 not have heard about strategic lawsuits against public participation, or shortly called SLAP. It's something in the US that's quite common in Europe. Until now, it was rather uncommon, and it's getting more popular. Popple is probably the wrong word, but it's getting more used. Let's put it that way. I'm not the expert, but fortunately, we have an expert on stage. So please give a very warm welcome to Naomi Colvin in taking actions against SLAPs in Europe. Thank you very much. Hello, MCH, and thank you for taking some time out of an incredibly sunny and lovely Saturday afternoon to hear about nuisance lawsuits of all things. My name's Naomi Colvin. I work for an NGO called Blueprint for Free Speech. As a colleague just pointed out to me, we do all kinds of different stuff, and sometimes it's difficult to summarize exactly what we do, but we have lots of projects running across advocacy and campaigns and research and policy work, and we also do some software development as well, and you may well be hearing a little bit more about that towards the end of this talk. But to start off, I'm going to talk about one of the things that we're focusing on a lot right now, which are SLAPs, nuisance lawsuits, and different strategies for limiting their impact on public debate. So, but we should start from the beginning, right? And how do you spot a SLAP? And that's one kind of SLAP. It's not exactly what we, it's a cat's lap. It's not exactly what we're talking about, but there's a slight sort of power imbalance between the big cat and the small cat, and it's not totally irrelevant to where we are. SLAPs stand for strategic lawsuits against public participation. It's a term with its origin in the US, but we've been seeing a lot more of them globally, and what does it mean? Lawsuits don't come to you marked with SLAP, so it's more about finding different characteristics that mark particular lawsuits, particular kinds of legal threats out as SLAPs, and what do they have in common? They have in common a power imbalance between a very powerful, wealthy entity and a much weaker entity, often an individual or maybe an independent media company, somebody or something who is contributing to public debate and an important way. It's a legal maneuver which uses the costs inherent in the legal system against its target. So, if you're targeted with a SLAP, it's gonna cost you a lot in money, time, stress, the opportunity costs of what you'd rather be doing, which is getting on with your work or getting on with your activism, getting on with your writing, which you can't do because you've got to dedicate all this time and effort to fighting this ridiculous lawsuit, which may be hopeless to begin with, but it takes so long in order for it to get dismissed that it costs you a lot in the meantime. So, how do you spot a SLAP if you're targeted with it? And there's a real playbook for this, particularly if you're a journalist and what happens typically is that you're writing a story about corruption or a very wealthy person or a very wealthy company that's doing something a bit dodgy and you've done everything you're supposed to and then you contact the subject of your article for comment like you should do and you've got as a responsible journalist, you've got to give them a right of reply and what you can't get back is not an answer to your questions. It's a massively long letter with a very scary letterhead maybe for some very expensive legal company possibly based in London, who knows. With pages and pages of pages, a sort of nonsense allegations ranging from defamation to GDPR claims, GDPR claims great, really useful for this because everybody finds it totally confusing and it's very complicated and nobody feels equipped to respond to that without advice, asking you for all kinds of information saying, oh well, not talking about the allegations but you've been misusing my personal data and I want to see a thorough accounting of how you've used my personal data in the writing of this article, just total wasting your time, privacy claims, harassment claims, all of this is very common grounds for slaps. So if you get a really long letter with a whole shopping list of allegations and claims and demands for information, that's a sign that you might be facing a slap. If that letter comes with really determined threats like this is confidential, you must not tell anybody about this letter, this may not be published, that's another sign of a slap and actually this is one of the reasons why until relatively recently, we've been really lacking a lot of hard information about how serious the slap's problem is because people sometimes take these threats and if they take them seriously to the effect that they self-censor as a result of receiving these kinds of threats, you can bet your life they don't want to talk about it. So it's really hard to work out, it has been really hard to work out how widespread this problem is. So threats to keep things secret, definitely a sign of a slap. Really extortionate demands or threats that we're gonna sue you for this much money like totally out of proportion to what we're talking about, that's another common sign of a slap. And this isn't true of all slaps, right? But sometimes that scary letterhead legal company might be based in a different jurisdiction from you. You might be getting a threat from written by a law firm based in London or Paris and you're like, how the hell can I fight this? I have to like just think about it's really hard and I have to recruit lawyers in a different jurisdiction. Maybe they speak a different language to me. I'm totally unfamiliar with how the legal system works in that country. Makes it even harder, right? And much and really raises the level of threat and raises the level of challenge and nuisance in dealing with it. That's a sign of a slap. And another giveaway sign of a slap. If you're a journalist and you write for a particular newspaper or you're an activist and you do your activism through a particular organization, but they're not threatening the organization. They're threatening you personally. So we're gonna sue you for this massive amount of money and you'll lose your house personally. And nobody's gonna come and defend you because we know you've got no backup. You have to do it all by yourself. If they're trying to pick you off personally, trying to separate you off from an organization you may be associated with. If they're trying to make it as maximally unfair as possible. Hey, that's another sign of a slap. One of the characteristic signs. So who is getting slapped at the moment? As I've said, we've actually been lacking a lot of information on this until recently. There's been a bunch of good research done on strangely enough in slaps in the majority world and those initiated by big countries, particularly against environmental activists. A lot of those cases reach courts in various jurisdictions, so there's a record to follow. The impact of slaps on journalists or where threatening letters themselves have been effective is much more difficult to measure. There has been some work done on it recently. So in a report published in November 2020, a group called the Foreign Policy Center surveyed investigative journalists, international journalists, people who really specialized in writing on corruption. Less than 100 of them, so a relatively small sample, but you know, best we could do just to get an indication of it. And that report found that three quarters of those surveyed had received a legal threat as a result of their work. So it's almost routine if you're writing on particular issues. And furthermore and even more worrying, half of those who had received a threat said that it had affected their work in some way. They now went about their work in a different way, maybe keeping more notes as you're going along so you have something to respond with as a result of receiving those legal threats. More than that, we know that activists and campaigners are the subject of slaps. Activists get sued sometimes by the companies that their activism concerns, particularly environmental activists, we're seeing more and more the use of criminal charges as well, against activists and tightening of the criminal law against assembly and protests, which quote unquote, disrupt. So, you know, and that's part of what I think is a wider problem that we're seeing more and more of Europe, which I'll call government slaps, where the authorities are initiating nuisance lawsuits against ordinary citizens who are exercising their democratic rights, invariably rights to assembly and rights of expression. Poland is a pretty extreme example of that at the moment where, and I'll talk a bit more in detail about that, the moment where we've seen a two-pronged attack of really, like, of defamation suits against people who are visible in the public domain or speaking out online, like famous historians getting sued for defamation, for being critical of the government, on being sued either by the government or by sort of para-government entities which are quite close to the government and also an epidemic of misdemeanor charges against ordinary citizens who are out on the streets demonstrating, to try and isolate, to try and intimidate, to try and dissuade people from exercising their democratic rights. Those are also slaps. So why are we talking about this now? There has been a massive growth in the use of slaps over the past five or six years in Europe. There has been a survey of all the slap cases which make it to courts, which, as I've said, is a small section of the true problem because it doesn't include slaps which don't, you know, instances where the legal letters themselves are effective, but based on slaps which have made it to court, we know that there's been a, you know, sort of a five-fold increase in the number of slaps since 2016, 2017. That's within the EU and the larger Council of Europe area. So, you know, and if you think about it, it's obvious why this has happened because once it's been effective in one case, the legal firms which specialize in initiating these suits and advise their clients to initiate these suits will say, well, this worked for this client. I'll advise my next client to give it a go. They're sharing information. They're sharing notes. They're launching more cases. Another big reason why this has become a focus for policymakers in the European Union recently is the fallout from Daphne Krakowana-Galizzi's assassination. Of course, it's nearly five years since that happened unless we forget those who are ultimately responsible have still yet to be prosecuted. It's a disgrace within our geographic region. But at the time of her death, Daphne was facing over 40 lawsuits, slaps, defamation suits, which by all accounts was taking up a great deal of her time by that point, almost a full-time job in itself, thanks to the peculiarities of Maltese law, those suits were actually inherited by her family after she was murdered. And sort of the disgust at that has definitely furthered and sort of helped motivate civil society to organise and press for changes on the European level. There's a group called Coalition Against Slaps in Europe, CASE, which Blueprint is a member of, and that movement has shown some, has had some success. The European Commission has just published some draft proposals. On the side of government slaps, the fact that COVID introduced some obviously justified temporary restrictions on assembly that's been exploited by governments who wanted to clamp down on protest, and we've seen a lot more of that. And finally, the invasion of Ukraine has meant that even in pretty slap-friendly jurisdictions of which the UK is probably the primary offender, taking oligarch money to launder managed reputations is no longer the respectable business it used to be. So actually, just as I was on my way out to come to this conference, the UK government published some anti-slap proposals of its own fairly miraculously. So along with Daphne, there have been some other recent really egregious slap cases. I'm not saying these are the most important ones, but these are the ones which, if you like, policy makers have taken account of, partly because we're talking about Russia, partly because we're talking about journalists, like from established organisations, but it is important. So on this slide, Catherine Belton, former FT journalist, author of Putin's People, a book about the milieu around Putin and how he came to where he is. It's published by Harper Collins, writes at the one-year deadline for initiating a defamation case. She was the subject, she and Harper Collins were the subject of a major suit from a whole panoply, actually, of Russian oligarchs, like a whole group of them. And she was sued not just in London, but also in Australia. Harper Collins. Now, some of those allegations were later dropped and the case was settled, but it's very easy to see that if you're a publisher that doesn't have quite the clout and the resources of Harper Collins, you might not want to publish a book like that because you won't be able to afford to do it. Not dissimilar, Tom Burgess, another FT journalist, author of Cleptopia, was sued by an entity called the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation, a highly, highly litigious holding company with some Asher Pajani oligarchs behind it that was thrown out in London's High Court in a very entertaining ruling where the judge said, well, it's funny that you've not sued about X, Y, Z in Tom Burgess' books, which also sounds quite critical of you and just sort of reiterated everything the book had been saying, basically. But ENRC also in London sued the Sirius Fraud Office, which is the agency that was investigating them for their activities. So that didn't, I think that had an impact and certainly didn't endear them to elements of the British government. And then there's also a picture there of Carol Cadwalada, freelance journalist, most associated with writing for the observer. She probably know. She did a bunch of reporting on Cambridge Analytica and the use of data during the US presidential election and then during the 2016 Brexit referendum. In the UK, she was sued by one of the major funders of the pro-Brexit campaign in the UK. And what is significant about that case is that she wasn't sued for anything she had written at the observer. She was sued by something she wrote on her personal Twitter account and something she said during a TED talk. Two instances where she had no institutional support from the observer at all. And the Guardian Observer have a pretty hot legal department. And in these situations, it's not that, say, the paper wouldn't want to support her. It's like their insurance wouldn't cover it. So she was sued in a way that would make, that would exacerbate the power disparities as much as possible. And that abuse is a telltale sign of a stab. As I said, there is a wider world of slaps out there. There's a lot of new and growing obstacles to public participation in Europe. Poland presents a pretty extreme case. Since 2017, the government there has basically tried to outlaw particular debates as part of public conversation generally. One of the key observers there has discriminatory legalism, i.e. the laws are used against people who the government doesn't like only. Again, that's very close to the concept of lawfare, really. VIP and economy class versions. So if you're someone with a well-known public voice speaking online, you're at risk of being sued for defamation. If you're a protester out on the streets, you are at risk of being laid with misdemeanor charges for stupid things like using chalk on the pavement or speaking to a loudhaler while you're out on the street. These things were formerly not really used at all. We've seen it really grow since 2017. And it's only really mutual aid amongst Polish activists, which has really kept things going there, because it's extremely isolating. Because most of the people who are being hit by these misdemeanor charges have never been targeted by their government before. And it's a very isolating experience if you have no one to speak to. So notwithstanding that we all know that the Polish justice system has come under pressure over the past few years, there has courts have been admirably independent in the way they've dealt with a lot of these misdemeanor charges. But obviously, the impact of being targeted in itself is a significant obstacle to further participation. And a lot of people have really left activism entirely. The wide world of lawfare, I think, if you're looking beyond Europe, then big multinationals trying to get environmental activists to shut up is a real signature type of slap that we see all over the place. And we have these in Europe as well. One where NGO based in Munich was being sued by an Italian politician because they talked about the use of pesticides in South Tyrol has only just been settled. And that took, you know, it's good that it was dismissed, but it took four or five years to get there, which is a significant diversion of time and energy, which could be better spent on the issues we care about. So slaps are a complex problem, and it should be obvious from what I said that there are different kinds of slaps impacting different kinds of people. It's quite easy to reduce to just journalists, but it's not just journalists. So we're looking at a few different ways of limiting managing the problem. So there are definitely legal mechanisms, the introduction of legal mechanisms that would help limit the impact of slaps. So typically we're looking at things like introduce a mechanism so that cases which bear the hallmark of slaps, say they've been preceded by a lot of the angry legal letters that I've been talking about with nonsense claims, so they can go to a judge really quickly and the judge can say, this looks abusive, let's get rid of it before it starts costing everyone serious money. And then we could also do with cost regulations, which mean that there's an incentive for the people who initiate slaps not to do it because they could be landed with the cost. That's not the case at the moment. Another side of the problem is training and professional standards. There is a community of lawyers, particularly lawyers based in London, who have been involved in, you know, who specialize in reputation management and initiate a lot of these cases. One of the things that has to happen is dealing with professional associations, trying to change internal ethical standards and, you know, on a professional standards route, make it culturally, socially, professionally, unacceptable to be running these kinds of cases and recommending them to your clients. Another thing, so about 10% of slap cases, we think, the ones that come to court, are have a cross-jurisdictional element. Either they're initiated in a different country or maybe the plaintiff is in a different country or maybe they're forum shopping to start a case in London because the cost implications are higher and then, you know, it's more dissuasive, it's more frightening. So another thing that can happen is not enforcing orders that come out of slap cases and other jurisdictions. They're saying, well, you can say that, but we're not going to enforce the cost order. That's another thing that can happen. And if you like, actually, this is slightly hard to find, you know, positive outcomes from Brexit, but this is part of the Brexit dividend, frankly, because it's much easier now for the EU to say, we're not gonna enforce that order from London. In fact, the UK has not been allowed to rejoin the Lugano Convention, which is one of the agreements which makes orders in various European countries automatically applying others. So that's something that's happening. There are a couple more difficult things which really should be tackled, but a bit more difficult, I think realistically. One is reforming laws in national jurisdictions which can easily be exploited. Criminal defamation is sort of a pervenual problem here, and freedom of expression organisations have been calling on particularly European countries to get rid of criminal defamation laws for decades, but that still needs to happen. Are there easily exploitable laws? Yeah, and the same thing, like getting repressive governments to stop harassing activists, that would be good, a little bit more difficult. Trying to stop new repressive laws being passed which make activists' life more difficult. That would be optimal, tricky. Probably. There are some moves which are under discussion. As I mentioned, the European Commission at the end of April unveiled an anti-slap package which includes a draft directive and a recommendation, rather predictably, and partly because the EU, it's, there's only so much the EU can do when it comes to member states, domestic legal systems. A lot of the really difficult stuff is in the recommendation, rather than the draft directive, so anything that could potentially become law, but the draft directive will have an impact if it makes it through the legislative process without too much, too many problems, will have a real impact on cross-border cases, not just cases from jurisdictions like the EU, but also EU cross-border cases. And actually one of the interesting and innovative things in what the Commission is proposing is that they are using quite a broad sense of cross-border, which doesn't necessarily mean people are in different countries, but if the public interest in more than one country is implicated in a slap, then that should be considered a cross-border slap and something could be done about it. As I mentioned, the UK has also come out with a bunch of proposals. Partly, I think this is, it's hard to see how this would have happened without the wave of sanctions, which has followed the invasion of Ukraine. I've not read the UK proposals in detail because they literally were unveiled this week, but the reaction seems to have been pretty positive and again it introduces a mechanism for early dismissal of cases with cases which bear slap-like elements. So we'll see how that goes. And there's some other useful stuff that can be used against slaps. Before talking about slaps, Blueprint was quite involved in the passage of another EU directive to protect whistleblowers and there are elements of that which are pretty relevant to slaps as well. So retaliation against a whistleblower, as long as they qualify under the directive, is banned. So that's pretty helpful. There are still some countries in the EU which haven't implemented the directive and they're well overdue in doing so, but it already exists here, for instance. So, where do we fit in? So Blueprint is running a project called PatFox, pioneering anti-slap training for freedom of expression and this is really a pioneering project. We're doing something which hasn't been done before at all. What we're doing is we're looking really at the more difficult cases of slaps, the ones which the EU directive, if it happens, is probably not going to impact on. So we're looking really at domestic slaps and domestic legal systems. And the concept of this is really, we know that one of the reasons why slaps have really increased over the past few years is because when lawyers launch slaps and they're successful, they share notes about them. So we want to get defense lawyers together and share notes about how to defeat slaps. We will be, we're putting together anti-slap curriculum which doesn't exist at the moment, so it's quite a task. It's a slightly complicated endeavour because slaps violate human rights principles, but they use the peculiarities of national legal systems to do it. So you need to be able to form a defense on human rights principles, while also having a lot of familiarity with the peculiarities of different legal systems. So we're putting together not just a curriculum, but sort of a recipe book for how you put together a bunch of European law with particular issues in domestic law and what would be helpful and what to look for. So there's a lot of different, there's a lot of voices coming together on this. The project is operating in 11 EU member states and we're putting together the curriculum now and then through the end of this year and through next year we will be training defense lawyers in 11 EU member states. If this sounds like something that you or your organisation could benefit from and you are in or have colleagues in any of those 11 countries where we're starting this off, please get in touch as we are putting together the sort of invite list for the first wave of trainings at the moment. Further than that, we are going to make as much of this as we possibly can, open source, so specialist curriculums and videos of trainings from each of these countries plus guidance on how to put together a curriculum in other EU countries, which we're not covering in the project. We are also providing sort of optional teaching in whistleblowing law and how to use the new EU directive and its national implementations to help prevent retaliation against whistleblowers and then also we've been providing digital security training for journalists for ages and ages, so we'll be also doing this and trying to help out lawyers as well. And on that subject, we have a whole bunch of projects in that area as well, not just teaching people to use the tools but also developing the tools. So I'm going to hand over briefly to my colleague Richard Pospizl who knows way more about that stuff than I do. Nailed it. All right. Hi, I'm Richard Pospizl. I am a software developer that works for Blueprint for Free Speech and I'm not doing that, I'm also the dev lead working on Tor browser for the Tor project. Maybe not. So we want to talk a little bit about Ricochet Refresh which is our kind of project that was being funded by Blueprint through grants as well as some of our future work that we are in the process of working on. So the talk was titled with, you know, it's a legal talk so that we're sneaking some tech stuff in at the end. So just as a show of hands, can I get an idea of like who here knows how Tor works is kind of understanding of on-and-routing and how about hidden services? You know about hidden services? Okay, so Ricochet Refresh is a open source private anonymous messaging app and it's originally a fork of Ricochet IM which came out like 10, 15 years ago. It's originally based off of V2 on-and-services which if you've been following Tor has been deprogated since like, I don't know, October of last year. But we started prior to that to upgrading it to work of V3 and add various other features and just the high level of how it works is it takes advantage of Tor's on-and-service feature or hidden services, so it used to be called and the idea behind a hidden service or on-and-service is that you have an address it's a very long kind of ID which is also a public key which you can use to privately and anonymously have a service on the internet. So I won't go into the details of how that works because it doesn't matter for this purpose. Assuming you have that building block of having the ability to open up a service to the internet without anybody knowing where you are or who you are you have built a in-semestering app on top of that. So basically everybody's ricochet refresh and before that ricochet I am ID is one of these on-and-services. If you want to talk to somebody you need to know their on-and-service and they need to have ricochet running and there's a handshake that happens let's you connect and they say, are you who you are? Are you who you say you are? And you say, yes, I am who I say I am. And you can connect and chat and transfer files and do all the kind of things that you would expect in an instant messenger. So that's cool. We've also added in a file transfer sometime in the past year on top of that. So it's something the original ricochet I am did not have. So we've kind of targeted this towards whistleblowers as kind of like our target demographic just because there's not really a good solution. Like right now the kind of go-to solution is oh, you want to talk securely, you signal which is great, it's not anonymous but it's better than nothing. You still have that kind of identifier tied to your phone number which for some of the models is fine. Just talking to your friends about where you want to get dinner. Cool, it's great. But if you are somebody whose life might be in danger or somebody who might get sued, you want to talk to somebody like a journalist or specialist and whatever it is that you care about then you really actually need like anonymity guarantees that are provable by the actual technology not just because some tech company says oh no, yeah, you're totally anonymous and we don't log anything, we promise. So like with Ricochet Refresh you can actually guarantee yes, you are anonymous. But, oh yeah, we'll have this little slide that's the kind of generic, like this is how Tor works slides. So you have the Tor network and you have an audience service and they have an audience service and when you open up Ricochet Refresh you go in and you connect to all the various audience services of all your contacts and it kind of initiate a handshake and you can determine why all your contacts are online and just kind of talk and then normally you wouldn't use Messenger. There are some problems with the current Ricochet Refresh sort of handshake which were kind of were sort of properties of how audience services work. So right now, if you want to share your handle in any kind of like chat client so like A1's Messenger comes to mind that's just because I'm old so like ICQ or MSN, you know, you have a handle and you add somebody's handle to your contact list and make a finding quest and you see if you want to be friends. But because you know, you are going through a centralized server in that case that centralized server doesn't expose people's online offline status unless you are actually friends and they can kind of like guard that because everybody's connecting to the server and going through the centralized situation with Ricochet Refresh and audience services in general. If you know the audience service ID or just the address to use a connection audience service then you can tell when they're online. All you have to do is open up a socket over tour and even if the service is protected by client authorization, you can still determine if the service is online which is not great, especially when that sort of like metadata can be used to prosecute people or like identify like, oh, you know, we are pretty sure that this person over here is actually this user over there. So we're going to spy on their house and it's sure enough as soon as they turn off their laptop and go to the cafe, this user disappears and then once they open up the laptop again, they come back online. You know, that's not the best. So that's kind of where Gosling comes in. So wait, what? Nope, this is still Ricochet Refresh. That's what it looks like. It's an app. You can download it here. This is where Gosling comes into play. So Gosling is basically a kind of ground up reimagining and re-implementation of how that sort of beginning authentication handshake should work. We've taken kind of what we know about how online services currently work and are working around that limitation of that kind of like what we call the cyber stalking problem where you have this identifier and you have no way of really using Ricochet and also controlling what people can see about you, which sucks. You know, I mean, it's fine so long as, I would say that the current Ricochet Refresh is fine so long as you don't publicly publish what your ID is. So if you and your friends all want to swap IDs and that never leaks outside of the group, then all any adversary is gonna see is yeah, these people are using Tor. Okay, that could be anything. Assuming they are super sneaky and like using like DPEC inspection or doing traffic analysis or super advanced stuff, right? So Gosling kind of takes all that information and breaks apart your separator identity from who your actual end points that you use to communicate with people. So you still have a public identity and a public onion service. We call this like the introduction service, which they will probably be changed because it kind of collides with the idea of like introduction node and Tor, which we don't want to confuse the two. So the name will probably change. So we started with the introduction server that you use as your public identity fire just as you do now with Ricochet Refresh. And you can turn that off whenever you want but still talk to your contacts. Because what happens is when you do this initial kind of handshake with the introduction server is that, you know, a bunch of crypto to verify that like the person contacting you is saying like, yes, I am this other onion service over here on the internet and these are my keys. So, you know, use some signature verification and build a handshake and make sure they are who they at least, or at least they make sure they at least control the keys they claim they control. And as part of that kind of handshake if it succeeds, it hands out a endpoint server which is unique to that particular client. So if that client then, you know, wants to cyber stalk you, then, well, you have to accept them as a friend and then they can cyber stalk your endpoint but you can just block them or better yet, just stop running that endpoint and they won't be able to turn it when you're actually online. They can still see your introduction server but the cool thing about the introduction server is that you don't actually need that to talk to your friends. Like if you add your five buddies as contacts or add your, you know, journalist contact as a contact, then you can just turn that server off once the endpoint servers have been like negotiated and nobody outside that will just know like, well, they used to have this client service and all this client service doesn't exist anymore. So it's kind of a, it's kind of like a long, longer term like identity and kind of works like a handshake of prior. Like they do a similar thing but it was like a ephemeral audience service that kind of like introduction handshake and then hand it off. But so we're kind of are working on reworking that kind of handshake part and separating it out as its own library because, you know, while working on a peer-to-peer instant messenger it occurred to me like, you know, there are other peer-to-peer applications that might want to exist and also be anonymous. So we're kind of pulling out this layer and the tour management and the key generation and all of that putting into a nice Rust library and we'll eventually be ripping out the guts of the current X-ray refresh and using this for that low level application, low level like kind of authentic authentication application and then building an instant messenger on top of that. Like once you've done that kind of handshake then you just hand a socket off to the next like the higher level part of the application and it can do whatever it needs to do, safe knowing that if it received a connection then it came from who you think it is and you know that you're private and anonymous and all that good stuff. So you can go here. We have specs. There is a not quite working implementation as work in progress but we're expecting to have a work of proof of concept sort of implementation working within the next month or two. So come by. It has been not audited but some were reviewed by various smart people who know how to use cryptography more than I do but obviously issues and pull requests are very helpful and welcome. So that's my bet. I guess I'll let you end. Okay, I guess we have a little bit of time for any questions, is that right? Absolutely, please stay on stage. Maybe we have a technical question. So we do have time for Q&A. If you have a question, please line up on both of the microphones. As we have no question from the internet yet we'll take the microsoft, oh my God. The microphone in the front, please step up to the microphone, come close and please ask your question. So, technical question there. Does the ricochet support this new ricochet? Does it support the synchronous communication or is it only synchronous? Hello? Hello? Okay, it's only synchronous. So because there's no centralized service for you to connect to, it does depend on you being actually online to receive any kind of... So a question for Naomi on the other topic. Phil? Sorry. So, do you think we'll see more slaps in the EU? Should people be bracing for this, especially... Oh, so thank you so much for the work you're doing with especially reading up the lawyer part of the thing. But in terms of the community, you mentioned the mutual aid that happened defending the Polish people. Let's even think about the people doing the protestors in Bristol and other places where... So is that something that Pat Fox would address as well? So either helping or providing that layer for that layer of the targets of slaps and so on. Sure. So the project is targeted towards qualified lawyers but we're really interested in reaching, say the lawyers who defend activists pro bono and the people who defend LGBT activists, defend other kinds of activists, you know that. So that's totally within scope of what we want to do. And I think you're right to pick out Bristol and where there were some protests last year, people may not know. And as a result, people have been facing riot charges in the UK, which hasn't been heard of for many, many years and the penalties for riots are really severe. We're talking about decade, you know. And the police bill is here now, so the future is gonna be... What is happening in the UK is kind of emblematic of what we might see elsewhere as well in that slaps as far as they impact on journalists who write for major publications, there's some action against limiting those, coming up against deteriorating national legal systems which make it much more easy to prosecute activists for doing righteous things. So yeah, I think that's a totally predictable outcome of what's happening now and we should look out for. Wonderful answers, thank you very much. Do we have any questions from the internet? Any more questions from the audience? Now is your chance, free legal advice. No, it's not legal advice at all. I'm not a lawyer, don't ask me for legal advice. All right, well, if there are no... Yeah, come up to the microphone, please. Can you hear me? Yeah. So yeah, so I'm actually Polish and I'm also a journalist security trainer. So I am incredibly, incredibly interested in both of those things. And would you say that... So you mentioned that the protest laws were essentially enforced much more severely during the pandemic, yes? Yeah, in Poland, there's other things going on as well but say in Slovenia, you can really see that the advent of COVID restrictions really gave license to the then government in Slovenia to go wild and prosecute anyone for doing anything. I mean, in Poland, the problem was already there before COVID, shall we say? Yeah, I know, I know. No, I was just curious if you saw that the governments were using COVID as a sudden ramp up for it and now that COVID is gone, well, sorry, when I say COVID is gone... Yeah, the restrictions of God, maybe. No, no, no, like for some of the governments, like the health ministries are literally acting as if COVID is gone and has the COVID-related protest bans, are they still being enforced or not? Well, it's quite a big general question. I think, you know, in general, I mean, a lot of those restrictions have now been lifted, but it's normalized. The police action against gatherings of people in particular countries, things have stayed bad afterwards. Okay, perfect, thanks so much. Thank you. All right, one more time. Any questions from the internet? No, all right. Any further questions? Are you moving towards the microphone for a question? Excellent. All right, sorry, the person in the back was first. Stay, stay, stay, we have time. So do you know of any slaps where the people have accidentally even found guilty of the charges? So, I mean, the charges are completely untrue, but has it ever happened? Yeah, I'm sure it has happened. Here you get one of the measurement problems where if people are found guilty, it, people are often looking, when people are trying to measure slaps, they're often looking for lawsuits which get rejected and they're often looking for civil lawsuits. And one of the sort of wider problems here and say the particular problem that a lot of activists are facing, you know, sort of the on the ground activism is the use of criminal charges, even minor criminal charges like misdemeanours which often don't get put into those statistics. And look, I'm not knocking the people who have put the stats together because it's a bit of a task and like they've been doing it for the first time as well and you know, at the result of a lot of work to try and assemble an evidence base. But yeah, for sure. There's a lot of, I mean, anyone who's done activist support will know this, right, that particularly if say you're getting prosecuted in a area or a region of your country where the pro bono legal network is less well developed, you're much more liable to be found or you're at a lower court whilst often those verdicts are unreported, go unreported in official stats. Anyway, you're much more likely to get a raw deal. Okay, thanks from camera one. One more quick question and quick answer. Oh, I hope it's quick. I was wondering about that Ricochet messenger. So you compared it very shortly to signal. I was wondering if it also uses something similar to the signal encryption protocol to provide plausible deniability on the encryption level. So Ricochet IAM and with Ricochet refresh kind of depend upon the fact that any services themselves are encrypted. So it's basically built entirely on the encryption of Tor to work. So there is no actual like encryption of the day stream itself within the app. But because it's going through Tor to encrypt it and has all those nice guarantees associated with it. Okay, thank you. All right, lots of questions. That's always good. Thank you very much for your interest. We are unfortunately out of time. So I would like to ask you to give another wonderful round of applause for our excellent speakers. Thank you very much. Thank you.