 Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you very much for having us. It's really great to be here. I'm just going to do some introductions and make some opening provocations. And then we will hand it over to our esteemed panel. My name is Marianne Franklin. Marianna as in Marianne. They faithful Franklin as in Aretha. So I'm professor of global media and politics and I'm currently chair of media, cultural industries and society at the University of Corningham. I was previously at Goldsmiths in London and I'm moderating this panel. To my right, to your left, I have Dr Eleanor Carney who is senior lecturer in data politics and social justice at the Department of Sociology and Criminology. In the new school, I believe, of policy and global affairs, our city university London. And to my left is David Duaneus Sidd, who's the Marie Curie fellow at Cadence University of Technology and is currently working as an associate professor researcher at the University of Tartu in Estonia. I was the president of the thematic group on digital sociology at the International Sociology Association, general chair at the E-Vote ID conference and program chair of the annual International Conference on Digital Government Research. And to my far right, to your far left, take it as you like, Julia Borla, who's senior researcher, politics of digitalization from the BZB at the Berlin Social Science Centre. Also senior associate researcher at the Centre for Digitalization, Democracy and Innovation in Brussels, co-chair of the communication policy and technology section, so I see a lot of Julia in my email, at the International Association for Media and Communication Research, which is what everybody knows as IMCR, and academic editor, of course, for the Internet Policy Review. So these are our panelists. I'm really looking forward to a very interdisciplinary and hopefully spicy discussion. Our plan is, after I've made a few opening remarks, because it's the only chance I'm going to get. I'll take two more minutes. We'll open up to the panel. It'll be about half an hour, and at which point there'll be time for about 10, 15 minutes for you, the audience. And then we're going to keep an eye on the bar, so we won't keep you here too long. Anyway, we're five years, 10 years, we're five years plus to use you in terminology for the Internet Policy Review. And we're going to be looking more or less around the notion of trust, distrust, whatever that is, and how might or might not relate to digital sovereignty, whatever that is, in light of three points. We have default proprietary power of what we call big tech. I don't need to spell that out. We have the return at single of the rule of law and institutions of nation states and intergovernmental organizations, otherwise called regulators. And we also have a whole host of activities, presumed, enacted, self-identified, and funded of civil society organizations who try to hold both those two large, important power holders to account in all areas of Internet Policy making. But actually, I run the instructions for us not to be too gloomy. Nonetheless, it's five years since we last got together, and I was lucky enough to be here for the five-year birthday party. But what are five years it has been? And I'm sure I'm not the only one to want to think back over the last five years. Whether there are reasons to be cheerful, if I may cite the late great Ian Jury, despite some more gloomy prognoses about the increasing Democratic deficit of the Internet-dependent world's dependence, increasing dependence, again, that word, on digital networks to do anything at all. So one could argue in the last five years that's come home. Why? Because what have we seen, and I'm just selecting, ongoing wars and militarized conflict, ongoing and Syria ongoing militarized conflict in the occupied territories, ongoing. New wars right now at the doorstep of Europe, European Union, in Ukraine. The global pandemic was changed arguably everything. It also saw a boom in being online, legitimately. We no longer have to go into the office. The arrival of online conferencing in a way we've never experienced. But the huge inroads at ed tech, educational technology has made it all levels of education. The two Mosque massacres in New Zealand, which has caused my homeland, perpetrated by one gun man with one webcam. Two automatic rifles went global live on Facebook. And that kind of brought to light the whole content moderation, our regulation tapped from responsibility to the public eye. And we're still seeing the aftermath of that. New regulatory tools, digital services act, copyright directive following on for the GDPR, the EU, and of course a whole of national, nation state based initiatives to try and protect miners online such as the infamous, shall we say, Eleanor online safety bill in the UK. The rise of Chinese made components while away, and microprocessors that keep the internet and our devices running, alongside increasingly embedded monopolies by singular millionaires that own and control transmission pathways. And here I'm thinking of Elon Musk's Starlink dominance. And finally the rise, the rise, the rise, the rise, and the rise of all things AI. Making moot the question of whether the human part of human rights for the online environment to cite an earlier articulation from over a decade ago, human rights online, just as human rights exist offline, whether that human part has been replaced by digital actors and who are they? Or what are they? So we're going to approach these ideas and we're going to use two kind of tricky terms Roth and sovereignty, very broad, very opaque, very meta-level. We're going to try and pin them down conceptually on the basis of my three experts' research and their thinking and with your help. We're going to problematise them, hopefully shake us up, open up a few back oxes, have a discussion and go start drinking to prepare ourselves for this amazing set of lectures we're going to have later in the evening. So opening statements from our three panelists and then I will go from there. We have a little plan but obviously we're going to go with the flow. So I'm going to switch from my very old tablet to even older, Encon Deadwood. Okay, so I'm going to go in order of alphabetical orders. So first of all Eleanor Kami, then David and then Yulia. They're going to make short opening statements and then we'll proceed accordingly. So Eleanor, can you hear me? Oh, okay, great. So it's a bit weird because it's a very fluffy thing in front of my face. Hi everyone. So for those of you who don't know me, we were asked to do these kind of very short interventions. So I decided to talk a bit about kind of the things that I learned and I think are really important and kind of relate them to the internet policy review. What I really like is the word review because for me in my work, that was always really important. So I think in the last decade, what I was basically doing is trying to understand what's happening behind those screens. So kind of looking into the politics of the attic industry, but also specifically unpacking all of the stuff around web cookies and digital consent and kind of showing that we can talk about this and we should talk about this from media and communication and sociology points of view. Because what I realized is that computer scientists, and I think a lot of us see that in a lot of the news that we see and a lot of the research that we conduct, whether it's policy or whatever, that there is this kind of computer science and the tech industries narratives that are controlling and kind of dominating how we understand but also how we engage with these technologies. So that kind of relates to the other aspect of my work, which is data literacies, which is, as Frederick mentioned before, I edited a special issue around that for the internet policy review. And I think that these are really important because I think as scholars and as journalists, as practitioners, it's really important for us to review the concepts and the narratives that were being fed by the tech industries and start thinking of different narratives. So in my work, it's not only about how we can examine that, but also importantly how we can reimagine and create different narratives and counter these kind of dominant narratives. And I think, again, that it's so hard for us to imagine that, and I see that in my work when we're interviewing, for example, citizens of how they engage with technologies, but also with NGO practitioners. So for example, in my latest work, as them, if you had all of the resources that you can, how would things look like? And that was a really hard question for them because it was really hard for them to imagine a different world, right? A world without Google, a world without Microsoft. And I think that is a trap for us because if we can't kind of verbalize or think about or create these kind of new terms, then it's really hard for us to break through. So short, concise. Thanks, Eleanor. That's very helpful. Okay, turning now to David's opening statement. Oh, no, you have your own. Just checking, just to a sound check. We're okay, we're good. Yeah, okay, David, do you have a mic? Yeah, yeah. Okay, good. Okay, the floor is yours. Thank you. So yeah, thank you so much for the introduction and for the opening statement. In my case, by training, I'm a sociologist and I'm working generally with technology, with technology, public administration and so on. And then somehow, quite often when I'm working with technology, I'm coming across different perspectives or different ways of understanding and looking at the same thing that I'm looking. For example, I'm researching on Internet voting and I'm organizing one conference on Internet voting and there are lots of cryptographers that they are coming. And they are always using the concept of trust, which is one of the opening concepts that we are having here. And the understanding of trust is very different from the one that I have. When they talk about trust, cryptographers, they talk about security, they talk about complexity, they talk about making this thing vulnerable and so on and so on. And for me as a sociologist, this is not necessarily what is bringing trust into a particular technological setup. So for me, it's more connected with which use we are making of it, which are the discourses around the technology itself and so on. And therefore I became interested in making research on that and I used an idea which is not particularly original because it was already written a few years ago that trust and distrust, are not symmetrically opposite concepts. So that trust and distrust, they are different concepts that they have different meanings by themselves and that we can approach them differently and in parallel if we want to get an overall picture of why do people trust certain technologies. And therefore I'm trying to implement that on Internet voting as we will see later. But this is my first idea, as I said, it's not original. It was already written before, but still there is an open avenue for researching this topic and for implementing this particular idea in different technological setups. Some of them, for example, are artificial intelligence or things that you were mentioning before. And in my case, I'm doing that on Internet voting. Okay, so keeping these kinds of robbing terms in our heads, turning to Julia for your opening statement and then we'll proceed to unpack a little bit. Thank you. I also have one of these fluffy little mic circuits. So I'm a, by training a communications scholar and over the last years I worked a lot on the history and the changing role of states in communication governance. And one of the things you cannot work on, you cannot miss if you work on this, is actually the discourse of digital sovereignty, which has become very prominent over the last decade. And so I was thinking how to kind of relate the topic of this panel, which is like looking back these last 10, 5 years and also thinking about the notion of trust to my research. And I came up that actually it's interesting to look at digital sovereignty from a perspective of trust because in some way you can say that the reasons we are talking about digital sovereignty here in Europe at the moment and why we started talking about it is maybe that you can say that on the one hand we lost trust and on the other side we gained trust. And this I mean is we lost trust when we look at external sovereignty. So when you look at the relation between, for example, the state and external powers, we clearly over the last 10, 5, 10 years we lost trust. So we lost trust in the kind of liberal governance model that we had for the internet. We lost trust in the idea of an open free internet that kind of would self-regulate itself. We lost trust in private actors that they can also self-regulate and that they would act in the best interest of their users and consumers. And we clearly also lost trust in the US government who is kind of behind this ideology if you want to. So we lost trust and that's why we kind of wanted to determine our strengths in our self-determination that way. But on the other hand you can say that we also gained trust as citizens in Europe. We gained trust when we look at internal sovereignty so the relationship between the state or Europe as a union of states and its citizens because we now actually trust our governments to protect our rights in the online space. And this is really when you look at like a long time ago because at the beginning if we all remember we see the creation of independence and so on kind of governments were supposed to stay outside of the digital space. And now actually nowadays we expect them to go in and regulate and act in our best interest and defend our interests vis-à-vis these other external powers like companies and other governments. Also when we look at what we just had, this information for example or whatever is going on in the online public sphere, we now actually expect our governments and we trust them to do this in our best interest. At least in Europe we do this. And of course it doesn't mean that they all everything do everything right but they have our trust that they try to do this right. And I think this is the biggest change I can observe over the last 10 years. Thank you very much. So you can see how the word trust has been used in many ways already. As the opposite but intention of this trust, trust as in we expect, we trust you will do this. This is a euphemism in British English for saying we expect you to do this. Or the genuine, yeah, they're all right, I can put my faith in them. We were talking a little bit about that in our preparations about whether the term itself is adequate to what we're trying to capture. There was one of the ghastly internet governance foreign motos, I feel it was a ghastly one called the Internet of Trust. Remember guys? The Internet of Trust just made my blood run cold. And I was thinking why is that making my blood run cold? It's like someone saying to me trust me. I'm in it, someone says that to you. Anyway, so I'm going to ask our two panellists, Julia, of course you can jump in as you like. But Eleanor and David have been doing research specific around these issues. Eleanor was talking about discourses and the misuse or the co-optation of language in order to smooth over any problems to hide other things. So David, would you like to tell us a little bit more about what you mean about trust, distrust and line of voting? Because that's a very specific situation. Yeah, there are two things here that I would like to put on the table initially. For example, stemming from one of the things that Julia was just saying that trust is growing and trust is decreasing at the same time. That would be, I know, it's logically difficult to place that in a construct but it makes absolutely sense when we see the fact. So then it's interesting, for example, this approach that I'm trying to use in my research allows to put these two things. And I will put later one example based on one research I was doing in the Netherlands before. Understanding that if trust and distrust are two different concepts, they can coexist. Meaning that we can trust and distrust at the same time on the same thing based on different principles. Or one particular asset can or one particular thing can have a differential impact in different people and for some people that would bring them to trust the technology and for some others it would bring to distrust. And that connects with my research topic. I'm researching elections and elections are a really particular part of public administration management. I mean, you can create an artificial intelligence system and if the day one, the system is not working okay we will repair it and it will work on day two. So the trust is not lost immediately in case it's not practically working but on electoral management if on the electoral day your system is not working you don't have another chance. You need to postpone the elections not just over, not only in the system but also in the overall working of technology and democracy. And I was doing research on something that happened in the Netherlands in 2006 and 2007. In the Netherlands, you used to have I'm saying you even if you're not Dutch from what I understood but you are the representative of the Netherlands they used to have machines for casting votes. And there was one particular hacker that proved on the television that the machines were not trustworthy. He proved that during the electoral campaign he went to the television he said they are not trustworthy there was a debate with the builder of the computers the computer builder said that yes and he went to the television and made the computer play chess live. Of course this is an absolutely trust breakdown and for the government I can imagine that they would be all panicking because they need to solve this issue to run the elections normally and that provoked lots of issues and of course the system was withdrawn after certain time and so on and so on but interestingly this hacker was bringing at the same time trust and distrust in the system was bringing distrust on the machines that they were using pretending to bring trust on the overall functioning of democracy by saying we need to come back to pen and paper in this particular case. And it's interesting how these two concepts somehow they can be merged together elections in the Netherlands are better now than they were before by withdrawing technology that was going to make the system more effective but we can find different examples of the use of internet voting in which this particular thing brought more trust in the system but I will probably comment that a bit more a bit on that later. Yeah okay just before we move to Ellen was an example from research just very briefly there what exactly went wrong with the machine that meant it was not trustworthy just in so many words there were two things first of all that this hacker was able to introduce a chip in one of the machines to prove that the machine was not working so the machine itself was working was performing the things as it was expected but the organizational setup to protect the machines was not working and this guy just went to the place where the machines were stored and said I'm making a demo in a school could you borrow me one machine yes of course it would the machine put a chip and proof on the TV never give it back and proof on the TV that and the second thing is that the machines he demonstrated that if you would have a microphone and you would be less than 10 meters far from the machine there was one political party that had one cup one letter that it was one of the normal 28 letters of the alphabet so when people were pressing for this party the machine was making a slightly different sound with the rest of parties so the secrecy of the boat would be corrupted if you have a microphone in less than 10 meters from that but still as in elections these kind of concepts they are very important if the secrecy of the boat is corrupted the system cannot be used anymore even if it's for some particular party that maybe it was never going to win the elections but still that should have been protected so there are many layers of complexity when we are talking about technology and about certain types of technology and on critical aspects like elections that can make the system shake for things that are really not not going to affect the overall result of elections which is the general goal when we are talking about elections the goal is not that the elections are 100% representative of what people vote but it's the fact that people will believe that they are 100% representative of what they vote and that was making the things shake when it's not working like that. Okay a very small thing but big consequences thanks for illustrating that I just wanted us to be very clear about what it was exactly that was not working it's Eleanor from your perspective from the research you've been doing what would you like to add to our discussion here about where the trust is actually the right word? I think again I'm going to go back to kind of reviewing the things that we think we know and I'm going to talk a bit about the different projects I've done around data literacy so you know we see a lot of research and a lot of questionnaires where you ask people about oh are you okay to trade your privacy or all of these kind of stuff for your data what we discovered in our project that a lot of people actually don't know what is data so when you actually ask them you know what do you think is data they said oh my email my name I have no idea all the other kind of data points that companies are collecting on them or extracting from them and another thing that they don't know is all of the organizations that are extracting that so I think a lot of the time when we talked about trust well a lot of people don't even know how this kind of all of the data economy works another thing we ask people do you like personalization so a lot of people said yeah you know more than 90% but then when we ask them do you like to you know how do you think about companies tracking you over time and 95% more said that they don't like that the fact that they don't connect the personalization to tracking over time just shows you know a lot of these kind of misconceptions that we think oh you know we talk about data so obviously people know about data we talk about all of these companies and antique companies which we discovered everyday new ones that are extracting our data they didn't even know when we asked them that have their data they didn't even think about even governments and things like that so again kind of going back to reviewing the things that we take for granted it's not only concepts it's what people actually know and I'm not talking about people who are more tech savvy or you know who read a lot about this we talked with you know people from lower income kind of lesser kind of education attainment and I think that here context is really important because a lot of the time we make an assumption about you know people people go you know what they're doing their research they usually interview students it's easier right so you know a lot of the kind of the participants that we would have is students or people that are easier to access a lot of the time maybe through social media a lot of people are actually still not still do not have internet a lot of people still do not have social media and so I really want to say that a lot of this trust and distrust a lot of it has to be what do people actually know and then what can they actually do about these things right because then when we ask well you know I can't you know it's my work is related I have to use Facebook or my family or my friends so you know I my relationship with trust is very complex because I feel like in order for us to have trust I need to understand what I'm doing right in an election I sort of know what I'm doing I'm voting for somebody to do this and that right but if I'm pressing consent the majority of people don't know what that means and whenever I show my students you know what's happening in the back end of their screens they're completely shocked you know they're when they're seeing hundreds of cookies sent to their devices whether it's you know their phones or or computers and obviously there was you know different kind of PR and different kind of which I show in my work of the different tech industries to hide that from us right because actually in the beginning the default setting was you know they saw maybe we actually show them what's happening behind the screen and then the advertising industry said no it's going to confuse them all of these cookies it's too much let's do all of these pristine you know looking websites where you can't really see what's happening in the back end so for me trust is very complex is about you know a lot of deception that's going on and kind of luring people to sit to press these buttons that basically they don't know what they mean and you know they're basically worthless because they're not really doing what they're supposed to do so I think we need to ask ourselves you know trust who does it work for right when we're talking about when Facebook tells us should trust us or Google you know should trust us you know who does it serve what does these kind of platform work for yeah actually got to contrasting here we've got by accident totally does incompetence you could argue lack of due diligence all the rest of it and by design perhaps we need to think about as an audience synonyms for trust also in your own language are we talking here about faith are we not talking about powerful power holders saying have faith have faith there's a sort of deification in sense going on whether by accident or by design so with that in mind hopefully you can come back in the audience feedback and interaction so we've sort of hopefully broken it open a little bit based on research I'm going to shift a little bit to the other sort of theme which is this theme about sovereignty because it is connected in some way or other. Sovereign means to have power over something whatever that something might be was in a confined area I come from a part of the world called Aotearoa New Zealand for us sovereignty is shared not everybody agrees but it is by a treaty 150 odd years ago supposedly shared ownership and control of natural resources and now increasingly through a digital data sovereignty movement supposedly shared control so sovereignty here has one loading but I know from Julia from your research the issue around sovereignty and that's another buzz we're seeing and you know European and international and small to stakeholder settings sovereignty let's get back out sovereignty and somehow all these issues will be resolved I like Julia from the basis of your research where do you think this whole sovereignty thing or was it just another discourse game another form of a hocus-pocus what would you say now actually I was just thinking listening to Eleanor I would like to pick up from there because what Eleanor's picking up is more like this would be what we now in the debate on digital sovereignty in Europe would probably refer to as individual sovereignty the right of the individual user to understand what is going on and to have a say in it and to act and to make a choice right and that also means the competence to understand what is going on this would be kind of what we would call individual digital sovereignty and what also is the aim especially in Germany a lot of the government strategy goes into kind of increasing this individual digital sovereignty abandon then complete a different layer in the debate which is not about individual sovereignty but it's about collective sovereignty and how we can assure as a state as a union of state as particular groups you just mentioned in New Zealand there is of course also districts in Australia as well New Zealand to Australia New Zealand sorry and there is this anyway in different countries there is this debate about indigenous digital sovereignty this idea of that they need to have their own kind of way to assure their self-determination the digital space so there are different kind of layers to the debate of digital sovereignty and I in my research I kind of try to trace them also historically how they developed and where they come from and what are the different actors behind the different reasoning behind and what I look in particular is of course the debate on in Europe and I think what is extremely interesting here is that it has it initially was a concept which was kind of referring to the when used by European policymakers to the Europe as an internal digital market so it was also used as a policy concept to defend within Europe and we said the European citizens what the European Commission was doing in terms of digital strategy so kind of to say we need this different kind of policy instruments because we need to defend our digital sovereignty and the digital sovereignty of our of you as European citizens so this was kind of a mix between this collective digital sovereignty and the individual one and also like trust me as a state or trust us as a union of state to actually have faith that we kind of help you to gain this kind of sort of digital sovereignty and to be able to make choices individual and so on and what we saw with the last years and I think the pandemic has a lot to do with it that they actually Europe started to use this concept as an externally oriented policy concept and it's not longer only oriented to European citizens and companies and so on but it is more becoming as a key policy on the dude kind of position Europe globally especially in the kind of competition between the US and China so Europe is trying to kind of say okay we have this this vision of a digital order which is different from the US level one and different from the restrictive authoritarian Chinese one we want to have this third way European way of a digital transformation and digital sovereignty is our way in our means to get there basically so it's becoming a geopolitical term rather than a kind of internal policy concept and I think this is very interesting because with this aspect we completely lose this individual dimension as well because that doesn't make sense in the geopolitical debate around digital sovereignty then I think that's really important what Julia is bringing up and I think David from your work as well and Eleanor from your other work with surveillance devices is that sovereignty has many loadings in different contexts so community sovereignty the least thing that we need by sovereignty when it's impacted by ownership and control or lack of ownership and control what if your machines are owned by a large multi national what if your key strategic infrastructure for your mobile mass is owned by another great power what if your own government as many people found out in 2013 I've just noted and still going on is actually spying extra judicially on its own citizens or hounding others so where does sovereignty fit into this I mean what are we actually talking about I think I'd just like to ask the panel to say what do we actually what do we what do you what do you mean from your research when you think about sovereignty if it's even relevant if it's not you can say no I'm passing and giving it to someone else yeah I mean in my case example I mean there are different ways of approaching the logic of sovereignty for example depending on who to whom isn't this particular type of technology providing a solution I mean I was I came back from Australia two weeks ago where I was conducting some research because then Australia they used to have also an internet voting system that it was initial initially brought to the public scene by people who were visually impaired because in Australia they have some interesting phone voting system in which people who have problems with vision either they go by hand with someone to vote so then they need to trust the person who is next to them that they are voting for party B or A or whatever or they have a system that they call to one telephone number and then they get a number an identification number to to keep the secrecy of their identity then they call to another number they provide this number they say what they vote and so on so they always need to rely on somebody else but using internet voting for example they could be individually sovereign and they could exercise the right to vote as normal citizens or citizens which are not visually impaired sorry and then there is one dimension that is connected with that I mean to whom the technology is providing a service and technology can help to gain individual sovereignty but same time cryptographers in Australia they were quite against the use of internet voting for the possibility of having some kind of security bridges that could compromise the overall quality or integrity of the elections so we were facing there some kind of clash between individual and collective sovereignty on one particular on this particular case and there is another case that we were commenting before where this thing can come to the table that in this case we are talking between the individual and the collective but for example the case of Ukraine that this 2024 they are going to have elections and they are facing coming at stake is the sort of democratic sovereignty of the country they need to organize elections they were at some moment considering the option of introducing some internet voting system to ensure that they can organize elections but that could put different questions on one hand if you need to do elections on paper your security security of voters could be compromised if you do elections online there will be lots of discussions about the security of the technological system and then there is an overall question of the sovereignty of the state which is organizing the elections and whether to use technology to provide the service or not so in my case for example I'm approaching the concept of sovereignty in a really pragmatic way because it helps to understand or to respond some questions but of course I'm not getting so much deep on the analysis of the particular definition of the concept of probably you are doing and probably you are doing this so good I mean so in terms of context sovereignty implied some sort of prerogative you have the prerogative to vote privately in the way you wish without interference or fear of leaks or intervention so that's a kind of very personalized notion isn't it and then we have this much more geopolitical one if we bring it down to sort of another cultural geopolitical militarized conflict situation Eleanor is this a chance perhaps to talk a little bit about your NSO discoveries Yes so in my latest work with Damko Tial we basically analyzed the legitimation kind of surveillance by NSO so we kind of analyze how they express themselves in different media and I think one of the things we think about sovereignty but context is so important like you just said because NSO what a lot of people don't know maybe is that it depends on the Israeli defense ministry because it's an export of kind of kind of cyber weapon it depends on it and what that means is that the way they express themselves in Israeli media is very different than the way that they express themselves in other types of media so we analyzed how they express themselves and first of all they mainly interview in Israeli media up until very recently and I'm going to say why the kind of the public opinion has changed about NSO up until recently they were quite celebrated so not a secret that Israel is quite a militarized country but one of the things that kind of was celebrated is one of their CEO which is not their CEO anymore they were selected as you know the most influential people when they do like the yearly kind of 100 most influential people all of these things they were celebrated they were collaborating with different kind of newspapers to talk about their success as a cyber company they always denied different kind of things that they've done across because they're doing it for the country and the way that they tailored it so they had different kind of tailoring of their messages you know we're doing it for the security of people we're doing it because we're Zionists you know that we want to kind of help and kind of bring different kind of things to the Israeli society it was very much tailored to the Israeli audience because as every company you know they have different kind of stakeholders that they need to please right their users their investors mainly the Israeli politicians things like that now so up until quite recently they were quite celebrated in the Israeli public there's very little kind of critical points of view about technology in the Israeli mainstream media but the thing that kind of changed things is that recently we discovered there was an expose that the Israeli police was using Pegasus which is one of NSO's technologies to spy on activists and that's when people were like oh wait you're spying on us that's not okay now we don't really like you and that's when you know NSO started of course they were also put in a blacklist in the US kind of blacklisting of the different technologies that people can use but I think again context is really important in a lot of the time when we talk about surveillance when we're talking about tech industry we're kind of only talking about the big companies like the U.S. or maybe Europe and we're forgetting that there are other types of companies and other types of countries where definitely trust in the government or trust in these kind of things is very disputed for whoever is following what's happening in Israel in the past few months the trust not that there was ever such a big trust but now it's even worse there's people demonstrating against the government so it's never just technology right it's always a mixture of the context of cultural context sociologically, historical economical to all of these things matter and it's really important not to make generalizations but also when we're talking about these technologies to understand that they answer to different kind of stakeholders and how they speak to these stakeholders differently in order to gain their trust. Okay, thanks I think this allows me to ask Julia this sort of golden question about the EU's positioning of itself as the white knight if I may use a fairy tale reference you all know what I mean by white knight on the white horse to come and rescue the princess from the tower before I do that NSO for the record and the recording stands for NSO the company. It's actually the the initial of the founders of the company okay right just so that the person in the letter NSO okay good. So Julia where do you think in terms of this whole kind of positing of EU ideas about trust trustworthy technology, trustworthy regulation better better than the Americans, better than the Chinese for sure, better than everywhere we've got the GDPR, we've got everything now, let's roll out what do you say to that based on your you know we're much friends here so and well I think it's it's maybe I'll pick up the notion of context it really depends on where the EU is coming from in which way and who they kind of include in this vision of a digital transformation led by European values democratic values, a human centered kind of digital transformation right. So if they use it within the EU I think also there are many different contexts, we have so many different countries and their countries where citizens probably do not trust their governments as much as we do here in Germany or in other countries right so there's already many different kind of context within Europe but now that they start to kind of export this idea of being kind of the standard setting or like institution or even like the EU putting forward this vision and trying also to transport them to different parts of the world and that's what they're really doing, they have these different strategies as well to really kind of export this idea of the digital transformation especially to the global south I think there they need, Europe needs to be very careful what it does and how it communicates it because it might not sit so well and especially in many of the African countries with the colonial past, if Europe comes and thinks we have the better idea and we have this vision and we principally say it's in human values to you, I think this is kind of a very historical move from the EU and I'm not sure if they really thought about this so much and what they're doing so this is kind of my thing, so I think it really depends on which perspective you're looking at this kind of discourse of the EU. It's also very arguably from certainly from the Australian examples just talking about people with disabilities also ethnicity religious persuasion gender sexuality, caste caste, these are all really important granular dimensions that I think tend to be missing when we talk about these big terms so point taken the EU and its European values also sends me shivering a little bit child of a settler society that I am so with that I'm going to just segue now to the audience, I'd love to hear what you have to say we all would and then we'll have a little bit of interaction in the audience and then I'm just going to I've got my arm about five o'clock-ish to sit right with you whatever and then we'll allow our panellists to have their final word with an outro so panellists get ready, anyone from the audience would like to make a comment please be brief this is not your PhD defence okay you can be so facetious, I'm sorry having done one myself long ago one at the back, just your name just so we know who you are, one at the front anybody else? good, we'll start at the back there, sorry sure, my I'll give you all when I think about your permission to achieve official sovereignty, one thing that comes from my own key pillar that is new interventionist industrial policy playing with something like the subsidies for digital, think about the important project of community interest from electronics, think about what used to be the European sovereignty plan, it's now a step and I think what's interesting about this against the better of the team of this panellists is that it involves the trust scheme, on the one hand the state needs to trust the companies that actually do whatever it holds complex for the money and on the other hand we as citizens need to trust the governments that they actually enforce conditionality because if the companies come through what they said they would know who, so my question do you have trust or do you have faith in the European Union that trying to achieve digital sovereignty it will not also set up a massive program public welfare okay, very good question I'll let Yulia ask David and Anna will chime in Yulia do you have a response to that challenge? I think it's a tough one, I mean do I personally trust, I mean I think what we need, what I see also when analyzing this as much as I know because we both analyzed European discourses on digital sovereignty and what you can see is that they become increasingly normative like loaded, like all this idea of digital sovereignty is there to actually defend our European and democratic values but what you can see on the policy level and on what is actually happening is a lot of economic and security policies so it's actually they kind of add this normative dimension to justify what they are doing, even to themselves I feel about what they are actually doing when you look at the really like the governance arrangement that come out of it it's mostly security policy and economic most economic policy but also a bit of security so if that's an answer I think we need to be very careful with this normative dimension on this discourse and not just buy into it yes and I think even even when I speak to European policymakers about it they are not entirely aware or at least they do not like to admit to this that there is this kind of normative dimension to it which is kind of set on top of it but it doesn't really correspond to what they are doing. Because trust itself is a normative term so good thank you. Next intervention with you at the front and then behind I'm Florian I had a brief comment about a bit involved with all kind of efforts to improve the Cyber Act and kind of this whole thing short with that maybe this whole like the European Legislative Initiative to increase sovereignty it also improves the digital space maybe that we talked about this kind of a bit of a mess and sometimes I have the impression that something will not be cared about what they actually do as long as they do something so that's maybe the quality so I wanted to ask what's your take on this that you have had similar experiences so Florian you sort of suggesting I think it's very provocative and interesting one that all this policymaking and all these regulations and directors are just basically keeping busy and meanwhile the world's on fire for example if you hear of concepts of official but that well okay this one again sort of whatever yeah we would have liked to have this finished before by the end of the quarter or something maybe like yeah but is that really the goal you know that's a sort of systemic almost sort of cultural issue yeah and I shouldn't be like some other quality metric that you want to achieve let's say who's the EU accountable to in its policy quality we hold on to that because I think we can return to the panel I'm just the next and then I'll have you on the list you say yeah after you I have a question to all but it comes from a remark that Julia made saying that we gained trust in our countries and the EU to defend our rights and I want to challenge that a little bit saying like two because we had a conversation we had one project about platform boards thinking about how actually platforms could install boards and that would meet some kind of your traditional laws of state and we're standing close to the government that who I presented this idea was like this is never going to happen because of foreign policy we would never bring this to the American president as a European approach and it will never come through because it will just destroy too many of the US marminists and we will never be able to do that so do we trust in the EU to actually defend our rights even if it's against the interests of allies okay even the allies question work so now we're getting to the real kind of nitty gritty here I'm going to you know is it even possible to counter the power the de facto ownership and control of everything we do by non-European companies basically without wanting to sort of get too specific because we can use our imagination Julia it was great that you would you like to respond and then Eleanor will do it can we trust can we trust right and I'm not saying that we can trust but we kind of expect them to act in our interests and that's what has changed right because we didn't 20 years ago we actually expected them to stay out of it because we thought we just solve regulate everything and we'll be fine and that turned out to be a myth okay any responses from David yeah I would add also another maybe provocative question I mean I understand that can we trust them also the other question is is there any alternative than trusting them I mean what is the alternative leave it on the hands of the external companies that you are saying that we need to be protected from I mean if it's not European Union the one who is trying to make this step there is hardly anyone who has the capacity at least to try then we can discuss if they are successful or not or if we are going on the right direction if it's better to follow one or another past but sadly I think there is no alternative than at least giving the chance to let them try okay Nemi I think for Elena just very briefly your response to this I mean to me the question would be what can actually citizens can do what can people do and I think that whilst the GDPR was a good starting point so far I don't think it's successful a lot of people have shown that actually citizens first of all don't know what are their rights don't know how to do it we are seeing how many years has been playing in Facebook almost five years so the instruments that we are given against these big technology companies are not good they are not working so you know I think that when we are thinking about policy and all of this discussion that's great but when it's actually not working now we can find Facebook and Google and tilt to Lauren get a million here a million there they make it in an hour so I think that we need to again review how we are doing policy it's not working we need to think about it in a different way okay thank you Eleanor we have so for listening to you the front page quite today and I'm thinking for story about sovereignty to be successful the both of us to be successful in bothering something to be serving the both and if that is the case and I find it quite curious that we can absorb from what you say that you was trying to sort of export to be successful in defending such a sovereignty worldwide granting every country the right or the right to be self sovereign and to support their efforts towards those events how does that unite within filling this idea of sovereignty on a very practical internet policy level with open standards interoperability interconnectedness and ideas that in fact can as well be associated with lack of sovereignty I find that so puzzling but I'm interested in your understanding how this relates or how this can be really your take on it sovereignty is zero some game I'm just wondering before we get to that response can we just one more question if that's okay just so we can it fits perfectly I'm curious myself now I wanted to contact back to sovereignty on the individual level which was shortly mentioned that especially for some of us for data literacy and you ended the public panel discussion in saying that in these big birds things like race gender disabilities and so on and I want to connect with that because you probably all know that there's a lot of criticism of the idea of sovereignty that's spreading to the shortly speaking a bad name for survivors of it so on the individual level I would like to ask you to sound to even the name how is it a good name or should we not ask but search for better name that data literacy on individual citizens possibilities that could get to regulation are also okay I think those are two questions nicely paired and I think this gives us this time is more or less up and the bar is waiting I'd like my panellists to respond to those questions in the form of your sort of closing remark as a response any way you wish you know we've troubled the terms of reference and I think we've rightly troubled the terms of reference from a research point of view also from an audit point of view nothing is self evident so on that count about whether sovereignty is the point or if it's a zero sum game or if we're just playing the same stuff that Empire played with 200 years ago who knows so to exit I'm going to ask anything David, Yulia and Eleanor your closing remarks okay well in my case I will bring it to the research on trust which is the one that I'm skipping your question but probably they are working more on sovereignty so they can bring some answers on that but I will bring it to the case of trust and I would bring it to the issue of knowledge for example that how trust is related with knowledge here I mean we were saying that trust it's a concept which is not easy to define it's kind of a big word like a big bag where we can put many things into but for example you were also mentioning the concept of faith and I would bring also the concept of certainty and related to the logic of knowledge meaning that the more knowledge we have normally when we were thinking about trust in the past the more knowledge we had the more certainty we have that things are going to happen in the way we expect one of the problems with the digitalization process is that our capacity to know and understand all the things that are happening in the process got reduced because it's impossible to get all the necessary knowledge to understand every possible step and implication of all the things that are occurring therefore we have every time less certainties and probably we are getting closer to the logic of faith and therefore we have lots of questions like ok is the state able to perform this role is this solution able to even to exist can we control these things or not because it's and we need to rely much more on trust in a situation in which trust foundations are shaking constantly for lots of different different reasons and one last remark is that the way that many digital technologies found to people to trust or at least continue using it it's true convenience to making things very easy to making things very nice to making things very friendly to making things in a way that you are not asking the necessary questions that you should have to see if you trust or not but at least it's performing the activity in the way you expect therefore the questions are erased by the by the fact that it's performing correctly and then we are giving data we accepting cookies and we are using technologies that we would not use maybe if we would be aware of what it entails so every culture has its stories its folk tales its fairy tales about these figures that arrive and say we promise you this trust us we will give you the gates to heaven one way or the other all to knowledge so thank you very much David Julia you are okay and then yeah I start it's yeah actually I respond to you because I don't think there is an easy answer to this and I don't think that the world has thought this through so and I want to actually reply with an anecdote of I was recently in a discussion with someone from the European External Action Service who was behind writing the European strategy and creating digital infrastructures in the global south and one of the lines in the strategy says we want to do this kind of massive investment private public investments from Europe in the global south to create digital infrastructures without creating new dependencies and so I ask them to do this how can you kind of massively invest European money in digital infrastructure in the global south without creating new dependencies and the person always responded by saying because we will have choice we will have no we are not talking about European dependency how will you do this without creating dependencies in the level of these countries and the only answer I got was it's their choice they can be dependent in Europe in the US or in China basically so I thought this was kind of telling about what is this idea of exporting the vision of the global like of a European version of the digital transformation to the global south Thank you very much you are very very present Eleanor your final remarks So as somebody who has done a lot of work on media history I think that it's important to remember that nothing is set in stone and everything is still negotiable and I think that it's really important for us as a society to ask what kind of society we want and what will technologies role in it will be so instead of thinking for example in the US going against Google's kind of anti-competition asking bigger question do we want these companies to have all our data and use it in the other way they want we are seeing different kind of lawsuits on open AI and all these questions the main question is is it okay that they are doing what they are doing and where are we as citizens what is our power in this kind of market in this kind of power dynamic and I think that again in this set in stone we still have power to have a say and create our own narratives into the way we want our society to be so yeah Thank you so much so just as a final provocation as a goodbye and thank you very much for being here ask ourselves who is this we is this the royal we we are the sovereign queen Victoria I Zarniklis that's the royal we and that's the way we actually as a plural here tend to be using it and that's the most problematic part to me about the discourse so perhaps we can go on who is this we and for whom are we speaking and on whose terms and do we have even the right to claim if you can speak for anyone else but ourselves and our media they'll always question the we that's the final I hope that's got us all thinking do this flowing thank you very much thank you for the chance thank you thank you