 Thank you very much for coming and I will see you soon. Thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here in Berlin because now these days I'm living in Chile, which is really, really, really far away. And as my great job, I direct this office. Mostly women work at my office, 85% are women of the staff. And we are trying to, we used to develop technology for public goods. And now we are kind of shifting the, and we are in a profound process of being critical of the work we do in two offices in the North and South on what is our role as civil society at the intersection of technology and democracy. And few days ago, I was giving a talk in Santiago, and I asked a question that let me ask all of you, who is born in this century, in this room? Basically, an indicative of how different our world is, because in that random tech conference in Chile, most of the people in the room were born after 2000. So, it is the demographics, if you think on this changing world with complex crises, like if you look at Africa and Latin America, the vast parts of Asia, most of the people, they were born after 9-11. They were born, many of them, and it's incredible the lack of a word that we have in young generations, and I don't want to sound like a grandma on the internet, but young generations, many of them are not even aware that when they were born, new wars were starting. Not only Iraq war, Afghanistan war, but that's a lot of privacy. So, many of the people today, young people today, starting to use technology and starting to use products like Next Cloud, we were the ones that were taking rights for granted. They, many of them, take the erosion of the rights for granted. And so, that's why I wanted to, this talk is going to be a little bit long. I will try to cover a lot of time, I will try to cover a decade, and I will try to cover different moments when I think that we will still somehow in charge of technology, and how we failed in tackling issues that only got bigger and bigger and bigger through time. I'm writing a book about digital colonialism, and as you can see here on the Ops and Downs, we are heading to a quite dangerous part. I would like to arrive at the last bit of this. I hope that this talk will help me conduct you through all these phases because next year is a crucial year. Next year is a year where a big conference is going to take place and it is not being discussed now. It is not in this media, and it is not socialized through our circles, but many of you might be familiar with the World Trade Organization. And the World Trade Organization will celebrate a big ministerial meeting next year, and then we will start discussing our issues, the future of economic commerce, technology, privacy and all of that. And there's a big, big, big push to basically consolidate a set of rules that will make practically impossible to fight back and practically impossible to re-democratize technology for people. And so there will be another bit, a little bit long, our conversation today, but I want to, and I'm not a pessimist, I'm optimistic that we can fight this back and I think that we can make the changes that we need, but we need to be very careful and look at the mistakes we made in the last nine years. So we may look at the things that we celebrated that were not motives of celebration, and things that were so overwhelming and so upsetting that it was like an associative, paralyzed, fragmented, and not really fighting back. I have separated a set in different periods from 2009 to 2012. I call it the unexpected development. From 2013 to 2050, the crisis of trust. Then 16 to 19, the digital despots consolidation. And then 2019, that's when we are going to hopefully have a conversation on how we fight back. So this was a really unexpected disruption. The massive leak of development of cables, a massive provocation by a big coalition of provocations, but also the collaboration on modern video, but also, and I don't want to be U.S. and U.S. centric, but also all the emergence of independent journalists and whistleblowers blowing the whistle up, just publishing everything online. And this was, the pirate day was also a disruption, and it was an disruption in different ways. It was played by our rules, instead of played by the rules, that assistant, chronic and assistant was completely outdated and not reflected in the values of people, was kind of imposing enough. And this is a mix that I'm spring. I am not sure if it was a disruption to celebrate or a disruption to be cautious in our optimism about. And it is interesting because if you compare this picture of the Arab Spring and the telephones and everyone being the broadcaster of their own revolution, and you see what happened next, and we know what happened next, Syria happened next, and lots of other conflicts happened next. And I think that we, if we go back to the mistakes we made, first in here with WikiLeaks, the revelations of Chelsea Manning and with WikiLeaks, we made a lot of mistakes. One of the mistakes, like I think that the most, as a lawyer who was very closely involved in the case, I think that the most important mistake that we didn't tackle was the increased role of private companies in censorship and the politicization of censorship with a phone call to a company by Washington. It was a series of attacks, it was technical attacks, financial attacks, physical attacks, surveillance. It was overwhelming for the people involved. But I remember when the diplomatic cables started being published and Amazon servers kicked out like Amazon, the DNS company, PayPal, all these companies, the reaction, the politicized reaction, but imperialist reaction to the WikiLeaks publication was not, I think that we didn't get upset enough. We were more upset about the revelations published by the journalists and by the attempts, like open attempts at assassination threats and all of that than as a civil society, we saw it as an isolated issue because it really caught the State Department by surprise and a lot of powerful people by surprise and they reacted in a very, I think that the most interesting thing is that they reacted in a very transparent way. They showed the real colors. They showed that when Washington is upset about something, the private sector is an extension of this very, of the most powerful army in the world, basically, and it will do as Washington says. And I think that mistake, not fighting back, not litigating, not exposing how awful that was, how centralized our systems were, how dependent our freedom of speech was of, let's say, how vulnerable our dissent was to the wishes of American companies. I think that that was, we neglected that very basic thing and it only in the next 10 years is really good words as we can see now. Good things that were of that time and is a reflection I have been thinking a lot of is that censorship was visible and tangible. So when your enemy is visible and tangible, you can fight it back. Censorship was a blocked website, a page that wouldn't load. Today, and as we will see, censorship is getting like more ubiquitous, more intangible, more arbitrary and less and less accountable. And I remember when I was working on digital rights at that time, we could point at the censor and we will more or less know the reasons of the censorship. It was a government, it was sometimes private sector for copyright claims, but nowadays is more difficult. If a word disappears from us, if it is really difficult to access information, we sometimes do not know the reasons behind that. Well, then we had the crisis of trust and the chilling effects attached to that crisis of trust. And we also had something very interesting that was not that present in our lives, probably in the lives of Germans, yes, but not in the rest of the world. 2014 was a key year when most of the people all over the world accessed the internet via telephones. It was more likely that you will access the internet via a mobile phone than by a computer. And that really changed everything and that really changed not only the commodification of people and people's data, but also the architecture, the dominant architecture of the way we connect. And I really, really, really like, and you, I think that you cannot see everything, but I will, yeah. I really, really like this slide is by Yochai Benkler. And Yochai Benkler, I think that he dislikes mobile phones as much as I dislike mobile phones because the utopian, interoperable, democratic internet I loved in the decade before was of computers and was of the promise of interoperability and was of the promise of anyone not only creating things for profit, but also creating things for public good. And on a mobile phone sometimes, I mean, not sometimes, most of the time, everything is for profit, everything is closed and two big actors control the markets. And as we have seen in this year with the Huawei conflict, it is really, it is not only market issue, it's a political issue as well. Well, this is, I mean, if I wasn't speaking to my art students in Santiago, I would have to go and speak what the spectrum means or what the RM means with this audience. It's quite easy to go quickly through this, but it is a good reflection on how each and every bit of a mobile phone is impossible to open, basically. And I shared with these students an anecdote when I was in Guatemala, when I was a little girl, part of my computer classes was to basically open our computer, see what was inside, clean the keyboard, clean piece by piece the keyboard, and then put it back together. And now kids, they cannot do that with a telephone. I mean, good luck. And they cannot see what's running on the telephone and they cannot, I mean, the devices, I remember that my grandmother used to say, oh yes, you young people know about technology and you understand how it operates. And I think that we have to stop telling ourselves that lie because I think that from 2014 on, we no longer, we have been removed from the right, a right has been taken away from us, and that's another fight that we didn't vote enough. A right has been taken away from us, not only as consumers, as people, as people learning and as people trying to improve what, and adapt the technologies we have. It's okay. We do not have any more the ability to play and think and do things. And that's especially important because with young people, I mean, that's the future. The future is a future of lack of accountability of the devices they use and the cars they use and all the nightmare to come with 5G. I really like this quote by Shoshana Subov because basically as we have seen, as we will see later in my slides, every digital application that can be used for surveillance and control will be used for surveillance and control. And yeah, I think that this was the crisis of trust of 2013 and then it continued to 2014 and it continues. It doesn't seem to stop on when it became clear, the WikiLeaks thing, we had like just a little test and then we really experienced this marriage between companies and intelligence agencies and I think that that changed but not enough. I think that we took the wrong path there. I think that we, people who understood the dimensions of what was going on, we really went on the defense, on encryption and privacy enhancing technologies, on trying to cover the camera on the machine, try to instead of fighting back and saying this is unacceptable and saying we are going to abandon these services and we are going to advocate for our governments to stop using these services and these companies should go bankrupt because they betrayed people. We went on the okay, this is inevitable, let's just protect us, we privilege people that know and understand encryption and let's go and hide and not fight. And the result, I wrote a paper and it's really devastating the paper because these guys are so intelligent, so intelligent that what they did between 2013 and 2016 was to reform most of the laws from most of the countries to legalize what they were doing and to justify what they were doing under national security arguments and that was our failure because if I look at Europe while everyone was like with a good fight with the GDPR, all these legal reforms, it was like super rapid, okay, terrorist attack here and next week the law was being discussed and approved without much public scrutiny or ability to change the things. And that of course, it not only happened in here but I think that Europe was the real change maker and Europe was the continent that could, the difference of treatment on this if instead European citizens, instead of using all this crap were using now by law and under national security arguments European made technology that is more accountable and more independent from the telephone in Washington situation would be different. It's important that we reflect... No, it's important that we reflect on this because we must not allow this to happen again and with the 5G technology we have, there's an opportunity, a window of opportunity there, devices that will pollute our cities basically. And well, I think that we owe a lot to this person and we do not thank him enough and we need to make... and I am glad that he's publishing his book soon, I mean it's already out because it will bring back to the table these topics because they kind of vanished. Cambridge Analytica blah, distracted us completely from 2016 and it's important issue but those issues here are very, very important and here it's not even into the infrastructure and we... I think that we need to really continue the pending conversation and challenge those laws being passed. This is a global issue as we saw with the XQIS Court and this is so outdated. I cannot imagine right now the government like led by Pompeo... Well, Bolton is gone but horrible people in Washington who really like to undermine people's rights. Imagine how vast... We don't have a whistleblower jet as posting how the surveillance under the Trump era is taking place but I imagine that if this was happening during Obama administration I can only imagine what's happening now. Well, the next period I want to look at was the one that I described like digital despots against citizens and I think that the point that marked the beginning of this era is when these data lords they start trying to be the ones connecting the next billion maybe you were not exposed to this blah but in continents like Latin America, Asia and Africa it was all about, oh yes, Facebook will provide internet for the poor children on the half of the continent or Google will provide this cable to African governments to be able to connect to the internet and it was a time of empty promises of connectivity that will solve everything and it also... it was more open the colonial attitude of Silicon Valley Silicon Valley companies through... I remember that before you will have these keynotes by the Silicon Valley people in tech conferences but then I started seeing a trend of Max Zuckerberg meeting the president of Brazil or the people at Google meeting basically Silicon Valley was slowly moving closer openly because they were doing it before closer to be these sort of tech ambassadors to do... I remember Eric Schmidt visiting Cuba and North Korea so it was weird because as a company you're supposed to provide a service and you're supposed to serve your customers you're not supposed to be political ambassadors to Cuba or North Korea and bringing the products offering the products to these countries in the global south key countries, powerful countries it was a lot... it looked a lot like when the Spanish arrived in Latin America and we were offering these little mirrors to the locals we found it abusive and we found it completely unacceptable but yeah, we will find out later the close relationship with politics as well and yeah, I love this picture and yeah, it is so terrible but you know that after this conference I'm heading to the strategy meeting of Oxfam and Oxfam International is one of the organizations tackling inequality all over the world and in order to connect and be able to participate in the conference I had to create a Facebook account and I was like, no, this is all that's wrong in the world and they told me, well, the only way we can connect many of our staffers in developing countries is through Facebook Facebook is the internet and it started much earlier it was a combination of austerity plans of lack of awareness of what was going on and lack of I mean laziness of governments laziness of governments usually what happened was that public service got privatized in the case of the internet it never made it to be a public utility a public service and I think that was another of the mistakes that we made and it can still be corrected in half of the world because 50% of the population is still not connected so how we connect half of humanity will define everything in the future I like here a lot Neri De Sifuentes is that was happening and these small resistance were happening as the data lords were imposing themselves she is a parliamentarian actually she's only from parliament but she's one of the youngest parliamentarians in Bolivia and Neri De Sifuentes is a free software activist and now is the minister of infrastructure in the country and I really, really, really like her approach because it's an approach that I have found sadly in Europe doesn't happen much it's still slowly happening but many of the decisions related to infrastructure and related to the tools that government uses and so on are decided are political decisions and if we do not get our people inside politics it will never happen so it's just a parenthesis on I mean she's very young and she has done so much and she doesn't have a formal education and so on imagine all the things that you could achieve inside politics it's a moment of reflection maybe for the next elections you will participate because if you don't participate people more stupid and people more like completely reckless and with a crisis of morale are going to take power and are going to take all the decisions and that's another of the reflections and that's another of the reasons why I'm kind of upset with Europe now most of the companies used by European citizens are in a jurisdiction vulnerable to the volatile decisions of this person and his team and digital despots are not do not work on isolation they work closely with the politicians in charge I guess that for big tech companies is much easier to deal with someone who cares about the issues and the problems with the one percent than the issues and the problem of the people so it's a political problem okay and it's not going ah this I mean all the CEOs of the tech companies also highlights another problem who is not in the room apart from women who are not in the room and is one of the problems that I didn't highlight from the beginning but it is as 50% of the humanity is disconnected I guess that 50% of humanity is being excluded from the process of creating technology of testing the technologies and on fixing this business model of data of the infrastructure but it is not only 50% of the population women are excluded not only the politics but also the process of developing these technologies is also that those who are not in the room are of the minorities are often vulnerable people whose interests are not taken into account on this and another important thing the close collaboration that has become very visible of these digital despots with the military but what I also want to highlight is our role as users using constantly these kind of technologies we are basically in the process of perfection in a killing machine and this is very close to my heart because I'm Central American and as you may be aware but a similar crisis that the crisis of refugees that Germany had in 2015 is going on now in the US as Shoshana was saying that every technology that can be used for surveillance and control will be used for surveillance and control that's happening now with migrant workers in the US illegal according to the US jurisdiction Palantir, Amazon all these companies are participating closely in something like basically the torture and persecution of poor people who the only intention is to work and to earn a decent living if you consider that thanks to free trade agreements and bad politics and interventions and so on the living wage of a Campesino in Guatemala is probably below 100 euro a month and you and it is the Central American cities are among the most dangerous cities in the world level of violence compared to the level of violence of a country at war then is no surprise that they go to the US and it is for me is really heartbreaking to see that technology is being taken away from the hands of them basically social media Facebook and all of that they are doing data scrapping to and that's the only way that they stay connected with the community and their families that they leave behind and this I see is using data scrapping to identify and to locate illegal migrants and the Palantir and Amazon and so on are making this efficient refugee camps, refugee jails and it is this close collaboration of a repressive government and unethical technology companies and this is becoming more visible so when we buy their products we are kind of assisting the persecution of vulnerable communities and let me stop here for a second, I'm almost at the end but very close from Germany in Turkey a journalist was chopped into pieces and that we failed we completely failed this journalist was kidnapped, tortured and you know treated with the most inhuman treatment and we didn't protest enough I think that this was one of the most outrageous situations that happened recently and I think that that moved our level of we had so desensitized and that why this is relevant for a tech conference it is relevant for a tech conference because this person was being subject of heavy electronic surveillance but it is also relevant because the perpetrators of this crime are heavily involved in the funding of tech companies the Saudis and so I have heard and there are big scandals on ethics in the tech community but these ethics the serious conversations and the very heavy conversations we are not having these conversations and I think that the moment that now has passed with that but we should be more angry and outraged and we should be more careful on analyzing who is really behind the tech companies of today well we are going through crisis from crisis the deep fakes and all of that we don't have tools to deal with that now the new threats and a legal battle that changes everything I think that the new threats as I was saying the biggest threat I see is consolidation through trade agreements and through security agreements of the power of the big tech companies and TPP and TISA were like big fights and we came out of those also the copyright directive last year was a complete disaster I mean we lost this battle is not only European the one that is coming and the next generation of trade agreements what they want to consolidate is our inability they want to block and write a citizens to open the black box and that's very serious if a trade agreement kind of crystallizes the opacity of algorithms and if a trade agreement restricts our ability to advocate for open and democratic automated decision making we are going to be like basically the slaves of the black box and I think that these trade topics are very complicated because when you advocate against some issues and against some provisions inside those you're often labeled as anti-development or anti-economic growth and that really will require a lot of creativity and a lot of technical knowledge democratized technical knowledge and you have a role to play on that to make the general public realize the importance of that and you still know how technology works and you still know how the technology works inside the black box and the dangers behind that and the lack of what can drive if there's no accountability on that if we don't fight that fight it's going to be very very complicated to win but another that's the political battle the other battle is the climate crisis and we do not talk enough about that in these kind of settings we need to in parallel of developing human centric rights preserving technologies we need to start developing in parallel and it has to go together we need to change the attitude of using technology all the time for all the reasons and keep wasting and polluting the world we need to re-examine and start developing technologies that also take care of the planet and last but not least I think that this cannot be done and people cannot be outraged if there's not responsible journalism and responsible enough knowledge of what's going on behind closed doors so I think that this battle of the current persecution and prosecution of Chelsea Manning because of refusing to talk against a journalist and the extradition of someone just because of publishing public interest information changes everything it's a controversial figure but it's not about him it is about the charges the charges now that he's facing and not only him but other journalism what we did with names are like redacted is because of the publication of information on 2010 that revealed crimes against humanity if an investigative journalist that was not doing this work from US even and that did what any other journalist was doing scrutinizing the most powerful government in the world is extradited because of that and faces a life in prison the chilling effect will be very very powerful and the re-criminalization of a source the re-criminalization of someone who blew the whistle is something abusive and again as in the case of Jamal Kajugi we are not angry enough we tend to forget it was 10 years ago so it seems so far away but if we have this kind of people in charge and we cannot blow the whistle against them without facing life in prison if blowing the whistle doesn't become citizen exercise as frequent and as common as requesting access to public information then on top of that the companies achieve opacity of the algorithms then we are going to be in serious trouble so that's all thank you so much and happy to take some questions or comments if you want to ask a question just raise your hand I will bring you the microphone the question is basically since there are so different approaches in South America and Europe and that all people don't make revolutions what can you expect from us did I get the question right? let me bring you the microphone the revolution so I try once again basically what are you proposing us to choose which kind of acts, what are the next steps practical steps for people in Europe we are edge people older people in Europe compared to South America and I was quoting that older people don't make revolution anymore we don't have the energy to do that so basically what we have to do to revolt ourselves against those injustices when we are in our comfort we have money and basically we just want others to let us in peace that is very tricky I think that Europe didn't learn from its history it makes me really upset and all people make revolutions if you read all the stories of the resistance and the partisans they were like entire communities and networks of solidarity that helped the revolution happen and I think it's not about age and comfort what makes you European and I think that doing nothing is abdicating to European values and what can you do I think that first thing vote better if there's not good options to vote at then become the option if you can only change things with your wallet then allocate your money in a wise manner in products that are ethical and that are changing things I think that sometimes you can make a lot just offering offering a little bit of time to put your knowledge at the service of people for example when this is happening, when these big negotiations on trade issues and technology are taking place even taking the moment to write a one pager explaining why something that you think is wrong on the text is wrong and sharing it with one of the negotiators of one of the global sub countries I think that inaction is not an option and I think that you have to be creative and find ways to contribute inaction is really not option at the moment in history not you will be complicit one of my favourite movements is grannies against fracking it's really worth checking out a granny and a police officer it's not a good look they're powerful as a privileged European I feel a lot of responsibility to act and represent Latin America, Africa and pretend that my voice or our voice is theirs how can we make sure that this is a global movement how can we expand and make sure that this is not only for Europeans well I think that there are many options and I think that you don't represent and you represent women and the voice of women can have different faces and I think that I think that we need to inform ourselves better on what's going on around the world and we need to be aware of what's going globally and act locally and many of the things happening I mean be very strategic the European Parliament has for example a big role on what's going on in Africa and Latin America and they can change things for good, so a gesture of global solidarity is to at least that your locals do not harm abroad I think that we are still, we have all the tools but we do not have the architecture of a global solidarity movement in place and we need to think deeply about that and how it's going to look propaganda part commercial, we are putting together something called the Progressive International and those are the questions precisely that we have been asked the movement was launched in New York last year with Bernie Sanders and Janice Barufakis and people like Ada Colau, Naomi Klein all the people talking about the issues this is the question that we are still struggling with how not to leave people out do we want it to be like English speakers only do we want it to, how are we going to connect will it only be like you know elites how can we really connect with movements and how are we going to decide the things but we often you know we on the good side are paralysed by the analysis we want everything perfect if you look at the other side they have the the nationalist, internationalist function pretty well across borders and languages the big push for nationalism and increased race on these nasty politics that's happening like very organically because they don't stop and think about these kind of things so I think that we just have to do it and it's going to be imperfect and we will make mistakes and people will be excluded but we can fix it in the process what we cannot afford anymore is to keep thinking how it will look perfectly one short comment you talked about that censorship like blunt censorship that this side is blocked would be a thing of the past and today kind of censorship is more subtle but of course this is only true for us privileged in North America and Europe because I mean large parts of the world's population they really experience this very blunt way of blocking I mean think of the Chinese Great Fireball think of Russia, think of Turkey, think of how in Sudan during the revolution there the government just switched off the entire internet for the whole country for more than a month so I guess there are many more countries like that but this is also a reality which exists and which we probably shouldn't forget about I absolutely agree actually West Papua was completely offline during big protests it doesn't even make it to the media anymore it has been normalized as well before it would be like all the attention focus on those countries and it's neglected it's simultaneous different forms of censorship and one of the forms of censorship that we don't discuss enough about it is the self-censorship of young people because they are so afraid that something that they said when they were 15 will chase them until they are 35 and applying for a job or a visa it is getting nasty it's getting in a time that we have more tools than ever before to express ourselves is the time that we are speaking the least okay so we have one last question I'm from South Africa I'm from South Africa and I lived through apartheid in South Africa and I was 22 years old I was at university in Pretoria and I came to Germany for the first time out of the country and I heard the name Nelson Mandela for the very first time being here I didn't know that he had been in jail as long as I had lived and that realization has been making it incredibly important for me to this conversation that you're having because the way the world is shaped it's shaped through the choices that we make and if we choose to be selfish if we choose to just think of ourselves ultimately the world is a really horrible place and so I work in youth development in South Africa but I really have a passion for helping the 200 million young people in Africa that are unemployed right now aged 18 to 24 to fulfill their potential and I really believe that there's like one basic principle in my life that I believe is really important for all of us and that is that we must never be overcome by evil we must always work to overcome evil with good and so in Europe relative to a younger developing world there's a lot of good that you can do if you start thinking with the question of how, which is what you were saying is not to say, you know I'm not thinking of Robert Kiyosaki, you know Rich that poor that way he says you must never say I don't have money, you must always say how can I make the money I need in the same way we must never say we can't do anything just because we're old or we can't do anything because we're far away we must start thinking how can we make a difference because we need to change the world Thank you very much, I think that was a very necessary keynote and very necessary conversation in text today of course I think we can, well I need to think after that, I'm sorry