 Hey, hello everybody, welcome back to this dream of the SpeedVestion Island 3. If you'd like to ask a question to our speaker, you can do this by using the chat functionality below the streaming function. So the next speaker here is Alexi Russel, former president of the Swiss Pirate Party. I'm proud to be here today. He will speak today about the digital integrity of the human person and new fundamental rights 2020 update. So stage is yours. Thank you. I did a presentation in English, I was authorized to do so. So I'm working since several years on this right to digital integrity of the human person and there has been a lot of evolution during the last year and I already presented one year ago in Leipzig and so now I'm doing like every year an update on the new changes which are coming. But first I'm going to present again what this right is about and go into some of the details and then see what are the updates of this year and what hopefully we can expect next year. So first this is a right that people didn't hear much already, I mean until now it's going, in Switzerland it's being used more and more, the terminology is being used and there are some real cases of, some constitutions are trying to get this right into some of the local constitutions. So basically it all comes down from this key moment which Peter Sunder summarized very well. When the judge asked Peter Sunder during the Pirate Bay trial if he meets people in real life and then he answers, no we don't use the expression in real life because we use the expression away from keyboard because for us internet is real and basically internet is a continuity. This small expression is a very old expression in our world and it shows that there is a change of perception between the old world where you have people and for example Angela Merkel and they see the new world with the Neuland and then there is the people today, most of the people who live in a continuity with the digital space, they don't see the difference. So there is a lot of search for a core digital human right and the objective of this core digital human right is to of course protect and give us some guidelines on how to ensure that people are safe in the digital space also but it has to be understood and enforceable by everyone. It has to be something very simple. So here the concept is very simple. There is next to the physical and mental integrity of a human person, there is also a digital integrity of the human person. Why do we have first the integrity, why does it exist? So in German it's called Unversertheit. Why does it exist and why it is put in constitutions at very high level in the constitution? It's because it's the only way to guarantee the autonomy and the freedom of the person. Basically if you allow one person to be safe to be protected physically then you can ensure that this person is going to take decisions without physical constraints. Very simple. If you go to the voting booth and you want to vote and if someone is hitting you at the same time you will not vote the same way that if you if you are not hit. So this is very it looks very simple but I believe we can also apply the same type of guarantee in the digital world. So there has been already a movement which says that is that that want to protect digital self-determination and this is exactly this. The digital self-determination is a way to recognize that also in the digital space people need to be autonomous, needs to be free in their capacity of taking this decision and for this they have to be their entity the person has to be protected. So I see the right to digital integrity to guarantee this right to self-determination. So the right to self-determination exists already since some year. It has been actually also established by the or the establishment maybe recognized by the the German High Court and in 2008 but it is recognized that in by some scholars in Switzerland that inside the constitutions today we consider that this right of self-bestimmung is present in article 13 which is about data protection but it's not very rightly implemented it's a bit hard to understand it from there because the text says you are only protected against the abuses. This is very specific and it's very hard to enforce information that is self-bestimmung or digital self-determination based on the current article in the Constitution. So that's why there is another article which is higher up in the in the Constitution which is the right of life. And the right of life is actually is article 10 in the Swiss Constitution and it's the article which is the most important because it's the first article that provides you a space you as a human being in the society with the state saying that is not going to is going to protect your life and it's going to give you the space to be an active citizen an active person and without this right of life then you don't have any other rights all the other rights that you have which is the right of movement the right of free speech the right of privacy any other right is derived from this right to life. It has a very long history but basically it has been written down quite recently. So the right of life is usually combined with two specific rights which is the right to your physical integrity and the right to your mental integrity. These are these are these are put usually in the in the in the Constitution some constitutions only have one some constitutions don't have any of those two they only have the right to life but the right to life is like really present everywhere. So now that we have our life which has been digitally extended we also could consider that our right to fit our right to our integrity of ourselves should be extended also. But it raises some questions and it or it has some some consequences actually and one of the first consequence which which is the it has already been established by by some groups and one of the group is called the aphapédépée it's an association of French speaking data protection officers or organization like Knil in France like the Edub in Switzerland and and many other countries they came together and they made a political statement in in 2018 saying that personal data are not an object that you can buy and sell it is actually part of the human person it's part of your personhood and so it has specific rights which are inalienable so you cannot remove those rights from your data and and these rights cannot be sold also okay can you know cannot be transferred because they are inalienable so here when we when we talk about the integrity of the person of course if we talk about the physical integrity is pretty easy to understand we have a body and no one is allowed to chop my arm without any reason but for the digital space it's a bit different because what is my digital self in the digital realm so it is actually my my data but it's not very well defined exactly there are some studies about all the different types of data that we have but then it's it's it's more like a very large concept so now these data they are not objects that you can buy and sell like in the US they have this silicon way approach where they can just buy data resell it reuse it against the person or there is the Chinese or the Russian approach which is more like data is part of the common good your your data your personal data is actually not owned by yourself but it's owned by the society and then can be used against you for the good of the society and this is what we see in China or in Russia so here the idea is that the data are part of yourself and that's why we can say then that the government that the state through the constitution should protect the integrity of these data and should not interfere with those as long as it affects your autonomy your capacity of taking decision one very good example is Cambridge Analytica where organization used personal data and interfered in the information bubble to change your way sub to change the way of some people of how they would feel and then to make them vote a certain way so this is clearly a manipulation of their personhood digital personhood and that affected their in digital integrity and it affected their vote so from there one of my consideration is that just harvesting data if you are starting to get data over people without them being informed and in and have given consent then basically this is already harming the digital integrity of the person so the fact that you have third parties that are collecting data without you having an interaction with them with could be a state organization or could be a private organization but this is already not acceptable without you having given consent and and also the the the last consequence that that is important is that the it has it comes with a realization that actually no one knows or no one no one understand the extent of his personal data and this is very important because one of the critics of current one of the critics of people who want to fight for their their their digital rights is oh but you just have to be responsible and don't put things on facebook if you don't if you don't want your data to be leaked just don't put your data there at the first place obviously this is a very bad understanding of how internet is working so you can argue yes but you don't know what metadata is and you can you don't understand what what are the consequences it's not just about my poster on facebook it's the fact that my friends are using my data on over facebook which i i i don't control but the reality is is actually bigger is that no one has full knowledge and full comprehension of the extent of his personal data that's not that's just impossible to have so the whole system must be made taking this into account we should be protected wherever that our data is even if we are not aware that the data is somewhere and in switzerland this is like really the case right now where if you want to enforce your right your right to data access your right to data deletion and so on you really need to know where they are and you need to act precisely and this this is this is really limitative so so the so breaking them the nothing to hide logic nothing to if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry i think that what that is a key thing that was always struggling before this right came is that a lot of people put digital right in the framework of privacy so privacy is a is a way to to live a life on your protected you know and the enforcing your digital rights is actually not only about having making sure that you can hide away and have a private life it's just actually a way to make you to make yourself be able to take freely decision also in the digital realm so when you when we talk about digital integrity it opens up it breaks this logic of putting people who are fighting for digital rights just in a place where we suspect them to hide something and that's not the case actually we don't most of us we don't hide anything and we have like normal boring life like everyone but just we want to keep our autonomy and then when we we don't we don't want to to have to see algorithm influence our our own decision making for example that's one example so digital integrity and and gdpr this is a question i i get often is it compatible isn't it not not is it incompatible it's a very good example that every every time you make a a big statement a big fundamental right you need to have laws which come and implement specifics and gdpr is exactly this gdpr is a is a big law which is is implementing specifics about how data has to be managed and most of it is actually not bad but it has a so it's a good complement to to the to the main principle but the problem is that it is incompatible within its article two and the article two of of the gdpr is what what i call the the security black hole is basically that as soon as a state says that there is this kind of security concern around the situation then they can collect data for no reason i mean they don't have to justify and they can avoid they can be excluded from gdpr and just collect all the data they want so this has to be removed with time it has to be it has been already reduced a bit by conventions 108 from the council of europe but but basically the idea is that every if we have a right to digital integrity then this right is is actually it imposes itself on the state so the state should give it should give the example that's that this is why we need a right to digital integrity the right to digital integrity is basically asking the state to treat his digital citizens the right way as free responsible person who can take their own decisions and they should provide the right tools to the citizens to to be able to to have this life and and to defend their their digital autonomy so states should be an example and today what we see is that states are not examples they are establishing mass surveillance even though they are in democracies they are working they are they are they are working with private sector companies like Palantir for example which are collecting data and they have the creating systems very connected systems between different governments and private companies and they create they create a system which is called today capitalism of surveillance so the state should be actually on the side of the citizen and be able to let the the citizen protect its own autonomy is its individual autonomy so at the end the right of digital integrity is should be i hope or can be in the future the justification for the rate for the right to data protection as a whole so data protection is only seen as one element to allow people also in the digital sphere to be autonomous so now how are we going to implement this and this is what we what's the most interesting is that once we have the right we need to put it somewhere and and actually there is so there's two main texts which are proposed so it's the charter of the fundamental right of the european union and the swiss constitutions i mean those are two ones which i have somehow i can i can work on so they have a similar article article 3.1 an article 10.2 which says for the swiss one it says every person has a right to personal liberty and in particular to physical and mental integrity and to freedom of movement so the idea here is very simple is to embrace actually our digital society and accept that today we are only social human beings because we also interact digitally not only not only physically so we add the digital part of ourselves in these articles so so for example the charter fundamental rights could become everyone has the right to the respect of his and her physical mental and digital integrity so from there some work has started it started very slowly a couple of years ago it's a long process which has started 10 years ago but in switzerland we already have three work which are in progress and the first one is in valet it's a it's a these are state levels so constitution continental levels for people who are not in switzerland so these are it's a federation so every continental has its own constitutions and they have for some a collection of fundamental rights which is included in their own constitution so they can add them so valet has one specific is in one specific moment right now right now because they are renewing their own constitutions so they're rewriting it from scratch and and and the they have a whole assembly for this that they they voted and there is a commission on a fundamental right that has added this right to digital integrity as a separate line but in the same paragraph as in the right of life and that should be that that is in discussion right now and we'll just come a bit later on what it triggered it's very interesting Contour of Geneva has also started some some work one of the main local parties has decided to make an initiative to collect signatures but because of coronavirus collecting signatures in the middle of the pandemic is not a very right very easy task so they they sadly decided to cancel it but they're going to submit a constitutional law so that's a whole parliamentary parliamentary process within the within the Geneva institution so that it can go through without a people vote but there there will be referendum but there will be there won't be an initiative okay Contour of Neuchâtel where where I am there is some work that is is being prepared also for in that way so the debate of in Valais and that was interesting you can find the documentation on the on their website I put the link there it's in French and in German but basically they they my message to them was really okay there is this right to digital integrity and you should try to add this and they they really listened to that and they took it and they they they put it and unanimously they added I mean the this commission it's not voted on it has to still to be voted by the people of Valais and there's a lot of process still but the commission and fundamental right they accepted to add this right to digital integrity but they came up with other rights and that's really interesting because they they tried out several ones one of them is every person has the right to control its digital identity and I think in the in the context of the EID law it's it's pretty interesting how how it how it came up so they they put that because they first put the the right to digital integrity and then so so when they talk about digital identity then they said yeah everyone should be in control and in control is very important because it means it means that the way you treat certain parties is very specific has to be very specific we have to define that but also it added in the same line it says it has a special right to anonymity within the digital realm I think that's very interesting a right so that would that's the first occurrence where there's a proposition of the right of anonymity there is another right that was proposed but refused by the commission so there was a minority report minority report on this right is that there was a right to not not to be surveilled measure or analyzed but for some reason which was not completely they thought it was a bit too much maybe to do this and the third thing is also linked to the right to be disconnected which is also interesting every person is allowed to communicate with authorities without using any specific technology and this is a trend we see right now where a government are pushing people to the digital connection and it's actually letting a lot of people out and and or maybe some people are using those tools but basically are are losing the control over those tools that are using and they're losing the control in their relationship with their own state so if you try to have a state that creates confidence with their citizen but you give them tools that they don't understand right now because they don't have the education because they don't have control over the tools that's not going to increase the overall confidence in the state so it's it's actually not going in the other right the other direction and and basically when you think about that every person has a right to digital integrity then you think about these these these things we added this year we added a Wikipedia article in French which the link is is is on the screen it was really an interesting exercise that we that we did here it's a very simple article which goes through a bit the situation in Switzerland and the the the mode the best lesson that we that we learned from this is that as soon as a Wikipedia page then it's it's a real thing because people the first thing they will do if you talk about something they will go on internet and they will they will search the topic and they will see the first thing is a Wikipedia page okay so they they they talk about something which is which is right I just made one mistake which I didn't know at that time is that we shouldn't never use like parenthesis at the end of a link it really is very bad for sharing the link but anyway so the Wikipedia page got some interest and there's already some other external editors on this article which is interesting this year and it's just like released a few days ago we have the first publication so in in beginning of the year 2020 there was a one-day colloquium at the University of Law of Nishapel about the topic and I was presenting someone from the Valais constitution was presenting and then all the teacher professors from the from key elements like constitutional law criminal law civil law international civil law they all presented and they made their own analysis of this of this new right so and and now we have this booklet which is actually a book with the contribution of all these authors that has been published a couple of weeks ago so that's the first legal public publication it's important because now people can start referencing this this this this right or and put references in their own work and and start to use this as doctrine so this is a doctrinal work that we've been doing I've been presenting this in going around so I was last year in the CCC also I was at the Winter Congress and and we recently presented it also at the Internet Governance Forum which is a is a good place to to have outreach to these are older achievements but I'm still putting them there because they're they're quite interesting is that Suico is an association for in Switzerland about digital world and they made a survey in 2019 for the for all the candidates of the national elections of 2019 and there was a question we were able to add this question in the survey where there was where they were asked what do you think about a right to digital integrity and there was a very high support so even though people even though it was not a topic at that moment and maybe they they when they saw the question they felt naturally that it was a good thing the Greens in Switzerland voted they stayed they they agreed up to 99 percent or 95 percent and Svalpe which is like the most conservative let's say they they agreed up at 55 percent which is not bad actually the Swiss Socialist Party is also has has made in 2015 so that was a long time ago a paper on on internet a position on the internet and they they did it in a way which is pretty interesting you have the you have there's the link also there on the screen they they really made a work and they involved a lot of people from experts and the community to try to see find a way to define what is socialism in the age of internet and how their view should be on on on on yeah on the internet and they also integrated after a proposition that we made they also integrated the right to digital integrity and they they really made it in the way that it's linked to the right to self-determination so this is how they see it very well they understood so the in terms of future work this year there will be few things happening so first there is an essay which is going to be published also so this is more like a political book publication that would be published in April which is explaining a bit the thinking about this so it's not the legal work like the first one which is more legal analysis and legal critiques but this is really like a digital an essay and thinking wishful thinking about how it could it could have an impact on the society there's a lot of legal research that is going to start in Neuchâtel University there is even a new laboratory in the law in the law university about the tech and and they're going to take this subject too hopefully we are going to to have some initiatives so I'm just going to finalize now with the last thing is that okay some people say yeah great Alexi I like this and I want to help somehow and the idea is actually the first thing that we have to do is keep on building the things that we are building right now actually that protects our digital integrity so everything which is based on anonymization all the decentralized tool all the all the all those new tools that we are thriving we are working with and we are thriving in these we need to to keep building and we can just add this little touch that does it does it protect on my digital integrity yes or no myself I'm working on the I'm helping people to build an anonymization network and that's exactly in line with with with my thinking um of course then then we can also uh in the whenever and I hope the next time that the digital zelshaft has a has a successful uh judicial process they can ask the question okay in this case did we hurt the digital digital integrity of the of the people it's something that you can take into a legal procedure and ask this question now that there are some doctrine people the judges can go and and and be uh question about this uh yeah basically and of course uh you can always always express yourself and and use this term um by saying instead of saying no I want to be private I don't want to people to see me uh to see my private information on on my social network you can say to people who don't understand who are still in the in the thematic of saying oh if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about you can say yeah but it does affect my digital integrity it does affect my way I can take a decision so it's a different language that you can you can propose to uh to to this uh and obviously if you want to help support initiatives local initiatives uh in Switzerland if you're if you're in Switzerland there's a lot of content where you can easily make a local initiative support them financially or actually help them and uh yeah that's it thank you very much for your talk and also for your engagement here in this area very interesting so I'm a little bit lost now so kind of use some problem um uh channel the IRC channel is not working at least not for me so but I have I have two questions so the first is probably or maybe a little easier one so um it looks to me that in the French part of Switzerland um this initiative is way further in progress so is this just by chance or is it because you're more active there or is it because people are more open-minded to these kinds of topics or so I've been more active and and I had the chance to to really engage with scholars in the University of Lausanne in the of Neuchâtel in the University of Geneva so it has been picked up from there and and because it has been picked up by scholars then it had echo in the at the constitutional hearings in Vale and in Geneva so yeah it was it was mostly due to the fact that um one of the reasons I was there more active so it could spread and but now it's spreading on its own um yeah so I have to do the same thing in the Swiss German part maybe we can support you there um so the same thing which came to mind when you were talking more at the beginning of the talk um where you were mentioning also for example Cambridge Analytica or this kind of thing very also saying um when such tools are are starting to influence your political or generally your mind um that's also violating your um digitally integrity but on the other hand um even in the non-digital world so we have we have advertising for political things on the streets and then it's of course not or at least to me of course not a violation of digital integrity but um so the question would then be where would you see here the border when would you call it as a violation of digital integrity and where would you say it's kind of normal ad or even part of the healthy political discussion which are needed in a democratic so it's all a matter of balance okay for example in the in the physical world you have propaganda you have political advertisement but for example you're not allowed to have subliminal messages like in the movies you know like where they put one uh frame and to to change your mind so so it is already accepted and that uh you can put political posters in the street but you cannot do subliminal messages so you see that that's one example where the society made some decisions and I think it will be the same for uh online political publicity if it's something which is uh outspoken which is presented and it's it's known to be political publicity that's probably something that the society will think it's okay uh what what is not okay in is when the the people are not aware of the functioning of the algorithm and that the people are using those tools knowing that the people don't understand and are pushing data to change their mindset this is different because then you don't have the tools to fight yourself against that because you're inside your bubble and you think that you're seeing the the reality and in in in fact the reality is induced by some political messages that you that you're seeing so I think that's way over the limits that the society should accept okay now we should need to find the right balance um and the balance will be always at if there's a normal person who is not stupid enough uh strong is it uh facing that kind of publicity will he be or he or she be strong enough to understand what it what it is and still to take his own decision you know that that will be the the balance all right since I still have no access to the fire state channel and I'd like to thank you again for the talk and for answering at least my question thank you very much and also thank you for everyone who was tuning in so we are having now a break until eight o'clock swiss time so that's almost one hour and then the next talk will be about bioinformatics heck thank you