 Good afternoon, everyone. I am Rob Farre, some of the research director at the Berkman Center, and I'm thrilled to introduce my friend and colleague, Ellery Biddle. Ellery is an author, she is an editor, she is a policy wonk, she is the advocacy director at Global Voices, which y'all should know about if you don't go check it out, Global Voices. She's also a fellow at the Berkman Center. She is a person who straddles that interesting area between research and advocacy in a wonderful way. She has been involved in studying and understanding digital spaces in Cuba for a long, long time, and I myself have been watching Ellery watch Cuba for a long time. Not in a creepy stalky kind of way. When we launched our internet project several years ago, the first thing out the door was a paper by Ellery on Cuba, which we are thrilled with, so that's what I mean in that sense. So Ellery is going to talk about the internet in Cuba. If you're here to talk about sanctions and opening up relations and those kinds of things, you're probably in the wrong place. We're trying to focus on internet-related issues, is that fair? So Ellery is going to talk for 20 or 30 minutes, so we'll have plenty of time for questioning. This is being livestreamed, I believe. Is that correct? Yes. So be careful what you say. It'll be recorded in posterity, and if you want to tweet about it, you could use the Berkman hashtag, and I think that's all I need to say. The floor is yours. Thank you Ellery. Cool. Well, thank you guys. Thank you Berkman and Cary, especially for pushing me to actually make this happen. So I have been traveling to Cuba since 2004 and doing different things there as a student and as a researcher, and I took my most recent trip just last month, and I am overwhelmed by the amount of information and new things that I have to think about and talk about. So this is not like the definitive everything you need to know about the internet in Cuba. It's a tasting menu of stuff that seems important and worth further research investigation and discussion. So here are the four, you know, the sort of listicle as suggested by Hausset. Here are the four things that I want to organize this around. A little internet can go a long way. Everyone is a hacker. Everything is in the clear, and the US is not going to bring Cuba online. So a little internet can go a long way. See, there's the Google dinosaur that, you know, you see it when you can't get what you want from Chrome. The internet in Cuba is still pretty slow. Timeouts are frequent. The network often falters or fails. It is not omnipresent. Most traffic seems to pass through a proxy where it may be stopped, examined, or sort of messed with in some other way. But that is about all I know on the side of sort of technical control. What I have become more interested in is what people are doing with the technology that they have. Generally speaking, there is not a lot of censorship. Scarcity of access is the thing that makes internet so tough in Cuba. So where does internet use happen? It happens in universities where people need access, places of work for professionals whose jobs seem to need or require an internet connection, internet cafes that are scarce and incredibly expensive, and Wi-Fi hotspots. The hotspots are something I spent, this is a relatively new thing. They've had them for about a year. There are lots of them. They are sort of widely available publicly, so you literally will be walking down the street and suddenly you'll see a bunch of people on phones somewhere, so you know there's a spot. And that is, it's a big improvement over what the situation was. It's just a couple more. But as you can see, it's not, it's great to be able to use the internet and to be able to move through the city and find one spot or another, but there are a lot of things that make this a pretty imperfect situation. Again, the timeouts and the cuts are constant. Also, weather is a factor. This is a nice one because there's like a roof thing, so if it's raining you just go under there. Publicness is a factor. You don't really have privacy, sort of personal privacy while you're online, talking to someone, doing research, looking something up. Also, security, literal security is a factor. You will see people holding computers with a laptop in a space like this, but that feels, to me, that feels a little bit risky. I don't like to take my computer out in a public space. Almost nobody has an internet connection at home. It's a very rare thing and to get one, there's a whole process that you need to go through for applying for connection. Interestingly, people who do have home connections have started using extenders, so occasionally you'll be walking down the street and you'll see somebody just sort of like next to a person's gate, like using their phone. So there's a signal coming from there. Maybe it's somebody that they know and they've given them the permission, whatever. It's kind of interesting. Everyone is a hacker. So I hope this photo makes you all happy. It's like the thing that everybody wants to dream about and they think about Cuba, the revolution and the old American cars. The old American cars are lovely to look at. They're also incredibly useful because they're their collective taxis. Many of them, not all, but a lot of them, they work on a set route and so if you are trying to get somewhere and you see one come by, you just shout where you're going and if the driver is going on that route and has space, he'll stop, you jump in. Great. The thing about these cars is that, so they're called almendrones. In the world, almendron means big almond. And when you ask, if you ask people, like why are they called that? They're like, well, because it looks like an almond. Like, does it really look like an almond? I don't know. But I have always taken it to mean, I like the meaning because there's something nut-like about them and that it's a shell. Like, this is, look, it has the body of the old American car. I don't know which one that is. But inside, you will find parts from Russia, parts from China, parts from somebody's kitchen. Like, you know, the floor, I've seen a bunch of, been in a bunch of cars where the floor is literally like a piece of plywood. So the way that people keep these up and maintain them is very, there's a very open, sourcy, hackerish sensibility about keeping the things running. Oh, and this is just a guy fixing one. So actually, my favorite experience in my recent trip involving the almendrones was I went out to the beach. And the ones that go out to the beach is a longer trip. And so when I was coming back, I was in a 55 Chevy that had like attached kind of above the rear view mirror was an MP5 player. And we just like watched Rihanna videos for the whole trip, which seems kind of crazy because you're in this car that was built in the 1950s. You're in Cuba, which is supposedly frozen in time. Not true. And you're watching these videos on like a pretty high quality device. They're not being streamed from somewhere. They're not being, you know, they're they're not in a cache. The driver went and bought the videos. They're on a drive. He stuck them in the thing. And then we got to watch them. So sort of a cheesy metaphor, I know, but it's I kind of couldn't I couldn't resist. So with a little bit of internet goes long way, right? Everybody who has a connection is not just going online and doing stuff and then leaving, they're going online, getting stuff and then sharing it in other ways, maybe sharing it, maybe selling it. There is a lot of media that travels around on drives, on disks and much more common now is to see signs like this places where like this is just like we copy shows, movies, series, telenovelas, whatever. And you can buy there. So there's there's like loads of stores now. And these are totally legal and authorized. And you can you can get all kinds of pirated, for the most part, media in these shops. And you can also buy mobile phone apps. You're not going to the play store, you're actually literally physically going to an app store. And you hand your phone to the guy and you say what you want and he plugs it into a thing you hope for the best. And then you get some apps and there's open street maps is really popular. There's like several kind of just static information apps with different different kinds of, you know, sort of directions and information, like there's sort of a phone book app. There's wiki droid is pretty popular. So you can pick you can go get a static version of Wikipedia that you just have in your mobile. Also apps like Zapia are common. And, you know, any anything that functions on a on a Bluetooth connection or that uses some kind of connection that doesn't depend on you know, a 3g network are also super common. I had the great pleasure of attending Cuba Con, which was the first free software conference in Cuba, and got to know people involved with some of these projects. This so the open source and free software development in community in Cuba is a really wonderful neat group of people. It's nothing new there. This is a place Cuba the first connection to the global internet in Cuba was established in 1996. So there for a long time has been a community of people who are doing technical work and developing technical tools and software and products. And I'll just talk about a couple that I found particularly interesting one I was kind of surprised I walked into a pre event for the conference. And the first thing I saw was big Mozilla poster. And I was like, Oh, I know about that. So I went and chatted with these guys. And there's a really this is a nice Mozilla community that is based in the information science university. And they do a lot of promotion of open source. And they also develop a lot of tools that are intended to help you with deal with us when you have a small amount of internet. So they you know, they made an add on called disable load images, where you know, if you go to a news site that's sort of weighed down by images and video, etc. It just stops the site from loading that stops you more quickly get text. Another one is called download plan, where if you, you know, there's certain times a day where it's doing a big download is going to take a lot of time. So you can sort of set it up. So it'll happen at a time that works for you. The other really interesting group that I got to meet was some of the developers of Nova Linux. And so this is the Linux operating system that was developed in Cuba about 10 years ago, and that most government ministries use. And it is free and open source. And the developers are an interesting group of people. And they said, you know, there's like a couple things one, it, it would be we could use some other open source software, but getting updates actually really hard. And being able to set things up so that you can get updates easily through an intranet was a huge advantage. The other thing that they explained how to do with technological sovereignty, there is very little trust in closed technology and closed source tools and platforms, particularly those that come from the US. We can all imagine why that might be. So another interesting thing I got to meet a couple of people who who are involved in this project at the conference. So it's the SNET. Turn your attention away from the car and up to the cables and the wires up there. Some of those are telephone wires and some of them are cables for the street net. The street net is a network that connects several thousand computers, some with a combination of cable and wireless technology that has existed for about eight years in Havana. And like many local community networks, it started out because a bunch of teenagers wanted to play video games with each other. And then they sort of got older and got interested in doing more stuff. More people got involved. The SNET has two social media platforms. There's one of them, CMA. It has a couple of sites that sort of have a Craigslist like function. There's VoIP. There are some street, there's some streaming radio, there are a bunch of blogs with different kinds of information. Am I missing anything? Chat forums, file sharing functions, stuff like that. It's a really nice user experience. I was sort of not, I wasn't sure what to expect in looking at it, but it actually, it feels very much like, you know, you click on Firefox, you go in and you have an experience that feels very much like the experience of being on global internet with some obvious differences, but it is effectively an internet. So the SNET is cooperative, it's non-commercial, which is to say that there is, they actually don't, there are no, you can't have a service on there that is money-making or that requires money for you to use it. And it is self-sufficient and user-driven. It's most of the little amount of funding that it requires for servers and for maintaining infrastructure is through donations, for the most part. The SNET is not secret. There, I was sort of alarmed at one point in looking, there were all of these articles in sort of the US tech media, the Mashable kind of websites that had headlines like, Cuban Teenagers built a secret internet. And it's like, well, if it's in Mashable, how is that a secret? It's not secret. It's not explicitly prohibited. It's not explicitly permitted either. So it exists in this kind of gray zone. And there's been some talk lately among some state actors about trying to come up with some kind of authorization for it. But for now, they remain in this territory. The SNET is not connected to the global internet. And that's important. The, I think, my sense is that everybody knows that if somebody were to connect it to the global internet, that could be problematic. You cannot set up an internet connection without authorization. So they have decided not to do that. The other thing that I think is really true and important to point out is that it's not being used to plan social movements. That could happen at some point. But there is a, there's a strong norm to use it for other things. And there is actually, there's quite a lot of civic value in what's happening there, even if it's not, if it doesn't fall into that ambit. Okay, so third point. Everything is in the clear. There, there was really being at this Open Software Conference was really interesting. Because people were, there were several people from the US and from Germany who were asking over and over again about digital surveillance, digital surveillance. What are you guys using encryption? What kind of tools are you using? All of that kind of stuff. And the response usually is like, no. And I was, you know, kind of trying to ask different people sort of what are they, how do they think about that stuff? What do they feel about it? And almost everybody that I talked to, young, old people who are blogging or doing independent media projects and know what their, you know, what options they might have. Journalists, including journalists from big international outlets who are working there as foreign correspondents, all of them said, we don't worry about it because we assume that what we're doing is, you know, somehow seen. When you go to the, so the Wi-Fi hotspots, the reason that I I used this image is because I was sort of thinking about the, not only the experience of the sort of what might be seen technically, but also what might be seen physically. But so when you go to a hotspot, you can't just like log in or just be online. You first have to go to Kiosk of Etexa, which is the state telecommunications company, the only one. And you buy one of these cards and to buy the card you hand, you say how much time you want and it's about $2 an hour. And you hand over your money and your passport or your state ID. And the person working there takes that stuff, writes down some information from your ID and then hands you back your ID and this card. And you, as you can see, you have this sort of annoyingly random login, equally annoyingly random password that you, you know, sort of scratch off. And then that becomes that's actually how you get online. Every time you go on to the internet, you're logging in through the Nauta portal. Uh oh, Chris Bavitz is locked out. This is all like very, there's, there isn't, I don't notice a lot of concern about this among people using the internet in Cuba because they're interested in using it. And there is like everywhere else, right? There's a general expectation that things are documented or recorded. Actually, skip that one. The other thing that I, that I sort of come back to this photo again, because I think that not only there's something to be sort of thought about in the fact that people are outside most of the time when they're using the internet. And this I was just doing some stuff on my phone one day, and saw this group of these three women come to the park and they're all taught they they were talking to somebody using emo probably. And the conversation started out kind of lively and jovial. And then it got something happened and it sounded like the tone changed, you know, it got serious. And just that kind of makes you realize how much you're, you just can't, you can't have an expectation of privacy in a social sense. And I think that that's I think that's important. All right. Point four. I don't think the US is going to bring Cuba online. And when I say the US, I mean the US government, but I also mean US companies and maybe even foundations or other entities that are interested in that idea. There are two examples of two sort of interesting stories, short ones that I'll tell that have, I think, kind of helped to prove the point. The first is about this guy whose name is Alan Gross, heads are nodding. Alan Gross, when the two countries announced that they were, you know, rekindling their relationship in 2014. For Alan Gross, that meant that he got to go home to Maryland after spending five years in a Cuban prison. Alan was put in prison because he had been working on a project as a subcontractor for USAID, where he was taking satellite and Wi Fi network equipment into Cuba without any kind of authorization. He was traveling there as a tourist. So he was erect, arrested and eventually convicted of acts that violated the integrity of the Cuban state. So he was sentenced to 15 years in prison. But then as part of the rekindling of the relationship between the two countries, he and one other American were released from prison and three Cubans were. So there was a prisoner swap as much as everybody wanted to say that it wasn't. That definitely is what happened. I drew this cartoon. And it's so that's like Hillary Clinton sort of, and that's sort of Raoul and the wall. But the point of the cartoon right is that throughout the period of Alan Gross's trial, the State Department kept saying, listen, this isn't about us trying to undermine integrity of the Cuban state. It's not subversion. It's just trying to bring internet to ordinary people. And the Cuban side kind of kept saying, well, actually, sort of a subversion. And I think that in a way both entities were correct. You can't look at what happened with Alan Gross outside of the history of the relationship between these two countries where there have been attempts at intervention via paramilitary attacks, exploding cigars, brutal economic sanctions placed on Cuba by the United States, and programs to support dissident activity that are, you know, to the tune of $20 million a year at certain points in time. So you can't look at that case and say, oh, it's just internet. It's very meaningful. And I don't and I think that this when this happened, it really sort of supported the idea that the internet isn't just this open free place where anybody can do whatever they want, but that it is actually, as many high level Cuban officials have often called it a ideological battlefield. And one where the US was very interested in trying to push a specific agenda. So my other example is a little lighter and more recent. So this is an art space out in the outskirts of Havana. And it is the art space of a guy named Katchel, who is a very well known Cuban artist, very firm supporter of the Communist Party and a good friend of the government. And he has the space is beautiful. He's got a whole sort of a compound with some galleries and his studio. And in 2015, he he has had an internet connection there for a while. And he decided to turn it into a hotspot and to invite people to come and use the internet for free, which was great. So a little over a year later, right around the time of President Obama's visit to Cuba, Google got involved. Look, you can see their logo right there. So like, for a while, we kept reading these stories like all these Google executives are going to Cuba, they want to they want to put down fiber, they want to create country wide wireless like who knows, you know. And what they ended up doing, I think they've made a lot of big proposals and I don't know many details about them. But what they ended up with is this, which is a room in Katchel's studio, where there are 20 aces Chromebooks. And you can go there and wait in line for a while and get a number. And when it's your turn, you hand your state ID or your passport to a guy. And then you can sit and use the Chromebook for an hour. It is a really nice internet connection. And that is great. But I think it's a sort of, it's an interesting response to an effort to really go big. And I should also note that this place is not it's it's a pain to get there if you live nearby, it's fine. But it's about 45 minutes from downtown. And, you know, it's like it's an effort. This is so this is the area surrounding the center. And it makes it very clear if you want to use the network, you don't have to go do some kind of exchange or anything like that. The contra seña, the password for the network is right there. Do you guys understand what what the password says? Down with the blockade or down with the embargo, the embargo is still in place. It hasn't been lifted. So and then this Carlos let to cartoon. So I think it's super interesting that Google, there's like this Google flag at one end of the block. And then there's this really powerful image that tells you how to get on to the network. I don't know what kind of I don't really know anything about how this was set up or what the relationship is now between Google and the Cuban government. But it is it was so striking to see this because this is a place where you there's very little advertising in Cuba in general. And what logos are branding you do see are almost always state brands. And so and there's I mean, aside from the old cars and I didn't plan that that was just there. Aside from the old cars like you don't see us brands anywhere unless you go to this place. So we're back to the dinosaur again. The I wanted to just end with a couple of images. So I got to check out some or sort of stumbled into some art about the internet that I thought was kind of produced some fun reflections for me. So this is a cartoon like kind of based on the Google dinosaur. And what the dinosaur with the T Rex is doing is biting through a fiber optic cable. So there's cable in Cuba that comes from Venezuela and it was laid. They first announced that they would do this project in 2007. And then the cable was finally laid in 2011. And then it wasn't until 2013 that anybody really saw any evidence that there was stuff flowing through the cable. So the cables this kind of idea that hasn't hasn't gone in the direction that that I think people hoped for. And then this is the last piece. This is also a piece of cable art. And it's literally a submarine made out of a cable. So I liked it because I actually think it's sort of pretty but it also evokes you know, it kind of makes you think about military stuff. It makes you think about the state. And yet it's there's something kind of calm about the image and you can't see there's actually sort of a satellite there. I'm not sure. I think it didn't make it into the picture unfortunately. But I also I liked the idea of ending with this because it encourages you to go deep. I think you know it's just it's a it's a really it's a complex landscape. It's not all about politics. It's not all about using technology with some kind of specific political end. There's a lot of really civically valuable stuff that's happening there. And there's a lot of limitation that people are struggling with. And that's all important. So that's the story. I'd love to know what we know about what folks are actually doing online these days in Cuba. What websites are popular? Is it on now? There we go. I was asking what folks are doing online and like what websites they might be visiting other social network sites, microblogging those kinds of things. Facebook is really huge. Like I can't emphasize that enough. And but it's I mean, yeah, social networking, like connecting with people. And if you have enough connection, maybe doing some other stuff. But being able to connect with people and figure out how to get stuff if you want to buy something that you can't just buy around you. This isn't I'm not talking about like using a credit card to buy something from the internet, but rather craigslist style. There's a lot that you can you can learn that something is available and figure out who to call and go get it. And people, you know, people read news, too. There's it's I you know, it's it's not I think it's like what I found myself doing there was noticing first of all that so much of it is just about connection with other people. But then also, personally, it's like, Well, if you only have crummy internet for a little bit of the day, what do you do? And how do you change your habits? I think penetration rates are crazy idea because look, like if you are right, like I have internet at work. So that means I have access maybe 40 hours a week. And then but I give two of those hours to somebody else or I give 10 of them to another person and then, you know, with the stuff like the extenders and you know, all these different ways that networks kind of exist. How do you tally that up? And I feel I mean, I felt like using the SNET is a way better experience than trying to use one of the hotspots because you don't doesn't cut out. You know, you chat you do whatever. So I don't know. I refuse to answer. June. He's gonna give you I was curious about your statement that you didn't think that Cuba would be internet accessed anytime soon. And for a long time now, the universities have had fairly good access. And when I correspond with Cuban academics, you don't really know if they're in the United States or Europe or Cuba. So I was wondering what you thought about the next step being businesses in the sense that a lot of businesses like Airbnb to depend on on internet, and whether perhaps there's going to be rather than a blanket. Oh, we'll have internet will go from universities to business and then something else and then something else and then something else. It's hard to tell I do want to clarify. It's not that I think access isn't going to continue to increase. I just don't think there's going to be some moment in which a US entity comes along and plunks it down. There is talk about trying to bring broadband to people's homes, which is really encouraging. But talk is different from it happening. I mean, the cable, you know, it took a solid what six years from when talk started until it actually became active. So I don't know. I do think that the more I mean that the business angle is really important. Like the Airbnb story is interesting because Airbnb when they opened their services to Cuba, sort of officially made sure they could legally do that as a US company. The number of Cuban places you could rent on Airbnb shot up in the first week. And the reason for that is that it's a place where for over 20 years, renting a room from someone has been a really like as a tourist has been a really common thing to do. So the structure was already there. But there was never the way that you figured it out was just like ask your friend and your friend's friend will take you to some place. And this kind of brought this new layer on top of it. But I think that there I it'll be interesting to see what other examples develop in that way and that can sort of make a case for having better connections in more places because of the economic and social benefits that it brings. But I don't I don't know what to expect. You and a lot of the developing world, one of the first things that tends to take off, especially in low bandwidth areas is digital currency, right? Like the ability to do payments from person to person without an intermediary of some kind, right? Like Bluetooth, like you mentioned, is there anything like that going on in Cuba at this point? I don't know. Okay, it would be interesting, but it is a place. There's two currencies. And that's a whole complicated topic. And generally speaking, people do not have credit cards, which is that's also right, which is also a character. Yeah, a lot of places. But I really don't know. Okay, you first. Well, no, no, you, you have the mic. So you should go ahead on her. Okay. Is what you describe both in terms of internet and SNET? Is that just Havana? Or is it uniformly spread through the smaller cities in the countryside? How much can you get to either internet or SNET from other than Havana? So SNET is in Havana, although it's the, it's a, it's not just sort of the central part of the city. It's a fairly spread out. There are other local networks that are similar in the way that they're set up in other parts of the country, but they're not connected. I don't believe so. There's also the Isla de la Juventud, which is an island about, what, 60 miles south, I think? They actually have their own SNET that they call it SSNET. So there's, yeah, there's similar projects, but they're not all, they don't all, they don't talk to each other. And that's if, if authorization were to happen, that could, I don't know what all that would bring, but there's some possibility. As far as internet, hotspots are throughout the country, but if you're in a rural area, it's not the same, you know? And I don't, and I, and I don't know how different the connection might be either. Oh, wait, you. And then we'll, hi. Hi. So I also actually went to Cuba in December and wasn't actually expecting to talk to people about internet access, but ended up spending most of my time talking to people about internet access, because that's a thing that people really want to talk to you about. And I heard a lot of, a lot of different anecdotes, and I'd love to talk later in a not Q&A session. But one thing that I heard from a lot of people is that prioritization is becoming an issue with the burgeoning tourist industry. A lot of people feel like tourists are getting internet before people. And I'm kind of wondering, like, how is the tourist industry locked in with American companies coming and also American internet? I met someone who is, you know, working in the first fully connected hotel where you could actually get internet in your rooms. And she was talking about how, you know, it feels like it's, it's kind of being kept from Cuban people and being catered to tourists. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that. Sure. I mean, I think that the, like, when I first started, I first started going there in 2004. And at that time, there were a couple of internet centers where you could go and pay a bunch of money and give over your passport and do the whole thing. Or you could go to the hotels. And all of the hotels had like a nice place with a bunch of computers. And it was a relatively okay process. And I think that it, in a way, there was a lot that started there. Like it earlier on, the feeling that, oh, you, this is all, you know, available to tourists, but not to citizens was much stronger. And that it is, it feels significantly better now. And now that, I mean, the economy, people do have more means than they did 10 years ago. So to spend the equivalent of $2 on an hour of internet is a lot for some people, but it's, it's reachable. But I do think, I mean, I think that the, I wonder what will happen as more, as there's more tourism from the United States. The fact is, there's been a lot of tourism from other super developed industrialized countries for a long time. And people just kind of manage. But I do think it's a drawback. And I, you know, I've noticed there've been a couple of big conferences that have happened. There was also a big to do when Obama came to town. And everybody said like, oh, the best thing about it was that the internet was suddenly good. You know, so there's, there's like, there's a knowledge and, you know, expectation that you're going to have to kind of make things better. And that's, that's a double standard, you know, and it's something that the government has been dealing with since the 1990s when they brought in the US dollar. It's just, there are, there are these sort of two standards that they maintain, but there's a cost to that as a political cost. I just want to pile back on that, on that because it, it goes back to the age old debate of whether the bandwidth scarcity is a policy choice by the government or it's, it's economic reality because of the blockade. Is there any update on that? What are people saying these days? Or is it still kind of murky? It's always murky, but I think that the, look, the Obama administration made a lot, did a lot, has done a lot over the years to loosen up the restrictions. You know, there's various laws that fall under the umbrella of the embargo. And the administration made a lot of effort to make it so that telecommunications companies could offer services so that stuff could be built. They also have this cable. Look, the speed is way better than it used to be. Like it is better. So that's great. But I don't, you know, I think that there's a, there's a feeling of we need to expand access, but we have to do it really carefully and we need to, we need to, you know, to be deliberate about it. And there's, you know, things are centralized there and, and systems move slowly. So it's not, some of it surely has to do with concerns about communication and information circulating. But it's also an effect of how systems work. Thank you so much for such a fascinating presentation. I have two clarifications I'm curious about. One is who pays for the Wi-Fi spots outside? And the second one, in that art studio, when you use an internet for an hour, is there, is there identification of you or do you use it completely anonymously? Okay, so the first question is who pays for the public Wi-Fi hotspots? Those are, that's the government. That's, I mean, the Atexa, which is the telecommunications company, but that's, which is a state owned company. It's not free. You're still paying for it, but yeah. You buy the card and then, yeah. Let's see. Fricacho space, what, how, you're asking how are you identified? And so what happens there is I don't actually know what kind of identifiers might be used technically, but you do, you are submitting your, your state ID and, and it, you don't get it back until you're done using a computer. That's really, this is working anymore. My question is for about the internet as a news distribution. There has been a phenomenon of news outlets coming up, like 14.5 million Sanchez and Perismo de Barrio. I wonder if, how do they operate and, and what's their public readership, their outreach, do you see people talking about them? So good question and something that I kind of wanted to cover, but I didn't and now I feel bad. But, so there are a bunch of interesting independent media groups, blogs, organizations that have been working there for a while. Some newer, some have been around for a long time. The way that they do a lot of their work is in analog in the sense that you're sitting in the room and passing a drive around to and talking together about what you're writing. And it's, it doesn't, I don't think that sounds very novel if you've ever worked in a newsroom or, you know, but that, but it is, it's a lot of the work that they're doing together. They're literally doing the same physical space. As far as distribution goes, it's a huge challenge. Because with, first of all, with the scarcity issue, the idea of like, oh, I'm going to go check out this news blog, like that's actually usually not people's top priority. There's all of these different mechanisms for distribution, stuff getting around. There's the packet of the week that's like a giant bunch of media that you can buy on a drive, you know. That doesn't usually include those kinds of independent media source materials. So you circulate material by email, you can just sort of pass it out to people. But I think the dynamic still for those independent orgs is that much of their readership is outside of Cuba. And that's valuable too. But there's sort of, there's a, you kind of have to ask a question like, well, is what is the, what's the value of doing independent media work for where you're actually trying to inform a community or public around you versus this sort of somebody outside. Both are valuable, but there's, but it is different. All of them have distribution strategies, local distribution strategies. But I think that they're, I still think it is, it's, there are people who do tech stuff and who are in that community know about them and see the content. But I don't know how much further they get. So related to that is, would it be frowned upon to bring something like a giant library box with you with a ton of content and just turn it on? Would that, and have you done that? I haven't done that. I didn't, I just went, I went with a burner phone. That was all. But well, no, no, but look, there are a lot of people who have stuff set up like that. So to go, I mean, I'm not, I can't tell you definitively what, is there isn't okay. But several years ago, I was there and I went to this like salon thing held by this linguistics professor who travels a lot, has a big digital, digital archive just on his own computer of papers and articles and texts. And he put a list of everything that he had, like put these lists on the walls in his living room and invited all these students to come. And everybody just looked through and there was like a guy sitting in his computer and you just hand him a drive and you say, I want these articles and he sticks them on there. And that's, that's a, that's a how stuff can move around. So similar kind of idea. But I can't tell you, you know, how's it? Oh, and then hi. Hi, it's great talk. Thanks so far. I have so many questions, but I'm curious specifically about street net and it's not secret, but it's also not explicitly permitted. And I'm wondering if the state has used street net at all has kind of, or state institutions have kind of use a street net as, hey, it's here, let's use this. And also kind of the origin of the apps, the social networks that are being used on there is that stuff that's been hacked together in universities, students, user groups from the early web there, or kind of how that came about. Great question. So has the government used street net? Of course. I mean, Cuba, I think, and this is true anywhere, but they're in particular, you know, still most jobs there are fall under some kind of the state institution. So to talk about the people as one thing and the government as another doesn't, it's easy to do that. And I know I do it colloquially too, but it's in reality there's there's no sort of clear line there. So certainly people who are associated with the relevant ministries have looked at street net for sure, I'm sure. And my guess is that they find it kind of, you know, kind of neat. The question of permission or authorization is like, I don't know, but I think that my my guess is that it's it's a kind of neat project and it has engaged a lot of young people in software development that, you know, that's not a bad thing. Where has this who's developing the stuff? A lot of people. I mean, the various open source programming languages super popular there. There's a lot of there are libraries of those languages so you can get what you need to develop what you want to develop. So it's not it's not there's well there's stuff there are repositories but you can also you can access GitHub there. So it's not it's you know they're not is it's not it's not so cut off. Wait did that get both parts of the question? Okay, pass it, pass it. Hi, a lot of developing countries like to brag about the proliferation of mobile internet and smartphones. What are the prospects in Cuba for the equivalent of 3G or 4G? I really don't know. I thought I've heard less about than the idea of broadband in people's homes. It would you know take a lot of work and planning. I don't think that you know if some if they did want to invite some US or more likely Chinese company to come in and set that up it could happen but it's not I don't know. I should say though that it's it's remarkable how much you can do with a mobile phone. Nate can talk about this a lot. Like it's remarkable how much you can do with a mobile phone that isn't attached to a 3G network. There's one thing I meant to talk about is there's a couple of different apps people have developed that let you use your national email which you can get on your phone where you can you can send an email and it will there's like a neat system that I don't understand the technology behind that will send a request to a website and then bring it back to you. So you can send a request to Wikipedia you can send a request to you know so that's kind of so there's a lot there's sort of a lot in between stuff. Sebastian. In just wondering about StreetNet I was and hearing about all the transfers that are happening on USB or alternate media that's not networked I assume that they use StreetNet to transfer much of the same information or is there an understanding that stuff that's for sale in stores isn't to be transmitted freely within StreetNet. Wait so plenty yes plenty of files that you might get because you physically went to get it you could also get if you're connected to StreetNet. True. What was the second thing though? Money related thing? Well many of these you said that there's stores that sell them. So is there a like a pirate pirate pirate pirates? Yeah yeah no when you're yeah it's not I mean it's also should be noted that the shops where I mean I went and bought some I don't know a bunch of Cuban movies that are really hard to get here and I paid 10 Cuban pesos for each one which is like 40 cents it was pretty good but yeah it's almost a symbolic you know it's not a but I yeah I think the whole question of what's going to happen with intellectual property if the countries really start to do more stuff together is huge and I don't know the answer but it is I mean the ideology of the Cuban Revolution the way that sharing and collective ownership and caring for things and maintaining things that that is the norm there clashes a lot with our with the United States ideas about and laws about intellectual property and it's going to be tough I think. I just want to root lava on top that that's not unique to Cuba I mean no not at all. People aren't buying much American content anywhere. True true true true this is a question about surveillance. Are the hot spots do you is there are they being surveilled is their concern about that and in general is the attitude about surveillance any is how is it different there than it might be here. Well see log it so you're always going through the Nauta portal whenever you're using the internet in a hot spot so take that for what it's worse but I would yeah I would assume so. Is there concern about it I mean probably but I don't but yes but it's also an accepted condition you know it's it's there's a you know and there are a lot of really heavy laws that restrict the use of encryption there so it's not it was extremely uncommon to hear anybody say oh yeah like I'm you know using this special secure app like no no and I try I mean I was sort of trying to use stuff that I already have on my phone and it was that uses intent encryption was extremely difficult if not impossible. I think that's the best way to put it that it is that it's an accepted condition and it is again not if there's nothing uniquely Cuban about that either I do think that the the thing of being accustomed to both this kind of physical surveillance and people just noticing each other and maybe taking note of things that they see and maybe using that information to some end later on is important in not only for sort of on its own but as a component of the kind of full experience of being a human who moves around who has conversations who does stuff in the internet and elsewhere. I think I don't know actually I like I really don't know you basically can't use Tor I mean if you are really savvy you can figure it out but it's first of all incredibly slow but I think there's also sort of ways that it is made difficult I don't know what the technical sort of components are of that then other stuff is just really slow and we should brainstorm later about why I can tell I can give you later on I can give you more information about the particulars of that experience. We should well we should talk about that later because there wasn't I did not right let's talk about it later don't know I think there are ways to get around there there work there's certainly work arounds and there's a yeah there's a lot of certain there's a lot of certificate issues to the come into play there but I don't I I came I wasn't doing a whole lot of technical stuff there and so I can't we can talk more about it oh you just mean acts oh I so I was like you can get I mean any they're plenty of HTTPS sites that you can access that's not a yeah no so there's regulation of N10 encrypted like sent you know encrypted email and things like that but you know no no no but going to this is where this is where it's like we'll just lay it all out of the table later but yeah no no I'm sorry so yeah so when you actually when you go go through a bunch of these when you go to the now to log in page you get others sorry okay when you go to the now to log in page it actually you get a notification a notification you get the notification that says this certificate or this doesn't have a trusted certificate attackers might be trying to steal your info da da da da right you can't buy a certificate there so there's that or that has the there's so there's like some kind of combination of legal and political and technical thing that has made it so that now to doesn't have one yeah but let's encrypt actually may change that because it is a completely free and open source certificate authority that the some people who are working on let's encrypt actually we're at the conference and there's quite a lot of movement around trying to get that established there so that will change yeah I just wanted to comment if you're seeing that certificate it means that it is possible that someone is man in the middle again and it's possible that their systems are and if you want to get around like using certificates or as if you want to use SSL sites outside of Cuba if they have a proxy in the middle that's sort of breaking that that encrypted communication sure I mean like I said there's a generalized expectation of monitoring so you know there's various ways in which that may be probably is happening we need to wrap up yeah sure anything like different that anybody's not I didn't say authentication authorization so you need then I'm that's a state thing you need state authorization to set up a connection to the global internet that's very clearly laid out so yeah you create an account you actually almost everybody is uses a pseudonym of some kind a handle it's the way that it's managed is kind of an interesting you've won for all of it yeah so they're thinking it looks like a Facebook club one is just you is you log into Espen and it gives you access to that and use the same login there yeah I mean I guess I actually I don't want to I don't want to go too far okay but thank you so much