 We're here at GSR 16 in Shamash Sheikh in Egypt, and I'm very pleased to be joined by Mr. Sharif Hashem, who is the Vice President of Cybersecurity for the NTRA, the National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority of Egypt. Mr. Hashem, thank you very much for being with us today. It's my pleasure. Thank you. Now, we've had a wonderful GSR here. We've had a lot of interesting conversations going on here. Obviously, I know that you're Vice President in charge of security for the NTRA. How important is trust in today's efforts to build smart societies? Trust is a very important pillar of any information society, especially when you talk about smart services, smart applications. And as such, individuals, companies, different stakeholders, interact and they do their business. They connect with each other. They go to social media. They really receive whether it is work related or business related, education related or cultural aspects of communication. And as such, they'd like to see this communication secure and they'd like to maintain their privacy. And definitely there is a role for a regulator to make this happen in a transparent way so that the citizen doesn't worry about the technology, which technology is being used, but measures and norms should be put in place so that the security and the privacy are maintained in a way to really build this trust. Trust is a result, really, of measures that are put in place, that we reach a level of trust that citizens trust that the information is going to be shared, secured in the way that they expect. No surprises. And also in terms of customer service and customer support or citizen support at large, this is something that needs to be taken into consideration because when we think about doing business offline, you already see the other person or the other entity go to a certain facility with certain logos. I mean, at the front of the facility, you know exactly where you're going, what you're going to do, what to expect. But if you go to a website that says this is the Ministry of XYZ, that means that this site could be legitimate or could be a fake site. And if you start exchanging information with that site, then it could be putting you at risk. So one way of handling this is to have trust-building measures, trust-building norms, confidence-building norms within the different circles, whether it is technical or service circles, if technical means the operators, the telecom operators, the internet service providers, or it could be the other service provider. If it is banking, it would be the bank, if it is government, it would be the government officials or government public services and should cover the technical regulatory aspects of creating this trust environment. Without this, really, we'll be hindering, we'll be wasting the infrastructure and we'll be putting our population at risk. And I suppose it's also keeping people informed and letting them know what to look for and also giving them that environment of trust. How can we maintain trust in your opinion in today's world? I'll tell you, without being philosophical about it, but you see the point is, individuals, we try to avoid risk, but really our life is about managing risk. Risk management is key to the success of this trust environment. So educating individuals is step one, so that the individual's organization would know exactly what type of measures are being applied, what type of data is being collected and who has access to this data. And even in designing, without being technical about it, but in designing the way the service is being performed, the service provider doesn't need to know more than what is really required for his business. For instance, when you go to a grocery store and you buy commodities, you buy some sugar, some whatever bread, they don't ask you for an ID for this, right? So there is no requirement if it is being sold online, really it's not required. They need to know where to deliver this service and that's it. And that you have enough money, electronic money to pay for it. Collecting more money, more information, sorry, about this means that putting your data at risk, because that would be a grocery store collecting everything about you, potentially putting you at risk if that store got hacked into the data could leak out and we have seen over the past maybe 10, 15 years, incidents where really millions of data records were leaked out. The challenge of leaking out data is really not only putting the individuals at risk, which is really a big, really a breaker to the trust circle, but also there would be economic and financial repercussions that would take several months really to deal with. So we'd like to avoid it, use in technical terms encryption, secure channels, secure ID cards or like multi-factor authentication. These are maybe technical terms, but all the citizen or the individual need to worry about is that there are certain procedures of getting this service. He or she would know exactly how to perform this and if something goes wrong, he knows where to call and what to do. There would be insurance because again we say that the individual is much weaker in a much weaker position than the institution. The institution can really create insurance framework around this service provision so that if there is any fraud, any wrongdoings that are beyond the control of the individual, that there are ways really tremendous and to make sure that the individual doesn't get hurt because of really fraud actions. So this is basically several components that would result in the individual or the companies or the whole society feeling or trusting the technology. And especially now I cannot talk about trust without talking about the Internet of Things. Now many of our devices are linked to the Internet. They know where we are, the locations, they know what we're doing, starting from your smartphone, your fridge at home, some houses, you know, the smart bulbs now, they can really, for facilitating or improving the quality of life and rationalizing the use of electricity, there are ways of controlling them. As such, they can, if tapped into, they can really be used to profile a person and have that person or that individual or that company being subjected to an attack by hackers or malicious activities. So the education is important, having the regulatory framework to make sure that the service providers, the technology providers, they have the right measures in place and making sure that the whole information society is reaping the benefit from the technology without being exposed to unnecessary risk. Now at the beginning I alluded to the fact that there have been some great conversations going on here at GSR 16, very excellently hosted here in Shabashik. I just wanted to find out from you what have been the key takeaways for people who have been unable to attend? Well, this is a meeting mostly for regulators and companies and people who are engaged in this regulatory framework and really it is challenging to everybody. So the information, most of the information, the outcomes, the discussion papers are hosted on the website of the ITU, the International Telecommunication Union and I would encourage whoever is interested to follow up this dialogue because it's ongoing process. Everybody is learning international organizations like the ITU, the UN entity and they have a role to play. Regulators have their roles to play. It's very interesting, forever is really fascinated by how the smart society terms are being used, the benefits, the potential benefits of such technology is being exposed to learn about really how to manage this, how to in the regulatory framework and how the dysregulation is evolving include really and requires a strong partnership with everybody, with the NGOs, I start from the NGOs, the private sector, government and learning from each other, learning about best practices and the ITU is really a great place to go to if you need more information of somebody who would like to know more about it. Shorin Fajem, thank you very much indeed being with us today. Thank you very much, my pleasure, thank you.