 Hi everybody this is Dazza Greenwood from the MIT Media Lab but actually at Harvard Law School in the Berkman Center where a number of us came over for a great AI lunch talk today. It's a collect connection between the Berkman Center and and the Media Lab where we talk about ethics and law and artificial intelligence and off camera here I'm joined by some some great members of our community and some visitors from OECD in Paris and and some and it's great here at the Berkman Center. So this is an experiment to try allowing some of our online some of the breakout discussions to continue online and for this first week we're going to kind of do it all together but then in subsequent weeks some of these topics and then some other topics that aren't represented here but that occurred at the MIT legal forum last week will have an opportunity to talk and then probably what we anticipate will happen is we'll have some concurrent sessions so that we can have you know several people really go deep into their topic and we might use Google on Hangout or other technology so we can start as a big group and end as a big group but then let people go into their their individual lanes. So with that we're going to we've got three today the very exciting personal data and identity ownership dialogue that Elizabeth Reneres and Tony and Christian and others had put together and then automated legal entity with the C4 gang among others and professor good enough passes on his regrets for today but wishes us well on that I think he's actually in the West Coast now and and then the computational law challenge and then but before we get started could we just do a very quick round of height like just hellos and my name is and and what your topics are I I scrupulously avoided putting Tony lie into any particular group because he's sort of like he's like the he's the star player that could sort of like switch it into like any role so Tony do you mind as you know our friend and longtime collaborator just get a start and say who are you and what what you into oh no volume from you Tony okay so we'll come back to you Tony and Marcy um who's on the also the the correct left coast with Tony um could you introduce yourself and please uh yep we can hear you okay I'm co-founder of the tech platform to help people find out about legislation uh non-facto single lawyer uh but I'm very interested in how data is used in policy making so excited to work on the computational law challenge um and uh and credits to you Marcy for bringing that up at the end of day one as a topic we should talk about to really allow people to talk about it over dinner and then and then to bring it up in forest that next day so thank you and so excited to be working with you on it uh Tony are you online now oh gosh not yet okay and I know that you have to go in a few minutes um so um if you have to go before we can hear your voice just know that we're grateful that you're here and going to work with you on everything uh and then Elizabeth um you're up I'm just going in order of the little boxes on my screen thanks Daza um yeah so Elizabeth Rainier is um a technology privacy lawyer um with interest in cross-border data protection um and emerging technologies like blockchain AI machine learning um I have practiced in the US London in the Middle East so I'm really interested in sort of competing frameworks on these subjects um and how these emerging technologies are going to sort of change our uh data ownership models entirely which is something that we will get into uh in my portion of the session thanks for having me Daza thank you thank you very much um what a great session you had and then uh next person we've got on the line here is uh Dylan um and are you um let's see if we can hear you Dylan is of um C4 coin and I see you get um soundcheck okay no sound yet um Dylan is a terrific person with a Malif Lewis um smooth voice that you're I hope we all enjoy shortly so uh Damon uh you're up sure uh my name is Damon um I work with community banks of I'm for an exchange primarily but I'm now in charge of monetizing uh their data so that's one one leg of it and I'm also just an angry citizen after aqua facts and a number of other hacks so I'm working on um deleting and hopefully collecting my own data from all these various brokers and putting it in one place we'll get forward to see how we all can work together because I think it's going to be more of a consortium approach what one group can't do it I don't think here here and Damon was also one of our star students in the first um future law MIT course and this is a student project of his that um that um you know we had some twists and turns but it's one that I hope that would be a good match for um Elizabeth's um breakout so thank you I'm glad that you could join us yeah thanks for having me you're welcome and then uh last but not least at least on this first go round is a christian smith ah hey daza um yeah that's me um I am not a lawyer uh I am a software engineer though and I'm principally concerned with um cryptographic protocols and privacy technology and trust networks and and that sort of thing so this is uh very interesting particularly around the the um architecture of cryptographic credentials and um also the architecture of personal storage uh to be implemented in such a way that it's aligned with privacy laws and actually effective at um doing what we want so here so um and also perfect match for Elizabeth oh yeah you've got it too and so like wherever you are like thank you God bless you come back to America sometime soon um and then hack with us online um all right then so why don't we just get started with um with with you Elizabeth um can you maybe just walk us through this topic and um and then um and we can screen share as well uh yeah sure I don't know if Tony wants to go quickly or if you've got sound I don't want to no okay okay uh we'll dive right in and so I don't know if everyone can access the document um I can go ahead and screen share it if that's better that would be great um is that working yep we can see it okay cool so um this basically came about um in talking to um Daza about uh how someone in the US would go about trying to access um personal data that's out there in the universe about them um and initially it seems like a fair enough question and then you start looking into it and it becomes um exceedingly complex um and sort of as a background to this um I just want to present the framework um to think about all of this uh in the US which is that um because we don't have a comprehensive wholesale general right of um privacy uh that's embedded in statute in the US um and we'll keep the constitutional rights aside for now um you in order to exercise your data subject access rights you have to rely upon uh independent and um uh disparate specific laws that apply to data depending on your role in society so the way that I've organized this document is basically uh as a catalog and it's I've just started it so it's you know early days um as a catalog of the laws federal and state um and categories of laws that may up might apply um to your ability to access your data depending on the hat that you're wearing so for example I've the categories I've started with are consumers um we'll get back to the citizen's point uh employees parents patients uh students and then I started thinking about other categories so foreigners um those outside the US and then um the impact of new technologies and potentially not roles that aren't even in existence at this point um so just from this initial and please feel free to interrupt or stop me if there are any questions as I go um even from this initial you know document you can see that there's this really tangled web um this really complex web of of laws uh sector specific laws that are implicated um and you know I don't have full excerpts of the of the statutes here but if you all the links are embedded to the the actual language of the law and the relevant sections so if you start to go through and click on some of the links and just have a look at at some of the language and some of the requirements you start to get a sense of just how onerous and almost unreasonable um it would be for an individual to really try and um compile a good and accurate picture of all the data that's out there on them um but putting aside sort of the logistical concerns for now I think there's a um a couple of other philosophical points uh that I wanted to mention um which are that you have to find sort of an applicable law or an applicable category of data or context to access certain data so it it's not just that anyone that has data out there on you you know has a legal requirement to provide it and as um Damon's already mentioned you you know you can very well be met with resistance um if there's no sort of express uh right to that data and this just demonstrates how you we really don't have a model uh of data ownership of individual data ownership um in the U.S. where you're actually the owner of the data that you are creating uh despite the fact that your data footprint you know in the modern age is so extensive um and is being catalogued and packaged and sold and resold uh by data brokers and others um you know much to their commercial and strategic benefit um whereas the individual is really at a disadvantage in trying to um adequately take stock of of their data picture so if you go through you can see um that that the rights are are fairly limited um so for example you know if we go to uh FICRA the Fair Credit Reporting Act um you have certain rights the right to annual credit report um you know the right to remove certain information um correct certain information but if you click on the link uh to annualcreditreport.com or you go to any of the the providers you start to see how complex it can actually be um Daz is doing something in here sorry uh like a clean cable of contents to your brilliant masterwork okay that's that's great but not too good and feel free to stop me if this is not going in the direction that you intended um going in the direction that we intended okay great so um so I think it's really interesting from a philosophical point of view that rather than being viewed as an individual who is a who has their own autonomy and sovereignty um who can control the data that they themselves are generating um we view the individual as this fragmented actor in society who you know really has to assert themselves in a context specific way to um to jump all through all these hoops and hurdles uh just to see personal data about themselves so um when you think about that you can you know you start to see why it feels like the system is broken um at the end of this document where I start to think about other categories um foreigners came to mind because I was starting to think about the GDPR which was the subject of one of the breakout sessions at the the recent conference at MIT um and you know we all know that the GDPR is going to have far-reaching effect because pretty much anyone being able to access uh your website or app or digital services from the EU will bring you um within the GDPR's reach and so you start to think about a very different perspective that you have um in the EU where there is a wholesale comprehensive general right to privacy um and the privacy and data subject access rights attached to an individual as one person of integrity and so it doesn't matter whether the data controller is uh you know any uh in the consumer sector you know in the is an employer um you you have a right to data that data controllers and data processors have and process about you um as an individual and you are able to assert those rights in one uniform way particularly under the GDPR if you look at chapter three on the rights of the data subject uh you have you will now have one wholesale um comprehensive way of exercising these rights across the EU and one thing to keep in mind is that the GDPR unlike the current uh privacy directive has direct effect in the EU which means that um it should in theory uh iron out all the discrepancies across national laws within EU member states um so you start to see the real culture clash here between the approach to privacy and data protection in the US and the the approach to privacy and data protection in jurisdictions like the EU and then you also see how this clash really comes to a head in in the digital uh environment and in an economy of personal data um I'll stop here for questions because I realize this is a lot of information uh before we move into sort of the the technology questions I have a question yeah Daza oh thanks um so there are a um is there any common um thread that you've noticed as you've been doing this excellent work um compiling is very actionable I'd say um drill down into legal rights in the United States for you know they're in some ways comparable to uh like a GDPR type rights uh anything that's common in terms of like what an individual would have to do to identify and authenticate themselves to um an entity that has their data so that the entity um can feel comfortable and uh with um like answering that person as opposed to giving away and actually like harming the person by telling like uh telling some third party maybe like a broad artist or you know disgruntled spouse or some like you know someone that's not that person that's acting you know um with an intent to commit a crime or a fraud um like what what's the commonality for the requirements or like the rely for like reasonable reliance on um on an entity that comes out of the blue and says hi my name is you know bob smith delete my data or give me my data like is there any commonality here especially common technical common kinds of requirements or due diligence that could be translated perhaps to technical requirements uh and you know um tools and um services that could be built uh you're breaking up there but i think i got the gist of the question right um so my perspective is that there may be more than we realize but because the laws are drafted so differently um and because the systems that implement them are so different um it's it's more difficult exercise than than i initially expected um hi uh so hello so um you know i think the problem is there's a lot of reliance on uh sort of what i would call narrative information so you know under HIPAA for example you or sorry under FICRA you'd have to prove uh sort of historical facts or biographical information um so i've seen some implementations where you know it's a question of uh five statements of uh potential fact identify you know correctly identify three or four um there are you know other implementations where you'd have to provide two forms of identification um i personally and this is you know not an area looked into in great depth in the US but i have not seen enough uniformity in uh the means of identifying or proving your identity uh to you know even overcome that initial hurdle of uh of an access request i don't know if others have seen different uh implementations i just had a quick question so it calls to mind the question for me of like what the liability is for those companies if there is that kind of fraud or violation that das is talking about uh because you know the it can either be proscriptive that um i was like what's happening on the screen uh that there are requirements for how those requests are handled but then also uh it can also be handled through liability for the companies if there's just a strong incentive to make sure that that's very secure um one thing i've seen is uh you know insurance policies that provide a certain degree of coverage um i guess is the question more uh protections for the individual or for the the company is the general question of is the liability tough enough that it makes the companies be especially stringent on this point or is it still kind of wild wild west so that companies have various standards because they're not too concerned about the the liability piece i personally have seen uh what i would call unconscionable disclaimers um and i mean i think we've all seen you know with Equifax and others that uh the risks potentially are more the liability that comes from a reputational liability and not the law itself isn't providing enough of a remedy um i you know again i think that uh it can even be really difficult for the individual to to challenge or to know why they're denied an access request or to know that it's on the basis of um or what went wrong with sort of their the process um so that the lack of transparency there uh can also disguise a lot of those errors that lead to fraud um but i this is not i think daemon might know more on this point uh i'm i'm learning about it so the first the first draft of the letters we sent we just had name address and last four of social and that seemed to be enough to get them at least one broker to delete the data um so we're gonna i think as we iterate we're gonna figure out what the standards are for each each broker and you know other types and then we'll we'll just have a streamlined system to get it done for each one i think it's going to be a very bespoke process cool um uh so in the room um elizabeth is um you remember that nice um chris montelain hi chris there's a question so actually you were hi something you were getting towards i was just gaming while you were doing stuff right um but uh something that you were um talking about or i think you began to talk about and maybe it was a misinterpretation of the previous question but i thought maybe could shed some or be an area of opportunity is the idea around perhaps corporations actually have uh better legal access to some of this information than individuals and perhaps if individuals assume the forms of uh legal entities that perhaps they'd have um some kind of you know greater access to this information or greater rights in the domain smart uh yeah it's a really interesting question i mean i it would depend on the law because a lot of the legal frameworks that you know the definition of the the covered data is that it tapped us to an identifiable individual um i you know we have a yeah i'm gonna back up uh chris for a moment um which is we just came from this excellent talk at the berkman center from uh who's the professor uh a young professor uh that was talking about infrastructure and treating the internet is public infrastructure partly law professor and one of the things that came up was identity and um we're talking about just this very question of like how do you like with it with the you know pony express and then the u.s post service we actually have a way that you can get in effect a permanent address a legal address of the mailbox roll for presumption that a person got uh mail within three days after it's sent to that address and so forth now all that's you know blown blown up um in the digital age so we're not sure how to what what is due diligence anymore so one of the people talked about i've talked about blockchain people talked about various things but something i like about what chris just said which i hadn't realized before is think about corporate law for a moment if you're going to incorporate uh or be an llc or or other legal entity in a jurisdiction the united states and other countries that i'm familiar with one of the things that you have to do is designate a person to whom service can be um served for process of service so you have a designated agent in the jurisdiction so that if somebody needs to sue you or put you on notice or something like hey my head's up we're bulldozing that neighborhood your business is in or whatever it is they know who to talk to um and so that's a system that scales and works and which you have familiar processes it's well understood um it's reliable that would be one of the properties that one would have if we like literally did what chris said and just created like a a c-corp or something for every individual or like a low dollar llc or something so sole um proprietor llc kind of thing at least you'd have a place that was designated an on file with a duly authorized state you know registry service to know where notice should be sent and where notice can come from that would be authoritative on behalf of that legal entity in this case an actual human so just that's just one cool property of the incorporation part that um actually could theoretically solve the identity issue it would then cause a lot more expensive problems like oh god 300 bucks to keep my what like my human identity up and then we're going to go to like identity jail if i don't pay you know like there's i think a lot of things ways in which it's not well suited necessarily but it does have a um an agent for service of process going for it a daza on that note i think we should also look at um like data power of attorney designation as well that might be another route you know we can assign a law firm or attorney to or just a person or company to to manage that whole thing and that might get around some of the costs prohibitiveness of everyone incorporating yep good idea that's good damon so elizabeth what else uh well actually anybody else like christian or maybe you could open it up a little bit uh more okay um so back to you elizabeth um yeah uh yeah i was gonna let christian speak to to this site of where i was going with this was uh you know solutions that are based in these emerging technologies uh like blockchain like um digital identities uh and how that might uh lower sort of the resource burden and make you know make the management of a personal data store uh a reality um for you know most people um so christian i don't know if you want to jump in here um sorry i had the screen freeze up there a couple minutes ago i could hear you but i couldn't respond so yeah i mean this is this is really the big question is um we sort of have to reinvent the entire universe right now in order to get any of this stuff to work um because because it depends firstly on having these self-sovereign uh credentials and there's a really really hard technical problem called decentralized key management that that has been the big blocker of being able to do things architecturally around personal data and and security in a good way and because we don't have that every system that's been built has been built has been architected in a in a in a way that is inherently insecure and inherently broken like i don't get to keep my data on my own devices that lives on somebody else's servers and and stuff like that so we really have a lot of reinventing to do and a lot of unpacking of assumptions to do before we can get to this new beautiful world where everything functions the way we would hope it would back in the old days where where we just put things on paper and laws that we have made made some sense and and they don't make sense now and we can't really reconcile the the legal and the technical parts of this partly because we're missing a few critical infrastructure links that have to be solved for it first so i think that was a really good really good opportunity we we sort of have to do a do over because everything is fundamentally broken and it's a really good time to rethink law and technical architectures and infrastructure and incentives and try to get all of those things properly aligned does if i could add one thing to that and also tying in what chris and daemon were talking about with powers of attorney and you know designated agents i think a lot of people are looking into implementing that and at with digital identities as well so some of that could be mirrored in the digital space and these aren't from my perspective you know mutual exclusive solutions but they all can be part of sort of a comprehensive new approach or new deal as you call it on our data a new deal under a new deal under it i'd like to add like an incendiary kind of round i don't think a lot of people have time to wait for the united states legal system to catch up and even to wait for technology what one thought process we kind of hatched was could we convince like estonia to provide people like americans a data citizenship just for a price and then that way we could we could just be covered under european laws and just kind of smoke a lot of these players out of it in an interim regime until we can figure it out ourselves i guess is anyone thought of that or is anyone looking into that part yes oh am i immune oh here we are oh there we go yes um so drummond reed's going to join us in the future and he's some some kind of deputy something or other he's a deputy for estonia on their program for um e citizenship or words that effect uh and he was he wanted to give a presentation uh to this breakout on um on on the process of gaining e citizenship um somebody sent me an update that indicated that there was a glitch in the system of some types so they've taken the american um ramp to e citizenship in estonia down temporarily while they figure out is like a security flaw or bug or something but there is um but there is that something is is a foot there so um we should hey elizabeth are you taking can can you add that in the notes there um i guess if you don't mind yeah sure um because that's that's clever you know this uh and then the other thing is i want it before we move to the next topic uh i want to just um ask elizabeth if you mind screen sharing again uh or i can go off sorry um let's try that again sorry uh that work yep good and then could you could you click um near the top i put um i put the list in from griffin yeah that's it right there there's an issue that griffin pulled um issue four um github issue four at the top uh higher oh got it yeah okay and then um if you then click on glam rock is her awesome identity um it writes further down in the issue it's glam rock data brokers um it's linked inside the issue there yep great this is um oh and i'm sorry then actually click the file um so this is if you scroll down a terrific huge list of all these data brokers and and the process is that she that you would when we go through like the address like what you have to do the sequence of things you have to do in order to request in this case it's your data to be deleted which is kind of the original um fire behind the concept that daemon had in our case i would like to suggest we consider maybe working together with daemon and um and christian and and others and glam rock if she'll have us i think vanna did a good job um opening with a charm offensive yesterday at bergman center so i hope that we've opened some good some good channels and opportunities for for partnerships here but see who would like to work with us to do a data access request so maybe something along the lines of you know my name is and under whatever laws we could cobble together from elizabeth that may apply to um some of the data brokers or to some people that data brokers have um data on and therefore one way or another the law is applicable where people are entitled to a copy of their data and then try to get a copy of that and put it into a personal data store of some vintage and type that christian could assist us in figuring out potentially and then you know just for good measure delete the data after you give me a copy of it for sure but the idea of gathering our data from all these disparate sources and then adding to it with things like lat long and our location aware and our medical records and maybe our like um you know our other um uh kind of a personal data to be able to do analytics on it and scale and to um gather together and credit unions and other places to allow this asset class to um aggregate its value and have more negotiating power i think is is possible once we get a copy of it and one way to get a copy of it is through glam rock some almost like checklist like guide for all the data brokers and so she was all too happy to allow us to use her or listed some under under a public domain and her only request is that if we do it um number one invite her to the party and then number two um do pull requests so as we like learn more about um other sequences or other um like um errors or corrections um just like make pull requests back so that we can keep her file updated how's all that sound yeah that sounds great one of the things we were thinking about going after once we kind of figured out the data broker um were data accounts you know like dead email accounts that are still out there that are you know people are buying and selling that data and it could be you know anything even even maybe even the credit agencies you can just ask one to just shut it down um so as we get more developed we can add a clam rocks database of like here are other random databases you're probably on but you don't you just never deleted your account kind of thing yes um so hey elizabeth yeah that one really interesting point on that is that the gdpr carves out dead persons so uh there's an interesting question about what will happen to data after the fact yeah that's an unfortunate phrase carving carving but yeah i can i take your point though i agree and that is helpful and you know that raises also the question of digital death and like the long-term archives and personal data as um you know as it goes through probate and what the elegant processes are for um digital fiduciaries and others who can access accounts to ease that transition because it is coming uh but then what happens to our data like i think it was almost 10 years ago now there was a i was on a south by southwest panel which is good and the title was you're dead your data is not now what and it was like we filled the whole room it was an awesome but you know what people are still dying and we still don't have the really good clue what's going on with the data so it's something to think about um hey dylan on the on the living person side just one last piece sorry to interrupt uh we kind of thought of a concept of um a data vaccine for my children so if we can pre preemptively delete their accounts and opt out of every possible account maybe their data well it's it's impossible to protect all of it but at least kind of tamp it down okay so then that so like it's more of a life cycle approach so you've got like the the kiddies uh the adults and then you know the people that used to be alive is that more polite yeah okay um so elizabeth can i ask you a question sure thanks um do you um would you be willing um to um do your do the show one more uh another time next week when more people would i think hopefully drummed and some more people that have a lot more to say even here in boston and and elsewhere that might might be wanting to talk about and more practically how to get how to go from where we are to like a project that we're happy to incubate for you um at the media lab would you be would is with thursday like around this time next week possibly work for you for that yeah absolutely and i think i mentioned i'll be on the east coast so works even better um and drummin and i are collaborating on some things as well so i can i can sync up with him and we can that was the next phase of uh the document i was starting is sort of how do we transform this model and where do we go from here um so happy to do it for sure okay awesome thank you so then i'm gonna i just feel like we should declare this a successful first online breakout meeting of um of the personal data and individual identity variety so congratulations everybody like um it that's done and like that in this one we should gavel it closed and say it stands adjourned um so awesome so now looking forward um i see we're almost out so the other thing i realized is there's no way we can squeeze these things into 15 minutes i don't know what i was thinking that's so dumb uh so what we should do instead is actually have like you know the full 50 minute hour um per topic and not try to jam more than one into one topic it doesn't seem to me but nonetheless um like we do have not only dylan but also harrison pearl the ceo of c4 coin um who's um the person that's really been driving this concept of a uh of a um wonder if you wonder like who's calling right now like is it one of you with an emergency that i must pick up or is it some spam thing who knows if only we had better identity um so um so let's move forward and let me ask um harrison can you get off mute introduce yourself and then um and um and then just give us a quick update on what's going on with automated legal entity and um and some and a concept of uh potential next steps people could uh know about and jump in into if they wanted to you know kind of grab an ore and help you row absolutely hi everybody uh it's as i said i'm harrison pearl and i'm founder of c4 coin and yeah we are absolutely very interested in the idea of an automated legal entity i think our perspective it comes from the entrepreneurial side um uh for us working on a distributed network we think an important use case is in terms of onboarding new users to the extent that might be legal agreements that come with joining a network and it would be great if from our end in a distributed way those agreements could be made with computerized entities or automated legal entities um and so we left the legal forum the other week uh with some great progress uh a decision that the LLC between incorporation formats is the most flexible and the one to pursue one of the nice benefits of the LLC is that there are many states in which you don't have to list your members um and so uh at least until you file taxes so we might need to figure that part out um but uh that was one of the that was basically where we had left from the legal forum um so from that perspective we've been trying to put together a hackathon to as DASA puts it create what's the like what what is the absolute most basic thing that we can call an ALE um not not something that can necessarily fully function on its own but at least meets the basic requirements of an automated legal entity um and so we've been kind of trying to take pieces away and and what we're really working on is a brainstorming document for a hackathon of coming from our grand idea of being able to enter into legal agreements onboarding people into a distributed network to like what is the core of an ALE what would be the first thing that we'd want to try to build especially you know in an open source hackathon type situation um and that's basically where we stand there so uh you know I'd love to open up the conversation one idea that I had was uh working with Drummond to uh use sovereign perhaps to give in a computer its own digital identity and the ability to sign its name somehow um it's a good idea um so do you have any um any asks or uh in terms of asks um I guess it's is there interest in trying to hack something like this together or is this you know because I know for us it will eventually become part of our critical path and you know if we had to we'd bushwhack it but we'd rather not see this type of technology become proprietary um and so you know to the extent that we can build a community and and make these things interoperable that's that's a goal so uh you know gauging interest for actually trying to hack something like this together and then if so it'd be great to get more input on a on a google doc to lay out what the parameters of that first hack should look like okay so do you want to make a google doc and invite us to it and then do a quick screen share and then the ask would be trying to group and help us complete the doc and then hack it into reality yeah yes exactly okay can I come back to you in a few minutes um to show us the doc and then we can split it and then marsy uh can I kind of um pivot to marsy a little bit on the computational law challenge from ge that sounds great okay um thank you um very much harris i'm really glad you're able to join us after all today from you and dylan being here i just have faith at finally that we'll be able to have an automated legal entity because you know because helping to drive it you absolutely have like my complete support like whenever it comes up and however it comes up on this until until the thing stands up and it could sue and be sued and just be a proper legal entity yet that is automated so carry on with your groovy self um and we'll be right back great marsy hey hi okay so let me ask you a question um so pivoting now to computational law um and this challenge prize um now that you've had a few days to like absorb everything that happened at the media lab um and you know the thrill and excitement of you know having um christoph from ge on stage there i'm talking it through and and you helping us to facilitate dialogue have you have you given have you had any further thoughts or could you maybe let people know like a little bit like what what what is the concept and then just let's know like if you've had any kind of further thoughts on you know how would we actually well okay actually let me i'll do let me do a quick setup of just what framing like what is the topic and then i want to ask if you've had any further thoughts on you know how we might be able to approach this and where the value propositions might be especially so but we have framing um if anybody goes to mitlegalforum.org everybody can see this excellent session that marsy helped as i mentioned earlier um kind of um spark into life um with um christoph from who's um uh a chief corporate council internal council for a lot of the innovation stuff of ge um basically proposed um uh um that we invent fundamentally a new way to uh to um compose and and and um work and and uh and um promulgate law um such that it's computational by um birth so that it would be like you know statistical models and like vectors and parameters and it would be um fundamentally math that is applied um so we can now begin to have more adaptive systems that are rules-based to be sure but that are not written in like you know 17th century prose anymore um but rather are written in the language of the of the new era of digital society and so therefore appropriate for as a means of communication of governance of that society good idea and then the idea for uh project would be to work with a city initially uh like a sovereign entity uh some type that we could help to refactor to be digital and then christoph thought christoph's idea is what what if we found a city that wanted to work with us then the project would be to um redo like the kernel like the philosophy curve a logic kernel um at the base so maybe be more utilitarian or maybe be optimized for happiness we optimize for economics we optimize for i don't know like equality but you have some kind of fundamentally political and philosophical um notion that would be reflected in the kernel at the lowest level of the operating system and then you could almost maybe slot in models for traffic and parking or for sales tax or for um some of the other areas of um of rules-based um governance that would be um data driven so um looking at it like that um um he thought we could find the city and then maybe do like a game um something where we could kind of give people some uh some some coins or some you want a chair okay okay um people are piling in which is nice uh you could we could incentivize uh citizens or residents of the city to play along and you know like drive the cars or you know do their you know sales and then we could get into the system and really kick the tires and um be able to um maybe the first city is like free but maybe the cities after that could you know pay a little something into a pot and who knows maybe that could be end up being an infrastructure fund of some kind or some reserve fund that would make it possible to enable a better propagation and deployment and maintenance repair you know supply operation just like the basic stuff you would want for infrastructure of this type to operate you know at scale but also the reliability needed to run a city um and also to be appropriate to rule of law and the civil liberties aspects of um the social compact that it reflects and um and supports so like it was a really cool idea and then there was some really great um uh dialogue and where we think we're going to go with this now is we're just going to do it uh so that would involve um having some design sessions and then um putting a plan together getting it out in contact with the national legal cities and some other groups now just to start to propagate the idea and maybe get a little bit of calibrates and feedback and who knows if there's a match maybe see if some mayors or other people might want to you know put their hat in the ring uh and then the other possibility people are advising like look at all of the amazon hq2 cities to see who anyone that put their hat in that ring might be a great um city people want to um um put their hat in the ring of like we we want to be first to be a computational um city uh and there's there's a bunch of other ideas that are coming online but i think we would be aiming up to like a second week of january like computational law palooza um at the media lab as part of our computational law course and i have it on very good authority here right in my little chat box that marcy's coming back to the media lab and she's gonna help us with this so yeah thanks again marcy for just breathing life into this thing and i just want to ask you if you've had any thoughts in the interim if you can just you know help us vision here a way forward oh absolutely so um for any anyone who actually was in that session at least for me it was kind of magic i mean chris i've laid out a very big vision and i think also one that that had a little bit of ties to like how we might actually take some baby steps on this i've been thinking a lot about um data and modeling and and you know responsive rulemaking and laws in kind of a meadow way uh but i think what what chris meaning in kind of a federal big picture how this would work um in a in a largely implemented way i think what chris stuff uh the picture he painted was much more of a like how we pilot this to actually figure out how it could work and i think the idea of starting with a city that's excited about it that would make their data sets available that potentially even the citizens could get excited about being a part of it i kept thinking over the past week about daza having almost like neilson families in the the city that that might be willing to you know provide even some of their own data or answer questions and help us model because you know if you're going to model how policies might impact people or their happiness or their productivity or their you know whatever it happens to be you're going to need to talk to some people so i think uh the the the concept just i don't know about you but but it's just been been growing and churning ever since uh we were all together uh in boston uh so i i'm super excited that you guys are going to run with this i think everybody uh or at least lots of folks i talked to you about it is is really excited to know that the steps will be taken and i think some of this is is closer than than um than we think so i had a conversation with uh cio palo Alto last week and you know we were talking about how they're going to make their laws digestible by autonomous vehicles when they hit the road pretty darn quick and so you know some of these questions are coming sooner rather than later so starting to um think about infrastructure and being able to model policy um both in in uh virtually before it's implemented but then also have law that's digestible electronically i think is is really exciting i have a procedural uh suggestions that uh marci picks on you perhaps uh it would be a good idea to just identify you know those kinds of people this um so they're obviously like different types of stakeholders love the idea of some kind of like neilson-esque handling because ultimately that's really what you're trying to drive towards is how can you make services that are more accessible more transparent for uh citizens right so so that's crucial but there's also definitely the city cio uh got the ag's um you know a bunch of different people so perhaps what might be a practical good uh next step is to just kind of identify so who are some of the people at least for now that exist within the network of this group at least that um would be amenable to get it being approached uh to volunteer their time and know and and the knowledge uh in the space um to try and map out what an ideal sort of way in which one might engage with the government uh as an individual and then tracking uh the outcomes of that or even tracking the current how things are right now i mean i think that's important as well but you know both sides of current state and future state um but just just having a dialogue with those people and actually getting in the same room would be actually the ideal um so that they can all kind of map out what they see as being the optimal path uh for their given like kind of role within the system probably yeah i think that makes a lot of sense one of the resources that i think will be really interesting here is the code for american network uh where they have a lot of um cio's and other folks in various cities across country um that was a great little pivot and they're like and we're moving back so good one and what i was imagining when chris was speaking by the way is maybe when we get together to design the design of a challenge we might say one of the first things would be you know like a classic larger scale public works project or infrastructure or like you know broad neighborhood or economic or social impact kind of thing that you um that you kind of work in there like a design charrette with the city council and the and the key stakeholder group so if it was tax you want the merchants and assessors and all those people if it was um you know transportation you know how you know the drill like you get like the manufacturers and the people with the telemetry and the third party stuff for the autonomous vehicles and that whole rigmarole and the safety people and just basically kind of just do the right kind of charrette um to get people involved and then start to hone like in some idiosque way um you know what the particulars of the project would be and then obviously have a lot of sandy pentland you know data-licious people around to ensure that we were to have the correct kind of like um you know um valid verifiable um statistical and computational basis so we can map the right types of data and um and have a proper test of the of the uh data-driven kind of aspects of this and then you know some success metrics and measurements uh in other types of like objective data and like the right types of measurements so we can learn something and that the other part that we didn't talk about too that I could imagine a charrette like that would be um christian smith's um particular brand of genius around um individual identity systems and um ways to express um autonomy you know you know slash uh sovereignty uh as an individual person one who consents to be governed in a social compact that is digital how do you do that like um just chicken and egg issue here but you go to the city that you're going to consent to for your identity well consents a two-party transaction so what identity do people bring to the table in a city where they are somehow apart from the city but also in the body politic well yeah and I think to I think dylan's point earlier I mean miss damon uh the conversation about um constituents or users or citizens being compensated for uh access to their data I think it it could be really interesting if there's a way for people to share their data and you know sharing for public benefit that they all benefit from i.e with with the city or with the community is one thing but then if there's you know if there's access for other reasons because you know somebody wants to build a shopping center or whatever they would have to give consent for that use and potentially be compensated for it um I mean we could talk for days about places to take this but it could be really interesting it could be really interesting yeah and the idea of like sharing the wealth uh I think what's part of chris stops um idea and it's and we should talk about that that's its own track honestly and the fairness and we should minister that and you know prevent you know city workers from walking off with you know pocket full of tokens and everything else like or or other wrongdoers that maybe blamed it on the city worker for real they're not just saying so all this stuff um is ought to be part of the design like a system with public integrity and with verifiability with accountability um and with reliability so it can work it can serve as a foundation as an infrastructure upon which to build you know the city on the hill that's shining city um okay so we need to go um real soon um but let me ask marcie what do you think is as a core collaborator would be the next step people could take like should they would you be freed if there was like a concurrent session um next week at oh we just lost harrison and he's back okay um uh would you be freed if we had like um if you were a person that people talk to like to actually get a google hang out you know absolutely and we can and we can start a a spreadsheet of if maybe and kind of segment the various pieces that are coming up because this is going to be inevitably a huge project that i think lots of ideas will come to so maybe organizing them and subgroups would be good tabs and spreadsheets and then uh named marcie who looks exactly like you um so okay that's great thanks marcie so that you'd be willing to um facilitate that next week same bat time same bat channel sounds good okay great that's one less thing that i'm not going to do um so that's terrific god bless you so now move it over to um harrison so we can see if we can pull oh i'm sorry let's gavel closed our second successful breakout group from uh mit legal forum online like refactoring itself in a digital form well done this breakout group stands adjourned boom okay um yay well done marcie okay and i'll and so last but not least ceo harrison pearl from c4 coin lay it down on us harrison how do we do an automated legal entity you're up um always you guys how is your coin by the way yeah uh hold on how do i screen share a nice coin shiny coin yeah my camera doesn't work okay you can send me the link or you can or you can oh the screen share uh you screen so if you move your cursor around the screen on the left there's a green um like box uh near the top of the page it's if you hover over it says screen share yep yep yep i just found that so while you're doing that i'll not stall but say two quick things which is i heard you use the word hackathon and my antenna went like what hackathon that sounds fantastic so um i've got authorization by the power vested in me by sandi pentland to um book a room uh where we can host your hackathon um to do an automated legal entity at the mit media lab where it's extra super duper cold what do you reckon uh that sounds fantastic okay all right back to you your screen is being shared oh it is okay hold on let's see uh do you see just this one page google doc so far yeah it's looking good okay um yeah so uh you know this is basically what what what we started with and we wanted to break down i guess what's the core of uh of an al e was we went back to that github that we started as a which i guess i should link in this document as well um and uh basically we we broke out like what were some of the components that we had started to list that would be part of perhaps a larger functioning automated legal entity and you know something that you said to me after the forum was you know you're you're kind of you're trying to make something that can run and walk and you know interact with society you should make something that is like barely alive and that can breathe right online oh sorry um i didn't realize i was off mute so yeah something that can breathe um yes sorry um no no worries so you know so we started by just kind of listing some of those elements because we wanted to pull them apart and and i guess make them less complicated um and i guess as part of that uh we saw a through line of creating a cryptographically secure authorizing signature because there's nothing really that should happen in here that doesn't have some kind of the signature involved in what's occurring right whether you're signing the accounting documents at the end of the year opening a bank account uh resolving things uh you know to add to the shareholders agreement or uh you know just interacting with vendors and the hiring process in general and especially when you're incorporating the the document and i thought you know looking into the definition of the signature the the important part was that it's it's both a proof of identity but it's also a proof of intent um and i think that you know off the top of our heads we know that there are several digital identity protocols being worked on and you know sovereign i guess is one that's uh part of the group um but please you know adding on to this list would be great um and you know proof of intent is something that uh i guess i haven't i haven't really laid my finger on exactly what i think that would mean uh in a digital sense um you know i don't know if that means that you would have to especially if it's a digital entity do you hash the like somehow do you hash the decision that it came to or do you hash the agreement that the decision was made under um or is this something you know that would turn into computational law on something that maybe the economics base agency would know more about and maybe combining these elements could turn into a cool hackathon um and then you know continuing this list here of trying to find what's really a valuable first hack that we can put together um and even just prioritizing uh various components that you know we can continue to work on in the future here so well done first of all in this so it's accounting banking um blockchain implementation which let's call it even like the like um omnibus ledger of the entity front-facing web portal yep governance mechanism for sure um hr employment so how do you hire people on board and by the way off board don't forget that um and then manage them um telling what they're authorized to do and not authorized to do we'll come back to that in a second project management oh well that's it right there and secretary of state compliance and all the other stuff the city and the federal and um so this is a great list i'd say that we ought to oh thanks delin for sharing the doc um i think we ought to just make that the starting list for your project of like and that's better than the list we came up with in github i think before it's like more succinct it's eight things it's not more than 10 i like it um one thing that you've got um that i want to suggest and hey christian smith are you are you on can you hear us you know click click off um yes thanks so um so two things number one we're going to aim to try to bring bring this like go home um like in about three minutes so that it'll be 655 um you know um which is before seven and uh that's good but christian um something that um uh harrison said was like like he was looking at what i would call primitives in uh in law for a legal entity um as there's a way to take seriously which i i'm grateful uh that um that you kind of honored like the feedback um to take it seriously about how do you make it breathe so you know that's a it's like that's a rudiment for um you know process oxygen blood you know digest um nutrients so signature is what you came up with i think that makes a lot of sense um because with a signature um you know an entity can sign corporate papers it can sign a paycheck it can delegate authority it can it's a mechanism a base level mechanism and a method by which it can express its existence and also can express its lack of existence so it can say i'm doing uh asset transfer and i'm dissolving my corporation so it's it's a good rudiment um so i'd say bravo and now when i think oh god well like how would i even do that the first person i would ask is christian smith who thank goodness is on the call with us so what do you think about that um well i think there there are a few elements to this and i'll try to keep it really really brief um one of them uh one of them has to do with cryptography itself uh and and the ability to prove ownership of keys and know that the you know various aspects of the signature can be trusted uh for their their authenticity authenticity but there's there's another aspect of this that's quite challenging and it sort of falls into that soft area that's um a little bit hard to define it's something that does that you've called this ceremony and in uh in software design especially application design we we talk about user experience and i think that's a critical very very important part of solving that problem because i mean it would be possible to create an application that that uses uh that prompts a user in some way to to use their keys to sign something and yet they don't realize what they're doing or or what the effect of their action is so that that word intent is very very meaningful and something that we have to pay special attention to here is how do we um how do we design user experiences that have that ceremony that really captures their intent in a way that would have some kind of legal binding sorry we're having this off bar people are aggressively in agreement with you in this room here um and uh that's helpful so like three three of the things that you said that we should remember and i don't know if i have access rights to the dock necessarily but one of them is like attribute i would call it attribution basically like um how do you attribute the act from the signature oh did i just hose the window no okay good i thought i stopped that broadcaster um how do you attribute the key to an entity like a legal entity and a person not acting on its behalf um and i don't know maybe you could like at the secretary of state filing in addition to the name and the um uh the agent for service of process and the address and maybe the the incorporating like directors you could just have the public key of the corporation or or several public keys and blockchain addresses or d i d's uh in the in the new parlance um and then you talked about the importance of having context and a provenance of the meaning of a signature in a in a context so like did a person appreciate that this was um a mortgage did they have the right notices and alerts and warnings where they where they uh did they have enough information to make a powerful like informed consent at a certain time so as you know we used to call ceremony but ways to get something in a modal or something on the screen and the sequence of things uh as part of what is signed and there's some other you know some big things we have to figure out in corporate law you know grand leach bliley and other things it may be that you want to make sure that a corporate um executive is on the hook and they have person they have personal knowledge that they've stood behind something that's also going from like a compliance officer so there may be different dimensions of ways to ensure that you have a coherent way to um collect and preserve evidence of what humans knew and when they knew it as part of the execution of their signature on these corporate documents that's I think makes a lot of sense you said a bunch of other good stuff too luckily we're recording this so we'll go back and and and remember so um you think we could um play with the hack that you made for digital um credit union um as a way to start doing um signatures on on things you better yeah also improve it if you guys don't play with it come on yep okay so so harrison um if you're if there's some notes on that um the one outcome is that um if you tell me like when a comfortable date would be to hack on these eight things and try to see how much progress we can get to something that we could pop out of a docker file to try to spring into existence um and the time when maybe christian has he's under excruciating um um pressure but a time when he could help us implement and integrate the um signature um hack as well so that we could feed um your your concept of what the primitive would be for for life support and breath um of the entity um then then then like i'll respond positively to all that stuff and provide and like book the room and um and um and work with christian and others so that we can um support you here that sounds fantastic um i'm happy to follow up and uh you know you can look for an email okay outstanding well in that case you know i think we have harrison i think we have successfully accomplished the third and final online breakout of an mit legal forum small group discussion session that has transmogrified from discussion to hacking into existence a perfectly good project that will exist in time and space and can be engineered to refactor the law for digital age the way we like it so thank you very much harrison thank you all for that great discussion and um i think uh it's whatever um as um self asserted chairperson of this i will entertain my own motion to consider this session adjourned boom thank you okay so now that we've adjourned all three sessions um we gotta do um can you shut that off uh we have to it's party time now it's like it's chaos and harvard law school um so thanks everybody um i i think this is so successful uh oh i'm sorry harrison i've got to ask you an after innings if we were to do another session that was maybe like a planning session leading up to the hackathon yes we're to thursday 5 30 time slot like um work for that so we could wait for me uh it's what six is like 5 30 doesn't quite work but six is great six of paul six is totally fine so uh because it's in the it starts within the window of 5 30 to 6 so that's easy and you can just let people know it doesn't start until six and then it ends at 6 30 like to me that's simple brilliant okay and would you want to do that when like in december or next week or the first or set in december would be great for us uh we got a couple dead coming up so yep so if you could just just keep me posted as soon as you know and we'll lock in and we'll put it on the schedule so that people know when your um concurrent breakup will be yep i'll uh i'll go through and i'll listen to the recording and i'll put some notes on the doc and then i'll send a follow-up email with everything dynamite okay everybody so seven on the nosy um so i think that um we ought to consider this entire um shebang adjourned now and i just want to thank you all for being such great friends and um colleagues like let's keep hacking over time and um much obliged so with with much gratitude uh we're going to sign off now from harvard law school berkman center berkman client center and then i'll see you um next week many of you and some new people um uh from the media lab uh so till then happy hacking