 Welcome, everyone. We'll just get started, but folks who are getting lunch, please feel free to finish up and others. Refresh your plates, as you like. So welcome. My name is Jessica Fielde. I'm the Assistant Director of the Cyber Law Clinic here at the Berkman Klein Center. I want to remind everyone that this event is being webcast live and recorded for our website. So both in terms of your consent for participating in that. But also, there will be opportunities for questions at the end, so just make sure if you ask a question, please wait for the microphone so folks online can hear you. If you want to comment on social media or live tweet, please use the hashtag BKCHarvard. And one last announcement. We just added a new event for next Monday. Amanda Askell from OpenAI will be here giving a lunch talk on competitive AI development without collective action programs. So that looks to be totally fascinating. Hope you can join us. Maybe you can get in a question or two about their GPT tool that they are not releasing since there'll be someone from OpenAI on the hot seat. So as for today, the Berkman Klein Center has a long history of involvement at the intersection of digital technologies and human rights, essentially as long as there has been an intersection of those things. And so we're very delighted to be welcoming today David Sullivan, who's the director of learning and development at the Global Network Initiative, to address some key questions and tell us some juicy stories about this space. Questions like, how can advocates, activists, and academics work with technology companies to advance human rights? And how do we properly do that is when is a public name and shame campaign a more effective mechanism versus a confidential conversation? David's experience answering these questions in partnership with tech companies range from situations involving conflict minerals and hardware supply chains to fighting censorship and surveillance online with organizations from the Center for American Progress and the International Rescue Committee. He'll talk about these questions and share stories for about 20 minutes. We will then welcome Berkman Klein fellow Chinmai Arun, who is assistant professor of law at the National University Delhi and the founding director of the Center for Communication Governance to engage in discussion with David for a little bit. And then I will pop back up to help moderate your question. So please save those for the end. Join me in welcoming David Sullivan. So thank you, Jess, for the very kind introduction. Thanks to everybody from the Berkman Klein Center for the opportunity to be here today. Working with Berkman faculty, staff, fellows, associates, students, interns has been a highlight of my time at the Global Network Initiative, but all done from far away. So I'm happy to be here with folks today and really looking forward to the discussion. Just for those of you who might be unfamiliar, so I work at the Global Network Initiative, which brings together technology companies with human rights groups, press freedom groups, socially responsible investors and academics to work on a common approach to freedom of expression and privacy online and sort of resisting government pressure to enlist companies in censorship and surveillance. But today I'm going to start with a story from a previous experience working on conflict minerals from Eastern Congo. I'm going to try to keep my remarks brief to save time for conversation, but I'm going to tell you how I got to find myself across the table from Steve Jobs and Cupertino talking about human rights, highlight a few points from that conversation that have wider relevance, I think, to the digital rights community, and then we can really get into it in the discussion. So yeah, the second half of my career sort of working with technology companies on tough human rights issues really came out of the first half of my career, which was working on humanitarian aid, relief and development and peace and security with a focus on the African continent. And in 2008, I started working at the ENOUGH Project at the Center for American Progress, which was working to try to influence US policy in support of peace in Eastern Congo and other conflict zones in Africa. And I should say that the multiple conflicts sort of across the Democratic Republic of Congo are deeply complicated and really outside the scope of this lunchtime talk, but at ENOUGH, we worked with field researchers based on the ground, including Congolese researchers, to study the conflict dynamics and try to identify sort of points of leverage where the United States could change its policies in support of peace. And then we, so we took that field analysis and we worked together with advocacy groups here in the United States from grassroots student groups, faith-based organizations, investors, and even a few celebrities, as you can see from the photographer for the book that actually this story was recently published in, Congo Stories by my colleagues, Fidel Bafalamba and John Prendergast, which I recommend is a good entry point into studying Congo's very fascinating and complicated history. So in 2009, so roughly 10 years ago, our field research had zeroed in on a previously neglected dimension of this crisis. Much of Eastern Congo's vast mineral wealth was fueling the conflict, enriching armed groups, whether it was kind of rebel groups or unaccountable elements of the Congolese army, all of whom were perpetrating horrific violence against people on the ground there. And the most lucrative of natural resources, these minerals, gold, tin, tantalum, and tungsten, which we call the three T's, would flow from mines that were in some cases controlled by armed groups through trading routes, which were taxed by armed groups or army units, to traders in the major cities in the region, out to mostly to Asia, to processing and smelting facilities where they would then enter into all kinds of supply chains, but particularly those for high tech electronics and hardware. So these are the four conflict minerals that we talked about. Tin is commonly used as a solder on circuit boards. Tungsten has a wide variety of kind of industrial applications, but interestingly enough, it's used for the vibration function on cell phones. Tantalum is a store's electricity, holds a charge, is used in capacitors that are used in kind of every type of electronic gadget. And gold is often in wiring, as well as being used for jewelry and all of those kinds of things. One thing today, there's a lot of concern about cobalt, which is essential for batteries, in which Congo has very high reserves of. But at the time that we were working on this, the regions where the conflict was taking place was not the regions where cobalt was mined. So it was not kind of included in this work, but there's been a lot of work done on this issue and a lot of companies are also looking at cobalt supply chains the way they're looking at these mineral supply chains. So we looked into this and we looked into what companies were doing. And we found that companies were aware of this link between the conflict in Congo and their products, but few had really done more than post vague written assurances on their corporate social responsibility website, saying that they instructed their suppliers not to source from Congo or not to source conflict minerals, but there wasn't any independent verification or followup to ensure that that was true. And so what we did was started a multi-pronged campaign to encourage both government and company action on this issue. So we pushed for legislation that had bipartisan support that was gonna mandate company supply chain due diligence and which was eventually actually passed as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Bill. And we also campaigned publicly and privately with companies encouraging them to take action themselves to sort of trace and audit their supply chains. Now at the time, technology companies were really dealing with this issue through an industry association. That was a bit of a word salad, the electronics industry citizenship coalition, global e-sustainability initiative, working group on supply chains or something like that. And while common industry action was important, we were worried that outsourcing this to an industry association could sort of result in a response that would be incommensurate to the urgency of the issue and kind of allow for a lowest common denominator approach where many companies could sort of free ride on the work of the few companies that were really leading the work of this industry association. So what we did was we wrote to 21 leading consumer electronics companies seeking individual meetings and commitments from them. And companies responded in a wide variety of different ways. Intel and Hewlett Packard, very quick to contact us and to work with us and to take things forward. Other companies, Nintendo didn't come around for years but didn't really hear from them. Apple, sort of the subject of today was squarely in the middle of the pack. So they were members of this industry association but they weren't particularly active in it. And once our campaigning sort of started to get some traction, we heard from their government relations team in Washington DC, they said, oh, we care about this. Could you maybe tell us where we should and shouldn't be getting our minerals from which seemed kind of odd. They wouldn't take a position on the legislation and said they don't take a position on legislation across the board. And so we sort of felt like we were being managed but because they took the same position as all of the other companies in the industry, it was hard to kind of single them out as being particularly good or bad. And so that changed in early 2010 when an activist named Lisa Shannon who is now a Kennedy School graduate and car center fellow, she protested outside of a bunch of tech company headquarters across Silicon Valley and the West Coast and she went to Apple headquarters where a PR person told her, Apple doesn't use conflict minerals. Our suppliers certify that they are clean. And so with those words, the company kind of stepped away from what had been this kind of agreed position, oh, this is a tough problem and we need an industries wide solution. And that kind of opened the space for us to do a little bit more sort of concerted advocacy, really targeting Apple. And so we had, well, student groups that we were working with protested the opening of the Apple store in Georgetown in Washington, DC. Video that we developed spoofed the old kind of I'm an Apple, I'm a PC ads and pointed out that both contain conflict minerals. Nick Kristoff covered this in The Times and our legislation was moving forward on Capitol Hill. So it was kind of unprecedented success. So at the time Steve Jobs was back in the CEO position and some folks will remember that he was in the habit of responding to emails sent to his email address which was kind of widely known and available sjobsandapple.com. And every time he did it, he would trigger a news cycle about whatever it was that he was responding to or speaking out about. And so this person, Derek wrote to him and asked about conflict minerals and he responded and said, yes, we certify but until there's a way to chemically trace these things, it's a very difficult problem. And so this was all across the technology press. And so our team, we were trying to figure out what do we do? Is there some way we can, could we reach out to this Derek guy and get him to respond? Or what should we do? When we settled on the idea that we would write Steve Jobs ourselves and tell him our arguments for why we think that there is something that could be done here. So we crafted this email and I sort of hit send on it, not really expecting to ever particularly hear back from him. But, and then the following day, actually where it was a very busy day in DC, we were doing a panel event with the Congolese Ambassador of Congress, someone from the State Department and I was kind of freaking out because all our speakers weren't at the event yet and I sort of look at my phone and I see this email that says, I'm happy to chat with your CEO. So after our event, kind of we gather the team in a completely giddy state and they're like, oh my God, what are we gonna do about this? We got way ahead of ourselves, had drafted up a multi-page response to a one line email. And so I get back to my desk after this long day and I see that I've missed a call. And so my phone just says missed call Apple. And I'm like, all right, this is probably someone from their DC office or from their communications office calling to sort of follow up or to be not happy with what was going on. And so I was like, all right, I should just call them back. And so I call back and this person voices, hello. And I was like, oh, this is David Sullivan from enough returning your call. And he's like, yeah, you got Steve Jobs. I told you, I'd speak to your CEO. I was like, okay, I'll do that. And so fast forward a couple of days and some colleagues of mine, my boss, John Prendergast, we got back, get on the phone with Steve. We call him on his iPhone, he picks up. And the conversation did not go well. He started to berate us for criticizing Apple, claimed that we were doing that because our legislation had stalled and characterized our ideas as stupid. And we didn't take the bait and we didn't back down. And we said, actually, the bill that we've been supporting was actually moving forward. It had been rolled into the Obama administration signature Wall Street Reform Act. So if that was passing, this was passing in it. And that actually, we think that not only do we have these ideas about how you can trace your supply chains, but other companies are supportive of them as well. And I think particularly when we said that Intel was working on it, he was like, that's a company I respect. Okay. And so he was far from convinced, but he said, I'll read a memo and we'll take it from there. So we put our ideas into writing. And a few weeks later, we wound up going out to Cupertino for a meeting with Steve Jobs and Tim Cook and a number of other senior Apple executives. So let me just stop right now and say, if you are going to a meeting at Apple headquarters, don't bring a PowerPoint presentation that is frowned upon, it does not go well. It does not get things off to a great start. Despite that, we made an initial presentation of our ideas to do for companies to do this human rights due diligence by auditing their supply chains, having independent audits of the supply chains and supporting the creation of a certification scheme, which would sort of allow for minerals to be ethically and responsibly sourced from Congo. So Steve Jobs was still skeptical and the conversation that ensued was combative at times and collaborative at times. But I'm sort of telling the story because I think there were four moments from it that stood out that sort of were interesting to me as someone who's been working with technology at companies on human rights, which I hope can be sort of the basis for talking about how to do this in the digital rights space later in the session today. So the first point was about how to get companies kind of to pay attention, how to get companies on the hook to do something about a given issue. And so shortly after we finished our presentation, Steve said, I don't want to have to give a shit about this. If I have to start caring about this issue, I have to start caring about every other issue under the sun and every other conflict under the sun. And so while I personally thought that maybe it would be good for him to care about Congo as well as all of these other things, we countered that the issue here was directly connected, directly linked to Apple's supply chain and to their products and services. And that the success and innovation of Apple didn't have a direct connection to Peace in the Middle East but it did have a connection back to these mining communities in Eastern Congo that were ravaged by conflict. And so in the UN guiding principles on business and human rights, this is what's called conducting human rights due diligence and it's where a company is supposed to identify and assess the nature of the actual and potential adverse human rights impacts with which a business enterprise may be involved. And the key distinction between human rights due diligence and other sort of company corporate risk management work is this is about risks to people, not risks to the business. And when a company kind of is assessing human rights risks and impacts, they're supposed to look to see whether they caused a certain human rights violation, contributed it to it or were directly linked to it via their products or a business relationship. And so while this discussion with Steve Jobs was happening sort of contemporaneously with when John Ruggy was developing the UN guiding principles on business and human rights, I think it's a good example of how you can use that kind of approach because we said you're directly linked to these things. What you need to do if you're directly linked to a human rights abuse through your supply chain is to generate some leverage to try to stop the violation of adverse impact. And so we argued that if you are to map your supply chains back to the sources and then be able to use your commercial leverage to have folks who are supplying you do their due diligence, you can help contribute to resolving the situation. And that's kind of what happened. So the second point is sort of knowing when you've succeeded to an extent. And so Steve Jobs, he told us that Apple did more than anybody to map their supply chains, that they were an industry leader and that we should be thankful for all the work that they were doing there. And he then went off on a little bit of a screed about Greenpeace. And Greenpeace had previously ranked tech companies on environmental concerns and he was saying that Greenpeace's rankings were dumb. Their criteria was bad. He wouldn't listen to anything that Greenpeace had to say. They just went ahead and made the greenest computer that had ever been made. And so again, I didn't say anything, but I was thinking to myself, wow, Greenpeace really was effective in inculcating some change here. And then right there on the spot, he sort of agreed, okay, Apple's gonna map their supply chains all the way back to the mines if possible. They're gonna identify all of the smelters and processors that they work with and they're gonna sort of go for it. And it was kind of a game-changing moment and because they had just committed to the sort of first two parts of our three-part ask. They were gonna trace and audit their supply chains. And then he was kind of like, all right, so what else are we not doing that you think we should be doing? And at this point, I had been quiet in my meeting letting my boss and others do a lot of talking, but I was like, I really wanna try to push for this certification mechanism or third part, it would really help on the ground. And I said, you know, what about that? And he just kind of looked at me and was like, now that is a stupid fucking answer. I just told you that I'm gonna do what you want me to do and then I'm not gonna do that and then you asked me to do it again anyway. And so despite being on the receiving end of a certain amount of fury there, we recognized that we had kind of accomplished an enormous amount. So at that point, another issue that came up was sort of secrecy and transparency. And so we could have gone public about this meeting right after it happened. I think that probably would have brought even more attention to the issue than was already there. But it sort of went against an approach that Steve Jobs went on about in the meeting saying Apple doesn't talk about what it's gonna do. It does things and then it talks about them. And he was very critical of our approach seeking commitments from companies of what they would commit to do in the future. He said, do it and then get it done. And so by not talking about the meeting and by keeping things secret, we created a kind of confidential space where we could continue to work with Apple's supply chain teams and to sort of figure this out. And that to me is similar to a lot of the work that we do at the Global Network Initiative where we provide the safe space for internet and telecoms companies to work with academics and NGOs and others. It's a different approach. It's one thing to be the organization that says we're going to be public and identify the issue that a company needs to deal with and then it's on the company to resolve it. To work behind the scenes, you actually have to problem solve, working with the company. Some people may feel like no, that's for the company that created this issue to do. We're just going to bring it to them and they should fix it. I think it's good to have an ecosystem of kind of accountability organizations and activists where there's room for different types of approaches at different times. So the last point that I want to make is that we were doing this inside and outside game where we were sort of working with bringing policy expertise and field research to activists and advocates and we were trying to bring a bit of activist energy to sort of insider policy debates. One part of that was we were planning to do a ranking of company performance on conflict minerals. And this was one issue where things were not copacetic at the end of our meeting. Apple was really unhappy with this ranking. They wanted to decline to participate. One executive told us that the ranking was too focused on areas that do not result in real change and could prevent the teamwork needed across the industry to drive action. So we explained to Apple that the rankings were going to be based on publicly available information. They could decline to participate but they were still going to be ranked. And so actually in the rankings that we did right after this they were in the middle of the pack because the changes we had talked about with Steve Jobs and his team hadn't been reflected yet. And it wasn't until a subsequent 2017 ranking that the organization did long after I had moved on that they sort of moved up to the top. I don't know if anybody in the room is familiar with who's worked on the ranking digital rights project that Rebecca McKinnon is working on. But I think folks who have worked on that will recognize the skepticism from companies about rankings. There's a lot of companies, even ones that land at the top of these kinds of things that do not like them and feel that they do not encourage kind of collaboration with the industry. But I think that you need a mix of competition and collaboration. So when you look at sort of tech issues and digital rights you see companies competing with each other to be more transparent in things like transparency reports and things like that. And innovations that fire up the competitive instincts of these companies that are really fiercely competing with each other can be valuable. So whether it's ranking digital rights or electronic frontier foundations, gold stars for there who has your back report these things do motivate companies I think more than anything. But you also need that cross industry collaboration. In our meeting Tim Cook sort of pointed out, listen we need the industry to work on conflict minerals because you need to aggregate leverage in the supply chain to be able to go to these middle men and say that you need to change your ways. So we've tried to do both at enough and we've tried to foster that collaborative environment within the global network initiative while still allowing other actors out there to kind of work on the ranking and the competing aspect. So the struggle for security and human rights in Eastern Congo very much continues today. Congolese people are the ones who are leading the drive for peace and democracy. You cannot solve a conflict in North and South Kivu from a boardroom in Cupertino but you can sort of start to change some of the C-no-evil kind of calculations that allowed us all to sort of unknowingly kind of contribute to fueling this conflict based on our sort of desire to have the latest technology at the lowest possible prices. The work that we did was a combination of a great deal of luck, even more privilege and the talents of a really fantastic team of researchers, activists, grassroots groups. So it's very much not my accomplishment. It is theirs and it is far from done and the people who are continuing to work on these issues today are, you know, kind of deserve a lot of admiration and support. I hope this helps us and I think about corporate accountability in other sectors and in other spaces and I'm looking forward to the discussion with Chinmai and with all of you. Thanks. So I wanted to ask you just because I'm convinced that someone in this room might find themselves in front of Mark one day. You told that story in a very self deprecating way but I also felt like it was an illustration of the importance of strategic silence sometimes and from that point of view, I wonder if you could discuss this tension between calling out and collaborating when you're negotiating with the likes of Steve and Mark. To me, I think it's important because I do think this is better. Okay, I think that increasingly in order to really kind of make change in the technology industry and with tech companies, we can sort of push from the bottom up but there also needs to be that connection at the top and to really sort of drive home the point to the senior most executives and investors across the sort of technology space of the importance of human rights and I commend the Berkman Klein Center for sort of, you know, fostering those discussions. I think it's a tough call to make. We used kind of every tool and the kind of activist arsenal to get the attention of senior people and this was an unusual setting. For the most part, we're working with people who are, you know, kind of the middle management, you know, managers who are working on sustainability, on human rights and whatnot and you sort of need to give them the tools to succeed so that your sort of public advocacy doesn't cut them down but you also sort of need to get through and I think to an extent, arguing from facts, arguing with nouns and verbs as opposed to adjectives and adverbs is a way to be able to sort of make your point and have the conversation and not back down from what you're asking for but sort of, you know, be able to make it in a way that the points will get through. Thank you. So the other thing that I noticed from the story that you're telling is that it was a coalition of actors that sort of coordinated almost and with like different registers and ways in which they spoke with the company, can you tell us a little about putting together the right kind of coalition? Yeah, I think you always need more people. I think that a diversity of voices can succeed in ways that are, you know, really sort of, you know, beyond belief. We had an issue that cut across political lines in the United States. Like I said, our legislation was initially supported by, that I think the first bill on conflict minerals was proposed by Sam Brownback who's a very conservative, you know, Christian Senator at the time. And so, you know, we were able to bring together kind of faith-based groups, student groups and, you know, it wasn't about building sort of, like it wasn't about getting everyone across the country to care about this issue, but it was kind of building a kind of working coalition that could sort of reach across and kind of make an influence. I will say that I think it can be a challenge. There's, in the digital rights space and on kind of digital rights issues, I think there's both an advantage and a challenge right now. The advantage is that because people who use technology, technologists and programmers and, you know, system administrators and whatnot, make for a natural coalition who understand the sort of challenges that are coming down the road when it comes to digital rights issues. But communicating those issues out to the wider world can be challenging. And I think we often sort of wind up with, you know, kind of either it's, you know, super libertarians and, you know, super left-wing folks and it's hard to get sometimes the importance of digital rights issues to resonate with that wider group. And I think that's something I want to work on. I think we all can work on. Speaking of, so this is almost like a transition into GNI, which you described a little bit in the beginning, but so my next question is going to be about secrecy and safe spaces which you flagged as you were telling the story. I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about GNI from the point of view of secrecy and safe spaces. Sure, yeah. So Global Network Initiative, GNI, we bring together our members and so there's a set of obligations for companies. There is a assessment process that verifies that companies are meeting those obligations which are really about integrating human rights and freedom of expression and privacy into their business operations and being able to, when they receive a request from the government to take down content or a handover user data, to do everything they can to resist those requests when they're overbroad. And then we provide a space for learning because the issues in the digital rights space, there's something new in the newspaper every single day. So you need to provide a space where the companies can learn together with NGOs and academics and investors. And then we work together on policy change to try to change laws around the world that are inconsistent with international human rights standards. Aspects of GNI are very secret and it's kind of a, it's a feature rather than a bug. The assessment process that looks at whether companies are meeting their commitments under GNI is confidential. It's reviewed by our board of directors including folks like Jamiah and Jess. But the reports themselves are not made public. We do a public report that has a lot of anonymized and aggregated data. The challenge we have is on the one hand, it's hard to sort of demonstrate impact when things are confidential. On the other hand, when you're talking about how a company can do things to keep a government from getting access to their data, you don't want to publicize that too much because then you're giving the government a roadmap to how to get around the things that the company is doing to resist that. So it's a challenge and a tension and we try to find ways to be more transparent about the work that we do while recognizing that confidentiality and safe space is kind of built into it. I've been reading about the GNI and the Buckman Klein Center's role about in setting it up. And so it's been really interesting watching the organization from the inside. I wonder if there's a way in which you can describe to everyone here a couple of ways in which you felt the GNI had impact that are discussable. So I think we have impact in a few different ways. So one sort of GNI has impact when more companies join GNI and sign up and make a public commitment to freedom of expression and privacy. When GNI started in 2008, 10 years ago, the three founding companies were Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. 20 of the founding 22 organizations were headquartered in the United States. So it was the global network initiative in name and aspiration, not in fact. And today we have about 60 members, half of which are from headquartered outside of the United States, including companies, a lot of mobile network operators based in Europe but operating everywhere, academics and NGOs from Latin America, from Africa, from South Asia. Last week we welcomed a new observer company, a line corporation who are a Japanese company that provide a messaging service that's popular in all parts of Asia. So as we grow and more companies kind of make these commitments, those commitments cover a wider set of users of ICT products and services around the world. We can make a difference when we work together on learning and policy. I think there are issues that GNI has helped to sort of put on the agenda, such as the sort of proliferating number of instances of internet shutdowns. We've seen a very vivid example of that and just how difficult those are, but how companies can work together with other groups on that. But ultimately like the rubber hits the road when companies take steps to protect their users by implementing our sort of principles and guidelines and by resisting sort of government demands. And a lot of that is stuff that we'll never get talked about, but I think occasionally it does. And last week I think Brad Smith from Microsoft made some comments and talked about how Microsoft was not providing AI for several kind of applications and not selling to folks, whether it was I think police in the United States in one case or to an actor in an unfree state, according to Freedom House. So that's where the rubber hits the road, but that's often the hardest things to talk about. This is true. GNI has been such an interesting model and such a success in the ways in which you described, but the tech world has also changed since it was set up and since the principles were drafted. And so if you had to think about the challenges for an organization like GNI with all the issues that are emerging, how would you describe them? Well, I think so GNI is focused on freedom of expression and privacy and sort of privacy with regard to government demands for data. It was created to solve the challenges that happened in the mid 2000s as Western technology companies went into places like China and found themselves having to comply with local laws that were inconsistent with international human rights standards. So it was about trying to figure out ways that companies can take down as little information as possible, hand over as little data as possible. Those issues are still very much kind of in the headlines and of great concern, but there's this whole wider set of challenges now. And increasingly I think people are looking at whether it's hate speech, harassment, terrorist content, you name the issue. There's a lot more, well, we want you to take down this content because this content is harmful or may harm someone's rights. But we don't want you to take down this other information because we want you to respect freedom of expression and privacy. That's a really hard challenge. And I think that all of us need to be sort of engaged in figuring out the right thing. I think that the multi-stakeholder kind of model that GNI uses is one tool in the tool belt of ways of working with companies on digital rights, but there are many others from legislation and regulation to kind of all sorts of other ways of sort of organizing and thinking about these things. But I think it's a much harder problem and as technology develops, it's only going to get more and more difficult as you look at things like artificial intelligence. Thank you. So I will not monopolize David. I'm just going to stop here and say that it's been such a privilege speaking with you and getting to watch GNI and learn from the inside. Back to you, Jess. I'm sure everyone else has questions. Yes, I know. There's a lot of that. Different from the Kimberley process. And I ask this because we were sold the same narrative with the Kimberley process and everybody took advantage of it and we're part of scope one. What are the lessons learned from the process to ensure that this actually makes sense? Yeah, it's a very good question. So the Kimberley process was created to address the issue of conflict diamonds in the early 2000s, I think. And that was one of several examples that we sort of looked at when we were starting to figure out how can we address this issue of minerals in eastern Congo. So we looked at things like the Kimberley process. We looked at work around labor rights and labor conditions. We looked at things like the extractive industry transparency initiative. And so in particular with the Kimberley process of which I'm not an expert, I believe that is entirely a governmental organization. So governments are the only ones at the table who are formal members. If I'm not mistaken, I could be mistaken. And it is dedicated to deal with one, the issue of kind of rebel groups or non-state actors dealing in these kinds of resources. And it was, it did not address the issue of say, elements of the army or state security actors dealing with those diamonds. So there were some institutional flaws there. We tried to sort of correct for that in what we were proposing and what we did together with many, many, many other organizations, other NGOs, UN experts, et cetera. And these things are always a work in progress. I was looking yesterday at a recent report from an organization that's been monitoring the situation on the ground. I'm not doing that anymore, but it's a constant work in progress. You have these mechanisms set up to validate minds on the ground in parts of Eastern Congo and you always have people trying to game the system. But the latest that I've seen seems to be that these kinds of responsible sourcing initiatives are making progress, but it's always kind of a two steps forward, one step back situation. I've taken on a couple of different roles. Your role enough was very different from the role that you have on the staff of GNI with the sort of attendant confidential spaces that GNI creates. We have a lot of students in the room who are perhaps thinking about careers in this space. Could you talk a little bit about the dynamics of working in those different roles and the advantages and disadvantages of each and what might have led you to a space like GNI? Sure, yeah. No, when I first started working with companies, I went to a meeting of this industry association when it was meeting in Washington and I got to be the person who comes in from civil society and pounds on the table and says, blood is on your hands. You have to do something about this. And that's, it's fun, but ultimately, there are many different ways to make a difference. And what I found from my work on Congo was while, ultimately, there's only so much you can do to sort of when you're dealing with a leader of a rebel group or army units in Eastern Congo, you don't have the leverage that you have when you're dealing with large companies. And so there's an ability to sort of work with them to try to achieve effects sort of back through the supply chain that was appealing to me and which led me to my role in GNI, which is much more sitting in the middle and being a facilitator and trying to figure out ways for everybody to kind of work together to create solutions. And that can be challenging as well because you don't always, it's both difficult when people ask sort of critical questions about what you're doing, but to be like, no, I'm kind of an arbiter. But I think that for students, there's no shortage of, I wish that kind of business and human rights wasn't a growth industry, because that would mean maybe we're sort of solving some of these problems and often they're just proliferating, but I think there are roles, whether it's within companies for NGOs and within government. I mean, I think that you sort of, the approach of sort of teaming up between civil society and government to sort of work on companies and work in a teaming up civil society and companies to work on government, those kinds of forging those connections and alliances is a way to make a difference. Other questions, yeah. In most of your talk, you were talking about tech companies and coordination of responses among tech companies, but I had some questions about that slide you put up at the very end, because at the top were, you know, Microsoft, Intel, Apple, so on. At the bottom, you had a bunch of general merchandisers like Sears, Walmart, Costco. I was wondering why, how are these two things related to each other and why were they on the same list? And the other question is, if Costco is a company that's doing really badly, they pride themselves on being socially responsible and it seems like they ought to be approachable on this. Yeah, so those companies are on that list because that 2017 ranking was looking at the jewelry industry as well as electronics and Costco and Walmart and folks like that are actually the biggest, some of the biggest jewelers in the United States. And it's, but it's a really good question because we sort of went at the tech companies and the electronics companies, but you know, these products are used in, these minerals and metals are used in everything. And it was very interesting when we were pushing for this legislation because we had sort of spent a year and a half engaging with the tech companies. Many of them were sort of supportive, more or less of a legislative approach that we need kind of common rules for everyone. And so we found a way to work together on legislation. Then when the bill was kind of moving forward when it got rolled into the Dodd-Frank Act, the rest of industry sort of woke up. And so the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce and all of these folks were like, whoa, we gotta stop this. And they have been the most prominent kind of groups calling for both to first stop the legislation, then stop the rulemaking process, then lawsuits and have continued to fight it. But the companies that sort of were involved from the beginning and were most kind of had taken the heat were ones who then saw a positive aspect to it. And interestingly, in the past few years, I'm not sure where it stands right now, but efforts by the Trump administration to either defund or get rid of the legislation have been opposed, including by technology companies like Apple who've actually engaged with the government to say, no, we need this. I'm sure that my former colleagues from the NF Project have been in touch with them, but I will find out. Thank you. One thing that struck me about the tale you retold is that there was no, as kind of a complete outsider to this work, no mention of a bottom line. So is that something that people actually don't care about? Steve Jobs is much more concerned with his attention or are these just veiled ways of talking about the bottom line? So very good question. And it was one, I think early on, there was kind of assumption that there's no way that it would be too expensive for companies to really kind of do this kind of supply chain tracing and audibility. And the more we looked into it, apparently, that was not so much the case. And it actually was only a couple of pennies per product or something like that that would have taken it. But I do think that the push from the bottom line, which is what has led to global supply chains being what they are with sort of things being produced as fast and as cheaply as possible, sort of led to this situation in the first place. And I think sort of awareness, once you, I think oftentimes the solutions to these things may actually be less expensive than people think they are, but it's what is expensive in terms of social cost is sort of get everything as fast and as cheap as possible. Thank you. Get around to it, Iran. Then I have another question for you. Thank you for the presentation and the guidelines that you offered. So given the intricacies of issues like hate speech and the significance of the contextual problems and the history, can you talk a little bit about what mechanisms are in place in GNI to make sure that you understand all the dimensions of the problems and how you interact with local groups? So that's a very good question. And so we are kind of expertise and insight into these issues comes via our members and in particular the human rights organizations and academics who are working on them. And it is uneven because the level of expertise on all of the different local situations around the world comes up to our organization unevenly. We are, I think one of our highest priorities right now is to like fully globalize the global network initiative and to make sure that we have members, both companies and non-company members from all over the world. And that is, we're making progress but we still have a long way to go in that regard. We are out there sort of trying to meet with people and sort of learn and listen and hear. My colleague, Nikki, who was previously at the Berkman Klein Center, was in Lagos today doing a roundtable with companies and civil society organizations. We're gonna be at Wright's Con in Tunisia in a few months. So we try to get out there and hear from people. One challenge we have that we're working on so multi-stakeholder initiatives like GNI, according to the UN guiding principles on business human rights and just good practice, need to have kind of public engagement mechanisms and grievance mechanisms so that if someone feels like they have been wrongly impacted or have something to say to us that they can get through to us. That's a harder problem to solve in the sort of digital space than it is offline where if you look at a mining community, well, there's the affected communities, the people who live around that mine and you can go and talk to them. And creating those channels when you're talking about a company with billions of users is a problem that we're trying to solve and where we could use help. So my follow-up to Erin's great question is what observations do you have? And I'm interested in David's answer to this question but also Chinmai's answer to this question representing first CCG at GNI. And now as an independent academic, as GNI has begun to globalize, how has that changed the organization? Well, it's been incredibly valuable. We now have academic and NGO members from Chile and Argentina and Nigeria and Uganda and India and South Korea. We need to evolve so GNI, when it started, the organization was the founders who were the board of directors, who were a largely American group of people who'd been meeting in conference rooms in the West over a couple of years and had become to be very good friends and had sort of developed trust among them that allowed them to tackle really difficult topics and difficult conversations. Bringing people, other people into that is essential because it's kind of myopic to think that those people can sort of do it on their own. So we've been trying to bring groups from the rest of the world into GNI. That can be a challenge, it can be a challenge for just logistical purposes. You're trying to schedule calls at a time zone that works for everyone. Doesn't work very well and so people who are calling in from Delhi are at a disadvantage and there's sort of ways that we kind of work together and interact and communicate that need to be sort of updated to be sort of more inclusive and reflect diverse voices. And so those are the things that we're thinking about right now but I'm curious to get your perspective, Chinlay. It's been super interesting for me because we joined GNI I think in 2013 or 2014 with Berkman's support actually. And initially it was great, it was well worth getting on a call at 1 a.m. because we would, it would be one hour's like deep dive into an issue that I didn't even know was an issue and then I'd know all about it by the time everyone in India woke up to the fact that this is a thing. And so it was fantastic as we were leading into this, as we were sort of getting into the space, the learning and development but then as David described, there's also a board and GNI has been diversifying its board and that's been great too because over time that means that you build relationships because you have to with people from everywhere. We've been supported quite a lot by all the board members. It's been great to have friends like Jess on the board with us. And so I imagine that like most things it takes time before the relationships form again but I can see them happening and I can see everyone working towards them happening. So it's been good. I think from our point of view, so sometimes the way in which a human rights issue can impact a global South country can be completely different from the way in which it works here. And if you speak with activists or with academics from the global South, our take on what needs to be done can be completely different. And I'm not saying right, I'm just saying different. And so it's been great because we have this conversation and we start to understand what the challenges of working at it from the North or from within a company are and they start to understand why it is that we're so agitated about the issue. And I think that the common ground is definitely a better common ground than when we're not talking. We have time for one more question, Hilary. Oh, we'll do two. We'll give Hilary and Cibela. Thanks so much for your talk. I'm curious as we're seeing a lot of internal organizing at tech companies right now, how you see that there should be connections or maybe shouldn't be connections or when it makes sense to work with organizers internally. Yeah. I have a similar question to what Hilary said and what this Irene said. You had mentioned that when it comes to the conflict minerals it was, you initially thought it would be an expensive process but it was actually cheaper than you thought. And I think I've heard some of the feedback from companies like Facebook that to hire people to monitor content or to create AI to filter through the hate speech is very expensive. So do you have any ideas on how you can sort of deal with that argument or somehow lower the cost through technology or some other means? So both great questions. I think in terms of the activism among tech, the activism among tech workers is really kind of inspiring and encouraging thing. I think that for folks inside a company they can use the sort of external commitments that a company has made to hold their company to those points and so that can be a tool. It may not always make sense to sort of work together but I think things can still sort of push in the same direction. And I think when it comes to the costs I think companies can afford a lot of these things. And I think that it takes particularly the sort of technical experts from outside of companies whether it's academia and elsewhere to be able to argue these things based on their own expertise and to push back and to make sure that you understand that what the real challenges are. And those may be difficult and they may take resources. I'm personally a little skeptical of AI's ability to solve things that depend so much on context as hate speech and things like that. I think that needs people and a lot more people but I think that making that case is something that we all have to do. Thank you so much, David and thank you Chin Mai for your role as a discussant and thank you all for being here with us today. I'm sure David will stick around for a little bit if you have one-on-one questions but join me in thanking our speaker. Thank you.