you very much for listening thank you very much Joe what an amazing encapsulation of the power of some of these tools the kind of level of detail that you can get from applying the methodologies that you outline you've picked up on all sorts of things that echo things I think there've been points that have been made in previous webinars I like your your phrase that you're collecting chains of evidence that there's no kind of single you're tracking down one thing and then that gives you a slam dunk proof of something but you're kind of coordinating different data streams and this really is reminiscent of that talk we had from Akled in the very first webinar actually where he said that the challenge for him how he encapsulated it was triangulating different data points and that you can't really be confident until you build up quite a web of different data points I think I was really interested by something you said way back when and feel free to think about this if you want to but in part of your opening comments you said that you do this you're trying to generate usable actionable intelligence for any entities that are concerned with the enforcement of UN Security Council resolutions so I'm really interested to find out how you get from your evidence to those entities how they're picking up how they're liaising with you if that's a straightforward task for a non-governmental think tank or not yeah I don't know if you've got anything to say about that now yeah no no sure well I guess it's a case of when we have you know public reporting public reports that we put out and it's the case of you know we work on this all day all day every day and it's the case of you know knowing your knowing your your subject area you know me and my colleagues database a lot of information and track a lot of ships so it's more of a case when we put out public reports then you can hopefully hopefully that's timely and that can be used in the in the right sense enough for people working in that space that they can they can pick up on and actually act on right thank you very much so again I think we've had this model before in previous webinars and in the last webinar we have Jamie Whithorn from CNS who feels like she's working on very similar things to you in the sense that you make sure you publish things in the right places and then they hopefully get picked up by the right people which are very interesting thing I think we might we might want to talk about later yes but in the meantime thank you to Joe I'm going to hand over now to our second speaker Faye Lezhnevska who's from SOAS I think Faye had some difficulty connecting to the webinar space I'll just check Faye can you hear me and are you here now it looks like you're here I am here I am hi great all right now the next thing is can I show my screen let's uh well I have huge problems with that so take your time uh right um go ahead here uh just get this up hopefully I'll take a moment more hopefully we'll be there I had it all ready but while you're doing that I'll just tell people that I'll post the links for the recordings of the first three webinars in case you're interested to to see previous events uh uh and I'll post them in the chat comment in the chat okay is that shared we yes uh if you if you now just run the the slideshow we'll be able to see the big picture yeah thank you okay okay right is it you can see that actually no I've just got to a plain white there we go is that what is that what you've been turning to show yeah no can you see the uh can you see it now yeah right okay uh I'll turn my video off just for right no it looks to take up too much time okay given that this um so uh I was invited really because I spoke to Henrietta about some work that I was doing um regarding the digital earth the concept of the digital digital earth and how the I'm so sorry to shut up but we are seeing the entire screen um so just we can still see your entire screen um so if you could just uh only open up the slideshow in full screen mode um otherwise we see your documents and personal communications and I just wanted to let you know right I don't know what's going wrong I'll I'll just sorry I don't know what's happening um no worries at all um you should be able to choose on when you're clicking on share screen um you should normally have the option to choose what uh type of document you would like to share so it's I don't know what it's it's on my other screen sorry no worries at all uh take your time do you want to go back to another speaker and Henrietta thank you I'll check um uh if he's available Ola would you be able to speak now uh yes I'm fighting to go um in the meantime uh to give a bit more time to sort out the screen sharing thank you very much Ola um Fayo could you please stop screens sharing your screen now please uh there's a button so you stop share all right yeah yeah thank you sorry okay these things happen all the time let's face it you've all been there oh good okay I can see that there um thank you um I just want to make sure that you can hear me properly Henrietta okay um so thank you guys for joining us today um I would like to start by thanking Henrietta, Dan, Julia and the members of the scrapbook team who were tirelessly on multiple fronts to convene critical discussions such as this one where we can meaningfully explore the possibilities within arms control and verification in particular I'd also like to thank the panelists who have taken the time to participate in this webinar series my my remarks today will be centered on exploring the possibilities that are within reach possibilities that include the prospects of meaningfully incorporating some of the verification tools presented in this webinar series into existing and future arms control treaties and agreements. I must note that my remarks stem from creative thinking about the political implications of open source verification and not from the practitioner's point of view such as Joseph's today where a marksman also be focused more on nuclear arms control but there are wider implications for conventional arms control and international security so we're well aware of the concerns about the future of arms control in recent times some state parties have taken decisions to unilaterally withdraw from their political and legal obligations within international security treaties and agreements even though we face temporary setbacks I believe the time is right to look ahead the crises that are expected to accompany the end of arms control treaties should encourage states to reconsider bilateral and multilateral negotiated agreements in the future moving forward I believe the arms control treaties will become more ambitious we are now five ratifications away from the entry into force of the TPNW this is bringing us closer to a paradigm shift where NPT state parties can no longer ignore the article six obligation some nuclear weapon states and nuclear weapon sharing states would soon be forced to pursue further and rapid reductions in the nuclear weapon stockpiles in order to maintain the image as responsible nuclear weapon states and to also appease domestic public opinion we might soon live in a world with lower numbers of total nuclear weapons a world where the marginal benefits of increasing stockpiles might also tempt some states to do so but also a world where the connection between non-state entities and corporations to the financing and support of the nuclear enterprise expands the type of activities that should be monitored you just have to take a closer look at initiatives focused on divestment from nuclear weapons so envision or imagine some of the activities that will be under scrutiny so when we look at new start for example some of the preconditions demanded by the Trump administration follow the trend US demands to count and limit warheads as opposed to delivery systems is a more challenging requirement and this is because warheads are not as detectable as large missiles or bombers or other delivery platforms this means that future inspection activities and notification requirements cannot be fulfilled with pen and paper reporting platforms the information age is producing new ways to improve inspector's ability to monitor the nuclear weapons enterprise and I think it is time that we at the very least equip treaty inspectors with internet connected tools for geolocation and for recording what they see and also for the transmission of analysis in real time over the past weeks our discussions within the series have highlighted the pervasiveness and efficiency of existing open source verification tools nearly all of these tools have been filtered by NGOs and by non-governmental monitoring organizations they include technologies already tracking illegal activities global transport networks and systems for disaster tracking so I think it's time that we recognize that these activities can be part of a global coordinated network that can complement and support interstate efforts at arms control while other open source methods can't really replace or reproduce the scope of internationally negotiated verification regimes other open source investigative work can in some instances be incorporated into the legal regime that we do it today in many cases open source analysts local knowledge gives them access to more detailed social and geographical contextual information on top of this many open source verification projects are transparent in the methodologies data and findings and contextual information means that their work is also open to scrutiny evaluation and authentication so one of the synergies I've identified throughout the verification series is the potential to leverage smart phone technologies to improve all techniques reliant on ground-based visual observation especially in treated reliance efforts at the moment we largely have two means of verification we have national technical means of verification and official on-site inspection activities this means have been treated as verification extremities but in the information age I believe there can be a third middle ground means to be clear national technical means or monitoring techniques used to verify adherence to international treaties and agreements these include space-based satellites reconnaissance planes radar systems seismic intelligence and other forms of high-tech systems that are used mainly by states international organizations but also big tech corporations on the other hand we have official on-site inspection activities with predetermined procedures and methods of inspection these activities are also designated to predetermined expert delegations so while NTM's national technical means allow for more frequent almost permanent verification of treaty compliance on-site inspections allow for more detailed appraisal of compliance on a more periodic basis and their political benefits for both of these forms in verification in isolation historically NTM's are focused on missile and neutral weapons counter proliferation activities but at its core the general principles hold for verification of treaties that counter chemical and biological weapons but also other treaties concerned with the protection of human rights and the laws of armed conflict we now have the means to field ground-based visual observation systems with characteristics borrowed from NTM's and on-site inspections so with the know-how of verification NGOs and the buy-in of interested publics such a system can be launched on the basis of existing technology so let's imagine an arms control treaty that permits national technical means on one hand official on-site inspections on the other hand but also non-state ground-based visual observations covering the middle ground we can have minimally intrusive on-site observation procedures carried out by locally based inspectors trained to use handheld technologies that transmit specific signal related to a specific treaty these observations can be carried out on reasonably pre-ordered basis which means more frequently than on-site inspections but less frequently than NTM's and the data gathered from these observations can be electronically transmitted to treaty compliance monitoring systems now this approach will allow us not only to tailor and limit the number of official on-site inspections but it also offers us better contextual understanding than what NTM's currently permit now I agree that thinking about such a system requires more critical and sustained consideration but this example only serves to illustrate what is possible if we take a fresh approach treaty compliance can take on new forms that are much more effective and better suited to the age of Google Earth now there are many ethical, political, technical considerations and I invite the audience to discuss this further in the breakout session and in the Q&A thank you very much and over to you Henrietta thank you Ola what a brilliant encapsulation of all sorts of ways that the open source projects open source research projects that we've been thinking about could be applied so right at the start of your talk you're pointing out that there are some really deep entrenched problems with global governance at the moment and there are also some signs of optimism with you mentioned the treaty printing nuclear weapons as one of them are the increasing numbers of people joining that treaty and of course one of the criticisms level to that treaty is it's possible verification provisions and you pointed out you kind of pointed that there might be a way of joining up different systems of having the national technical means governments own systems for checking on each other with the treaty based systems which include on-site inspections and then maybe open source stuff can help with that so that kind of relates to the question I was really trying to ask Joe earlier this sense that he's collecting data there's a lot of data being collected and then how does that data get to be applied globally to to help with things so I would like to kind of follow up on a whole bunch of these things but what I am going to ask you about Ola in the first instance is you mentioned you mentioned a vision of could this be part of a global coordinated network so we've heard from people cited in many different places in the world using many different methodologies it says some sort of way to coordinate these activities I wonder have you have you thought at all about this like like Joe if I'm putting you on the spot and you one more time to think about this please please feel free to pass on it but have you thought of how systems could be coordinated or joined up in any way um yes I haven't really had sustained thoughts on how to actually join up and create this global network but there are two preliminary considerations that I've been able to think up um so the first is a global network or a global federation of made up of these NGOs and exporter organizations that already deal with the tools and methods of open source verification now a lot of these organizations carry out functions in different contexts and they also use different tools and methodologies but much like this convenient forum I believe that there's enough information exchange and some standardization of widely used techniques then we can have a global system on the basis or on the backbone of this constellation of organizations in more practical terms the second format that I've thought of is one that's based on treaties treaties that cover different contexts so in this particular format what I think could be feasible in the medium and a long-term future is that recognized organizations recognized experts can be part of the actual implementation or enforcement regime of particular treaty wherein there's a legal provision for observation missions which aren't as stringent as official you know on-site inspections that are designated to these non-state entities and I think one way in which the information produced by these observations can be standardized is actually by having a direct line of communication between these observation missions the depository of treaty or the central treaty enforcement body so just to summarize the first would be a global constellation of organizations and NGOs on the basis of expertise and techniques but the second would be different global networks centered around treaties and their enforcement cycles if that makes any sense yeah that makes total sense thank you very much and I'm aware in our audience today we have people that have been involved in the design of international treaty frameworks and design and the implementation so it'd be very interesting if anybody wants to step in with any experiences of how that might work how a well and also Joe actually seeing as you're one of these verification practitioners as it were the extent to which it's possible to develop federations loose coordination channels between NGOs involved in different aspects of open source verification and whether that's already happening in fact and also the the challenge of getting those findings into people implementing treaty regimes if that's possible if it's desirable what would that look like yeah anyway thank you very much Olamide Samuel I'm now going to invite Fayya Leshnevskaya to try and share her screen again so if we can can I go at that thank you great Fayya I can see your screen now and I've unmuted you so I think it's good to go thank you excellent right well thank you again Henrietta for inviting me to contribute to this webinar I think I'm taking more of a historic and and somewhat bigger oversight to the issues by looking at the geopolitical dimensions regarding the the critical infrastructure that's been established to deliver both open source and closed data systems and and the consequences potentially off that as we move forward I'm focusing on a concept called digital earth digital earth has been presented as a benign apolitical concept but in many ways it it really is not and I'll explain why it was Al Gore that really coined the term digital earth he coined it at a time when he was involved with the negotiations for the Kyoto protocol to the UN framework conventional and climate change it's very much off his thinking that this was a means by which we could globally come together and manage global problems particularly relating to the environment but he was at the time the deputy the vice president to in the Clinton administration which at that time had through the introduction of intellectual property law basically commercialized opened up the competitive environment for what we see coming later as the international big tech industries from from the US and we also saw the standardization through ICANN so it's very much a post cold war very US dominated idea that was furnished by technology and values by from the west so that's how digital earth kind of emerged what's been interesting about the idea is it's been taken up the most perhaps vigorously within China and the international society for digital earth was formed in Beijing in 2006 and its mission statement is like non-political non-governmental not-for-profit and you know again being apolitical very neutral really about achieving these these these goals collective human goals you know uh 20 well 13 years later in the uh Florence declaration agreed last year there's a real recognition that we're not talking we aren't we're not talking about just satellites we're not talking about observation and gathering data from geo satellites the digital earth because of the advances in technologies we are talking about the internet of things obviously that interlinked with 5g so you have a a really complex infrastructure which is not around the earth but embedded in the earth and on people with you know various technologies that people carry with every day and it's interesting you know that Ola was saying you know people using telephone and mobile phones to citizen science this has been a really big part of the idea of empowering civil society to be part of of digital earth to be responsible and contribute to achieving the goal of a sustainably managed world it came at a time as well of the digital earth when we have the idea of the Anthropocene and that we have a bad Anthropocene the big impacts on the global environment with ever-increasing threats to breaching planetary boundaries and in increasingly we see the digital earth being deployed as a concept by big technology companies and by governments alike and academics as a means by which we gather enough data to address the problems that we're faced with so for example the FAO Google earth map now that was launched just this month Google have been working with UN agencies and particularly western environmental organizations for example in 2014 Google worked with the World Resource Initiative Institute rather to develop the Forest Watch that now has moved on to becoming Natural Resource Watch so huge amounts of free data open data to observe and track and trace and manage to potentially develop more policy on environmental governments and as we see in the Florence Declaration the link is also made to the UN Sustainable Development Goals the UN environment program has launched a significant program around gathering data working with open source data working with the various citizen organizations academics so there's an enormous emphasis on data gathering using new technologies as part of digital earth to achieve the objectives of the Sustainable Development Goals but also other multilateral environmental agreements particularly the Paris Agreement obviously like tracking carbon emissions smart cities but we also have other land or orientated ones like this one for the earth map which is the FAO are particularly keen to look at how we can use digital technologies to improve efficiency in food systems now behind this again you have Google and there's a quote here by Rebecca Moore which basically says we're just providing the service we're only providing a service so that the FAO can do its job and again that kind of benign perspective of the technology behind the service provision which is to facilitate the open source gathering of data there's very little kind of recognition of the relationship between the physical infrastructure the government relationship between google and other platforms providers and there is very little appreciation of the tensions between different service providers so let's go back to China. China has ambitions similarly around digital earth but if you if you go back to the establishment of the international society for digital earth the idea is very much like it's a global collaborative approach but you see here with the Chinese Academy establishing the digital earth under information silk road there are territorial ambitions as well about controlling access to data because access to data regarding natural resources, near neighbor supply chains is vital for the continuation of a sustainable China so it's no wonder that the new digital earth is linked up to also the global satellite navigation system beta 2 which is already be linked in with surrounding countries in there to China and is established specifically to compete with the GPS of the US and one of the interesting things of course is that this is a real challenge to the original establishment and infrastructure of the internet from the early 1990s and that which was under ICANN the standardization body that the US had backed up until it became non- international and nationally orientated in 2016 so what we're seeing and I mean what I'm trying to sort of communicate is that essentially we have emerging territories over the digital earth infrastructure and that infrastructure is both physical in terms of the economics and in the production of the technology it's about capturing the economic value of the data and controlling those territories where you hold that data and who controls that and there is certainly a division between China and America and Europe is in there as well I haven't spoken it about Europe and I don't feel I have the time well I want to just speculate ever in the the coming decade is the China will in the coming decade remain with the same political authority with the same premier Xi Jinping who has a particular vision America will not have the same person in power so the what we can see I expect is the digital earth will be increasingly dominated by a perspective of and the physical infrastructure of China China has really ramped up and it only saw we saw yesterday 2060 as their zero emissions target that will have a planetary impact in terms of trade in terms of relations and they underscore that with their ambitions around digital technologies economically and in terms of data gathering China is also the one of the main investors in in the key technologies for advising the digital earth and obviously within an increasingly insecure environment whoever can deliver a more sustained and reliable system is going to have much more leverage internationally politically and my bet is on China out of the two at the moment so yeah thanks very much thank you Fayette maybe if you stop sharing your screen now please and we'll come back to the plenary I think that was a really interesting compliment to the sorts of issues that Ola was raising thank you very much for that so Ola in his in his recognition that in the sorts of open source investigations we've been looking at in these webinars he could see the nascent qualities of a global system for tracking weapons that could maybe either sit entirely in the NGO community or maybe somehow there could be some sort of arrangements for using it within the bigger set of treaty regimes against weapons in different forms what you pointed out Fair definitely seems to me as though that system of collecting open source stuff and using it globally sort of is there in this idea of digital earth they've kind of worked out some of the mechanisms there's UN agencies using digital data in this way and that it maybe isn't the panacea would be reaching to and if we're thinking about global systems care needs to be taken about how they work who's doing it who can use it who owns it not if I've got that right so far so I guess my question to you is well just that do you do you think there can be any sort of regulations for who's doing it and controls on on how the data is used is it too late for digital earth already or can anything be done to meet against the sort of risks you highlighted I think one of the really one of the big difficulties about any of these conversations and digital earth doesn't really get talked about in that context very much you generally get conversations about regulation of particular aspects like AI there's a lot of focus on AI at the moment how we're going to regulate the internet of things continuing discussions around privacy online privacy we don't think about the infrastructure off the digital earth collectively and I think a much more collective focus is needed because if you only focus on particular aspects like you know how data is used and data privacy and stuff you're not focusing on like the actual security systems behind it how those systems are linked up with other parts of the the infrastructure I think there's a really to understand the digital earth concept is a meta infrastructure upon which other infrastructures are absolutely dependent and therefore the insecurities it multiplies the vulnerabilities and insecurities for undermining and attacking those so increased reliance on them becomes really problematic and I mean I was listening to Ola's ideal suggestions about treaties and monitoring and this and that and I so you know I would really hesitate around you know there's some really significant questions around particularly the security of the systems how systems interface interoperability between US Chinese European within different sectors all these things so yeah. Great well thank you thank you for that words well those words of caution it's all really interesting I'm just going to point out to everybody that the time is now three and so we're now officially at the optional breakout session so I do hope everybody will jump in with any observations or comments or questions about this. I think Fayette it's very interesting that he raised these points I'm also mindful going back to Ola's talk that the international community in all sorts of contexts has managed to develop very delicate balancing act in the verification regimes that are attached to international treaties outlawing different weapons systems so in the traditional concept of verification it's tied to an international treaty and there are very clear systems for doing the sorts of things you you talk about there's very clear systems about what people can look at when they can look at it how the data is stored how information is stored how they can communicate with people and who's doing it so it is possible to set up systems that address complicated information environments what concerns me and I want to go back to Joe here as well if that's possible is he here oh no is he gone what's interesting oh yeah sorry I couldn't see you in the list of people hi Joe. I'm interested to know how that feels to you as an open source researcher because in the past webinars the people you've talked to there's been a sense of small non-governmental groups collecting information in a very progressive sort of way wanting to help make a difference to to global governance in a very positive way so does this talk about joining up make you feel nervous does it feel possible to be thinking along the lines that they're just outlined about if it's possible to set up systems where you are truly interoperable or is it better to do it how you're doing it now quite independent isolated groups relying a bit on happenstance about what you happen to be looking for or not does that make sense to you Joe. Yeah it's definitely an interesting question not one if I'm honest I've thought about a lot and in terms of in terms of the open source collection we have in a minute I still I think we're still relatively in the infancy of you know collecting this information using open sources right so it's still developing and we don't really know where it's going to end and we don't really know how you know it's going to be in the next couple years let alone um forever in the future so I I'm not actually I don't actually know and that's a good question I would definitely go away and think no no so that's that's great isn't it and you said right in your talk this sense that the there's only going to be more of this stuff whatever whatever we're thinking about now it's going to get cheaper it's going to get easier there's going to be more people doing it so in a previous webinar one of the speakers did mention maybe there was hundreds or or joined up in us in that way about about best practice for open source research I noticed that Sergei Batsanov has asked to to speak and I'll be very happy to hand the floor to him if he's still here fine yes there you are I'm trying to unmute you yes there you are I've done that thank you thank you do you hear me now yes thank you very much okay first of all thank you it's a very interesting discussion I'm sorry really sorry I could not join you earlier I mean for your previous webinars so maybe I'm therefore I'm at the risk of saying something that had been said earlier but nevertheless I'm not really trying to comment on any particular presentations made today but of course my thoughts kind of were born when I was listening to those presentations and not in a very systemic way let me share some of the observations now if we take verification of arms control tweets and in a more general sense behavior of players players concerned it's not a secret that to a large degree with the strict verification rules and procedures without them a major actor or major group of shareholders so to say are the intelligence communities of again leading countries now usually the as the current situation shows and at least as I can understand that they have no particular problem of gathering catching tons or mega tons of information of different bits and pieces where it becomes more difficult is when they start analyzing this information sorting it out and there they have several choices not mutually excluding ones one is to outsource the information analysis to some private companies and and that is happening another one and this is what we are discussing now is civil society so they may be tempted to outsource that process to civil society exactly to do what we are discussing now and the third option is to outsource the whole process to artificial intelligence sort of that as far as civil society is concerned that does create certain risks now there were a couple of very good and appropriate mentioning of infrastructure for this and who controls it who owns it I think it will become a very very pertinent element equally what is important in my view is actually who pays for that the norms control regime who decides who should be accredited and who should not be accredited and in that taking into account these two questions sort of I think we should also look at how this play this is playing out in existing verification regimes paying now one of the organizations that I am following rather closely is the IAA and there is IAA budget when including for the application of safeguards there are certain rules how the balance has to be maintained between safeguards and other activities like the IAA activities in the promotion of the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and nuclear science and so on and so forth the letter is to a large degree to a significant degree financed by voluntary contributions by states and I had several discussions including with directors general of the IAA including with deputy directors general responsible for safeguards where I was asking this question to what extent the safeguards which is verification activity of the agency can be financed especially when you have a surge in activity like the agency had to do after the after it was given both rights and obligations to help verify the JCPOA provisions nuclear deal with Iran so is there a place for voluntary contributions for that and the answer I was receiving every time was categorically no because when it comes to collecting data on the basis of which you decide whether somebody is a good guy or maybe not so good guy there should be no place for voluntary contributions from states the other example is another organization which I know perhaps even better than the IAA that is OPCW and in the OPCW of course there is there are several projects related to Syria and there you have a lot of voluntary contributions specifically by states who for their own reasons they are not going to discuss whether it's correct or not specifically do not like the current president of Syria and who think that he should go away now I find it a rather let's say worrisome sign that such activity can be financed by countries with a clear and ambiguous political position regarding the country which is being inspected and the question in my mind is then how to take care of the fact that the financing of let's say NGO surveillance whatever verification activities could a word falling into the trap the other thing is and that is what came to my mind when listening to the first presentation Korea how we North Korea rather how we follow various legitimate activities of North Korea North Korea in that sense may be an easier example because there are numerous decisions and resolutions by the UN Security Council focusing on that country and so on and so forth but still what about other countries do we are we going also to track everybody's illegitimate activities and there are a lot of legitimate activities by a number of other countries belonging to different political groupings alliances temporary alliances permanent alliances and so on and so forth just look what is happening to the supply of weapons and sometimes fighters to influence the outcome of the war is in Libya today now how would that work and how would that be financed that's another question and also what approach in general should such additional let's say verification activity take adversarial or something let's say less than that how you can ensure that the process itself is not corrupt due to what is corruption resistant due to obvious or very possible wishes to use that process as well and now everything is being weaponized in this world unfortunately to avoid being weaponized not in the sense that it it can be turned into a missile but weaponized in terms of waging a global or regional whatever propaganda war thank you yes sorry yes let me just see but i think i more or less said what i had to say yeah the question is very much about trust and the current mistrust in in the real world around us which unfortunately mistrust is getting stronger deeper and ever more pervasive thank you thank you very much again i'm sorry that i interrupted you prematurely just that yeah so you know this is really fascinating bringing your experiences to some of the things that have been raised today i really picked up through your comments this sense that there are interrelated sort of vulnerabilities with any verification system some of them also do with the practicalities of how that's set up which relates very strongly to watch fair which what pho was talking about earlier and i uh you you raised the point about who pays for it the the fact of how it operates could be subject to some sort of subversion and leaving it up to voluntary contributions it is problematic and then this sense of who chooses what's being looked at okay north career is something that's being watched at the moment but who gets to choose the other things um it feels to me as though the open source research project we've been showcasing might be one way round some of these vulnerabilities in that you have lots of independent separate but overlapping groups that are self financing uh which is something we didn't talk to joe about but that there are redundancies in the information collection and in in how they operate um i'm not quite sure if it addresses the ethics question that you raise because i am aware that the sort of people that we've been speaking to are from majority uh uh uh western perspectives i'd say so i'm not sure i think that is a real point that needs to be explored in much more depth um i'm aware that dan plesh wants to come in now and i had a comment um earlier on from somebody saying um uh that we don't just need to be watching states proliferating there's increased risks of non-state actors getting devastating weapons systems and uh that that needs to be kept to nine or two uh but thank you over to you dan i think this has been a tremendous remarkable um series of webinars and i think we'll continue them and develop them i think part of the premise for all of this from the perspective of the scrap project was that on the one hand you have a let us say an educated world that thinks it's viable and sensible to monitor the world's greenhouse gas emissions and to organize to change the whole of industrial society to deal with that problem but very largely that entire community and the people around it uh when they think about if they think at all about the world's weaponry think about it as um uh too hot to handle too hard to think about you know a a very secret difficult world and not helped by the the blizzard of acronyms uh in our in our communities um and we also know if we stop to think that uh while there are all sorts of regimes and organizations dealing with destruction or focused on uh what in i used to used to be called when i was growing up low intensity conflict in in marley um and parts of syria and middle east for example uh and we've had incredibly informed presentations from people engaged in these two different worlds um since the decay of the european arms control agreements of the 1990s there's really absolutely nothing in the NGO field or the official world dealing with the major armaments of the world's armies neighbors and air forces and yet this is where trillions of dollars are being spent and i think what i feel from this webinar series is that we're getting towards a process where we can start to say well if the political world was there uh and to have to help generate the political will we can uh look to uh bring together network use examples the different components where people have been coming from to our webinars but also uh if that's the kind of practical vision but also to communicate with that let's say that that's wider educated world to say actually um not this in theory but in practice uh global weapons governance is actually a practical proposition here's how and i think that given the uh extremely dangerous trends that we don't have to restate at the moment in geopolitics and weapons production that has i think huge potential and i'm just very heartened um by the individual contributions and the quality um of the different contributions that we've had over recent weeks and months that's what i want to say really i think it's been tremendous and uh there are a lot of ways forward but it's very encouraging for us to think about how we might engage great thank you very much Dan i've had uh Sergei wants to come back on that briefly and then Feyo wants to say something i think and then i'll invite uh Ola also to come back i know joe has to run quite quite quickly um so i'll very quickly uh invite joe to say anything but just uh uh leave if you need to uh no uh joe's got uh yeah i just want to say thank you very much for uh inviting sessions and these have been extremely useful and the people that have been on them um it's been great to have them all in one place so i think it's been really great um thank you and on but if anyone wants to message me about the work then please do and um thanks again well thank you very much for being part of it and i look forward to future interactions um so Sergei over to you for response to Dan's point uh yeah uh am i unmuted yes yeah good uh couple of things first it was not my intention to actually criticize or to take an issue with anything said uh by the presenters nor in a more general way to try to throw doubts about the the whole exercise uh simply to point out that there are issues that uh at least require certain cautions caution and uh thoughtful approach and those issues i think uh pushing me at least in my or my mind towards suggesting that there should be some uh difference at least at the beginning uh at the introductory phase as to the weight of what is coming from um let's say the civil society observation capabilities and more traditionally from more traditional sources then uh and i cannot really specify it perhaps subject-wise uh in terms of what is being monitored what is being observed uh there are um say issues or limitations or prohibitions where uh all those dangers which i mentioned may be much more pronounced and there are things uh there are areas where they are less pronounced and maybe at the beginning it would be useful to concentrate on the letter that is uh that when you discover something and that something is kind of bad the impact of that would not necessarily be dramatic and uh cannot be easily weaponized in the negative sense that there is uh that the result would be that there is something that we should look at again more attentively maybe from another angle both physically and uh literally and uh in theory um and come to uh an explanation uh and it also seems to me that and actually that applies not only not only to the raw well to the actual mechanical data uh but um to the interpretation i remember uh that you listened to a very interesting presentation by uh Richard Duffrey uh and that was about the yellow ring in Southeast Asia and in Afghanistan and it took a lot of time actually for researchers after all those events uh to sort it out and to find the real explanation of that phenomenon which leads me to think that um there should be some uh let's say assessment body that uh may be tasked to uh address the information coming from the open source thank you uh thank you Sergei uh yes very interesting uh and relates to a big question about verification that's being there for as long as i've thought about these things this question after detection what what happens when you find some bit of information that implies something bad has happened and what you're saying is the open source stuff needs to be very wary uh about the claims it makes i think and the the data rather than triggering some sort of automatic responses that uh it triggers a set of authentication and follow-up uh information and research gathering sort of uh activities yes uh thank you very much uh Faye you wanted to come in on this yeah i was just um sort of jogged by something that Dan said uh the kind of like the separation of communities i can focus on uh you know verification around uh the weapons of mass destruction and verification of environmental degradation for multilateral environmental agreements either to uh inform uh policy and lobbying or to inform enforcement and compliance uh i was reading um really interesting book recently just published called dogs dies by a guy called doodly uh and it talks a lot around how the space project you have different communities within the space project and the space project being all of that infrastructure i spoke about for the digital earth and how it's you have the military side of it you have the protecting the planet earth side of it um and often as Dan says they're not communicating with each other but using similar tools and increasingly those tools can be used for both positive and negative purposes so something that i've been looking at is the use of surveillance technologies um and how they're being employed to undermine the activism of indigenous peoples and uh uh displaced peoples in in the amazon region so this is the use by the state of everyday technologies which are for surveillance and but there are similar technologies that the communities themselves are using to surveil the um the loggers and the companies and the the breaches by by the local authority with the police so there's an interesting kind of interplay about the technologies that make up all of this infrastructure increasingly become affordable usable by anybody and what an idea by uh this guy uh jaras groves of sustainable warfare that we just sustainably manage warfare through the use of all these technologies disrupting and and causing upset around the world um and i think sort of examples that it's a shame that uh the russi uh john burns gone there's a russi example of you know shipping where you can easily disrupt shipping through getting into tracking devices and moving them off course uh by uh sending the wrong information there's a lot of uh aspects i'm picked about but i think dan's absolutely right getting different communities together to start to see how what's going in one community is actually really very similar and things could be learned i mean in many ways i'm very glad that you invited me on because you know i am not a weapons of mass destruction surveillance expert my interest came from looking at uh survey um tracking illegal logging but you know there's lots of interest there but yeah yeah thank you feya and uh we're delighted to have you it's not just fixed to weapon systems these set of webinars because we're absolutely aware that there are synergies and overlaps in different uh monitoring uh activities um so it's great to have you and to explore some of these implications and you raise yet another set of ethical conundrums this kind of set this idea about surveillance technologies in general uh uh going into ethically very complicated spaces of privacy or subversion or or controlling a political narrative in all sorts of ways that weren't necessarily intended so we're getting very close to 330 so i'm going to start winding it all up and uh before i close it all down i want to give ola a chance to come back uh on on some of the comments that have been relevant to his talk and to reflect on the webinar as a whole thanks ola thank you very much harrietta i'll try to be as brief as possible um i would like to thank everyone for the very insightful comments made and feedback um to some of the issues um that have been raised in this webinar um i must note that the the thrust of my contribution today was to inspire creative thinking around much established arms control uh regimes and treaties and quite a number of these creative solutions are rather ambitious um and also um are not entirely implementable in the short term but it's definitely positive that we begin to start looking at what capabilities exist and how they can meaningfully enhance even piecemeal meaningfully enhance existing arms control regimes i'd like to leave the viewers with a specific thought on the possible application of ground-based uh visual observation systems when we think about uh deploying or imagining the deployment of these ground-based observation systems um in less complicated theaters so if we're looking at bilateral arms control agreements for example the issues with regards to financing and the issues with regards to technology deployed and the interoperability of these technologies would be less disruptive to progress so really if we're thinking about differentiated contexts um whether it's in uh bilateral fashion focused on arms control for example these contributions become a little bit more feasible and realistic and of course on the basis of breast practice that has to be you know negotiated between state parties we might be able to develop a toolkit that can then be scaled up or deployed and wider multilateral uh legal agreements and treaties but thank you very much over to you Henrietta thank you Ola and I think that's a really important point and follows really neatly from the sort of things that Sergei uh and everybody was talking about actually this sense that negotiated treaties each have very particular verification requirements and verification needs and a sense that the open source stuff can be much more flexible uh than the negotiated regimes and maybe there's opportunities to marry some of those up um and and definitely you've posed a really useful question to the whole series this this bigger picture thing can open source research that is happening all around the place in many different contexts can it be harness uh to better use within systems of global governance and if so how what does that look like uh and Fayette you've done a really good job of keeping us grounded of hang on a minute you need to watch out for these sorts of things um so it's just left now to say thank you very much everybody for being here and being part of this great uh discussion um it's given me loads to think about we have another webinar in a couple of weeks um with some different open source experts um i'll be very happy to see you all there again um and in the meantime um look out to the recording which we'll be coming through in a couple of days thank you very much and hope you have a great recipe of days bye