 So I wanted to welcome everyone to the New America Foundation. I'm Thomas Gideon. I'm the director of technology at the Open Technology Institute. OTI, as some of you may know, is an operational think tank that brings many disciplines together to collaborate on improving access to and control of open technologies. In supporting one of those disciplines, the one directly tasked with the research and development of open technologies such as the Commission Wireless Project, I especially appreciate the purpose of this event and this event series, this wider multi-city, multi-continent series of bringing people of different backgrounds and experiences together. My team's unofficial motto is, not even spaceships are built in a vacuum. The technologists at OTI work alongside planners and researchers, advocates, and organizers to ensure that the technology they build serves local needs as we find them out in the world. Third Monday is an event series in more than nine cities now. I think the 10th or 11th just came online. And as I said, multiple continents, three at last count. And it strives to support similar close connections between local activists and technologists. Each city brings its own particular character into the mix. Here in DC, the realms of activists and technologists often overlap with that of policy advocacy. Our speaker this evening, Catherine Marr, director of strategy and communications at Access Now, knows this better than most, working very much as she does directly at this intersection. It's my pleasure to welcome her here to discuss with us work that Access Now along with EFF and Privacy International are leading with the support of hundreds of NGOs around the world and applying human rights principles to communication surveillance. Welcome, Catherine. Thank you so much for that kind introduction. I'm delighted to be here to introduce the international principles for the application of human rights to communication surveillance. I'm very much here as the representative of a group that is far greater than myself, that includes literally hundreds of organizations that have come on board as signatories in support of these principles, as well as dozens of drafters who contributed to the process at hand. With all that we have recently learned regarding the scope and scale of government surveillance at home and abroad, there has never been a more urgent time to address the question of fundamental rights in the context of ubiquitous digital communications. Here in the United States, we have heard subvences put forward pertaining to the legality of a variety of surveillance programs under United States law and their impact on US citizens. Whether these surveillance programs are legal in the United States is very much a matter to be determined. I look forward with anticipation to the outcome of a variety of pending legal challenges, filed by many partner organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. However, we can be much clearer on the fact that these programs are likely in violation of international human rights principles, including those enshrined in international law. Even if the rights of US citizens are protected by oversight and due process, the Obama administration and congressional leadership have been freely acknowledged the fact that the targeting of foreign nationals is a key component of these programs. This intrusive blanket targeting infringes on these universal human rights, the right to privacy, the right to free association, and expression. And while the United States seeks to settle issues pertaining to the constitutionality of these programs, there is a whole other body of international laws to consider, including Article 17 and 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States is a signatory. If you look around the world, virtually every national constitution and international legal framework enshrines the right to due process and privacy in some form. In the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, this is described as prohibiting arbitrary and unlawful interference with privacy and that everyone is entitled to the protection of this right. Similarly, the US Fourth Amendment talks about unreasonable search and seizure and the need for warrants issued on the basis of probable cause. So in October of last year, in 2012, in Brussels, a group of more than 40 experts in technology and with backgrounds in industry, academia, the legal sector, and of course civil society came together, forming the basis for what is now known as the international principles on the application of human rights to communication surveillance. The intent of this original gathering was to offer clarifying guidance around the access to data and content in the context of law enforcement. But as the process continued, the discussion necessarily widened to include questions related to the national security state and surveillance practice. The principles, the outcome of this discussion seek to put forward an evaluative framework for assessing concepts, such as when is surveillance arbitrary? When is it unreasonable? And how does surveillance take place in a way that is grounded in international law and jurisprudence? They're intended to provide clear and pragmatic guidance for governments to respect the fundamental rights of digital users while engaging in efforts to protect the security of all citizens. By clarifying the processes by which access to digital data occurs, the principles also seem to seek to assist policymakers to evaluate whether current laws and regulations comport with international human rights obligations. The process, which took nearly a year, was shepherded by a committed group of 15 civil society organizations. Together, they analyzed more than 60 texts of national constitutions containing articles or other language related to communications privacy, including the constitutions of the United States, Peru, Germany, Kosovo, South Korea, Moldova, Japan, Vietnam, Rwanda, truly a massive global undertaking. As well as international human rights law and jurisprudence, such as the European Court of Human Rights, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and various different articles ranging from the American Declaration of Rights and the Duties of Man to the Arab Charter on Human Rights. The process, which finished in this July, came out with 13 clear principles. The drafters had to confront some significant questions around choosing language that met the needs of the global community while being relevant to national frameworks, deciding whether or not metadata should be included as protected information and determining issues such as how specific the language of proportionality should be. At the end of the process, three core organizations, including my own, as well as Privacy International and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, emerged as coordinators to help build awareness, secure signatories, and push for the adoption and implementation of these principles in practice. To date, the principles have more than 215 signatures from around the world, including human rights organizations, legal departments of universities, and independent media groups. This includes 20 signatories from the United States, as well as OpenITP, the host of us here this evening, as well as FreePress, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and Internews. This is very much civil society's effort to proactively engage with policymakers and other stakeholders in protecting the fundamental rights of all people. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the principles themselves. As I mentioned, they were nearly a year in development. They included 15 core civil society organizations and are drawn on the basis of more than 60 different constitutional frameworks. The outcome, the 13 principles, have been endorsed by the 215 global signatories and the 20 US global signatories. Now the content of the principles, there are 13 include legality, which is the idea that any limitation on the right to privacy must be prescribed by law. That is, in practice, any surveillance that is conducted by law enforcement, intelligent agencies, or other government-affiliated institutions must be clearly spelled out in the plain text of the law so it is accessible and foreseeable to the public. That means that the public is aware of the way, the scope, the procedures, type, and duration under which the state may use, and the relevant law that authorizes that surveillance. They must have legitimate aim. That is, laws should only permit communication surveillance by specified state authorities to achieve a very legitimate aim that corresponds to a important legal interest. That is, a compelling state interest that is one that is so important, such as the protection of public safety, that it outweighs the individual rights of the users. Justification for this surveillance must be spelled out in law and can be conducted only in the furtherance of these previously specified legal interests. A very relevant example from the news that took place over the course of this weekend is that one of the journalists associated with some of the disclosures that we know around the NSA programs that have been in the news recently, Glenn Greenwald, his partner was recently detained while passing through international transit on the basis of an anti-terrorism law, which was the basis for his detention. Now, whether that law in practice is directly related to that detention would be something that would need to be spelled out very clearly with regards to legitimate aim. Necessity. That is to say that the information sought can only be, or the surveillance can only be undertaken for which surveillance actions can only be undertaken when there are no clear other means of acquiring the necessary information sought. And when the information to be acquired is of vital importance to addressing the issue at hand or vital to the investigation. Adequacy. Any instance of communication surveillance authorized by law must be appropriate. That means in practice that the type or form of action with regards to the surveillance, sorry, for surveillance action undertaking must be strictly adequate. It must go no further than what is required to obtain the relevant information. Proportionality. Any, it must, surveillance, excuse me, surveillance is a highly intrusive act. It directly interferes with the individual right to privacy and has deeply problematic impacts on the right to freedom of opinion, expression, and assembly, which are the foundations of democratic societies. Therefore, any surveillance must be proportionate. It must weigh the benefits gained from acquiring the information against the severity of the intrusion on the fundamental right of the person affected. Competent judicial authority. That is to say that there must have a judge that is independent from the other branches of government who's familiar with the issues at hand and has the authority to decide these matters. Determinations related to communication surveillance must be made by a judge that is impartial and independent. Due process. States must guarantee and respect the individual's rights by ensuring that lawful procedures that govern interference are properly enumerated in law. That is to say that the principles must be applied in a procedural manner that is consistently practiced and clear to the general public. User notification. Individuals should be notified of any decision around their communications. Currently, there are many practices in place by which governments have access to user communications through third-party providers. And those third-party providers are gagged from actually disclosing to the user that their communications have been accessed. User notification is a clear part of the principles and an important component of notification so that that user can seek right to remedy or redress. Transparency. States should be absolutely transparent and clear about the scope and use of their surveillance communications techniques and powers. This is a very easy one. Just like the legality requirement that requires that citizens be able to understand what the law authorizes, states must be transparent about the procedures, scope, type and duration of surveillance that they engage in. This means disclosing when surveillance has occurred and under what statute or law it has occurred. Recently, the Center for Democracy and Technology based here in D.C. was involved in organizing a letter that was signed by many of the companies implicated in the NSA Prism Program as well as a number of civil rights in the human, civil society and human rights organizations in calling for greater transparency from the U.S. government regarding the scope and extent of its national security programs. Public oversight. States must establish independent oversight mechanisms to ensure the accountability of surveillance practices. At the moment, surveillance is a practice that takes place in the dark. It is important that there is public oversight to address misconduct and rein in abuses. This could take the form of an empowered ombudsman or oversight board that sits outside the three branches of government such as executive, legislative and judicial and examine the way that surveillance laws are adopted and implemented as well as bring cases on behalf of citizens. Integrity of communications and systems. This is a critical point and while it may not necessarily be clear with regards to its link to international human rights principles, it is about defending the networks at a fundamental infrastructure level in order to prevent rights violations. Surveillance and monitoring capabilities such as deep packet inspections and backdoors offer the opportunity for systematic abuse. In particular, backdoors into networks weaken network integrity as a whole making the network inherently insecure for all users by creating additional vulnerabilities that any bad actor can exploit. A good example of this here with regards to communications in the United States is the proposal for the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, second version, Kalea II as its colloquial known, that would propose mandating that commercial service providers such as Facebook and Skype incorporate backdoors into their platforms. These platforms would work or these backdoors would weaken the security of these platforms as a whole, impose cost on providers and rather than narrowly targeting specific users who are the targets of investigations, broadly expose all users to potential surveillance. Safeguards for international cooperation. In response to the changes in flow of information and with regards to communications, technologies and services, states increasingly need to seek access to information in the law enforcement and national security context from providers that may not reside within their own borders. This is absolutely part of the process of, this is absolutely part of due process and a critical component of a number of investigations, many of which are entirely legitimate. Unfortunately, at the moment, it's unclear, it's often unclear rather, the processes and mechanisms by which states cooperate with regards to information sharing. Within this exchange of global digital information, it is important to have clear and consistent ways in which countries access and transfer that information, such as mutual legal assistance treaties to facilitate this communications transfer. This allows for greater due process, a record of information sharing across states and a specification or and should include a specification that in the context of discrepancies between state standards that the higher level of protection for the individual applies. Finally, safeguards against illegitimate access. States should enact legislation criminalizing illegal communication surveillance by public and private actors. We've seen many instances of abuse by public and private actors and so the law should provide sufficient legal or sufficient civil and criminal penalties for illegal surveillance, protections for whistleblowers and avenues of redress for those affected individuals. Anyone who accesses digital information without the procedure set out above should be penalized and those whose rights are violated should receive retribution. These are the 13 core principles and they are available at necessaryandproportionate.org. Now, they launched in July of this year, so just over a month ago and as I mentioned, there are more than 200 different signatories to these principles. The next steps forward this September include presentation of the principles at the UN Human Rights Council in mid-September at a side event and the various different coordinating organizations involved will be urging the UN Human Rights Council to adopt the report of special rapporteur Frank LaRuse, recent report on surveillance and human rights, as well as integrate these principles into a binding resolution at the United Nations level. At the US level, we know that a number of organizations are seeking to integrate these principles into pending legislation regarding national security surveillance and we expect that organizations around the world as signatories will be doing the same. Thanks. So I wanna borrow a little bit more of your time before we open up to the usual discussion amongst ourselves. That's really the focus of Third Monday. I know this is a bit unusual. Before that, I would like to give you a chance to ask Catherine some questions about her work and her presentation, but I'm gonna exercise moderator's prerogative and ask a few questions first just to unpack some of the things that you talked about, some of the things involved in her work. Starting with really, if you could speak a little bit more about the driving force behind the formation of the principles, so maybe what some of the expectations of the NGOs that have been leading the development over the span of time that this has been developed, what it is that they thought might happen with those principles, how they might be put to use in some way. Sure, so the formation of the principles and the initial impetus for this group of organizations getting together was actually very much in response to what's known as the UK Snoopers Charter, a bill that had three major components that would have created new power for companies to collect specific information, create a system for a public body to have access to that information and make changes to the regulatory authorities within the UK that would have been able to access information for surveillance purposes. So Privacy International, which is a UK-based organization, convened a group as I mentioned of 40 different organizations to come together with regards to an understanding, trying to create a better understanding of international law, and from that, or better understanding of the various different principles and actions currently at play at the time in 2012, and begin to sort of create a framework by which organizations, both in civil society, but also the private sector would have clarity around the way that they engaged with law enforcement agencies. This process led to the creation of principles. These principles have certainly a precedent. I mean, you can look to 1996 in the creation of the Johannesburg principles on national security and human rights, for example, as an example of when civil society has been able to come together, create a set of principles that then become integrated into the basic understanding of the way that we conduct all sorts of different national security activities, surveillance activities, and the like within the context of human rights law. And so I think that the real idea with regards to the drafters was how does this become an international norm? How does this become a touchstone that people can refer to? How does this become something that is an effective component within sort of the existing digital rights and human rights space? I wanna come back to that before I turn questions over to the audience. But I also wanna fast forward a little bit to where we are now and what is no doubt on many of the attendees' minds in terms of the mass surveillance that's been, the story of which has been unfolding here in the past several months. And there have been a lot of parallel efforts around this, the Stop Watching Us campaign, the letter from Best Bits Internet Governance Coalition to the, I'm gonna resist the urge to go to the acronym here, but people will recognize it who work with the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and of course you made a reference to the other joint letter. So if you could talk a little bit about perhaps how those bookends of the act in the UK, the circumstance here maybe informs the fact that you have been working on this up through the release in July. You're still working on this in terms of socializing this to relevant government bodies and agencies to achieve that touchstone that you articulate so well. What is the story in between? How has the work on this been responsive to the latest revelations? So I think this is interesting. As I mentioned, the principles initially were designed to deal with law enforcement requests. And that is to say, the sort of run of the mill every day, the law enforcement bodies approach consumer service providers or ISPs and request information, whether that be metadata or content data about an ongoing investigation. And over the course of the year that these principles have been developed, certainly more recently since the revelations about some of the NSA and GCHQ programs, the drafters of the principles went back and said and sort of asked themselves the question of whether there would need to be existing or modifications to the principles in order to address some of these concerns about national security. What I found so fascinating about the process is that the drafters all agreed that in fact the communications principles that have been set forward within a law enforcement context held up to the national security context, which I think speaks to the fact that the principles are universally and broadly applicable, but also that some of the existing secrecy and justifications around broad permissions with regards to national security are perhaps unjustified if these principles could equally apply within a more conventional law enforcement context as well as the national security context. So fast forward a little further out going back to those expectations. Given what you talked about in terms of the launch of the principles in July, the work being done since some of the points of harmonization that you touched upon with work elsewhere in the human rights space, what does the world look like with that keystone, that norm, that international norm with those principles in place? What does that look like to the technologists, to the activists, to the policy advocates, a world war or maybe 6, 12, 18 months further on from this? I might even go further than that. I think that the creation of international human rights norms, as we know from past experience, is something that takes a significant amount of time. I made reference to the Johannesburg principles from 1996. Now, those are principles that have certainly gained attraction, not only recently, but recently with regards to some of the revelations that we know around programs such as these, but those principles are now 1996, 17 years old, is that right? This is a process that we anticipate will certainly take some time. The, I think the end goal or the sort of midterm goal at the moment is this UN resolution that I made reference to. I think that would be supported very much at the international level because many international groups do see the UN as a key arbiter of rights and an excellent place to petition to in reference to. Over the long term from discussions with members of the coalition, I think that the objective is that these principles will become so well socialized that any sort of proposal with regards to legislation on surveillance will necessarily have to refer back to these 13 core principles as legislatures and other bodies consider the implementation of surveillance at a state level. I think that as an activist or a human rights organization, this is an incredibly useful tool. As a policymaker or legislator, these provide guidance so that when you are drafting potential legislation, if you're looking to reform existing protocols or legislation, they become a very useful test. And certainly I reference the sort of network and communications integrity. As a technologist, I think they provide wonderful guidance for what it is that we should anticipate and hope for with all communication systems, which is complete network and system integrity without the inclusion of backdoors or other forms of interference. Great, I think that's an interesting picture to look forward to on a longer timeline. Although we'll see as these things accelerate, hopefully. The experience that you've had adapting with the recent events gives you some experience in some point of triangulation, perhaps future events and testing. It sounds like in a good constructive fruitful way, testing the principles, anticipating what might be coming next. So I promise I wouldn't monopolize Catherine, so I would like to turn over to the audience for questions. We do have some volunteers with mics in the audience. So if you'd hold your question until the mic comes to you, since we are live streaming and broadcasting this, so all of the audience at home can hear you as well. Daniel Burninger, VCXC. You didn't mention the internet. So the NSA goes back to the 50s, which is an entirely different world of communication. Are there any bright red lines that you see? Is there anybody support sort of a John Perry Barlow Declaration of Independence? Actually, you can't go there sort of thing. I think that that is a great question. We don't make reference to the internet and that's for a variety of reasons. We make reference to digital communications, certainly. I think the expectation is very much that the modalities of communication will certainly change going forward. If you look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is a document that dates to the first part of the last century, what you'll see is that, particularly with regards to articles on the right to free expression, they actually don't make any specific reference to a mode of communications. And I think that that's something that we very much look to adopt with regards to these principles is if this is to become a touchstone document going forward, it needs to anticipate whatever forms of communication we might see in the future. I don't know about the bright red lines as sort of the declaration of cyber independence, but I do think that there are certainly groups that are out there looking at those issues and it's useful to have a whole spectrum of organizations and sort of positions on the matter. This is very much designed to be a collective understanding within a pragmatic framework that is a tool of guidance for policymakers, but also is a tool of defense for human rights advocates. Any other questions here in the front? Soren Dayton, the one that surprises me the most is, in some sense, the user notification. If you take the analogy to, say, law enforcement, phone tapping, there isn't really a notification process, as I understand it, and I could very well not understand that, but I'm also struck that in the European Parliament's sort of reaction to this, they included user notification in their early July amended motion that was led by a whole series of people in reaction to the first wave of stories out of the Guardian and the Post. And so, one, can you explain a little bit more of the context to the user notification? And two, I've always been struck that the European Parliament, in particular, because it doesn't really have any security apparatus associated with it. I mean, none of the European institutions do. That's the first place that something like this could really come to at least a vote in a parliament without some of the other pressures, and could you comment on that? So user notification, as I mentioned earlier, is very much, along with transparency, understood to be the touchstone for the beginning of redress with regards to rights violations. If you don't have access to information about the fact that a rights violation has occurred, it's incredibly difficult for you as a user to be able to seek any form of remedy with regards to that violation. On the fact that it's included within the principles, as I mentioned, the principles themselves come out of a survey of a variety of different bodies of international law, international human rights tools, constitutions, and so we do see discrepancies from state to state. It's very much something that's preference within a European context that you might not have here in the United States as a sort of core point of action. I take your point with regards to notification with an ongoing wiretap, for example, that would certainly interfere with the process of an investigation. When we talk about user notification, what we're often referring to is the removal of issues, or the removal of tools such as gag orders on companies with regards to disclosing the fact that this sort of request for data has actually occurred. We know that particularly here in the United States, national security letters, for example, have been used, that have tied the hands and the voices of companies with regards to their ability to disclose that any form of such information grab has happened, not even necessarily to the users, but to that specific user, but to users as a whole. And so we really want to make sure that there are provisions in place for these different companies, whether they're private sector actors or service providers, to be able to disclose and provide that degree of transparency to their users, even just so that users can make an informed choice about the services that they engage with. One question about your note status. You know, I don't, I'm happy to follow up and give you my email address afterwards and I've got colleagues in Brussels I'd be delighted to ask. Hi, Kevin Bankston, Center for Democracy and Technology. Thank you for having this event and I know that the principles were in process long before the NSA revelations, but it's very auspicious that they debuted at this time, particularly when there's been very little in the discourse about it, about the rights of non-U.S. persons. I wanted to highlight a couple of things that have been mentioned already. First, spinning off of your comments about transparency, a joint letter by a variety of companies and civil society organizations demanding more surveillance transparency, which is still open to signers at CDT.org backslash we need to know, but more importantly, I wanted to highlight something else that Thomas mentioned, which is the joint letter to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which went public, I believe earlier today, that staff from my organization and New America and Access and dozens of other organizations worked on and have signed, trying to inject that discussion into the debate over NSA surveillance and in particular get the P-Clob to consider the rights of non-U.S. persons and the human rights of everyone when preparing its report on the NSA programs. And so I just wanted to highlight that and the fact that because the deadline for those comments is not until September 15th, that letter is also still open to signature by organizations and by individuals via the Best Bits Coalition at bestbits.net backslash P-Clob, just because it's so fun to say, P-Clob or Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Thanks. I think we had a question here and then we'll get to the folks on the side of the room. Yeah, George Lyle from Internews. I just had a question about perspective. People have been talking about NSA and spying at least since World War II and it really started to pick up steam in the 70s. So today, is it a matter of governments are truly doing more spying or that the spying has gotten three times easier because of advances in technology? I'm unfortunately not a historian of surveillance. I would suggest certainly that what you can draw a distinction with regards to the NSA is spying on foreign governments and foreign governments as targets, which was historically their mandate and purpose and the sort of increase and diffusion of the collection of information with regards to private individuals. I think that that is an evolution that we've seen with regards to intelligence agencies at a global level and that's in response to a variety of issues. Certainly the emergence of non-state actors as a sort of primary narrative concern within the national security community. As opposed to with regards to whether these intelligence agencies are doing more spying, I think that there is certainly an argument that's been articulated that addresses the fact that the cost for spying or the cost for surveillance has plummeted precipitously with regards to given the advances in technology and the ability to do massive data storage and to conduct the sort of three hop graph analysis that the NSA and other, certainly other intelligence agencies have the ability to do. And so if you do have decreased costs and increased ability, yes, I think that it's probably fairly safe to say that the amount of data that is acquired if not the collected under NSA definitions with regards to interpretation or analysis has certainly gone up dramatically. We had a question on the side of the room, right there. Hi, I'm Chris Doughton with the National Democratic Institute. Now that these new principles are out there and being promoted, how would you suggest that civil society on the international stage get involved? How can they help promote this either domestically or as an international collective effort? Well, there are 215 civil society signatories. We would love that to be 500, 700, 1,000. The signatory process is open to all. I mentioned that it includes everything from human rights groups to independent independent media groups. So it really is open to a broad variety of individuals. And so if you and your own work or any member of this audience works with organizations that are looking or would be interested in participating, by all means. Thomas raised the question with me earlier about whether these principles would ultimately evolve in some way. I don't necessarily know that something like that is on the table now, but by participating as a signatory at this current stage that would open the door for such organizations to provide input going forward. Within the domestic context, the signatories and the sort of coordinators of this campaign to receive more signatories have a variety of guidance as to how organizations can go to their legislators and their policy makers and use these principles as a tool in their setting of policy in the domestic context. And certainly at the international stage, the more support that is afforded to efforts at the human rights council level, the more likely there will be success with regards to a resolution on human rights and surveillance. And I think that that's something that we're really looking forward to. The previous report by a special rapporteur Frank LaRue on human rights and surveillance failed as with regards to being adopted into a resolution because it did not have full support of the members of the human rights council, including the United States, it declined to endorse fully the report partially in because the report actually made specific reference to the foreign intelligence surveillance act. This all was prior to the recent NSA revelations. So gaining that universal support, ensuring that that goes to a resolution, that's something that the international community is extraordinarily well positioned to do and would encourage that sort of participation. And of course afterwards, I'm happy to provide any of my contact information and my colleagues as well as the other organizers as to how we can provide that direct assistance. Hi, Griffin Poiz from the Open Technology Institute. You mentioned as part of the 13 principles, the formation of an independent court to actually overlook sort of this surveillance, whether it's broad spectrum or more tightly enacted. Would that be something closer to the Hague? Or would that be something like a more independent FISA court like as we have now? That's a great question. The principles are not prescriptive in the sense that they don't put forward the idea of an international court. The idea is very much that oversight at the judicial level, competent judicial authority should be integrated into all decision making around access and collection of data. So that would happen with regards to individual requests, specific warrants and the like. The idea of having an independent sort of ombudsman, which is I think the other thing maybe that you're making reference to, is the idea that that would be an independent entity that has sort of a, has a sort of longitudinal perspective that understands the history and the context of surveillance as it occurs within the national context, but is also independent of executive pressure or legislative pressure and could provide the sort of as act as an advocate on behalf of citizens, be able to potentially file a case on behalf of those citizens, would really depend on the specific national context, but the principles are very much designed to be reflective of a national or domestic context as opposed to trying to create some sort of additional super national body. Back to the perspective question. So in 1971, Cointel Pro ended in the United States and then three years later, we had the Privacy Act of 74. Is there any chance in this country, I think the one surprising bit for me, is there sort of political energy to do something similar in this country? I mean, I can't speak to specific legislation. I will make note of the fact that ever since the revelations were the guards to NSA spying, here in the United States, we've seen a variety of different proposed legislation put forward, including the Amash Kanyers Amendment that recently went to a vote that actually failed by just almost insignificant number of votes, very much tied to political leadership issues here in the United States. And with the legislation that we've seen put forward, aside from the Amash Kanyers Amendment, I think that there are things that we've seen that are very much in line with the way that the principles would seek to reform surveillance practice as to whether we'll see anything like a renewed church committee that is empowered with the authority to fully investigate and provide transparency around ongoing actions. It's absolutely a hope of mine and I know that in speaking with the international community, it's a hope as well. I think that Kevin from CBT made excellent reference to the fact that ongoing activities and discourse have focused very much on the rights of U.S. citizens and so any form of action at a congressional level would ideally include a narrowing of the scope of surveillance, not necessarily on the basis of national affiliation but on the basis of reducing the overall amount of information acquired and analyzed which would have significant impacts with regards to reducing the number of innocent non-U.S. persons who are also subjected to surveillance by these ongoing programs. Any other questions? All right, then I guess it's just left for me to thank Catherine once again, both for the presentation, a deep dive on the principles, your patience for answering my questions, the fantastic questions from the audience, although no doubt folks recognize some of the names of organizations as being those that are working alongside on these principles and it's then just left to turn over to the rest of the evening at this point in terms of there should be some residual refreshments, well, I hope, on the back table and along the backside there and I would encourage folks, we have the space for another hour or so for folks to make introductions to themselves. I'm happy to facilitate a group introduction all around with the folks that are here, although you've heard some speakers that may have sparked your interest that you wanna talk to more based on the questions that they put forward to help advance the discussion. Thank you again so much, Catherine. Really appreciate it.