Let's start soon. What? The fact that he was here at 22C3, at least I already told you. But the year between 35C3 and 34C3 and 35C3, also known as 2018, had a lot to talk about and our next speaker will give us an overview about the things that at the German and the European level were taking place. And what happened in 2019, please welcome with me the head editor of netpolitik.org, Markus Beckelal. Good morning. I hope my voice will hold. The new edition of the best and the worst in net politics in Germany and the EU from yesterday and today. And my promise I only have 14 minutes. Many topics that are relevant, I had to leave out. But many, enough of them have been left as well. What's new from next year is that we have a government. Last year we had the failed coalition talks. Now we have a grand coalition, the conservatives and social democrats, that is Merkel 4.0. What's new or what is old, rather, is that they still don't have a digital minister and as we know, the best digital minister doesn't help at all if we have idiots sitting in there, as we know from the EU. The good news is that after 13 years, Angela Merkel as a chancellor, digitalisation in net politics has suddenly become a topic, has suddenly been on the agenda. There is a lot of work and there are expert circles. We kind of lose sight at netpolitik.org. I will just read out a few that have been founded. There's the digital cabinet, digital council, digital commission, the think tank digitally to work society, learning systems platform, legal things and artificial intelligence, future of education. Those are just a few and that's not bad but the problem is that there is a lack of coordination in the government. Now the person responsible for coordination is Dorothee Baer from Bavaria. She is responsible for digitalisation in the government and for net politics in the government and communication to the outside. She thinks that data protection is a disturbance. Sometimes she regards bus timetables as a problem that have nothing to do with personal data and there's this nice quote from her, what she wants, what she wishes for, I quote, that's from outside, have to give us their expertise and their creative powers for a time for the common good. So dear government, it could be so simple. Why not just add a few civil society representatives next to the industry lobbyists? Why do all the parties in parliament invite nerds as experts but the conservatives, CDUs you would never do? It could be so easy and then the nerds would come because the offer has been standing for several years, we just have to accept it. The digital agenda is now called the implementation strategy but what's lacking unfortunately is the strategy which is not new but the government one or two months ago presented their implementation strategy and I took several approaches to comment this on netpolitic.org and I didn't know where to start. It's such a weird collection and such a mishmash all ministries send us whatever they do concerning digitalization and then that will just be lumped together, that's what happened and at least you see that something is happening but not with a lot of strategy. Let's come to the weather. Now the bad news first, there's a storm coming or for the target group that knows the storm from the internet, this image, a running gag for many years that I've been doing net politics, net politics is the EU copyright reform, meanwhile it's the second reform that I have been following and the EU copyright reform is on its last stretch. The one divisive issue are the upload filters in article 13 and the ancillary copyright in article 11. Now with the ancillary copyright I cannot really explain what the logic is, I haven't quite understood it. The question that we ask ourselves is at netpolitic.org, can we still link to other articles with a headline without having to pay a fee? Not even the politicians can tell us that. Great work was done by Julia Reder and her team. Without her it would all have been so much worse. A huge thanks to her.  To define what is shown to us and what can be published is a problem and the interesting question is where are the democratic controls when it comes to what the filters let through and what they do not let through and about that there will be more later. Now the ancillary copyright, the German version of it was the top expert into the EU. We actually said one and a half years ago at netpolitic.org that this would not be compliant with European law so our readers will know. We did go to court about this as well because we wanted to know in the decisive session of the cabinet five years ago who was there to part in what was discussed because back then the Chancellor Minister Eckhard von Kleden was responsible to and his brother was a lobbyist of huge German publisher Springer so we saw a conflict of interest there. So we went through until the Federal Administrative Court and we only got a partial judgment in our favour so we will get the list of participants. The government never wanted to hand out that list of the people that had been there at that cabinet session because with the reasoning that the behaviour of individual ministers could have been gleaned from that so we fought that through. What we didn't get is that the protocols that are protected for 30 years will be handed out. They stay in secret. What is also new, Girls' Day in the Interior Ministry, this is the famous picture of Horst Seehofer as he started his office and that's not the only problem the Grand Coalition has given us more surveillance authorisations than any other previous governments and they now go into the extension round basically so. We had obligatory upload filters as part of a sensitive infrastructure and they are in place already. There are, at the EU level, we've just had the debate as a consequence of the EU Internet Forum. I think I talked about that two or three years ago, three years in Hamburg. It was a meeting between people from the large platforms and EU security officials and politicians and privatised law enforcement was the idea and they wanted to insert upload filters, introduce upload filters and they did that and most platforms have installed upload filters of some kind and now soon there will be the regulation to prevent terrorist content online and in our opinion that is the same thing that back then we prevented using the censor-sula meme with Ursula von der Leyen, the then minister and our demand is the law expects providers to remove content within one hour and that will only be done through upload filters, that's the only possible way and whether that will help and there will be instruments for automatic recognition so where then is the outcry if the very same thing happens that that was in the German censor-sula debate and no one's interested that's a huge problem. Horst Seehofer the interior minister brought this on the way but he won't be talking about this anymore there was a conference of EU interior ministers where the EU council resolved a past that idea and the Austrian interior minister in place of Horst Seehofer said that the internet was a fire starter, a negative enhancer, there should not be a new Islamic state on the internet and gaps should be closed that had been closed in the real world, those were his words. So what is terrorist propaganda? It's an interesting question not really clarified but there was a case when at least part of the political spectrum spectrum was of the opinion that that was terror-related and that was the debate about the Hambach forest which is a forest that is being raised for lignite mining and that included climate protests and there were discussions from ministers saying that these will be close to terrorist content so these might be filtered out automatically and how this works in practice we have researched. There is a hash database that is live and there are 50,000 hashes in there, hashes are digital fingerprints of content that has been marked as terrorist and these are administrated by Europol and added to this database and we wondered what the democratic controls were and we asked the EU commission for that that brought this all along the way and those people said oh I don't know and then we asked Europol and those people that actually insert all that data and they said oh no we don't know and therefore we have a database that feeds those upload filters supports them and we have no democratic control because no one's interested in what happens once something is in it could stay in there forever and we can't even talk about it because when uploading this this automatically will be deleted and we don't even know that something exists that we can that we should talk about. To the next item on the EU level there's a lot happening there because the EU legislative period is ending in May elections are coming so many projects are on their final stretch and then from March April on they'll be campaigning and there is a project for evidence at the EU level I think we had to talk about this yesterday and the idea behind that is to equivalent to the American Cloud Act to make internet operators within six hours hand out the user's data to to authorities otherwise fines up to for up to 2% of their global income could be occur could occur so if that goes through they could an EU security authority could call a German internet provider and tell them give us the data of this Hungarian opposition people that you host and you have six hours to respond how high is the likelihood that the provider will then take legal redress and face the risk of a fine up to 2% of the global turnover and this project that weak this weakens the options of authorities to defend against violations of basic rights done by EU authorities and this is something for legal nerds to consider and it wrongly assumes that metadata are less sensitive than content data the usual problem and it the option gets into play that no judge needs to approve and the question is what are the rights of the affected people and as I've said providers hosting providers are actually left without protection to the authorities I searched I found this picture from 2017 in Karlsruhe when the Constitution Court started talking about state Trojans and the state Trojan these now is called source of surveillance surveillance at the source and is now going to be forced through through laws at the federal state level in all these 16 states what we what we understand to be the state Trojan which is a highly complex system of black markets where security holes are sold from dubious sources the state Trojan software then uses these security holes is armed with them now this too many politicians seems well state Trojan is such a like a telephone that you buy it at the at the retailer and you put that onto the computer so we have to explain more what this is about because still in the name of security there's a massive IT insecurity that is being created if the state Trojan is pursued and that is the wrong way and on top of that this state Trojans is another example of how surveillance authorization is first put into place and then extended we have researched how state Trojans are used originally you know the argumentation was for heavy heavy crime like murder and well we found out that most targets are actually drug related and I think another drug policy would help more than a state Trojan at this point so you can find that in our merch shop soon the police laws have been discussed by consensual courts and they are in almost all federal states by now and so they are used at impending danger so without an actual danger of crime so in barrier you can be locked up forever soon in barrier this has been explained by CSU logic so this supports civil rights and this has been the former and I think still current Interior Minister Herman but that's bullshit right it's it's just but the police laws have a big big advantage because finally tens of thousands of people go on to the streets in support of civil rights not only in Bavaria but also in Brandenburg in Northrend Westphalia in Saxony so here's a chance for new bigger civil coalitions and on the topic of coalitions our old debate of license plate registration so the the government argues with particle dust thanks and then this entire so the government totally failed here and the answer is more surveillance so the argument is that that license plate so license plate scanner as the only practical practical way of enforcing the ban of older of older vehicles of course there are milder ways of enforcing this this bands and if our traffic minister doesn't know then that's his problems not ours this is about environmental protections of something that doesn't photograph the faces of the drivers here's another quote quote from Andreas Scheuer so traffic minister transport minister this must be okay that's what is called privacy no one is talking about a surveillance states well we do that too was in 2018 a lot of protest against the trial of biometric video surveillance at the Zutkreuz station in Berlin many creative images the scientific test of that surveillance technology in our view is a joke as the case computer cup among others found out but we should discuss this at a more basic level not just about error rates because those will be improved in time probably and baseless mass surveillance of the open spaces by biometric ways endangers our freedom 2018 is a year why we are able to talk to computers and they are talking back to us and 2018 is the year where people basically put bugs in their own homes by their own free will and the discussion around Alexa Google and what's their name it's it's just starting and there are a lot of questions we need to discuss for example where are the where's the data stored is it on German servers is it on US servers so with Prism all the security agencies can access those who can access those in the first place how secure is it where's the point where Alexa and co store everything forever because it's just more convenient for both the user and Amazon do we train with Alexa a jump global voice biometric system so we can be recognized everywhere on the basis of our voice because everywhere Alexa devices and do these devices recognize me wherever I am and when we're training such an artificial intelligence so it knows us better and understands us better and we get used to this and when do we reach the point where we can't leave the Alexa and the Google world anymore because we train them so much under ourselves that we would need to start over when we leave them and what could possibly go wrong that's been asked by the city a German computer magazine so someone did a GDPR request and got got voice data from someone else and so we need open and decentralized solutions which we can trust so we can actually use this technology at home that's what I wish otherwise we know from the big data protection agencies we can learn a lot for example Mark Zuckerberg blocked his web camera Susan 17 once it's both debate back so we had this talk from Constanza and Ingo earlier about this information and this debate about this information is a debate we need to have but social boss is really the least of those problems so like with state trojans we have the problem that politicians have this fuzzy idea of what bought is and they are talking past each other for some it's Russian trolls for some it's artificial intelligence of a chatbot which you are talking to when you're you know talking to customer support which is an entirely different debate but you need to ask politicians what are you talking about in first place and what's clear is when you're talking to an artificial intelligence then you need transparency that's a consumer right and we need to enforce those but we also need transparency in studies that spread panic because they're talking about social boss that no one can actually understand because by now it's common to to call any Twitter account a social bot if more than 50 tweets are made per day right so we have a lot of problems in this we have the problem in the society that we have a lot of people with too much time on their hands and too much anger which easily reach this 50 tweets per day but that's not a reason to enforce clear names so we have Cambridge Analytica and Facebook it's not the first data scandal from Facebook and it's won't be the last so we are we have counted 21 scandals but just two or three days later Facebook released new features and all the journalists were busy with social new features Cambridge Analytica is still carrying on and it shows that Cambridge Analytica is just a tip of the iceberg it says from at one of maybe a thousand companies which act on the same way and which are collecting data and in the same way are using this data to manipulate people on Facebook or elsewhere and congratulations for everyone to who switched to Instagram what's up in protest of Facebook's practices so that brought us a debate how do we break up how can we regulate platforms to enforce more consumer rights breaking up Facebook is one necessary way and Google too because they have just simply become too powerful and as an example Facebook and what's up when when they bought what's up they promised that you commissioned that no data would be shared well I would doubt that and simply take that back and this is all about platform regulation which rights do we enforce how how do we strengthen the rights of users against platforms against a take it or leave it policy how about media diversity how do we create competition and how can we have privacy friendly alternatives and further them that's something where we have far too little from politics 2018 also showed us that Facebook kills and Myanmar in Nigeria everywhere where the company earns money but doesn't feel responsible to support fact checkers with the right information that's a problem too and 2018 brought us a nice film movies the cleanest about content moderation policies in great in big concerns so that's so here you can see that in 2018 that's a network enforcement law does less does less damage in practice than expected because platforms are deleting everything anyway which doesn't conform to their community policies and that's what we got from the transparency reports okay let's go to slightly cloudy so from tomorrow onwards everyone hell will have 50 megabits per second broadband connections at least that's what Angela Merkel promised in 2017 who doesn't have 50 megabits so look even with amongst the more nerds there are plenty who doesn't who don't have that so I know plenty of people in Berlin who can't go past 16 megabits if they even if they wanted to so here we have Kliessengerne one of the most popular most well-known holes in the broadband mobile connection so the telecom as a PR geek erected a cell phone tower and do you remember these these slogans if if this doesn't work by tomorrow well with 5g all problems will be solved well we'll see if if 5g will actually come and whether we all have gigabit connections also billions of support money were promised uh after 4 billion were made available uh we can say that 2 million euros of those have been spent so far some of them to consultants you could say that broadband extension will actually support powerpoint bingo more than anything else and there's a bit of progress regarding zero rating offers at least there are no court judgments uh the stream on offer from Deutsche Telecom is in violation of net neutrality but the problem remains that zero rating as such is not seen as a violation of net neutrality and we need clarification that it's not just telecommunications providers that have made their hands dirty in the net neutrality debate it's also the organizations that take part in zero rating programs and get themselves a competitive advantage this way because they are getting premium access to customers and that in particular i'm referring to the public broadcasters that unfortunately have changed sides in this debate and take part or at least i'm negotiating to take part shame on you public broadcasters we have an AI strategy uh to involve civil society that hasn't been enthralled in those meetings at the chancellor's office it was industry lobbyists most of all in the consultation there wasn't even a button that someone could click on to be part of civil society if you were registering um and i think research for better anonymization of big data uh and research on privacy by design and by default as a condition is sadly lacking another topic that's 2018 was the year that many companies for the first time actually dealt with data protection there was a lot of insecurity lots of cease and desist letters were feared not many came but the detail of still hasn't been clarified as is always the case with large legal complex compromises but at least there are improvements for users there is the market location principle where you can go to the courts at home there are large fines and and large damage payments and support from the supervising authorities and we have a new public sport which is gdpi inquiries and the website is german deine daten dein rechte your data rewrites meanwhile max schremse is trying to try this market location principle because he in austria is now trying to take facebook to court and facebook think they still want to be taken to court in ireland where the office is also congratulations to andrea fossoff the federal privacy commissioner on the 7th of january if her term will finally be over we'll have an successor urich kehlber who seems much more active which isn't really hard um so that's might be an improvement but one thing we have to call for much more consequently there are many politicians calling for a doubling of the staff of the interior secret service instead we at least need a doubling of the staff of the data privacy commissioner because these people defend our constitution much more now to the EU privacy regulation that's the small sister of the general data protection regulation in the EU parliament with a one vote majority uh there was a vote for more users rights it's now in the EU council and it's getting stuck there and our government was one of those that did actually take part in all the blocking the EU privacy regulation could give us different things no day after processing without consent more protection from online tracking privacy by default in browsers too for example limits to online tracking uh more transparency for state access of course governments don't want this we should discuss which values innovations should bring what are these great data innovations if users don't know what happens in the background and that's something another reason why we need transparency in tracking and also the digital pact is coming or it won't or maybe good in principle but again 20 years late as so often the problem with the digital pact might be that it's mainly seen as an investment support for microsoft and batsman and the like telecom and we know that the best equipped schools will be of no use if teachers don't know what to do with these machines and what is also missing is a consequence strategy to for open source lesson materials that's something we should look for yeah running gag every year freifunk initiatives could be registered charities there was another vote in the uh in one chamber of parliament is now in the main chamber of parliament that is reformed grant coalition go ahead that's not only something to do for voluntary engagement in the digital sphere but also something against the digital gap and uh on site now to the nice things there are a lot of nice things so we are celebrating the open internet one of the nicest science citizens projects was a bicycle meter they had the sensors which were delivered to 100 bikers in in berlin which measured the distance to cars over a long time span because technically cars need to have 1.5 meters distance to bikes so when we are driving bikes on streets we are dependent on cars holding themselves to that distance and this project showed nicely that even with a science citizens project you can on the one hand do nice and interesting things but be you can also start a public debate and this model should be probably extended to other things uh one of the other nice projects this year was open laws often gesetze punkti so originally these these things were protected under uh under copyright um and you basically needed to pay to access those but according to the but thanks to the open knowledge foundations uh they just scraped everything and put it on open laws punkti often gesetze punkti and now it has been announced that this will be put on the internet from the start so that's a great success that's only a first step also legislation should be open and accessible we may progress on open access uh with project deal uh german science publishers were approached so we are financing uh science and they are financing with our tax money a couple of private publishers um so they are pay so they publish these results and uh well you could do it differently but we haven't so far so now a lot of universities uh uh don't want to pay as a publisher elsewhere because it doesn't want to take part in that deal but here too is clear that um open science needs to be open we need real open access and well at least we are on the way there so whatever institute open knowledge i don't know what institute it was was to search on social consequence of digitalization and i think that's good and without any irony but again at at least 20 years late but better late than never uh then there was the for the first time there was the bits and trees conference where the environment movement and the network movement for three days talked to each other came together that is another bit of progress uh we had a sustainable it conference some years back and the problem then was that the environmental movement didn't really know that they were also affected by just digitalization but they have got the message by now at least part of them and this year we had 800 people in berlin at our dust is nets politic this is net politics conference the first took place five years ago and back then everyone in the audience and on stage were about as old as me and me and this time for the first time i was about the oldest most of them were younger and it was much more female which is a nice development which shows that we do not have any problems with uh new people and that's why we will go on and have another conference on the 13th of september and at the same time or just after we'll celebrate our 15th anniversary of netspolitik.org and another thing hanski aug marson the head of the interior secret service who had been heavily implicated with right-wing politics has finally gone and we are still there and we've grown a lot and if you want to support us because that's what we live from live by we depend on people giving us voluntary donation donations so that we can have an open offer there's a silent sms option for donating you seem to have to send a message with the text still sms to 81190 but then of course you can also uh make regular donations through your bank account anyway never give up never give up 2019 will be a tough year at the beginning of the year with e-evidence the terror regulation and the eu copyright reform we have three big things at the level that will be bad and the german government is getting heated up to get more surveillance laws on the way so controlling power in the network is getting worse on each front so fight for your digital rights enjoy the conference get informed get active and get home well thank you yeah and uh also i hope you've enjoyed the translation you've been listening to sebelis and strange cliff and uh marcus says we have stickers and bags okay anyway we like your feedback as translators c3t is our hashtag c3 lingo is our twitter account thank you for listening oh yeah questions and answers please line up behind the microphones those leaving the room please be quiet so that we can hear the questions one question from the internet and the internet there's insecurity whether the fact checking and the filtering by facebook you like or you do not like and uh how this connects to the the rejection of upload filters not at all so i don't connect this at all to the eu upload filters i think it's important that it and i think it's right that there is democratic fact checking institutions even in in platforms like facebook i'm i don't think it's okay that facebook thinks it's that uh they are free and uh get money for that so especially in countries like nigeria and mayan mar where they get a lot of money for that and don't take any responsibility for all the fake news they get there and that spreads really quickly there and that leads to programs and uh genocide so there needs to be more work done here please wait collecting your bags until the talk is over and the q and a is over please if there are any more questions please line up behind the microphones all right it will only be a bag if you ask a question now that's another way okay if there are no more questions then surely you will be available later for all these people thanks ah there is a question that one microphone for okay and a follow-up question to the previous one how where do you see the limit between facebook's responsibility and their censorship because that is a difficult thing if facebook gets uh takes action whether it's fiber something or not i think the financial problem is that we are having two approaches on the one way either you are a provider or you are media then you are uh liable liable for what's happening um and with facebook and youtube and et cetera uh with monopolistic platforms which are exactly in the middle which we need to regulate with a third way because of course they have a certain responsibility but i don't want that uh mark zuckerberg also needs to uh legally is legally liable for my net politics website facebook page right so we need new approaches to regulation to solve this problem so the answer is much more complex thanks a lot please a huge applause to marco speckadal


Hi, my name is Jeanne Zaleski and I had bariatric surgery through Mid-Michigan Medical Center Gration in June of 2017. I've always had a problem with my waist since I was young and we tried everything from dieting to cutting back on foods and trying to eat vegetables and fruits and as I got through high school I got bigger and bigger. I would gain a few pounds, I would lose 25 pounds, I'd gain a back, I'd lose it and I did everything. I exercised and did everything I could to try to lose the weight and I knew that weight issue was a problem with my family because my father had weight issues, my mom had, my sister, my brothers and I looked at that and I did not want to end up being heavy and overweight and not being able to change, chase my grandkids which we do so much together and they're everything. You know, every time I would get up to move, my legs hurt, my knees throbbed, I shortened the bra and I just didn't want to be that way. I work for the Mid-Michigan Physicians Group Cardiology. What really helped me make my decision was I see a lot of patients that are overweight, that are having problems moving around, they're shortness of breath, they're walking with canes and I looked at myself and I seen that and I said, you know, I don't want to be there. I'm 62 years old and I wanted to take charge of my life and so I went ahead and I seen my doctor and I consulted her and asked her if there's any way that I could maybe get some help, maybe it's bariatric surgery or maybe she could refer me to a surgeon. That's where my journey began. After my doctor referred me to Dr. Banachi, I met with him and explained kind of what was going on with my weight issues and he said that I was a perfect candidate for it because I was healthy. He said, you are really a perfect candidate just because of your BMI being so high. So that's kind of where it began and he asked me when do you want the surgery and I said, right now, after I met with Dr. Banachi, I met the support team, great group of people. We talked about different ways of exercise, different types of food to eat, where I would be going in the next few months in my journey. I had my surgery on June 14th and I was ready to go home right after. I was in surgery for a couple hours, everything went well. I was ready to go home and they said you can go home the next day. So I stayed overnight and in the morning they went over everything with me, what was expected and what I would be going through in these next few weeks and I went home. But once I got home I had to look at all my brochures that was given to me from my support group to see what I should be eating and what I should not be eating and to be sure that I'm getting all my protein in during the day. I started losing a couple, two, three pounds a week and there would be one week I'd lose a pound, one week maybe two, one week I wouldn't lose any but it started coming off and within, you know, six months or so I lost 40 pounds. On my exercise day I feel wonderful, I've lost 70 pounds, I feel great, I get around, I chase my grandkids, easy for me to do pretty much anything. I do a lot of walk-in, I try to keep exercising, I want my treadmill which I can hardly do that before. I'm always busy, I'm very energetic but I feel 100% better. My name is Angela Hathaway, I had the bariatric gastric sleeve surgery through Mid-Michigan Medical Center Midland and I've lost 134 pounds. I am a wife to my husband Keith and I have two little boys. I've had problems with my knees since I was junior high age and they were just getting worse, problems with my back, everybody suggested maybe if I got the weight off it might help with my problems. I actually was with my family physician Dr. Paul Berg and he was helping me out with one of my foot problems. I said, well I've heard that being overweight affects your feet and all your joints of course and he suggested that maybe I should look into gastric surgeries. The first six months after my procedure was a difficult time because you're still not allowed to eat a lot of things but progressively as the weight kept coming off I got so much more energy. I was actually doing 5Ks, was able to play with my kids and I didn't mind going shopping or doing all those normal things that a lot of people take for granted because I was always too tired to do them. I was able to do the things that normal people would do and actually enjoy them. When people ask me about bariatric surgery I don't really sugarcoat it. I let them know that it is not easy, it is a tool to help them and that with some hard work and dedication to the program that is outlined to them that they could be very successful and it's rewarding and it's the best decision I ever made. Back in 2000 when I moved from Brazil to America to US I was 42 years old and my weight was around 220 pounds but during the period of 14 years I gained a lot of weight mainly to the fact that here we eat much more food. The fact that I didn't do any physical activity to offset this I start adding weight and like I said in 14 years I moved from 220 pounds all the way up to 310 pounds. That's when I decided that this thing should stop and I should change the way it was going to. With the weight gain came a variety of health issues. The most critical one was type 2 diabetes. I also doing my weight I had back pain, knee pain and I snore. I had this lip apnea and this whole thing was adding up to a point that I could not manage anymore. I chose to have the surgery at the Michigan Medical Center in Midland because my colleague at work had the same surgery with the same team and he was very successful in his surgery and I was impressed with the results so I went to attend a seminar and one of the coordinators explained us how this thing works and the several different options of surgery and I chose for the, it's leaving a straight to me because I found during my research and conversation with the doctors that would be a more definitive solution compared to the other options even though all of them has their benefits I chose to be more radical and say okay if I have this leave gastrectomy it's kind of a no way back so I would reduce my stomach size I will be forced to eat less and more frequent and I will have to be educated in terms of what kind of food to eat and eat more health and etc. So that was what I decided to do. And a couple of months later around July in that same year I found this Taekwondo school in the Midland Mall and I decided to join and to have an activity that I could commit with time. It requires certain abilities in terms of agility, flexibility, elasticity, dedication. All of these together with a physical feet preparation and during my tenure of being prepared and moving from belt to belt to belt I saw other people that that was part of the group that I go in the school going to competition and we have this group going right now. We have nine students and four or five of them came from the bariatric surgery so it's very very very rewarding. The surgery changed the way I eat primarily by limited the size, the amount of food that I can eat. For me having the bariatric surgery was the best thing that happened in my recent life. I was going like I said in the wrong direction and bariatric surgery put me back on track to be healthier to remove all of those issues, health issues that I had and today I'm a healthy person, I'm happy, I like the results. If I have to do it again I definitely would do it again. Hi, I'm Gail Gorman. Five and a half years ago I had bariatric surgery and I've lost 192 pounds. And I'm her husband Ron and I had surgery down in 2012, bariatric surgery and I've lost a little over 200 pounds and I've managed to keep that up. I decided to have bariatric surgery when I started getting really really heavy. My father died at 52 from a massive heart attack and I was afraid that if I didn't do something drastic and permanent I was going to follow in those shoes. And I weighed 426 pounds, I was on four different blood pressure medicines. I had a very difficult time getting around being athletic at all and my doctor told me he said if you want to see 60, if you want to see grandkids, you need to make some decisions. Bariatric surgery has changed my life drastically. When I weighed 426 pounds I was not healthy and couldn't do the things that I'm doing now. We own horses and we horseback ride and now I have no trouble jumping up in the saddle and being able to do the things that I couldn't do then. We have done three half marathons together. We've done many 5Ks. Getting down and playing on the floor with my granddaughter when she says, hey grandma will you play tag with me and being able to actually get up and run has just been fantastic. Having the surgery is the beginning step, it's a tool, but it takes a lot of commitment and a lot of time from you to go ahead and do the exercising and change the eating habits and realizing that it's going to just make your life so much longer, so much richer. My advice to somebody that is thinking about it would be to get educated, go to some meetings and find out and then make some smart rational decisions about what you want to do. If somebody was considering and thinking about having the weight loss surgery I would say do it sooner rather than later because you are missing out on some wonderful time of having the weight gone, having your body feel good and just living life to the fullest that you should and deserve to have. My name is Joe Monaghan. I've lost over 135 pounds after bariatric surgery. I was an air traffic controller for over 32 years. With that job comes a lot of stress, rotating shifts, you never seem to get on a constant regimen of when you eat, when you sleep, so over the course of that career I gained over 100 pounds. I weighed 322 pounds. I'd given up pretty much on everything I enjoyed doing. I tried every way you can think of to lose weight. I tried Atkins, Weight Watchers, South Beach Diet, Counting Calories, you name it. I tried it and I'd have a certain level of success with all of it but I could never stay on it and the end result would be I'd wind up gaining more weight than I lost. After failing at every diet I could possibly find, I finally started to look at bariatric surgery. I did a lot of research. I wanted to make sure that I knew exactly what I was getting into. I had a procedure at Mid-Michigan Medical Center. I had zero complications. I was in the hospital for three days. It took fantastic care of me. Bariatric surgery gave me my life back. Within about five months I'd lost over 110, 115 pounds.  I no longer had acid reflux and I no longer had high blood pressure. After losing the weight, I now can do anything I want to do. I feel 25 years younger. People come up to me all the time and say, I would not recognize who you were if I didn't know who you were and I always laugh and say, that's okay. I don't recognize who I am every morning when I look in the mirror. It's truly a gift to have your life given back to you like this. Everything about this surgery is about changing your life and a lot of changing your life is making better decisions. Bariatric surgery is not a diet.   It's not a miracle, it's a tool, but the results can be miraculous. My name is Bruce Olson and the years since I've had my bariatric surgery, I've lost over 110 pounds. My cardiologist actually suggests I look into bariatric surgery. I was dealing with some serious issues. I just couldn't get the weight under control by myself. I'd reached a critical point and I needed help. I started my process by attending one of the seminars sponsored by Michigan Health. Surgery is not something you should rush into. Take it one step at a time, learn the pros and cons, and make your own decision. As far as the actual surgery is concerned, everything went just like clockwork and through my day-in-a-hashtag at the hospital, I couldn't ask for anything better. Since my weight loss, I have found it more convenient to do work around the house, especially doing special projects for people. It's just so much fun to be able to do things and not get tired. The current project I have right now is a concession trailer for the Masonic Lodge. I also have a project I was asked to work on by the Parade Chairman for the Lady of the Eagles. It just gave me something to do because I have all the tools to do it and the freedom of movement to do it. I feel like the surgery saved my life.