 Thank you so much for the introduction, and thank you so much for hosting me. It's very rare that when I'm being introduced, someone gets both my first name and my last name right. And you did a perfect job. So I think we are at a very interesting historical moment where we seem to be pessimistic and skeptical almost about everything. The governments, the financial system, the European Union, climate change, and the only thing that we seem to be optimistic about is the internet and its power to liberate and spread freedom. It's probably the only ray of light in an otherwise very dark global tunnel. I, however, think that it's not a unique moment. I remember that back in 2005, when I was starting in this field of new media, the internet, and social change, there was also a lot of optimism. And that was that sense of optimism that actually attracted me to enter. If you remember back in 2005, 2006, we were at a period that is very similar to the current one, in a sense that there were several recent revolutions. There were huge events that happened first in Serbia, then in Georgia, then in Ukraine, then in Kyrgyzstan. People thought that the color revolutions would be spreading all over Eastern, Central Europe, Central Asia. Since I came from Belarus, that was a very strong, for me, experience just to watch it and expect how democracy would spread. Around the same time, there was also as much excitement about the power of the internet. And that excitement, in part, derived from the role that technology has played in those recent revolutions. In Ukraine, for example, text messaging played some role in getting people onto the Maidan Square, but also, in part, from the role that the internet had played in the campaign of Hoverdine. If you remember, he was one of the first candidates in the US who managed to take advantage of blogs and social networks to raise a lot of money. Even though he didn't win, it was foundational and inspired by a lot of the innovations in the Obama's campaign. So looking at those innovations, what I personally thought was that the internet would probably be playing an important role in the political process, especially in the region that attracted me the most, the centralist in Europe, but also that its influence would primarily be positive and it would be strengthening democratic forces. So in that assumption, I myself have spent the three years that followed working for an NGO that was funded by a lot of Western foundations and governments and basically tried to promote the use of new media in Central Asia, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and so forth. So I spent three years traveling through 20 plus countries, meeting with activists, bloggers and journalists and training them how to block, how to use social networks to spread their message and so forth. What I discovered in those three years was that we were in a sense outsmarted and outwitted by the authoritarian governments. Many of them were much more sophisticated in their approach to internet control than those of us working in the nonprofit sector initially assumed. When I only started working in this field, my assumption was that all that the governments could do to control the spread of information was more or less the practice of internet filtering. So they would set a list of websites they don't like and then they would rely on all sorts of internet censorship technologies to block those websites. And for me as someone who was somewhat familiar with technology, that didn't seem like a huge challenge. Already then there were several tools that could be used to circumvent censorship. You can install those tools on your computer and it will allow you to access websites that abandon as is happening in China on a daily basis. So it didn't seem like a huge challenge until I started paying attention to the more sophisticated strategies in which authoritarian governments were controlling the web. And to make it easier, I would just lump them into three big categories. One of those and perhaps one of the most dominant ones was use of the internet for propaganda. That I noticed in Russia, but as I started studying it a little bit more, its role in the Chinese internet also became very apparent. The governments became very eager to basically hire bloggers, train them, pay them and have them enter discussions on the internet, on blogs and forums and social networks, participate in them and try to steer them in directions that were favorable to the government. The Chinese government had put it on an almost industrial scale. There are reports that they are training up to 300,000 bloggers to do that. All of that is done in rather the centralized manner where local party cells and local governors basically decide whom to train which blocks to go to which discussions to hijack. They've been thinking for a very long time why exactly that happens and I realized that the government does it for several reasons. First of all, the old conventional methods of internet filtering are no longer extremely effective in a world where everyone can publish. So in a sense, the advent of social media has definitely decreased the cost of self-publishing. As we all know with the proliferation of blogs and social networks, anyone can spread information very easily. And what happens if you think about it in the political context is that once government sensors start going after one publisher of information, a blogger or an independent news media, immediately the content thereafter pops up on a thousand other sites, right? Because it's so easy to replicate it and it's cheap and a lot of people do it. And the fact that the government is actually trying to eliminate that content from the internet only lends credibility to the claims in that blog post. So what I think the government's began doing instead was to try to spin those discussions by discrediting their authors and by discrediting the initial publishers. So instead of just going after claims that the government found ridiculous or threatening, they would go and attack the authors of those blogs as agents of the CIA or Mossad or just being anti-patriotic or whatever. That became a big business that our entire companies, many of them specializing and offering PR and all sorts of other advice to corporations in those countries that also cater to political clients and who happily go and discredit a blogger often in conjunction with, say, cyber attacks on their private email and thus releasing information selectively about who they are, who they talk to. Most recently in Russia, just last week, we saw one of the most prominent Russian internet campaigners who's been fighting for transparency in government, a guy called Navalny. You may have heard right about him. There's a long profile of him in The New Yorker. A few months ago, his private correspondence was basically released on the internet by a known parties. His emails appeared online. People could download them. And the idea there was to show that he's been promoting transparency somewhat selectively. So he would accept offers or requests from various oligarchs to go after other oligarchs. And even though that was probably not true, and some of the emails that were contained in that file were fabricated, that still raises a lot of questions in the minds of people who may otherwise spread his message. So the key to a lot of this propaganda campaigns is to really prevent the information from being spread as opposed to try to censor it and thus encourage even more people to spread it. The other tactic that I identified was the growing use of various data mining and surveillance tools to make connections between activists and their political causes or just to study how various activists are connected to each other. And that may not seem like a big deal until you think about it in the context of say, a country like Belarus, where there are a handful of known figures in the opposition, but a lot of the people who support them saying the student community are still relatively unknown to KGB. And KGB is still the name of the Secret Service police in Belarus. So what would happen there is that the KGB, for example, would start browsing the social networking profiles of those activists that they already know to try to identify some of the friends who they are not yet on KGB's radar. There are whole stories of KGB officials showing up in universities and inviting various students for chats at their dean's office and then asking them all sorts of bizarre questions about their activities in the opposition only to point out at the end that, hey, we learned all of it from a social networking profile. Of course, all of it is self-disclosed and we can just simply blame the activists for not taking the right measures of precoation, because, again, this information is public, but I would argue that as we move on in advance with the use of social networking sites and with the growing self-disclosure of various data points about ourselves and with self-disclosure for reasons that have to do with efficiency or with savings or that we simply get nice coupons in exchange for releasing the kind of music we listen to or the books we buy, all of that will be accumulated and in the context of authoritarian states. It will not be used to sell you in a better TV set or a better car. It will be used to actually predict your political and social milieu where you come from, what you read, who your friends are likely to be. And if you think about this, you can actually start designing customized games for censorship. You can actually design if you really think hard about it. If you manage to link, for example, my Facebook profile, my LinkedIn profile, my Spotify account where I listen to music, my Netflix, my Amazon wish list, if you manage to integrate all of that into a coherent profile of me on the internet, you can actually use that profile to predict what kind of websites I should be allowed to visit and what kind of websites I shouldn't be allowed to visit. If I am friends with 15 investment bankers on my LinkedIn website, chances are I don't present much of a threat to the Chinese regime. So I may be allowed to read any website that I want, including Wikipedia. If I'm friends with 50 human rights activists, the words are that I am a threat, which means that they need to limit my consumption of information accordingly. It may sound like science fiction, but I do not see much that stands in the way, technologically speaking, that would prevent governments in cooperation with companies from doing so. That would especially be an even bigger problem if you think about limiting people's activities on just certain sites, right? And just think about it. The more of your activities happens on Facebook, the more information you consume within Facebook and the more news you actually read within Facebook, the easier it would be to customize because the government would only need to convince one player, which is Facebook, to limit access to certain activities accordingly. We may debate about the ethics and what the company should do, but this rise of predictive censorship, as I call it, to me is particularly troublesome because it would help the governments to bypass what's known as the dictator's dilemma. And that term has been around since late 80s, and basically the idea behind dictator's dilemma is that governments have a choice and it's either to control the spread of information technology really aggressively and heavily and thus suffer the consequences of economic collapse and decline, or to allow the information flow freely and then suffer the consequences of political liberalization. If you manage to separate people who are contributors to economic growth from those who are contributors to political liberalization, you actually can escape that dilemma. So if you manage to build a censorship and surveillance system that allows you to separate investment bankers from human rights activists, you can actually allow investment bankers to browse everything they want while limiting human rights activists to just two or three websites that haven't been approved by the government, but that's just something that we need to think about on a macro level. The third feature that I identified of this new sophisticated control that the authoritarian governments exhibit is the use of new forms of censorship and cyber harassment, as I call it. And again, we tend to think about internet censorship sort of just one paradigm and that paradigm is internet filtering. We tend to think that, well, government bends certain websites and that's what internet censorship is all about. However, increasingly, that picture is far more complicated. I would argue, for example, that we need to count cyber attacks and especially particular kind of cyber attacks known as the now of service attacks among this internet control, internet censorship category. Just to give you an example, through some research, I managed to find a popular website in Saudi Arabia called Tomar. It's actually a philosophy, a forum about philosophy. Philosophy as a discipline is actually banned in Saudi Arabia. So you cannot study it in university and people who are interested in the subject have as supposed to be predicted, found a very good home online and they started talking about all sorts of issues including philosophy, but also about public affairs, foreign policy and gradually it became a very important space for public debate in Saudi Arabia. The government initially tried to ban it and it didn't work in part because people who would be most obvious visitors to a site like this already knew how to use anti-censorship tools. So they already knew how to install something on their computer that will allow them to bypass the restrictions of the government. So that strategy failed. But what the administrators of the site began noticing very soon is that their website was overflattered with traffic, was overflattered with visitors. There were more visitors than they ever had and at first they saw that it just reflects the popularity of the website. As they began investigating they found that it's actually artificially produced and engineered traffic that comes from a very clever manipulation of other people's computers and is basically the result of a cyber attack. And those cyber attacks, their only purpose was to make that website unavailable for long periods of time, thus eroding the community spirit that was already built on the website. Because if you wanted to go to that website and contribute something but that website is unavailable say every week out of a month, chances are you'll go somewhere else. So the purpose of the cyber attack was very specific. It was to prevent people from actually bonding and forming an online community or if that community was already formed the purpose was to undermine it by essentially eroding the social capital that was already produced. And the bigger, even larger problem today is that we all depend on intermediaries when we are online. So that company, that philosophy forum had a contract with some company in America that agreed to host their website, right? The more cyber attacks you attract, the fewer companies would like to deal with you because they have to clean up afterwards. All cyber attacks create a huge mess. And if you're already known as a dissident, if you're already known as someone who has something controversial to say and the odds are that you will be attacked no company would want to deal with you, right? In a sense, it's akin to having, as in the US, we say pre-existent condition when you're applying for insurance, right? Once they know that you will attract cyber attacks, companies just run away. Internet providers and hosting companies say we don't want to deal with you. So in the case of the Saudi guys, they could, they were dropped by three or four companies that hosted them and they eventually offered protection from cyber attacks for which they had to pay $10,000 a month. There are actually special companies that specialize in protecting you from them. And again, that was not something that they could pay because it was a project started by two middle-class Saudi guys, one of whom worked in a bank, the other one was selling electronics. So the website gradually became much weaker and was almost destroyed, right? That tells you, and again, the key thing to understand here is that as a case study, it's very reflective of this new forms of censorship that are popping up all over because it's very hard to detect, right? You don't know that this website was attacked by the Saudi government. There is still no link to the government itself. We don't know whether it was some non-state actor or whether it was a government operation and the perfect thing for the government is that they can always deny it, right? Which they would not be able to do in the case of censorship. If you just go and block a website, people know that it's the government that blocked it, right? If the website becomes unavailable because of cyber attacks, it's a completely different issue. But the other use of cyber attacks that I would mention before moving on is around particular sensitive political events. So in my own home country in Belarus, what we would see is that around elections, for example, all of the sites belonging to the opposition and all of the sites belonging to the independent media would also become subjects and targets of cyber attacks and thus become unavailable during the period in which they needed it the most because those would be the sites that would publicize where to organize, where to go, the protest venues, what to do and how to do it, right? So at the very moment when people need those sites to operate, those sites just go down and unavailable, the protest then dissipates sooner or later and then the sites go back online, cyber attacks upside. The severe clever tactic, it also allows governments as I've said to claim that they're not doing anything wrong. It's just because too many people want to visit those sites, which is also true because this is the period when most people want to visit those sites during the elections. The other clever angle that I'll just mention from Belarus is that again, on the day of the elections, what happened is that the government managed to manipulate the fact that it owns all the ISPs in the country to basically display the old version of those sites to the visitors. So people who would visit the site on Sunday, on the day of the elections, would see the version of the site that was available on Friday. So essentially all the updates wouldn't be visible, right? So the old version of the sites was cached in whatever, we can talk into the details, but basically people who would want to see the updates from the square and learn about the protests wouldn't see them on the site, even though the people who were operating the site saw that they were actually updating everything and it would just appear, but it wouldn't be visible to the actual audience. So there are a lot of clever tricks, which again derive from the fact that the government owns the ISPs, right? In some countries the government doesn't, so such tricks are clearly out of reach. So with those three big areas of control that I've identified, it's surveillance, propaganda, and new forms of censorship and harassment, what I've discovered is that governments are actually much more aggressive players in this field than we previously imagined. And if we let them continue with this kind of activities, they would actually become much stronger than they were before the internet, in part because these new forms and new platforms for sharing information do arm them with new tools for surveillance that it didn't have before. Just to give you an example again from Belarus, sorry, it's the country full of terrible examples, well, good examples for me, but terrible for people who are subjects of them. Again, during the elections, last year's elections in December, it appeared that the government managed to get in touch with the three main mobile network operators and actually get information about the mobile phones of anyone who was present in the public square where the protest took place on the night of the election. And this is very easy to track because those mobile phones have to connect to towers and the government can actually, well, the operators can actually identify where their subscribers are with a very good degree of precision. So it may as well be that the government actually has a list of 5,000 people who are present in the square simply because those people carried mobile phones, right? We can of course debate about whether it's good to carry mobile phones to protest, but if we begin to have that debate, then we kind of have moved beyond the question of whether mobile technology can be of help in mobilizing protest because if you don't carry a mobile phone to the protest, that means that the other guys have one in one way or another. But what does it all adapt to? And I think we'll have to move to Q&A soon, so I'll try to be short in adding up this new means of control. What does it all adapt to? Well, I would say that none of this denies that the internet and new media and blogs and social networks could be powerful tools for mobilizing people. Clearly, you can spread information very easily through those platforms. Clearly, you can debate the legitimacy of the government, publicized videos of police brutality. All of that is undeniable. The purpose of my project over the last several years has been to try to show what are the things that we need to work on and to solve to make sure that the governments don't acquire and the particular authoritarian governments don't acquire too much power in this space. One issue in one area of intervention, I'll just use as an example, there are many others that we can go into during the Q&A. One area would be, for example, the use of surveillance technology by those regimes. All of that surveillance technology, which allows them to monitor internet traffic, to monitor our cell phone calls, to monitor the location of people in certain areas through their mobile phones, is supplied to them by Western firms. Just last night, it emerged that the Syrian government is getting most of their surveillance technology from a firm in Italy. We know that the Egyptian government and the Libyan governments got their surveillance technology from firms in Germany, Italy, the UK, possibly the US. All of that technology ends up in their hands for one reason or another, and this is something that can be stopped with enough pressure on those companies on the one hand in the West, but also the smarter regulation. In the case of Syria, for example, American firms already prohibited from selling technology to the Syrian regime because there are sanctions on them because Syria is one of the countries that the US doesn't like their companies doing business with without prior approval. And yet, some of that technology that was made in America ended up in Syria because the company that owns it claims that someone bought it on the secondary market. Now it appears that the Syrian government bought that surveillance equipment from Iraq to where it was shipped by the American government. And again, we can talk about ways in which some of the strategies backfire, but there are, and there should be more ways to make the traffic of such technology more transparent and easier to investigate and ideally, we should actually impose restrictions on the sale of such technologies to those regimes. Syria is one case, but there were no restrictions on selling such technologies to Libya or for that matter to Egypt. The other point I'll mention very briefly here is that the reason, for example, why the Egyptian government had technologies in which they could listen to Skype calls, right? And again, some people who hear it for the first time think, how could that be? And Skype has always positioned itself as a service that is extremely hard, actually impossible to wiretap. And people, activists who use that always assume that that's the case. Actually, those activists would show up in trainings organized for them by the US government and by the European Commission. And in those trainings, trainers would tell them that if you have some concerns about security, stop using emails, stop using phones, start using Skype. You know, that's the advice I gave some of them five years ago, six years ago because that was a general assumption. What we didn't realize is that in the meantime, the Western governments have huge concerns about the fact that Skype cannot be wiretapped because a lot of drug dealers and criminals and terrorists began using Skype for exactly the same reasons. So what they did in the meantime, the Western governments was to fund the creation of several tools that allow you to wiretap Skype, not necessarily by decrypting its traffic, but by, say, planting some spyware on your computer and monitoring and recording everything that passes through your computer's sound card. So they would just record all sounds that your computer makes and that way they'll actually understand what you're saying to Skype, for example. So they wouldn't need to tinker with the code or breaking code or encryption, decryption, all of those problems can just go, they can bypass them. So what happened is that NSA, FBI, MI6 and others have created an entire industry of firms based in the West that create such tools and supply them to NSA and all of those other agencies. In the meantime, the secondary market is selling those tools to Libya or Egypt or Syria or elsewhere where those tools are being used completely outside of any frameworks of the rule of law and they're just abused by those governments and regimes for political purposes in making sure that we see that connection between on the one hand, in the case of America, the growing surveillance state and the needs of FBI or NSA on the one hand and then the way in which those needs end up affecting the foreign policy and they end up empowering the extremely nasty regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere. That connection is somewhat unexplored and politicizing it and making it more explicit is something that I think we need to be doing much loudly and on a more irregular basis. So that's another way in which smart interventions can be made. I can list too many more but we agreed I'll talk for about 25, 30 minutes. So I think I'll stop here and we can have a Q and A and be more than happy there.