 This is our next talk coming up, it's Sophia Tseli with the state of digital rights in Latin America. Sophia, up to you. Thank you so much. Thank you everyone for tuning in today. As it was said, my name is Sophia Tseli, and I'm a cryptographic researcher, mainly a cluster, but I also led the development of the author of the Record Messaging Protocol in its version 4. And on my spell time, I also researched about the state of the digital rights in Latin America, and specifically I researched around the usage of digital tools to enhance gender-based violence in Latin America specifically. But today, with one thing to talk to you about the state of digital rights in Latin America, and this is a really big topic, so I will try to just cover the basics of all of it. So don't expect that much in the depth of the topics that I'm going to talk about is more of an outline, so people are more aware of the state of it. So let's start with one of the most interesting questions we're talking about, the state of the digital rights in Latin America, to actually talk about what is Latin America. And for some people, maybe on the audience, this would be really simple to just, because people already have a preconceived notion of what Latin America is, but actually to Latin Americans or for people living in South America or Central America or the Caribbean or the South or North America, this is not an easy question because there's a lot of questions around when actually Latin America was created as a concept and what actually means as a concept to be a Latin America. Does it actually means you have some certain cultural background that is shared between each other or what this actually does this mean? And actually in certain parts of what some people will actually think is Latin America, some people actually don't think they belong to Latin America because sometimes they're associated to be part of Latin America to have a background of being colonized by European powers and also have an indigenous background. And as there's racism in Latin America as everywhere in the world, certain people in Latin America that think themselves as white don't want to belong to Latin America because of the reasons. So speaking of Latin America, San Ocean is a controversial topic in itself in Latin America itself, but on this talk I'm going to speak about and be referring to the Latin American region, specifically to countries belonging to South America, to Central America and the Caribbean and to the South of North America, mainly to Mexico. And when I talk about Latin America as a region, I'm not including French Guyana because that's part of the La France de Autrenaire and it's part of the Cheyenne area. So that's the first question that now has been answered at least for this talk. And to actually give a little bit of background of why I think it's actually important to talk about the state of digital rights in Latin America is mainly one of the reasons why I wanted to give this talk at CCC was mainly because sometimes in this kind of conferences we hear a lot about the state of digital rights mainly in the global north but sometimes we're oblivious to actually what is happening in the global south and it's the same kind of a state or the same kind of ideas and notions that we have for digital rights apply the same to the global south. And in this case I'm just going to be focusing specifically on one region of the global south, mainly Latin America, but there will be needed actually more research and more actually people talking about other regions of the global south. And to give a little bit of historical context of why it's actually important to talk about digital rights in Latin America I was wanting to actually start with this specific historic instance of something that happened in Latin America. And the reason why I'm going to highlight this specific instance is because sometimes we think that this kind of surveillance or this kind of censorship of the kind of going against human rights only happens sometimes in the global north because we sort of associated that the transgression between towards digital rights only happens between spies and big countries but that's not actually the case. And in this historical context I'm going to show you why it also happens sort of in Latin America. So what is the scene? The scene right now is the Cold War and this is basically this historical instance in which there were two superpowers basically fighting for economic, political and even cultural I would say around the world and there are two superpowers with Soviet Union and the United States of America. So this time during the 70s and the 80s Latin America sort of elected certain socialist and I put socialist and quote socialist governments to be the representative of the people and I said socialist because sometimes we have another specific notion of what socialism is but it was a specific notion of socialism in the Latin American context. So these governments were actually elected but certain other powers that exist also in the Americas didn't like that these governments were elected or even they didn't like what happened in Cuba mainly the Cuban Revolution. So in order to prevent all the Latin American countries turning completely socialist what happened is that the United States backed a campaign of political repression and state of terror involving intelligence operation and assassination of opponents mainly in Latin America and in fact the deposition of many of the socialist governments that were elected in Latin America. And this backed campaign of political repression happened in several countries in Latin America mainly Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador and Peru. And the involvement of the United States was not only about backing them economically but they actually provided planning, military cooperation, training on torture, technical support and supply of military aid and this happened during Bayer's administration of the United States mainly during the administration of Johnson, Nixon, Paul, Carter and Negan. This not only happened between cooperation between these Latin American countries and the United States but it's also happened between the same Latin American countries. So the same countries that I just mentioned also cooperated between each other to provide themselves with actual good planning on how to efficiently torture and efficiently kill opponents to the regimes that were installed by the United States against the socialist governments. During the 70s and the 80s not much was known actually and how actually these operations would actually carry out. Of course it was known that a lot of people were killed and a lot of people were disappeared and a lot of people were tortured but it was only until December of 1992 that Martín Almada and José Agustín Fernández dropped to an obscure police station in the suburb of La Mare in Azucion in Paraguay and why they dropped into this station was because a whistleblower actually sketched the plan of where this police station was so they drove to it and what they found is that they found a cache of 700,000 documents piled near to the ceiling of something that later was going to be called the Terror Archive, Los Archivos del Terror which was a complete paper database of the interrogation of records of interrogation, torture and surveillance that was conducted under the military dictatorship of Alfredo Strasner which was the Paraguayan dictatorship during the military intervention of Latin America. What they found out is that mainly it was used in four months telephoto cameras watch apps to peel this paper database of everyone that was viewed as a threat and I highlight here that it was everyone that was viewed as a threat was not actually only people who were actually deemed to be actual political opponents to the military regimes during those times but it was mainly everyone that they thought was actually some kind of threat it could have been an artist creating art that was against the regime it could have been students that for some reason decided to read Karl Marx so all of these people that somehow were associated with socialism or somehow were deemed to be opponents of the regime in that time targeted as threats and it was not only them but also the friends and their associates so they created a database of not only the people that they think they were a threat to the military regime but also of any kind of friend or any kind of family that they had The archive was a total of 60,000 documents and where the photos and in compromise 593,000 microfilm pages the rest of all of these of all of the database and all of this torture and all of these killings was that up to 50,000 people were killed 30,000 disappeared and 400,000 were arrested and imprisoned and until this day if you go to any of the countries that I have just mentioned you will see several businesses and several families of actual of people or relatives of people who were actually disappeared and until these days there's a lot of countries in which a lot of people are still asked for the bodies of the people to disappear or at least to know what happened to the people to disappear so while I'm speaking about this the reason why I'm speaking about this is because we sometimes think that these things don't happen at this level, that people don't get disappeared because there exists a paper database of you that showcases yourself as a threat for some reason, for whatever reason just because you somehow read some book that someone deemed that it should be unacceptable to be read during that time that's what happened in Latin America about that time and the other reason why I'm showcasing this is because sometimes we think that countries only surveil their own citizens but this is not true, it was even true in the 70s and the 80s that several different countries that had military governments at that time were surveilling the citizens of other countries and these countries were sharing these databases between each other and the other reason why I'm highlighting this is because this was not like a stall or solitary operation that was happening because this Latin American country decided to do it, this was backed out and actually planned by the United States this well known and the victims of the torture have actually stated several times that for example that when they were being tortured there was always the presence of a United States person in the room actually training people on how to efficiently torture, training people on how to efficiently track people, training people on how to efficiently create these databases what will happen today will be that this kind of paper databases that existed on that time will be much more efficient because people are using the digital tools every day and it will be the same that they will be backed by some power, some more powerful country that will have an interest in the economic and political scenario of several different countries so today there will be much worse so the reason why I wanted to highlight this is to actually show you an historical instance when indeed this happened and that it could indeed happen in the future as well so what's the theme when talking about the digital rights in Latin American countries, in this talk I decided to talk about four main topics that I think are really important when talking about digital rights in a region, the first one is to talk about what kind of privacy laws exist on those countries the second one is talking about the type of cohesion that exists in these countries by the use of digital tools the third one is to talk about the state of the billions of those countries and the fourth one is to actually talk what kind of secure communication are actually provided in those countries so let's start with the first one which is actually the privacy laws and on this since the arrival of GDPR has been like a hot topic for now some years but indeed this is not something that was just created by the arrival of GDPR but indeed for example in the human rights it's actually defined privacy it's actually defined as a human right and because of this most of Latin American constitutions actually provide some certain kind of protection towards privacy because it's part of the human rights mostly in the past the constitution was only focusing on privacy as far of the non-digital world but as with the arrival of the digital world privacy is also applied to the digital world since 2010 where 62 new countries have enacted data protection laws and every country as I have said in Latin America has some form of private data protection in Latin America the first country to actually have a privacy law was Chile in 1999 followed by Uruguay, Mexico, Peru Colombia, Brazil although in Brazil I would put an asterisk because even though it was created in 2018 some parts of the law still needs to be debated August 2021 and some parts of the law were actually videoed by the current president and there has been some pushback around that law for a while now other countries that have actually a privacy law are Barbados and Panama one of the questions that you can ask yourself when actually talking about privacy laws in Latin America if this is actually a phenomenon in itself or it's just like something that has been inspired because of the arrival of GDPR in most of the cases that we have actually seen it's actually mostly inspired by GDPR because it's mostly what is right now in fashion so to say but it actually needs to actually happen still a lot of research to actually say that this is a phenomenon of their own or that these privacy laws are actually thinking of the reality of Latin America on their own and not just taking some other privacy laws from other countries so the first question that actually needs to be addressed when talking about privacy laws in the Latin America and the context itself is to talk about what is privacy itself and this is something that now scholars and researchers are actually talking much more around in the sense that even though for one region privacy will mean something because of the cultural background of this region for another region maybe privacy will not be the same because of the different culture meaning of privacy depending on the region of the world that you're talking about so for example something that still needs to be researched is what actually means what privacy actually means for a Latin American context what does Latin America actually think of privacy the other thing that actually gives a lot of talking when you're talking about privacy laws is what actually applies to privacy if privacy is only the contents of communication that gets the status of being private or if anything for example the network transmissions are actually also part of privacy and this is something that still been talked about the same when talking about privacy laws in Latin America actually thinking about what data is defined as private as I have said and what about metadata or subscriber data and what about linked data metadata is usually what they say is they usually define it as like auxiliary data that gets created during for example having a conversation, subscriber data sometimes they define it as the auxiliary data that the initiator actually created and linked data is more about this data that can actually be linked to an individual and use for example for advertisement several of the different laws in several Latin American countries have different approach to all of these definitions but most of them are mainly inspired by the same GDPR definitions what about anonymous data certain of the privacy laws indeed in Latin America indeed have some kind of mention of anonymous data I think in the Brazilian one for example they say that anonymous data should be private if by some reason for example you are able to de-anonymize the data by using the same mechanism that the service that anonymize the data you manage to de-anonymize it and then the data is also considered private but if like for example you took the data created by some service and you later by using a completely different mechanism that the one provided by the service you managed to de-anonymize it then that data is not private anymore and this is sort of mentioned a little bit like in a big terms but at least it's there so I just wanted to highlight these questions in the sense to actually say that most of the time when you read the privacy laws of different Latin American countries the sort of notions that sort of the defining sort of big mention but not much going in depth of the different notions one important thing to actually think about when talking about Latin American privacy laws is what about the data that gets sent or transmitted to other countries because one of the realities of Latin America is that there are some services that provide certain kind of services in Latin America that are Latin America in itself meaning that they are like companies that were created in Latin American countries and where the data is stored in the same country but most of the time in Latin America the consumers of applications mainly use social media that is created in other countries and where the data goes to another country or communication systems that go to another country most of the privacy laws in Latin America actually says that if the data gets transmitted to another country that this other country should have the same level of protection as the one that is given in the owner's country but even though this is said in most of the privacy laws in practice this actually does not happen and until this day I have not actually seen anyone actually asking any of the companies that we use for social media or for communication to actually surrender the data or to say that they are not applying the same level of protection that Latin American laws provide for their own data so that is still it steps on the law but in practice not much happening another question that you should ask yourself when talking about privacy laws is what about the data that is already stored so one of the things is that even though this data these privacy laws exist even though they existed for some long time still certain countries and certain companies in other countries have been storing this data for a really long time and we don't know if there will be at any point any kind of request to actually say yes to render the data of all our citizens that you have stored for this amount of time that doesn't have happened so far now let's talk about the second topic that I was outlining in the introduction the second topic is the times of cohesion what kind of cohesion actually exists in Latin America in regards to digital rights and in regards specifically to freedom of expression of the current state of what happened in COVID-19 and about gender based violence by using digital tools so the first thing about the health system and COVID-19 so in this this is a really complex topic but I will just try to highlight certain points about instances in which digital tools are being used to actually diminish the rights that people have to other things specifically something digital tools have been used to diminish the right people to the health system and to the education system so in one instance of this happening for example is by the usage of biometrics which is the on a rise in Latin America specifically in Chile and in Brazil one of the proposals for example for Chile was to use biometrics during health checks meaning that you will have access to certain public systems and to certain health checks only by surrendering the biometrics of yourself and this actually doesn't apply to the Latin American region in the sense that for example in the rural areas most of the people that were asked to surrender the fingerprints because they work the field or because they sometimes have some kind of disabilities the fingerprints could not be read because there was no fingerprint or because the fingerprint was really difficult to be read what this means is that the health system became unfair in itself because the people were not able to access a health system anymore because they could not really surrender the biometrics because the idea of biometrics didn't match the current reality and this is something that we will talk during this talk quite a lot but sometimes in Latin American governments they take one technology because they think it's cool that other countries right now are using but they don't think of what it means to actually apply this technology in a Latin American reality not an instance in which biometrics are actually abused in Latin America and this is an abuse that is happening not because of Latin American governments or maybe it is in a way but mainly because when Latin Americans have to travel to another country for tourism or for working or for whatever reasons they usually have to apply for a visa so the are for the United States and most of the times they are asked to surrender the biometrics at the time of applying for the visa or sometimes at the time of crossing the border it's not really known what happens with the biometrics of the people who are being asked to surrender them for the visas or the legality of actually of all of these it's not known where is this thought and in some instances even when you are surrendering your application for your visa and surrendering your biometrics you also have to sort of surrender your social media in the sense that most of the times in order to be guaranteed to be given a visa you have to sort of know that your social media is going to be examined and it's going to be checked that you don't have anything that that country that you are willing to travel to deems that but coming back to the health system sometimes in the health system for example the reason why for example Latin America use it social media quite a lot is because sometimes the social media is the only option that they have and if you will see in a few slides that I will talk about this in the future that sometimes because Latin America has an unfairness between what kind of discourse gets pushed in the mass media what happens is that minorities usually go to social media to actually try to put themselves in the discourse or to actually have support from other people or to showcase what kind of unfairness is happening to them which is bad in itself because this is the only way that they can publish what is happening to themselves and at the same time they are surrendering their information to social media companies that exist in other countries so in the case of the health system for example this happens quite a lot with people who are HIV positive in the sense that because they don't have a support from the local governments from the local Latin American governments they use social media to actually find psychological support or to find any kind of support or even to actually find any way to buy the medicine that they need because the government is not providing the medicines that they need what they do is that they have created their own market in which they can buy the medicines that they need because the government is not providing this what in reality this makes is that there is an unregulated market for medicines and there is a distortion and of course there is data that has been stored in the social media of these companies that exist outside of Latin America about the health status of the people suffering from this the same happened during COVID-19 in which mainly all of the health system of all Latin American countries collapsed and what happened is that there was a lack of medicines and people started selling medicine again through social media or oxygen tanks or other kind of ways that's the only way that people could actually sometimes get medicines through the usage of social media and this again poses the question that this was the only way that people could actually access the health system and at the same time they were giving away the private information and the health information to companies that exist outside of the Latin American countries because it was the only way in which they could access some kind of health checks. Just to give you an example in a specific example and a study in 2019 showcased that in Ecuador 10.7% of people between the ages of 15 and 49 are defined as digital illiterates and only 41.4% has access to a smartphone and there's more access to smartphones and in general to the internet in urban areas and there's more access to smartphones from men than from women and other genders. This is really important to highlight especially when talking about COVID-19 because one of the proposals that the Latin American governments have had is that in order to know how much people have been infected with COVID you should install an application on your phone that actually tracks your movements and this of course has privacy application for your the data around your location but it also doesn't really make sense in a Latin American scenario because most of the people don't actually have a smartphone. So actually asking people to install an application for COVID-19 when they don't have a smartphone or asking people to start an application to for example a schedule health checks doesn't make sense in Latin America and just makes it why the unfairness of the health system itself. And this is again an example of the ideas that sometimes local Latin American governments have that they just see that other countries are actually creating an application for tracking the COVID-19 but it doesn't really make sense into a Latin American reality and so yeah. And another topic sort of related to cohesion and unfairness is gender-based violence. In a study of the World Health Organization in 2002 showcased that gender-based violence is the main cause of death of women in the world and that 23% of women worldwide have reported some kind of digital gender violence. For example, in the Latin America concept, in Ecuador every 71 hours a woman is killed and if this women that get killed in Ecuador is not because someone for example was trying to steal something from them but they were killed because they were women. So this is often a time school after this site. Latin American countries that are pretty much sexist so as I said, most of the minorities in Latin America don't have a way to express their struggles or to gather support through mass media or through the discursor to the main discursor that happens in the countries. So what they do is that they switch to social media or any other kind of digital tools to sort of empower the struggle that they are living but what happens is that because they have been using social media or they have been using digital tools, some other groups have actually targeted them through the internet and actually surveilled their usage of social media. They have created a strategy for hate speech on authorised discrimination of intimate images, cyber sexual harassment, trafficking, masturbation of their identity and censorship. So if you talk to any person or activist who is actually working on gender-based activism or an LGBTI plus activism, you will see that they are always targeted by the usage of social media and there's actually on some instance that I talked to some activists, there was actually a showcase that right-wing parties and right-wing people actually create training on how to actually harass activists by using social media. One important case to highlight here and it's again from Ecuador is the case of Juliana Campo Verde, which is a woman that was killed by a Christian pastor and what this Christian pastor did was that he hacked into the social media of this woman to actually try to convince the family that she was not disappeared and this was actually at the beginning not even taking into account by the court but later by actually, by pressuring it it was actually taking into account. As I said, mainly the people, the minorities who actually try to be actively actively fight for the rights of women or LGBTI plus a in Latin America get a lot of hate speech, they always get the fresh shame of the photography, monitoring, commenting, reporting every post they send them masturbation videos of men and what also happens and in one instance that I was helping one woman for example all of their photographers were taken from the social media and it was specific men created art based on them and that was a sexual nature of these photographers that this person took from her account and that happens all the time and most of the time when women or other groups actually try to publicly say that this is what is happening to them or they go into the judicial system to say that this is happening to them and that it is unfair and illegal, most of the time they are diminished because they say that this is just hysteria of women. In the case of grooming this specifically happens in Latin America for teenagers and for children and what the research has shown is that this happens through the usage of social media for teenagers and the usage of games for children. One important thing to note here is that in most global north countries it has been said that one of the reasons why we should break into an encryption of certain secure messaging applications is because they are trying to find child predators that have or child sexual harassments that operate at a level that sometimes is international and while it's true that sometimes they find the sexual predators, what happens is that this person gets locked or something similar but not really a reparation for the people who were harassed in global south countries. As I said there are massive attacks against people fighting for rights specific to gender in one instance for example we know that they were even giving training sessions for how to censor people activists that were working in gender based rights. For example there was one instance in which they were giving seminars on how to efficiently target and how to efficiently send like memes and create sexual imagery of these persons so they will silence themselves in their activist plans. So the goal is to silence and intimidation. In the specific context of domestic gender based violence it doesn't happen as it was often highlighted in a global north that it happens often by installing for example more in the cell phones or in the devices of the victims that doesn't happen a lot. What happens most of the times is that the passwords get the stallings by either by cohesion or either because the person sort of guessed or what also happens is that most of the time in domestic abuse cases what happens is that the perpetrator will take away the devices of the victim that will take away their computer or their smartphones whatever they have to isolate the victim. So it's not much more about installing malware as it is in global north countries but in this case there's a lot that is actually missing and there's a lot of research that is needed around the topic. There's a lot of research to actually call this as it is this is actually targeted surveillance even though some people have actually not called it that way because they say that this is just this is just activists being targeted or this is just activists that are complaining too much or this is you know the state of the world in which obviously if you're a feminist you will get all of these targeted targeted harassment but that's not true. This is actually what the research has actually shown in Latin America is that this is actually targeted harassment around groups that there are seminars who actually train to how to emotionally do this. There are Facebook groups and privates what's a group in which the social media of activists is shared and people are encouraged to sexually harass or harass in any way these people. It's something that is missing that is an interesting research to actually do is to actually find out how the campaign of the homosexualization clinics happening in Latin America that are usually happening over social media what is the homosexualization clinics? It's basically some clinics that exist in Latin America that they say there are clinics for drug related issues to recover your drug addiction but in reality what they are is that there are clinics in which LGBTIA class people are actually kidnapped and tortured until they become straight. What actually means becoming straight I don't know but they are actually tortured in many cases they are raped and this happens all over Latin America and the way that these clinics showcase or advertise is to the usage of social media so it will be really interesting to show, to have a research around how what actually are the strategies that these people are making by the usage of these digital tools. I understand for abortion clinics and I put abortion clinics in quotes because abortion is mostly illegal in Latin America with deception or Uruguay and since yesterday I have been up but what they do is that sometimes in university forums in social media they advertise these abortion clinics which are not really abortion clinics but are like just places where women go to think to have a safe abortion but it's actually places where they either convince women to not abort or try to kidnap them so they don't abort this will be an interesting research to actually do and if you want to know more details about gender and race violence and how it's actually executed in Latin America have an upcoming talk in Enigma around specificities but let's move on to another topic and the topic is the billions as I said when talking about women's activists and LGBTIA and LGBTIA class activists and uncertain of different activists I have already said that these kind of minorities get targeted for billions even if people don't want to call it a surveillance itself it is in itself surveillance of these groups and targeted harassment of them but to the most classical surveillance that people have in their mind the surveillance that is either mass surveillance or targeted surveillance of political opponents and human rights activists let's talk it now in this point so I've already said billions it's also a question that has been asked when talking about privacy laws in Latin America and one of the interesting debates that happened around the time was what is the billions if it's only like if you have to doubt someone and you're reading it as a human is that the billions or that also includes like for example if there's machine reading meaning that if it's some both that are in your information and later creating advertisement based on it is that the billions or not and there's still some ongoing debate around that I really like the definition made by EFF in this report which is really good so you should already if you're interested you wish that it's not civilians not only about private communication private communication for another human being but also collecting, monitoring, intercepting, analyzing it using preserving it retaining it so and what I like about this definition is also that it says past, present or future because the billions is not only about what is right now happening but also how much it has happened in the past in Latin America in itself Latin American government often time allows from former white happy nor civilians in the face of crime in many of the definitions that I have found they allow in the face of crime if this is a serious crime if it's terrorism or if it's we ate an investigation what exactly is a serious crime is not actually defined or when does a crime become serious what actually defines terrorism itself sometimes it's not actually properly defined or when to add an investigation is actually a good case for actually having white happy it's actually also not really defined national support and means of civilians is not really there so for example there's not really an instance in when they say that more installation is allowed but in practice as you will see in a few slides what actually occurs and most of the times when there is more whether this is being allowed to target political opponents or human rights activists it's often times more where on software that is sold by global north companies which opens up many questions that I will cover in a few minutes in the case of location parking also some kind of access is provided depending on the Latin American country in Colombia for example just to give an example it is required that telecommunication services the two main ones in Colombia and Movistat and that will provide a hand over location data authorities in Ecuador it's actually really easy to get location data about someone it was an incident for example if you go to the police and you say that someone is disappeared they will actually turn location tracking for that person in order to find it pretty easily but something that is often times found in most of the laws of Latin America that well it says that authorities can get access to location tracking there is no clear distinction around which authorities actually have access to this location tracking or even more if the authorities share between other authorities how is this sharing actually happening that's not really defined in the case of Brazil Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Peru and Honduras they all have that retention obligation which requires that they lock vast amounts of data about the uses and provide low-informance access to it if they need it in the case for example of a Tweet and investigation of a serious crime in practice this is really oblivious and opaque to the users sometimes there is some kind of notification that says that you are using a service this data is locked but most of the time the users don't really know that this is indeed happening and if you are an everyday person in Latin America if they know that their data could be eventually used later for to aid an investigation or that it could be given to authorities most of the people will not really actually know that that's indeed what is happening and again there is no clear distinction around which authorities have actually access to it let's talk about in general about the question of surveillance if there is actually mass surveillance in Latin America what it has been shown that it in contrast to the global law there is not this traditional instance of mass surveillance in the sense that they have not been really that much like documents that showcase that there is a plan from the government to actually to be allowed the citizens at this scale but there has been very much instances of targeted surveillance it could be and it's mainly reasonable to say that there could be mass surveillance but at least so far we have not had that much of an example so to say some notable examples of actually targeted surveillance of the software installed by Colombia that's called Esperanza and the other one that was solved by a very system that is called Puma and this was an spy software for telephone communication and it was targeted towards journalists, political accusation parties, human rights activists and this was all done during the Alvaro U.S. government in Colombia most of the time the software or the reason why they tried to justify that they bought this software is because they tried to help anti-kidnapping operation, anti-extortion operation anti-terrorism, anti-drug trade and this is a common thing all over the world that the reason why they say that they break into an encryption or that they need to buy more is because they're trying to a criminal investigation or some kind Citizens laugh on the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies Monca School of Global Affairs actually rebuild the existence of command and control servers from Team Spy National Team Fishers, remote nutrition, civilian software in Mexico and Panama, Venezuela and Paraguay and of course despite what was developed by a German based company and the thing happened with the hacking team in other countries mainly Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico and Panama and it was the same, it was mainly targeted to political opponents, it was targeted to human rights activists, it was targeted for journalists how it was bought, that raises a lot of questions of why the global north countries and these companies were actually selling this malware to governments in the legality of it, these companies couldn't actually sell it as it is, so they tried to find a legal way to actually sell it the way that they found is by using intermediaries mainly for example in the case of Ecuador there was a Colombian based company that was the one that was buying the software from the global north companies and then re-selling it to Colombia and Ecuador another question is if it was safe to use in the sense to assist this malware really doing only spying on the political opposition or whatever they wanted to spy and it was not backfiring and also logging data of the Latin American governments or the people that were in spy as we know now it was also doing that, so there was not even a notion of the governments that bought this of what actually they were buying and what about the reality what about actually buying another software from another country to actually spy on your citizens that raises a lot of questions in the case of secure messaging what we have found is that there is not a lot of use such of actual secure messaging in the sense of traditional secure messaging application that exists today in the case of why many people in Latin America use social media if they're activists they mostly use social media because that's the only way as they don't have access to mass media the social media gives them a way to access to have a way to publish what they are doing in some kind of way and the way that for example they operate how they are going to create meetings of what kind of strategy they are developing is through the use such of what's up there's not much use by such signal that I have no no no because it's not so known because it's too slow specifically when I have spoken with journalists in Latin America they sometimes have told me that they don't use it because it's too slow because people cannot really send documents to signal because it will take forever because it's too difficult to use when people say it and mostly because contacts do not use it so most of the people don't really use signal and so therefore they don't really use it if your family or friends don't use it then you will not use it often something that is really used is telegram because they have sort of a marketing campaign for Latin American activists so most of Latin American groups actually use telegram all of the give message and communication systems are hardly used you hardly see people actually using OTR or PGP because they are much more difficult to install so not really that much use and what often happens is specifically we are talking to activists about that fight for indigenous rights is that they often don't have enough economic advantage to actually buy a lot of smartphones and put signal into it or buy a lot of computers what they do is that often times they have one desktop computer and they share between each other because that's what they can so in this case there is another really good solution for secure messaging for them there is one instance in which you can there is a country who has actually asked WhatsApp to actually surrender encrypted data of someone to aid an investigation in this case it was Brazil between 2015 and 2016 and because WhatsApp refused to provide this data it was blocked during that time which to this day there is still some debate about the legality of actually blocking it or not so as I'm running out of time let's go directly to some conclusions so in conclusion there still needs a lot to actually think about Latin America in terms of the digital tools and the privacy of them and the surveillance that you can actually make of them and there needs to actually be thinking about Latin America context and what means privacy to the region itself instead of just thinking that we need a law so we are just going to copy some of the same concepts and put the same into the Latin American concept in the context of COVID that even though it's nice idea maybe to have tracking applications for COVID-19 if their privacy is preserving of course but maybe in the Latin American concept it will not make sense because not a lot of people have actually access to one smartphone that they care on all day still I need to think about the data that's consumed by other countries so mainly because most of the people in Latin America are using social media that is developed by other countries and mainly they are using Facebook and Whatsapp what actually means that the data gets stored in another country we need to think about the malware market and why certain companies from global north countries that are actually selling this malware and what does it mean and what legality has that actually what we know is that malware is mainly used for targeted civilians specifically for journalists but it's highly used for digital gender violence I know that there's a lot of studies from the global north who how malware is actually installed for spasware and all the kind of this but it's not that much used for gender-based violence in Latin America in Latin America it's mostly about hacking social media accounts or like restricting the access to the device we need to more research to actually know how digital tools in how car after the digital tools actually impact the minorities what actually means for example for the women's rights activists or LGBTII activists to actually be harassed all the time and monitor all the time their activities through digital tools and we also need to think is there a secure messaging solution that actually works in Latin America for activists that sometimes don't have the same level of access to technology as they do half in the global north or the same access to the internet in general to the connection of the internet as in the global north more details around all of this will be discussed actually at the panel that I will be inviting you now or to happen maybe in January and February and to actually talk to people who have been doing all of this research around what actually of the findings are and what we can actually do to actually think about a specific way to create a secure messaging solution or to think about privacy in a Latin American context and that's some kind of reference if you want to relate about privacy laws and put assembly in fear the same for civilians and the same for cohesion when it's the cohesion is COVID domestic abuse hate speech gender-based violence and all this with that thank you very much and I don't know how the questions were but yeah thank you very much Sofia thank you very much for this very interesting presentation thank you thanks a lot for that really interesting presentation there is still time for some questions here use our RCJet it's linked in the jet tab below in your video browser here you can also go to Twitter and master on RC3-CSH would be the hashtag hashtag so far let me quickly see yes no questions but I have a couple of questions so in the meanwhile folks if you're interested send us your questions they will be collected and forwarded by me in the meanwhile I have a couple of questions let's say to you until the others come up with their questions you said that polis treats females which have been harassed when they go actually to indicate that there's something really going wrong as historical beings so the question is for me that's a typical say male reaction so what's the distribution between males and females in polis in jurisdiction like for example judges and so on is a force so I suppose there is dis-equilibrium dis-equilibrium yes there is not a balance between the number of women in the polis and in general in the judicial system in Latin American countries even as far as going like for example women presidents in Latin America hardly I think I can think of an instance in Argentina Chile in Brazil in my country has not been an Ecuadorian president although it should have happened because there was actually an Ecuadorian woman who could have been the president but they didn't allow her but yeah there's always a disadvantage about it which actually asks the question if there will be more women in the police or in legal authorities to actually believe women that could certainly be the case but could also be certainly the case of women sometimes the women join mostly male dominated fields what happens is that they integrate into the same pattern of thinking so they get more so they get more easily more easily so they feel more is that comfort on the work that they are doing so that could also be that even there are women that will be still treating other women reporting bugs because they have integrated into the same male thinking just to preserve the job okay well that's a sad story obviously I mean that's exactly the way it shouldn't work okay we have some questions flowing in so the first one is what is the reason for people not thinking about their own privacy what do you think about this so in general I think that in Latin America there's ceiling digital tools there's still not this notion that you are actually being surveilled and that the data that you are given to companies actually have some kind of cost or that it has some kind of yeah that it has some kind of cost so what people think is that they only use social media as they will be using casual conversation they equate social media with that like for example social media is the same as having a casual conversation with someone meaning that after I finish this casual conversation it will go to the air there's no record of it so there's this notion of that there's still some need to actually say no this actually is almost as writing something into a paper because it has the same level of storage it's not like only talking it's the same so that still needs to be actually pushed into the agenda maybe in the same education system to actually say the usage of social media or the usage of digital tools has indeed these actual implications and this is this to happen I don't know if it's specific to Latin America certainly in Latin America happens but I think it's also in the world that people treat the usage of specifically social media and WhatsApp as if it was like you know casual conversations but it's not actually the case great thanks for that elaborate answer oh wow now it's going on that's good we are having the questions now can activists operate properly under the circumstances that they actually know that they're being spied on there's been some instances in which activists have been actually targeted and sort of being aware of this there's a lot of journalists who have actually been aware of this and in Ecuador for example what they started doing is that they started collecting the malware that they were sent so there's like a little collection of the malware that was sent to them and they sort of realized this but there was no way for example they sort of figured out this later at the time they were already targeted because most of the time people don't have access in Latin America to antivirus software because it's really expensive and your company will not pay for it or sometimes you install your antivirus software from buying it in an illegal way the license in an illegal way that happens a lot in Latin America so there's no way for the license in the cases also sometimes when government actually targets political opposition or activists they sometimes they don't know exactly how to target so there was one instance in one there was one judge in Argentina who got killed and when people analyzed his phone they found out that he had malware installed but the malware was not functioning because the malware was only to be used for a computer for a desktop computer but not for the phone so even the government sent this malware to try to target him but it was not efficient because it was not for the purpose that they were wanted so sometimes even when governments buy this malware they don't know exactly how it works so they just only send it is there a way that they can keep working there's some ways that they can still work but most of the time what activists in Latin America use is mostly the use social media and WhatsApp and they get infiltrated quite heavily in those groups so they can track most of the times what they do is that they have now created like a strategy on how to efficiently use social media and how to efficiently use WhatsApp and if they actually need to come up with certain important decisions or certain important meetings what they do is that they gather themselves in person rather than using any kind of digital tools so that's like a common thing that they prefer to meet in person using any digital tool okay okay there's a question actually about this panel you've mentioned folks out there are not quite sure how to find it so basically if you can comment on that it would be cool I'm still thinking of exactly what is going to happen there's still people from from article 19 from Karisma from EFF I did something similar on an event about messaging but the widespread activists from Hong Kong and Tibet and this one is going to only be focusing like in America I will put it on my Twitter because that's the way I put it I usually send it also to mailing lists last time I also send it to the tour mailing list but people have an idea of what other mailing lists I can advertise this to I can also send it along it's very in a Hacker way in the sense that it's very self-created nothing like advertised by these companies so yeah just tell us your Twitter my Twitter is just tell us perfect that's the one we need that's the one we need very good okay let me see we still have a little bit of time left now hmm maybe another question you were talking about data retention in several countries of South America are they usually then requested by judges or do you have some information that this actually flows by some other weird let's say channels it flows by a lot of weird channels specifically sometimes police it's has access to this data stored if it's important for a crime I don't know how much we're sampling companies and that's a question to us in itself in for example in the companies who have access to the data that's being stored by the same companies if there's like some kind of internal internal guidelines of how actually who has access probably not but usually the police is the one who has access or the if it's in a serious crime and a crime when I say serious crime I mean something that it has gets more like public attention or mass media attention usually it's the prosecution usually it's the judge those are the ones who have access okay okay yeah we also got some some tech comments here basically so one person is saying what would it be would achieve disposable life usb or less be of help for activists over there for people like tails, ninja or less or something like that it would definitely be of help there has been some instances for example the tool projects actually trying to reach out certain Latin American activists and actually helping them and I know they have been doing lots of good work around that area with tails it's a little less because installing tails for people it's still a little bit scary and sometimes they don't really know what it needs to install tails are most of the operative systems that I have been used by activists specifically indigenous activists in Latin America's windows so yeah yeah that's not the way but the other operating systems they're a little bit tougher to use and plus you said people are very very let's call it illiterate when it comes to digital communication I mean they are using their phones and just think it vanishes in the air so I think it's really hard to communicate use of those operating systems I mean there is also one I mean digital rights yes that's also part of the topic somebody is wondering if there are hints that manipulations were done on the level of elections do you know anything about that yes specifically in Brazil that's a really interesting cryptography by the name of Diego Aranya who actually made a huge research about Brazilian elections in terms of covid actually this is an interesting really interesting question because some governments have actually been proposing to do digital ways to actually elect presidents to this day they haven't come with a good proposal in terms of physical elections there's always manipulation in Latin America in my country in Ecuador there has been lots of scandals of actually physical manipulation of elections when they create forged ballots when they toss out some like big containers of ballots that they don't want so even in the physical sense there's still lots of attacks around that okay Sofia again lots of thanks for this interesting hour with you in the name of the audience in my name which is Grafias they can actually reach you through your contacts now back to the studio okay thank you very much bye