 in a South Asian context today, if we can move to the next slide. Okay. And then, so what is cyber warfare? Cyber warfare is the use of cyber attacks against a nation or state with the intent to cause harm upon it. Cyber attacks generally are just attempts to gain access to computer systems with sensitive data. And then we have some examples listed there at the bottom of the slide. Viruses which can take down critical infrastructure, attacks that prevent legitimate users from targeting computer networks and devices. Hacking and theft of critical data from institutions, governments, businesses, and propaganda or disinformation campaigns used to cause serious disruption or chaos in a country. Usually they're like related to like politics in the country. Great. So can we go to the next slide, please? So why are these issues important? The global cyber threat continues to evolve at a rapid pace and there are a lot of rising number of data every year. And the main issue with this is that cyber criminals can collect medical financial business and governmental data and these can threaten a lot of existing systems that we have, both in the public and private sector. Another aspect to consider of this issue is the cost. As corporations predict that a worldwide spending on cybersecurity solutions will reach a massive $133.7 billion by 2022. So there's a huge financial cost of this to consider as well. So having the background of these issues in mind, it's going to be very helpful to consider these factors once our panelists come and they should be here shortly. Hello, Dr. Wolf. Thank you for joining. Hi, sorry I was running a little late. I hope you went ahead and got started without me. Yeah, no worries. We're actually waiting on Mr. Chakravarti right now. But let me just introduce you first. So Dr. Josephine Wolf is an associate professor of cybersecurity at the Fletcher School of Law and Flemacy. And currently her research includes international and internet governance, cybersecurity, security responsibilities, and the liability of online intermediaries. In her book, you'll see this message when it's too late, the legal and economic aftermath of cyber security breaches was published in 2018, and her writing on cybersecurity has been featured in Slate, The New York Times, The Washington Posts, Atlantic and Wired. Yeah, just a few more minutes for Mr. Chakravarti. Oh, it's here. Welcome Mr. Chakravarti. Hi, good afternoon. My apologies. I had some trouble dialing in this morning. No worries. Mr. Ravi Shankar Chakravarti is the director of research lecture in global business and doctoral research fellow for innovation and change at the Fletcher Institute of Business and Global Context. He's also a founding member and co-head of the digital planet team, an interdisciplinary research initiative dedicated to measuring the global internet economy and understanding the impact of digital innovations in the world. Thank you so much for you both in your time. I'd like to now ask both panelists to present their opening remarks. If you could keep these to about two minutes, I'd be appreciated. Let's start with you Mr. Chakravarti. Oh, I was actually hoping you would start with Professor Wolf, but hi Professor Wolf, how are you great to see you again. Well, first of all, thank you very much for having me join this panel. What I thought I'd probably do is set some context specifically given that this is really about South Asia. And if I'm able to share my screen, what I would like to do is kind of walk us through what the digital context of, you know, from an evolutionary perspective. Where do, you know, at least four of the biggest countries in South Asia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, where do they stand on various aspects of, you know, various foundational aspects that inform their digital journeys. So if I can share my screen real quick. There you go. I think I can, but let me just one second. Let me just, can everybody see my screen. So I'm going to drop links to this. This is the digital intelligence index that that we developed and several of you. I'm hoping at least from the undergraduate program are part of the part of our digital intelligence. Digital Planet Research Program. What we do, what this is, and what you're all seeing is a study that we do, looking at the digital evolution of 90 countries around the world. And on, on the Y axis here is the state of digitalization, which is informed by four, you know, four major sort of factors, you know, conditions of demand, you know, which include all aspects of digital consumption, the readiness and sophistication of consumers, what kind of digital uptake there is in the country, et cetera, et cetera, conditions of supply, what kind of infrastructure exists, not just hard infrastructure, you know, which is telecommunications, et cetera, sort of relative to soft digital infrastructure, and so on and so forth. And then looking at institutions to what extent are institutions enabling digital progress, you know, what is the core learned order function of a country are institutions enabling, you know, are the market friendly are they enabling, you know, businesses to take root and, and so on and so forth. And more importantly, how are institutions primed to advance their digital economies. So that is yet another sort of factor, the fourth factor is innovation and change that is happening either because of or in spite of these, these, you know, the other forces that I that I just outlined. When we combine those, what you get is the state of digitalization of a country, which is the y axis that you see, and then the rate of digitalization how countries been progressing over time. And this is 12 years of data all the way from 2009 to 2019 160 data points. You know, comparable across these 90 countries over 12 years. So that's a that's a pretty powerful data set that you're seeing crystallized in here for us to see now if I punch in the four countries that we mentioned in there. Bangladesh. Pakistan. And Sri Lanka. And let's see where they are. So what we see is India and Bangladesh seem to have a lot of momentum, relatively speaking, and a lot of headroom for growth and Pakistan and Sri Lanka are, you know, both low on their state of evolution and slow in their momentum and you know, we could do this in several ways we could, we could compare their trajectories. And I urge you all to kind of look at these things in great detail here on absolute state, you could compare them to, you know, some kind of an aspiring upper middle income, you know, median. And what you see is clearly that, you know, all countries have, you know, lack a certain amount of demand sophistication. All, you know, some countries have, you know, India especially has made a lot of progress on on its institutions, still a lot of headroom for growth on demand. And there is a, there is a gap that they can fill on supply infrastructure. Now you could do that for several other countries. Again, Bangladesh, lots of room to grow Pakistan similar and Sri Lanka. So what I would, I'm actually going to drop this link for you all to kind of play with it and, you know, I kind of want to, you know, kind of want to say that, you know, we are looking at a region which accounts for about, you know, at least a fourth of humanity between the four countries where there is a tremendous potential for, you know, and headroom for growth from a digitalization perspective and a lot of opportunity for cooperation. So I kind of want to pause there and pan it over to Professor Wolf to for her remarks. Sure. Well, thank you so much. Oh, go ahead. Sorry. I was just going to thank Mr. chapter ready. And I encourage everyone to mess around that tool. I might say part of the digital planet team and so it's awesome to see people engage with our research. But yeah, we'd love to hear from you Dr. Wolf. Thank you. I'm really, really fascinating digital private project. Thank you so much for showing some of that that's always really enlightening. What I would say about cyber crime in South Asia is that it's a relatively understudied area in this domain right there's a lot more work that's been done on cyber crime in Southeast Asia there's a lot more work that's been done on cyber crime in the Middle East there's a lot of work that's been done on cyber crime in Russia and Eastern Europe. And so we're thinking about South Asia, we are dealing with some of the worst statistics in an already pretty weak set of statistics for trying to understand what the cyber crime landscape looks like who's conducting those crimes. It's not our sense that South Asia is a hotbed of criminal activity and in the terms of kind of criminals making a base out of those countries or the online infrastructure there where we think that like, that's much more common in Malaysia we think that's much more common in parts of Eastern Europe. We do think that there is a fair bit of cyber crime targeting people certainly in India we have some data they're not great data to track kind of what some of those trends have looked like especially during COVID with more people working remotely and relying on computer infrastructure. But on the whole I would say it's been a region that has been neglected to a large extent by people working in this area. I think there are a couple reasons for that that we can get into more during the discussion. I would say it's a combination of perhaps slightly slower rates of internet penetration, in which you don't see sort of either a huge target for criminals or a kind of important intermediary hot point for criminals there. There's also a kind of interesting set of internet policies that don't necessarily make it a very conducive region to setting up a lot of criminal enterprise there. And so I think sort of one of the things that's interesting to me is thinking about how how South Asia manages to proliferate internet penetration pretty quickly over the past several years, but also perhaps avoid some of the pitfalls of the countries that have become home to really extensive and damaging cyber crime rates. And that's one of the things I hope we'll explore a little bit today. Thank you so much. Sorry, go ahead. Do you mind you were saying please please. I was quick. No, I was I was about to, you know, not in in agreement with everything the professor will have said. When the professor of you mentioned that Malaysia is a bit of a hard bed. I think back to my own days back in when I used to run payments businesses in the region when whenever card skimming for credit card skimming was was was a, you know, right in Thailand and Malaysia and whenever our customers will travel to that region will use their cards because, you know, likely their cards would have been compromised. So it looks like they've advanced on that front. And I also want to agree with possible to comment about institutional barriers. The very barriers ironically that inhibit digital progress in the region seem to be inhibiting criminal activity as well. And that's a bit of a bit of an interesting angle that go ahead. No, I just like to thank you so much for those introductory remarks and like to pass down to Akash now for the moderate section. Thanks, Jeevan and thank you, Mr. Chetavadi and Dr. Wolf. I actually am really curious a little bit about what specific barriers you might see that have both inhibited digital progress in South Asia but that have also inhibited inhibited cyber crime activity but I before we get to that I want to ask just a couple of general questions for those attendees maybe are not so familiar with the cybersecurity landscape globally and then we can zoom in really quickly on on South Asia. But for those of us in the zoom call who might be a little bit unfamiliar with some of the challenges that we're seeing in 2021 in cyberspace. What are those challenges you are we looking at a lot of state sponsored activity are we looking at a lot of cyber crime activity. Can you sort of give us a lay of the land of cyberspace in 2021 really well take a stab at it first and you can add anything I've forgotten. I think when we look at the lay of the land right now we're seeing a pretty significant combination of state actors and non state actors. What I would say sort of important to keep in mind about the non state actors is that in many countries and almost every country where there's a sort of significant cyber criminal organization operation. Those crime rings are being tolerated or supported or actively promoted in some cases by the government in most of those places right there is. I would say nowhere that you have a massive cyber crime operation that the local government is actively trying to stop because we actually can do that right you know we do have the tools to track down large financially motivated cyber criminal operations, if they are within our borders and our jurisdiction. So that would be kind of the classic example of this where you see some private criminal entities operating at very large scale, independent of the government but in various degrees of cooperation, or you know, willingness to look the other way, at right and in contrast to that if you look at a country like China, you see a lot of cyber activity, certainly right some you know very significant espionage capabilities, but much less privatized sort of criminal stuff happening around the edges. I would really emphasize you know you're seeing both you're seeing all possible combinations of private operations government operations mixes of the two, you're seeing a lot of ransomware won't surprise anybody here probably you're also seeing sort of continued espionage efforts the shift to remote work and kind of more online things and remote access has of course enhanced that you're seeing still an enormous amount of financial fraud being perpetrated. And that looks like a whole bunch of different things that can look like the best payment card but it can also look like fraudulent transfers out of bank accounts. You know, a lot of sort of sending fake invoices to companies and saying please transfer the, you know, this amount for the services we rendered to you on that stuff is is more effective than you would think or hope it would be. So all of those things I think are very much in play. I'd say the extortion piece is a big focus right now for a lot of countries, thinking about ransomware thinking about kind of all of the variations on online extortion many of which rely on cryptocurrency payments, and what it might mean to cut down on that. And the thing I would say about that I think it's perhaps especially relevant if we're thinking about the South Asia region is that those are the kinds of cyber attacks that you usually see the costs of being born by individuals. Right so when you think about like the theft of payment card numbers that is something that first of all is only going to affect people who already have credit cards. And second of all, most of the time the costs of that are not being borne by me, they're being born by my bank or my credit card provider because I'm going to, you know, say oh this was stolen I shouldn't have to pay those charges. When you're talking about something like ransomware that can affect everybody who has a device right there that's no longer sort of limited to a particular population. You no longer have somebody else that I can go to and say, you should have to pay for this, you know, this, this wasn't my fault. And so you see this real kind of decentralization of the costs in a way that to my mind is is sort of very damaging for the population of people who are perhaps not accustomed to protecting themselves against certain types of cyber crime and did not have a kind of background in the earlier forms of cyber crime that were more focused on payment cards and on other types of theft. Obviously, and if I may, if I may add to what was said, you know, the, the low and slow state of digitalization and low digital sophistication, not just among consumers, but also by institutions makes them a target for all kinds of cyber crime. So, if you all recall, I think it was in 2016, the Bangladesh Bank, the, which is the federal bank of Bangladesh was hackers, you know, managed to manage to pull out what was it close to about 100, close to about 100 million out of the bank, and that primarily accounts for what, and finally, you know, what made them spotted was a printer. Otherwise, the money would have actually, you know, a lot more would have been out of so. So that's something that, you know, also hurts country. So in some sense, their inability or lack of digital sophistication and institutional level also comes to her. Well, actually, I think I'll make that my next question. You know, so when we talk about the institutional challenges in South Asia, as far as securing cyberspace, not just governments, but banks, big corporations. What sort of barriers are we seeing those institutions face in successfully protecting individuals from bearing the costs of cyber criminal or even state sponsored cyber activity. Well, I think you're starting with a with a big assumption there which is that protecting individuals from these costs is their priority. And, and I think that sort of historically it's not clear that's been the case. In the past, and by the past, I mean like 15 years ago which for people like me who studied the Internet is, you know, the equivalent of medieval times. It sort of organically been the case that a lot of the costs are being borne by payment networks and banks. And that's because those were the, those were the financial intermediaries, you needed to go through, if you wanted to steal money. And so it's not so much that there were protections for individuals as those were, there was no way around that, if you were hoping to steal millions of dollars. And what you see with the rise of cryptocurrency is the ability to circumvent those intermediaries right the ability to say okay you know what mastercard visa they generally good job are Google but let's let's just say of you know enhancing payment security. I don't want to have to go through them anymore because they're going to cancel all the credit card numbers I steal immediately. Why don't I get all my payments in Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever else. And the thing about those cryptocurrency systems and I'm sure you will be able to tell just from my comments how I feel about them which is certainly not how everybody feels about them. The problem is they're really designed to be outside the reach of government and policymakers that's kind of their whole motivating purpose is to say you're going to untether yourself from the sort of centralized bank currency system. So, so I'm sympathetic to the challenges of trying to sort of reconfigure those systems so that they are more regulable and better sort of better able to protect individuals. And at the same time I think if that's where the criminal activity has moved then that's what you have to do. Right if the cryptocurrencies are one of the key enabling forces which I would say they are here, then you have to be willing to sort of enter into that space and tackle it seriously and I think you're seeing some willingness right if you're seeing a variety of countries, including the United States, but many others starting to say you really have to sort of get into this now. It will be a slow process it will continue to be a slow process. It's made slower by the fact that most of the people who do financial regulation. Either don't understand how these systems work or don't really like them in the first place and don't really want to. I think that's been one of the biggest barriers that you're dealing with a sort of financial transaction mechanism that was deliberately designed to only empower individuals and not to sort of give any authority or power to those intermediaries. And so to then try and insert intermediaries who can help bear the costs and provide protection is really difficult. Thank you. Yeah. Okay, so I will ask the last question that that we had sort of our general overview section and it's you know we've talked about a lot of threats that have sort of generally existed in cyberspace. If you had to pick maybe one or two that are most directly relevant to two individuals and institutions in South Asia. What would you say are one or two things we should keep our eye on in the next two or three years that might directly target South Asia. Go ahead. I just did a lot of talking. I'll take the first shot at it. So, so one one threat that, you know, I personally see is the development of again, from a consumer perspective, each of the countries is developing their own payment networks that are domestic. And, and clearly they're making rapid advances. I mean, India, for example, has financial inclusion in India has gone up from what was low 30s to roughly about 77%, depending on how you measure it. You know, people's the bank account and or some kind of a digital wallet. Now that means that you know there is a tremendous amount of usage of some digital forms of money happening. Without adequate levels of literacy, digital literacy. So what that ends up creating is vulnerability at a very large on a very large surface area of consumers who probably don't know enough about how to protect themselves and the lack of institutional mechanisms that that protect consumers. So that's one. The second is these payment systems and, you know, and rails in and of themselves that are domestic in nature. They are again connecting it back to my earlier observation about how the bank of Bangladesh was victim of a cyber, you know, cyber theft activity or hack activity. These payment systems insulated as they are from the global system means that they are more vulnerable. So the lack of, you know, and, and big networks, global networks, be a swift visa mastercard where it is folks who are engaged in moving money around in the world have capabilities that, you know, can identify, you know, threats coming from the outside insulated payment networks, you know, or insular payment networks tend to become, you know, very attractive, you know, targets for cyber criminals looking for an opportunity. So those are at least two that come to mind. I'm curious to hear what pros and cons thinks. So if I'm thinking about kind of two or three things to keep an eye out for to work on I think for me one as you've just heard me talk a lot about is the cryptocurrency ecosystem. And sort of what it would look like to try and impose some of the same anti money laundering know your customer requirements on the cryptocurrency exchanges that turn fiat currency into cryptocurrency and vice versa. And we're definitely seeing some movement in that space I think for that to be real, it has to be enforceable. And that's been the big problem so far right there are lots of sort of theoretical requirements for cryptocurrency exchanges but the actual enforcement of them has been extremely lax in many places around the world. You're seeing so just a couple weeks ago now you saw sort of the first serious sanctions, directed at an individual cryptocurrency exchange the Sue X exchange. I think that would be an interesting test of sort of, is this about getting much more serious or is this still kind of signaling and symbolic. I know it's a little too soon to say right now what that's going to look like but it's certainly the kind of step that could be about making this a little bit more real and a little bit more aggressively enforced. I think another area to watch is going to be around regulation of ransom payment right so you can crack down on cryptocurrencies you can also consider saying, we don't want people funding these criminals we don't want people kind of giving their money directly to these crime violations and thereby fueling future suicide the crime in this way. And I think a lot of rub regulators are sort of thinking more and more about what are the circumstances under which they think it should be legal for ransom to be paid and what kinds of restrictions might crop up around there I think that would be another thing to pay close attention to them the third one and this is a really basic one but really important, and maybe especially important for South Asia where as I said we've got you know very few good statistics very little good data about what the crime landscape actually looks like. So another one is really basic but really important reporting requirements. Right so if you fall victim to ransomware you have to report that to anybody if you experience various kinds of cyber criminal activity or cyber sabotage is there a mechanism for sort of collecting that data. I mean that's you know that doesn't solve anything on its own but it does give us a better starting point for trying to figure out what the problems are in different places and what the right next steps would be. I mean you've got a very little bit of that in like the United States and the European Union I would say right in the United States most states all states now have mandatory reporting for breaches of personal information. So if you are banged for your supermarket or target or whoever else experiences a data breach right they have to send me one of those form letters that you probably all see that some point saying your social security number and your address and your phone number and your email address have all been reached, but that's really the only kind of incident that has to be reported so everything we talked about we talked about ransomware we talked about denial of service attacks and talk about espionage. So all that we still don't really have any good data on and that would be another area that I would say sort of worth watching and thinking about progress in that space moving forward. Yeah, absolutely. And I actually want to bring the conversation back to something that Mr. Chathir Reddy talked about a little bit earlier which was sort of the increasing democratization in payment methods in South Asia. We've seen you know in Bangladesh, we've seen easy cat or be cash in Sri Lanka we've seen easy cash in India we have Paytm phone pay we have all sorts of you know cashless services that are dependent on citizens in those countries using you know their maybe their mobile phones to pay. Is that you sort of see that maybe Mr. Chathir Reddy first then Dr. Wolf do you see that as an increasing vulnerability for individuals in South Asia or do you see that maybe as more of a strength. Well I was actually hoping to pull up another trend line but to answer this question. It is both right it is both a strength and a vulnerability. I mean what is happening on the one hand is there is greater uptake of digital payment methods particularly in India it was you know it was forced on consumers demonetization left many people with no choice but to plug in and that created its own set of problems. Now there is so on the one hand there is uptake there is usage without a corresponding level of literacy and that gap will come back to bite. Now who will invite big question if you know if it bites enough voters then you know some politicians will end up taking taking that up if it you know if it's if it's small enough then you know if it's ends up going going and biting the merchants but it will bite it will bite the lack of that level of literacy is a problem. So if there is one thing that all these governments and even businesses that are interested in advancing digital activity should be focusing on raising levels of basic levels of hygiene you know you could call it cyber hygiene digital hygiene you know that is not keeping you know that's not keeping in base with the levels of usage. So and that's problematic that's problematic. So I think that's right I think that's sort of when you when you ask is that more secure system or less secure system it always depends on what the alternative is. And in this case right if the alternative is say an all cash based system that I think there are security benefits and there are security disadvantages right so the security benefits have to do with sort of smaller scale one off crime it's harder for me perhaps to steal your your digital wallet than it is to steal your cash. It depends on depends on sort of the security mechanisms and how it's being stored. On the other hand if you're worrying about large scale cyber crimes and of course it's much easier for me to steal money stored on your phone that it is for me to steal money out of your pocket. And so so I think it sort of shifts what kinds of crime you worry about. And, and that can be good or bad I think the advantage to it from a from a security standpoint is you inserted more of those intermediaries. I was talking about right so all of those companies you've just named now have some role and some potential kind of security that they can provide. It sort of gives me somebody to go to with my money is stolen and say, what happened, can you make me hold again, whereas kind of my money is taken out of my house or off my person that you don't really have that in the same way. But I think that depends a lot on who those intermediaries are and how much security and help they're actually providing. And so it you know really depends on what are the guarantees that they can make to their customers and how much do they have by way of safeguards for any kind of theft or financial crime. And I think actually we see a couple of I see a couple of follow up questions in the chat that hopefully we'll get to in a few minutes about sort of that gap in digital literacy and how that might impact individuals bearing the brunt of sort of that activity in cyberspace. But before we get to those questions I want to zoom I realize I'm jumping around a little bit between topics but I want to come back to something we touched on very briefly at the at the beginning of the general questions, which are state sponsored activity. And you know we have seen all of us I think I've seen the flashy headlines you know Russia is involved in the 2016 election we saw some intervention by Iran I think in 2020. You know, many of us have read all across the news that there's some sort of flashy state sponsored cyber activity going on going on, but we haven't really seen that in South Asia. And I kind of want to ask, first, you know, we've seen North Korea, China, Iran, to some extent the United States, Russia develop offensive capabilities and cyberspace and we've seen them deploy those capabilities. Do you see that on the horizon for states in South Asia developing those offensive capabilities and cyberspace and sort of on the flip side, do you see South Asian countries as victims of offensive capabilities of other countries. I guess maybe we can start with Dr. Wolf and then move to Mr. Chaturvedi. And all of this could change I don't see them as very big victims. I think the reason is that there is much less online infrastructure in a lot of these countries that in the places that we typically think of being a surprise targets North America western Europe right you. You are much more of an attractive target, the more that your electric grid has been brought online the more that your critical infrastructure is networked. And I think right now, to my mind we're still at the point with a lot of South Asian countries where the infrastructure is not so online as to be really vulnerable to a lot of those types of interventions. And that could certainly change I think you know we could be having a very different conversation in two or five years. In terms of whether those states themselves are developing these capabilities. My guess would be yes my guess would be everybody right now to some extent is thinking about how do we develop our offensive cyber capabilities. The one that I would say you know people would probably most likely to fear in this context would probably be India, which has access to you know fairly extensive infrastructure and expertise in a lot of these areas and will probably turn out to be at some not to just future a serious player in this space and I'm just guessing that's not based on you know any particular capabilities or attack it's just something that that government is clearly very interested in and involved in thinking about. And I would expect other South Asian countries to also be sort of thinking about and worry about this too I think you know if India is developing cyber capabilities it's a very likely scenario that Pakistan is also thinking about cyber capabilities that nobody will want to be without them for very long. I think the challenges there have to do with how much money and how much sort of computing infrastructure of country is willing to invest in this. Generally I would say offensive cyber capabilities are something you invest in, after you've taken care of the kind of basic computing needs of other critical infrastructure components of a country right it's not a time to think you invest sort of your first set of servers and you want to sort of make sure people online are online you want to make sure the communications infrastructure is reasonably robust you want to make sure the online banking system is working reasonably well and then you have some resources and some expertise and some time to devote to thinking about what the offensive capabilities might look like. I would say it hasn't been kind of top priority to my mind in a lot of these places but I do think that will shift and I do think that you will you will sort of see and are probably already seeing growing interest there. And, and one of the things that's actually a little bit hard to know about countries that haven't really exercised their cyber capabilities very actively yet is how much they've already accomplished. We don't have a good way of saying sort of how sophisticated is India cyber arsenal at this point, because they have an exercise and that might be because they have anything, but it might also be because they're waiting for the right moment and they're you know sort of looking for for the opportunity. And so it can often be a sort of very sudden shift it's not like say developing nuclear weapons where you have a lot of lead time and everybody's kind of watching it happen. It's often much more of a sort of oh we thought they weren't a threat, and then one day they do something and we realize they really are. So Mr. Shadrviati have you seen sort of like any passion, or maybe passions is a wrong word for any any enthusiasm in South Asian governments or even in the South Asian private sector to develop that sort of offensive cyber capability. So who is this offensive cyber capability being used against is a question right I mean everything that person will have said I hold hard to agree with. I mean if you look at, let's just take two examples. What's up in India is a minefield of misinformation, and a large part of it comes from the ruling party, and it's it's machinery. So, in some sense, there are offensive capabilities, they're just using it to misinform and create all kinds of disinformation within their own borders. Now is it happening, you know, if that is in any form a predictor, I agree with with Professor Wolf that you know India is the country to watch out for, given that it's holding its disinformation misinformation capabilities on its own people really really well. So what are for that, and you know what's to say that they can tone those engines against, you know, against Pakistan or Bangladesh or whatever it is or, you know, for the run. So, so then. Yeah, that's definitely super interesting. Thank you once again Dr. Wolf and Mr. Shadrviati for engaging with us in this question and answer portion. I know Jeevan wants to turn it back to the audience, and maybe see if we have any interesting questions from them. Thanks again Jeevan. Yeah, now we'll take questions from the audience. Everyone feel free to leave a question in the chat. First, let's start with engines question. She says, in Myanmar, psychological warfare was used by the military to cause terror among the civilians. This can be seen through social media platforms and media. Likewise, resistance campaigns were started online. Can you touch upon the differences and connections between psychological warfare and cyber warfare. Whoever like to answer this question. I guess what I would say is I think that you know cyber warfare can take a lot of different forms or cyber attacks, perhaps more accurately right you, you see ones that are strictly financially motivated that I think we wouldn't think of as being really psychological in nature. And then you see ones that clearly do have a sort of really significant psychological component. They were more thinking about disinformation. When we're thinking about public shaming attacks when we think about things like the data breach on Ashley Madison that released personal information about people who were looking for extramarital affairs right all of those are cases where I think there's a really significant psychological component and so it all depends on kind of what data is being accessed into what end. One thing I'll say about some of the psychological components is that from a legal standpoint, they're often very difficult to litigate so if you're trying to sue a company if you're trying to sue somebody over a cyber security incident, then that is a much more difficult form of harm to get a court to go along with and saying like I lost a lot of money because of the cyber attack. So I think we're still sort of trying to get a handle on how best to frame those kinds of harm, and understand them and the political world so that they are, they are recognized and sort of not dismissed as in some way less real or less tangible than the financial harms or other types of consequences from cyber attacks. Dr. Wolf gallery asked a question that's well suited for Mr chapter ready. Could you expand on the gap in literacy about the cashless services and how that might affect people and governments in South Asia. The lack of literacy and usage affect governments and people. I mean, so if you think about this short, I mean, you know, on the big difference and let's just take two large, large countries in the United States and and India right so if you were to, and any number of scams that happen on, you know, old, older folks living in America, you know, taking the social security numbers and, and, and, you know, and or, you know, stealing from their bank accounts and so on and so forth. And what you need in a place like the United States is, it's, you know, even if you even if you get to 100 if you're a cyber criminal and you get to 100 of them, and you take about $5,000 from each of them, that's a pretty large, you know, heist, but I'm going to turn. Now, in a place like India, I could probably just get five cents out of every customer, but there are 500 million of them. And that's a pretty large number two. So five cents is a lot of money for somebody who's living on $2 a day. And if those people are, you know, plugging into the digital economy without adequately knowing how to safeguard their, you know, their savings. That's problematic. So how could it affect them? It could affect them deeply. I mean, not just on the governments and governments do everything. Right. I mean, they are on the one hand, they are, you know, there are so many priorities, what are they going to do, you know, give out COVID vaccines or, you know, build roads or, you know, you know, build schools. So many other priorities that they, that they are all struggling. So there needs to be some kind of a public private partnership solution to raising levels of digital literacy and, you know, shall we just call it some levels of digital hygiene because that will come back to us. So that's one. How will it affect governments? Look, if you all recall what happened during the, in what was Andhra Pradesh, which now became two states, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, India, the microfinance crisis in, you know, in the previous decade. Lots of private capital chasing, you know, microloans and, you know, farmers, smallholder farmers being over lent to and getting overextended and committing suicides because they could not pay back. And that becoming a political, you know, a massive political issue. You can see these repercussions. You know, it's not like they haven't happened before. And could you see something very similar happening in the digital, you know, because of the, you know, this lack of digital literacy and digital hygiene? Absolutely. So is that, I hope that answers the question. Yeah, thank you so much. Arjun asks, do you see, do you foresee an attempt by South Asian governments, particularly by India to tackle extensive disinformation, prevalent in social media, or do you see them using this information more as an offensive tool in pursuit of their own objectives? Dr. Wolfe, if you have a comment. Well, I think the answer is probably both. Right. I think that, you know, one of the, one of the tricky things for governments in general is there are forms of disinformation that many of them dislike and one to turn down on and there are also the forms of disinformation that some of them turn out to find very useful. It's hard to sort of do an effective crackdown on one and not the other. I think what you see in India in China right now are really sort of blatant disinformation campaigns coming from the government. And well, I mean, from other countries too, but what I think is interesting about India and China and the reason I lump those together is they're very internally focused right if we compare that to say the Russian disinformation campaigns that you have read most about, those are going to be more kind of outward facing those are going to be more about influencing people in other countries, there's some within the country as well. So I don't think there's any disinformation, but I think that the, the idea that you're going to be able to sort of wield this information the way you want to as a government, but also get rid of any of the disinformation you don't like is probably a little bit unrealistic my guess is that how it's is through the big social media platforms right so what you're going to see is a lot of pressure from India on Facebook on Twitter to sort of label or remove certain types of content. And a lot is going to come down to sort of how willing those platforms are to cooperate and to tailor their policies to the requests of those governments, Ravi already brought up what that right really important example owned by Facebook. Very, very sort of fraught negotiations or regulatory threats and proposals right now coming out of India, focused on that platform in particular, and I think we can sort of imagine that expanding more broadly. But I honestly think it's very unlikely that any of these governments are going to decide you know all this information is bad we're never going to use it ourselves I think it's a very tempting tool. And I think especially given how hard it is to eliminate completely and it is extremely hard. Right, I mean there's you know, even if you decided all this information was bad it would still be an incredibly challenging way to to crack down on things. It's sort of major piece with the fact that there's going to be some amount of disinformation out there, then I think it just becomes really tempting to use some of that yourself. And I'm not sure I see sort of any solution for that. I fully agree. You know, to your to the question. The only thing that I would perhaps add is, Cui Bono is a good question to ask who benefits, and clearly as possible outline the government benefits from, you know, all the governments in this question, actually, rightly outline benefits from there being, you know, a level of disinformation problems that, you know, works to their advantage. So, with incentive to stamp it out. Thank you for those insights. We have time for one more question. Mira asks, given shared democratic values mutual concern over China's rise and it sector ties, the US and India logic partners in the global artificial intelligence race. How can the Biden administration best position itself for successful cooperation with India. We'd love to hear from both speakers. I think AI cooperation with India has not been a top priority. This administration or any US administration. I think that the real focus around AI has been China and the real focus has certainly not been cooperation. I would say what the US tech firms are probably most interested in from India is the collection of data, right about sort of the population there. And so I don't know that anybody in India would regard that as cooperation so much as just kind of using using that data for enhancement of US owned AI systems. In a lot of cases, I do think that sort of there's there's clearly a lot of collaboration between US tech firms and Indian branches of those firms as well as more local Indian firms themselves. Not just on AI but on all forms of tech development. I don't, I don't think that in great danger at the moment I think that sort of cooperation is is still pretty strong. I think that the challenging thing for India is probably thinking about how do you make that a more equal cooperation or more equal partnership and less of a sense that sort of all of those efforts are really ultimately serving the US tech firms, most. But that's a priority of the Biden administration to be honest sort of making that a more equal partnership I think their AI priorities are much more about strengthening the US AI industry, rather than about sort of forging more international partnerships on that front but we'll see I may be wrong about that or I may be too cynical about what their priorities are. Oh, no, not cynical at all. I think I think I fully agree with both of them on this. And in some sense, the one advantage that I see, or one potential cooperation and it definitely won't be an equal partnership in that sense. There's at least three decades of cooperation between US businesses, you know, of all kinds, for which India has been the back office provider of tremendous amounts of services right now that you know could also help so there's a lot of work, low level work that is needed to train machines right tagging tracing every little activity which is cost prohibitive if it is done in the United States. Now, India being a perennial source of, you know, good enough and cheap labor could help advance that now is that an equal partnership with India is not, but could that create a ton of jobs in India? Absolutely yes. So, so there's that. But I fully agree with what Professor Wolf said, I don't think this is, this is or, you know, even has to be the Biden administration's priority to create an equal partnership at all. You know, it should be the Indian administration's, you know, priority to find ways to punch about their, you know, current capabilities and rise up to, you know, and raise their level of capabilities to even aspire to an equal partnership or something even remotely close to that. Thank you so, thank you so much everyone I think it was fitting to end in cooperation however cynical. Thank you everyone for joining and a big thank you to Dr. Wolf and Mr. Chaturvedi for taking their time to speak to us today. I think everyone learned a lot. And please stay tuned for upcoming Sark events. Be sure to follow our Instagram at tough Sark and our Facebook page. Everyone take care. Thank you. Thank you.