First I'd like to thank you all from coming I'm Greg Conti and I'd like to talk to you about the idea of Denial of information attacks and in one sentence the idea is attacking humans through the computer system Not attacking the computer system by attacking humans through their computer system and how we can counteract that And here's one example large shark Currently I'm at Georgia Tech, but I'm also in the Army And I'm here as a free citizen and not as a representative of the government So more specifically Denial of information attacks attack you the human and try and get Consumed the limited resources that you have if you contrast what you can handle Versus what your computer can handle in certain categories. You'll fall over far faster than than your than your box will So if it slows you down or alters your decision-making then that's Then that's the a denial of information attack occurring So I think the best example is spam and I won't ask you but just consider how many of you have deleted email Based on say a subject line that you shouldn't have or you've opened email that you shouldn't have And I know I when I talked with my wife about this We thought it was probably or you guys are at the leading edge. So when email was first spam first Started coming out you probably figured that out pretty quickly But who's received and I'll ask for a show of hands who has received a frantic email from a family member About some virus email that they received or some knows if your local tech support for you or your family or friends Who's received emails like that? Pretty much, you know almost the whole room. So I think spam is an example I mean consider how much time have you wasted on spam and these are just examples So what I'm trying to do to this problem is look at the bigger picture and look at the structure around it and then How people are defending it and defenses to just add some Some structure to the domain I take one step back And there's some interesting statistics that just recently came out of the University of Indiana, I'm sorry Indiana University about about phishing and what they did is they went to a social networking Networking sites like Orkut and found out who was friends with who then they used that information To send out a phishing email to college students and they sent them out to 500 people And with but with the return address of a friend The emails were just like hey check this this site out. It gave a generic link off campus That link prompted them for their credentials or user ID and password from college And they were 72 successful And the students were very mad, but there's some interesting Statistics if you take a look at the gender If a male sent an email to another male only 53 of them fell for it You can see where we're going here If a female sent an email to a male it went up from 53 to 68 percent female to female 76 percent And then they live in a different world than I do but male to female 78 percent of them fell for it. So that was on average it was 72 So male to female was the worst category, but I thought the real insight there was using that social networking information So I don't want you to confuse this with the now of service attacks This is a recent innovation from a major Major operating system manufacturer They've evolved from the blue screen of death to the red screen of death This is from longhorn. I guess it's vista these days Anyway back to the it's it's not What you consider denial of service where you're consuming system resources ram hard hard drive space processing power It's you're consuming the humans resources is the key difference And it's compounded by the idea of information growth If you look I mean this and information is being generated at a prodigious rate And this study is very very good And I'd also like to mention I personally hate bullet slides. So I have very very few in here But on the slides on your disc on the con cd. I've included an extended version that has more information With links and things Anyway, I just wanted to highlight one of these that the this is a study coming out of berkeley from 2003 Entitled how much information and it's it's a very good study except it's like 150 pages, which again is information overload But the surface web at that time they estimated was about 170 terabytes or 17 times the library of us library of congress print collection So a tremendous amount of information in 19 or i'm sorry 2003 And that's just the surface web not the dynamically generated web So we just talked about We just talked about Attacking spam attacking attacking primarily your cognitive decision making Well, there's other attacks that attack your perception. All right. I had this on a web page Can you how much work can you get done with that sitting on the web page blinking? Right, so that was on a real estate web page. I had to slide it off to the side To be able to get any work done and I it just makes me mad. I wanted You know, what were they thinking who's going to go out and buy coffee based on that? So we talked about cognitive resources And perceptual resources then we have motor resources And the idea then if you go back to the the novel information attack if you're slowing the human down You're beginning to win if you're sending them in the wrong direction. You're beginning to win Motor resource attacks often slow you down. You have to stop what you're doing grab the mouse Click the pop up get back to what you were doing And I thought this example from hack proofing your network Again gives an insight into the idea of the decision making by the human versus You know the decision making by the computer and I'll read it for those in the back In the end all the power of the intrusion detection system Is ultimately controlled by a single judgment call on whether or not to take action So if you can get into that decision making cycle you can affect have affect major outcomes I thought it was also relevant to look at information flows So if you consider signal being what you're looking for if you're out on the web for example or in any information space You're looking for certain information That would be the signal Noise would be everything but what you're looking for So the best case would be signals very high And noise would be very low. So that's the best situation. So what you're trying to do is increase your signal to noise ratio If you consider a small amount of signal and a small amount of noise It's still manageable for humans. So you can look at this list of 10 things Maybe if it's 5050 you can still pick out what you're looking for some google results are like that But it starts getting worse when you have low signal to noise And particularly you have a lot of a lot of noise a little bit of signal what you're looking for That's the domain of the not denial of information attack And then you start getting into denial of service if you have lots and lots of information then you start Overcoming your computer's resources. So that's more the denial of service attack So if you consider this web page and this is weather.com I started going to specific news sites and then I thought I'd get in trouble for whatever one I chose So I thought weather would be safe So if you went to this website to get something done and I actually tried to do this to find out Las Vegas weather Yeah, I mean hot and dry. What was I thinking but Anyway, if you say you came to this site and Putting your signals noise ratio goggles on and all you wanted was the the you know, the United States weather and some basic weather information All of that is noise Okay, so it just tremendous amount and I know there's some plugins for various browsers that help But the idea if you can just get down to the signal, it's it's tremendously better experience So besides the idea of the signal to noise ratio And the keynote speaker at black hat was gillman louis who also mentioned this up mentioned this He is the CEO of incutel, which I think is a cia cia startup funding venture capital company pretty interesting But anyway, he mentioned the oota loop and the oota loop is was Observe orient decide and act and it was developed by a colonel john boyd who was in the air force And this came out in the the 60s about how fighter pilots make decisions And if you could make your decisions faster than the other person you could go through this cycle Then you win So if consider if you're in a certain situation or even looking at a web page or any looking at logs You have to observe the data or even your email is probably the best example You have to observe your email And after you observe observe it and orient yourself to it then you have to decide what do I do And if it's it's a puzzling subject line you spend time you're wasting time you're slowing down this loop And then after you do it you have to act and typically action requires some Physical response, which is a motor response, which will slow it down So if you're slowing the other your opponents Oota loop down Again, you're you're conducting a successful attack So you can have people go through cycles unnecessarily or you can slow it down So With that in mind observe orient decide and act. Let's look at the web page again And this time if your task was to just find out find out your local weather, which isn't Available and it took me a while so you observe Observe this and orient yourself to it and find out Where where do you type it in? Where do you get your local weather? So think how how long it would take? Well turns out It's there everything else is noise for the task at hand So you've slowed the person down as I go through that and grant they've got business reasons for doing so They want to show you ads Some some of the news websites are the worst offenders of all Okay, so moving forward. Let's look at then you've seen some of these examples big examples Let's look at how people are defending against these type of attacks And I spent about oh geez three years of my life reading slash dot every day looking for denial of information attacks in the news And certain trends came out of it and clearly there were there were legal responses And you can consider the anti telemarketer legislation for example And as well as regulatory There were moral responses public relation campaigns From the motion picture association of america for example, like you'll put our employees out of their jobs a few pirate pirate movies And I I was particularly intrigued by the the use of violence violence is a if people receiving information They don't want violence has been a proven countermeasure in certain instances and I was particularly intrigued by the Let's see charles bower charles booer case where he received one spam too many And snapped and started sending death threats back to the spammers And he was arrested for his troubles So I wanted to take a harder look at all right. You've got these limited resources. How do they all interplay? so this Is you and I've modeled it and it's hard many or may not be able to see it but those Those boxes represent your cognitive capability short term memory long term memory And that's you and that's you in the red square talking to your computer. So the arrows you see between that actually Along this boundary, that's your vision.  So the input output through your computer Which also has a limited amount of resources cpu ram hard drive space and io And it communicates so you're the information consumer you're consuming information From information producers and you need to pull that information in say from websites over some sort of communication channel Those are servers out there providing you the information. They too have limited resources And often there's a human sitting there, you know the spammer hits the send button But there could be things like unattended machines like sensors So if you take a closer look then you can see where these attacks take place For example, um, if you use very small text like in legal agreements and yulas You will that's attacking us the vision of the recipient Spoofing the browser, you know some of the phishing attacks that have taken place occur along that hci boundary I just found this useful to get a feel for where these things are occurring to look at Where attacks are taking place, maybe where new attacks could take place as well as where some defenses could be put up So if you look at defenses, there's a The the hci boundary between you and your computer There's been a move forward in the notion of usable security like security actually people can It gives them the information they need TCP damping on the communication channel will slow down if a certain number of email exceeds a given threshold They'll slow down the the network pace I believe that's actually There's some penalties and capture the flag on that front Or pushing most of these push the problem back to the attacker So you see computational puzzle shelving attack that requires if you want to send this email for example requires A small amount of cpu space on the attacker And I'm particularly intrigued by Paul Graham's idea of The Eliza spam responder and who's heard of that idea with for spam and Eliza Okay, good. The idea is Eliza is a early Straightforward artificial intelligence and program program that was designed to be like a psychologist So the idea then is you have a listening on a given port or email address the email comes in if they can Uh Craft it in such a way that the spammer buys the response and people all across the internet do that we win So it's a pretty intriguing idea and it shows you again.  I love slash dot. There's it's like this high of mind and there's always interesting insights So from slash dot on this subject I have a little php script that I use whenever I get a phishing email The script generates fake credit card numbers and expiration dates And repeatedly hits the sites the phishing sites form dumping in random information Any halfway intelligent fisher would record the ip address and just dump all of mine when he saw they were bogus But it makes me feel good that I at least wasted some some of his time So again, you know, you push that back if a lot of people did and I'm not incurably I don't want to get drug off in shackles But it is intriguing the idea of pushing the problem back to the to the spammer So I've I've looked at this well honestly entirely too much this problem But I have there's several papers on it that are on my website Then I'll give you the link at the end and it's on the cd But if you're interested, you know on any of the papers on the website that are like pre-publication You can send me an email and I'll send you a private copy for review or something like that And most of the others are available if you're interested in more. I just tried to hit some highlights I thought you'd find entertaining So given that big problem I wanted to look at a specific domain and I there were a lot of people working in spam So I've looked specifically at network security And in particular the idea of using information visualization as a way to deal with that problem of Denial of information attacks because there's this battle and you see it during capture the flag of hiding your activities from the human who's monitoring the system or the The intrusion detection systems or the defenders. So I was looking at information visualization to do that So I came up with a tool That's a pvr and it monitors network traffic Will load historical data sets and provides different specially crafted windows to hopefully provide you insight I at inner zone. I had a friend we who said they thought they might have to change the rules of capture the flag If all of a sudden you could see network activity in useful ways. So and that's the idea I mean all the space were and everything's one upmanship So I thought okay, you know, we have these windows and that's useful. Well, how How can we attack them? You know that kind of take it one step forward and look at how can we look at the traffic in ways that are useful Then take it another step and say okay knowing this Knowing how we all think okay. This is in place. This is cool. How can we attack it? So this is what the tool looked like and this is just a quick snapshot And it's using the microsoft virtual desktop to show a few different pains at the same time. I'll demo this at the end Okay, so last year at def con I gave a talk on a related subject and the first question was how do we attack it? And so the combined with the interested my interest in in your interest I thought it'd be an interesting space to look at and you'll find in academia Not many. I mean if you're not in the security field Generally, you're not in the security field. So You can make a lot of progress just by you know looking at their stuff and breaking it for them It's pretty fun So that that lets the work on malicious visualizations And then the idea was attacking the human through their computer through their their system that prevents presents information to them in some way So ideally you can understand how these attacks occur then you can design better better ways to protect yourself Ah, I was motivated by pokemon now. I know at a normal academic conference People wouldn't know the answer to this, but why was I motivated with about pokemon as far as attacking people through information technology? seizures, okay, very good In the late 1990s There was a specific pokemon episode that had rapid flashing red Lights in 20 to 30 hertz Okay, well that turns out that people who have photosensitive epilepsy. That's just the right frequency to trigger a seizure and reports vary but Thousands of people went to the hospital with nausea And several hundred went to the hospital with because of seizures. So It got me thinking about reaching out. I know that's a very specific case But I think the prevalence in in the us population is about 2 percent through the lifetime for epilepsy So it's not it's non-zero But it got me thinking about through attacking people through computers But then I wanted to be realistic So yeah, I mean you want just want theoretical attacks that never occur I wanted to look at well How could where can you really insert information into what people see and how can that little bit of information Impact a lot of information or the display of the information So I made some assumptions. I'm not dosing the system I'm just adding a little bit of information trying to skew the results as much as possible and trick people As well as in some cases, I think it's reasonable to assume you could alter the timing of the data Particularly if you had access to the sensor or something or the network somewhere in between you might be able to slow it down But I really focused on adding a little bit of information And I did not assume that you compromise their computer and you had full access to the database to do whatever you want with it I wanted some places where you could really do it So you know network Traffic is where I spent most of my time Particularly in this area because I mean clearly you can spoof packets. You can jet things I mean you're constrained in some ways by protocols or upstream network devices But still the the network you can insert information pretty much at random As well as some of these these other domains any place where you can insert some amount of information Then then there can be a problem So going back to the model, I assume that anywhere in that space Along the communication channel or the information producer could insert a little bit of information And then the timing attack would occur even on the sensor itself, but I was looking more at the between the network in between So how do these things manifest themselves? I looked at all the different places where they could manifest themselves, but I've chosen some highlights here I think would would be best just to show you the idea So I focused on your computer how people can send a little bit of malicious information to your computer So that it'll present you a lot of malicious information You know in a visual display So I What really got me thinking is just some tools and this is a $10,000 visualization tool It labels things only puts 20 labels on the display So if you exceed you know hit a threshold above 20 labels labels start disappearing So I thought uh, you know if there's certain If you can exceed limits of the program Then you're gaining ground you're slowing people down They may miss what you're what you're trying to what do you want them to miss or See what you want them to see And even better in displaying information Oftentimes labeling algorithms are used And you can see here that it doesn't take much To start filling up a display with labels And you know dropped out here, and they're not even sorted in this one So perhaps just a little bit you can start hitting the threshold And even better I think as you see auto scaling algorithms Where uh, this This graphic The left hand side shows ports on external computers That are talking and on the right hand side are ports on your computer So it connects the dots between one to the other what port to what port And on the if you look at the little detail That's those are you have a great deal. That was the initial display. It was like one to 135 And it but this tool auto-scaled so initially I saw exactly what I wanted to see I winged one port one packet to a high port It auto-scaled it reduced all that relevant information down to one pixel So then you have to waste time grab the mouse zoom in zoom out zoom in zoom out just by winging one one packet high Now you may think this is just arbitrary But you see this in real life. This is a very common um web Now the log analysis program. So here and this is from the netty at home project. You see a spike of activity And actually this was slash a site being slash dot so Yes, it's more akin to the Nile service attack, but it does illustrate that you can Impact I mean web logs you can enter information in I mean you probably send ascii art into web logs if you were so inclined But that input in the logs and then you can alter how the information is displayed So you see that on the day of the slash dotting It flatlined everything else. So, you know everything else gone Also, this is the spinning cube of potential doom, which you may have heard about And the idea is it shows network flows in 3d space And in the foreground though if you look at how information is rounded down Then In the this is a whole class b network mapped. So that 2 to the 16th bits Mapped along about 5 or 800 pixels And the entire internet is on the green line So you're mapping 2 to 32nd more or less Along the along the vertical axis. So you're losing a great deal of information And then the z axis blue that they're mapping the target port And it turns out that an attacker if you're using this to watch your network the attacker Would be able to operate with tens of thousands of degrees of freedom as far as destination port Destination ip and source ip and illuminate only a single pixel So again that looking at the scaling in place is very significant And of course just using a little bit. It's you put it with something on the screen It's easy often to put something on top of it Some types are more susceptible than others As well as just inserting some random noise or carefully crafted noise So how do you protect people how do you protect your your users from Small amounts of information having a major impact on what they see Well the first thing and there's no cure all In systems where there's some degree of authentication Then that's better than no authentication or limited where you just basically have to click on an email to verify your identity or something And This I think it's not a for you. I'm just telling you for entertainment purposes this next one I'm telling the other people that this line because they need to do it That that you need to design systems with malicious data in mind Oftentimes they live in a utopian world and design systems where they just think only happy data will arrive So but to design systems with malicious data As well as to train users to be alert for them and we're you train You know people not to give away their passwords over the phone or whatever That you train users to be aware of the weaknesses As well as to allow them to customize the system So again, there's more on this This paper is on your cd. If you're interested in some more detail And as well on the cd. I've got some other links you can go to for more information So this is a tool I released at black hat and the idea is it's a network pvr And each of these windows Each of these black squares is a thumbnail that shows you your network traffic So let me go ahead and load a packet capture data set And this data set is a packet capture from honey net scan of the month And you can see it's loading the packets And there's 3,300 packets. So this is what I was working on. Remember I'm going back to what I said before I wanted to build tools that would raise the bar on what type how visible tax are to the people watching the networks Then I wanted to take a further step and look at well, how could that be subverted? So I'll point you toward my black hat slides and I'd be posting those in a little while Where it goes into more detail on how this works But I'll give you a quick a quick tour and this is also on your cd The idea is there's different views that show you your data Most straightforward and they all operate in tandem. So what you see in one occurs in the net another So if we play it You start seeing the data different views are all operating in lockstep So the most straightforward one is showing you the text in the packets. This is a text view It'll go and show you the ascii or the des of the hex view as well as a decimal view But anyway, things like it has a the strings command built in So you can filter just for the The text strings of a given length in the packets This view shows one packet per line And you can see it tells you it illuminates the pixel on that line if That hex value exists. So for example in this this region Here that's the printable ascii range. So if you hover over it, you can see that that's a b I can't a j and so on so you can see that The the characteristics of it It'll also do the frequency of the bytes per packet And you can set a threshold Anything above a certain threshold will be hot so we can move the threshold down Till we start just kind of finding the tipping point It looks relative to each packet in that case I don't pad I don't pad anything Yeah, this is this is very straightforward. It's kind of like an initial step I mean, there's all sorts of like entropy algorithms I could use to Do all sorts of cool things with this type of view and then you see diagonal lines Which are bytes occurring in each packet but changing with the regular consistency so you can look at the slope So that's one. That's the byte frequency view I think you'll find this one particularly entertaining This is called a parallel coordinate plot and essentially you're connecting the dots on these axes Where where i'm going with it is it's connecting the dots between Every header field that's possible. That's my goal. I've got 17 fields in it now So if I go like this It shows the shows the fields The idea then is you can go through one at a time And see each packet and see its values for every header field Or you can play it and what you see growing on the right. That's the ip identification field You can see the distribution of ip addresses And you know the idea then is you can take 5000 packets Roll them through this and at least get watch them unfold and get a feel for what happens So you can see random activity for a given field. You can see sequential activity. You can see Things that don't change things that change a lot and so on I'm going for a whole model of interaction here like a mixing board that allows you to constrain everything and update the Displays as well So anyway given this tool, let me show you one or two more windows and then I'll show you how to attack it They're using it for capture the flag to show the network so on occasion So you could have some fun This is more of a matrix view And I won't go and it does have some some uses other than just looking cool But I won't we're kind of tight for time. I won't I don't want to blather on about it But what this is one packet per line and it's showing you the bits in the packets So if it's if it's the pixel is on if there's a one on the wire So you can see different types of packets and it's you can see at a glance the length of the packet As well as I've played around with such things as will show me the printable ascii values in there So when I do that it grays out everything that's not printable ascii And this is the blue is printable ascii so you can see at a glance what packets after you've filtered things contain printable ascii I've also played around with the idea of no ops I like the idea of Disassembling code on the fly looking at things as if they are executables and perhaps you as an analyst If it's color coded by common opcodes or something we'll be able to look at the The flow or the packets and say that looks like an executable going across the wire and it's not supposed to be there Perhaps you'll see something your intrusion detection systems or anomaly detection systems won't in the final one Think of this as battle zone for for networks It's connecting the dots between any fields. I don't know if you can quite see it in the back But it's connecting the dots and then it pixels fly off And slide off the screen based on what and this is showing Source ip to destination port tcp port So but as it happens if they fly off the screen so you can see a variety of activities And the way it's set up is you can compare anything to anything So there's all sorts of crazy combinations that might be of use to you And if you have the different windows open, you know all at the same time running lock step You might be able to find things you want to be able to find using today's tools So anyway, this is on your cd I'd encourage you and i'll give you the link to go to the The website where you can download the latest version. I made a a little bit of a fix that'll make it It crashes on a certain header condition So, uh, but it's i'll post that when I get back from defcon Anyway going back to the topic. So that's the tool then I thought how can I attack it? So let's look at some basic attacks apparent It really doesn't take much to bring down a visualization system if you're so inclined So I showed I showed you what normal looked like Now something odd happened here So let's go ahead and see what the attack looked like Now this is only 203 packets. So if you were just playing information looking at a data set watching capture the flag I'm using random ip's and we're only at 30 and it's already becoming crowded And look what's going on on the uh udp. This is color coded. So orange is udp traffic You can see that it's filling up the display pretty quickly With only 180 packets. It's already what a windshield wiper effect. Well as it turns out you don't need to hit every single port You need to know what it's you make a best guess at how it's scaled So I only need to like hit every 60th port With a packet to draw the line and create that solid effect So let's look at another example that totally melts it down So again, just a small amount of information can generate a lot of noise for the human So this is 1300 packets But this is pretty much a nuclear meltdown Now you can change the speed as well. So I'll change the speed to max And look what's happened on the ip address space But you can also see what I haven't messed with so perhaps something is constant in that some way Maybe they have a consistent time to live or or something that you can grab a hold of and create a filter to counter this So again, I try to create the tool and then think about how it would be attacked and then how we can defend and It never ends, but I think this is worth looking at. So that's a meltdown There are other interesting uses Who saw the talk at black hat? Okay, if you saw the talk at black hat, don't give this away, but there are other interesting uses So this is 600 packets And if you look at it say in the parallel coordinate plot display You can get it, you know the 600 packets you can look and see a quick overview of what happened Okay And again, you can run through them Well, it really just looks like a lot of source ip or source supports were in use but other than that not the same ip is We're used So let's play it again though with a different view So if we look at the frequency of the packets then, you notice odd clouds of packets Of bite of groupings of bytes Then if we look at it as a rainfall remember, this is one packet per line And the way this is it takes each Bite on the wire maps it to a pixel as a as a grayscale So you can see the rainfall effect of the bits on the of the bytes on the wire as grayscale It's have I or could you Right now the the There's a degree of flexibility built in the question was how much can you can I change the mapping of colors? Well the extent as it's there's no technical reason you kind of do that as far as what it's coded I have filters built in right now. They're straightforward. I want to go to greater complexity But they'll filter certain streams of tcp udp icmp and you can change the colors by clicking on there and that'll change it But I the degree of customizability isn't there yet But it's certain. There's no technical reason that couldn't occur. So just to wrap up I again on your cd. You've got the talk slides The the rummet tool itself is on the cd The malicious visualization papers on the cd and there's a hacker convention article. I want to point to you point you toward Because I know some of you have difficulty explaining why it's a value to come here Or is it just me? So I was able to get into the communications of the acm Which is like the professional computer societies lead madly journal on why computer scientists should attend hacker conventions So hopefully you can change some perceptions out there And you can wave this around in front of your your husband wife or boss Or parent And that's on the cd as well I'm looking for anyone who could give me feedback on the tool It's at rummet.org and again, it's there. It's on your cd as well I'm trying to I'm in school and I'm trying to graduate so I need feedback to make it better And right now I've got a two page five minute survey if anybody would be kind and see julian I'd be Permanently indebted to you if you could fill take five minutes your time fill that out it would help And it basically if you're a therial user or snort user is just to be some quick questions on How can people mess with your minds if you are using that tool or how they happen? Lots of people to thank I've been I've been iterating through this in In small groups and I've gotten a lot of feedback from a lot of people so too many to thank it one time Finally I wanted to end with I've had a good experience at george attack a very positive experience And I've enjoyed the they've got an undergrad and grad or masters and phd programs and infosec So if you were interested in that you could send me an email And I'd be happy to answer your questions or point you to someone who could As well as they're looking to partner with industry again. This is part of my business case. You're coming out here That they're looking to partner with industry and government So if you're looking to kind of like outsourced Rnd, uh, they're very much up for that and the website or I could point you to more information So with that are there any questions? Yes Okay, the the website is outdated as of now So I wanted to release it at black hat So when I get back the version on the cds like 1.7 something and I have 1.8 something that I'll release as soon as I get back It'll function. There's it's ip header length is if it's not five it'll crash Okay, uh, which is five is the normal value, but if you get other other things then it'll it'll crash But there's so on the cds a sample file and a key point is it doesn't load pcap natively So I have a little conversion tool that converts it to the file format so the tool is on the cd it runs on xp And I have a sample data file on there for you to take a look at and play with Okay, yes I have not but I definitely I don't see any reason why not I mean I want to do I want to show like the picture of what it looked like or whatever with the The pcap file and the file format for my tool Just have them there. I mean there's not sensitive or anything. So yeah, absolutely I want to share them and but I haven't when it's one of those things like the week I get back I'll be working that Well, I'd like to thank you all for coming julians in the yellow shirt If you uh, if you any of you could fill out the survey if you've worked with ethereal and Always wondered how you can mess with people through it or work with snort. I would appreciate it And if anybody's interested I'll be outside


We have about 15 minutes, a little more, four questions and I'd also like to offer the opportunity if any of the three of you have questions for each other, just signal, because I think there's quite a lot to debate about there, I see. Is it on? Okay, I'm formal now. Good, thank you very much. It's really exciting presentations, all three, and very good introduction as well. So thank you very much for that. I want to ask about another couple of intersections, which I think could be really, really important for this and will be increasingly important. This has been about informality and formality in the work situation, but if you then compound it in terms of informal settlements, you know, the kind of slum dwellers and shack dwellers international agenda, it becomes even more complicated, because you might not just be vulnerable where you're working, but also where you're living, and that compounds it. And I wonder if the panel have comments on that. Secondly, whether you have comments on unpaid caring, because that's a huge burden on women and will increasingly become more and more. I saw a statistic which was so big that I didn't believe it, and because I didn't believe it I think I've forgotten it, but I think that by 2030 there are going to be another 100 million Indians who are over 65. And that means a huge additional burden primarily for women, unless there's a vast change in terms of male behavior. And then, Ravi, a question to you. Your typology, don't you also need a sixth category or additional categories for the firms that are playing international hide-and-seek and not just national hide-and-seek? Thank you. What we're going to do, because the questions are coming, I will take you, there's the lady there, and then some to you I'll go behind in the first round of three, and then I'll see you again in the next one. Thank you. Yes, thank you for these presentations. I'm particularly interested in the study of Ravi and the presentation on these categories. And I was wondering if you took into account the intersection of this informal sector with actually informal employment, as a lot of these, a lot of enterprises can be compliant for taxes and paying taxes, but hiring some workers formally and others informally. Or another scenario we see a lot in the Middle East is enterprises who oblige the workers before hiring them to under-declare their revenues so they pay less social security for them. Thank you. So thank you all three for very nice presentations. This is a question for Ravi on the very nice tax typology that you have. So the question here is, in many of these VAT regimes, the threshold says firms above the threshold are in the normal VAT regime, and firms below the threshold have a special regime, a separate regime, single tax or fixed percentage of sales or something like that. And then, my understanding, but sort of what your opinion is, they segment firms because firms below the threshold cannot sell to firms above the threshold because debiting for the purposes of the VAT cannot occur. So the fact to really segment the economy into these firms can only buy intermediate inputs and sell them to themselves, but the larger firms cannot buy intermediate inputs from the smaller firms that are below the threshold. So changing the threshold then will leave the composition, will change the composition informality, but will also have impact on firms depending on whether they want to sell to the larger firms or not as they debit or credit across the regimes. So I just always have some reactions to that. I'm going to take the fourth, because some of these questions were very much directed at individuals, which is great. Thank you very much. The person. Sorry. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you very much. So Peronos, Swiss Development Agency, CEDA. Well, thanks for good presentations. And I would like to raise the issue of the political economy of informal employment. The issue why do firms not formalize, and there's a lot has been said about why they dodge formalization, et cetera. But what about the other side? What about incentives to prevent formalization? Government incentives, government and others incentives to prevent formalization. Because clearly the informal economy is a gold mine for rent extraction. To point it out, police, et cetera, requesting bribes. So there's a lot of vested interest within departments, governments, et cetera, was on that score. But there's also the insider-outside issue, I would think, that formal firms and formal workers often have an incentive to keep others out. Because it allows segmentation of the labor market into those who can have good working conditions, worker rights, higher wages, et cetera. And they can do this because they can exploit those on the outside. So have you looked at all into the issues of governments and other vested interests trying to prevent informal firms from formalizing? Thanks. Thanks. Thank you very much. And you're Sam first, and then the person sitting behind the lady in the straps, and then we'll stop there and give them around, and then I'll see you. Okay. Yes. Yes. We're somewhere one way from Tanzania report. Yes. This is a very interesting three presentations. They have convinced me that informality is very diverse and very complex. And I think this is a good starting point because then we cannot oversimplify it in policy. But second, I think the discussion about taxation is very common even in our countries. But one way of seeing it is actually scaring away the interpreter to formalize so that we can tax them, to formalize so you can pay tax. So it would sound like formalization means paying tax. Then that's a message that go underground. But I would like to see it in terms of what a number of you have demonstrated, the productivity issue, because they are informal. They cannot access resources, information, markets, they are limited in that respect. Therefore they remain low productivity, low incomes, non-listening jobs. So one, if one sees in terms of how to access resources, then it seems as we showed in here two main categories of challenges. One is how to make it easy for them to cross into formalization through the legal and regulatory framework. But secondly, how to ensure that they have access to resources, proper premises, markets, finance, skills, all these, because they can't get access to these, they remain low productivity, low income poverty. Thank you, Sam. Very much. Yes, sir. You'll be in the next round, the person in front of the class. Hello. My name is Miko. I'm from the University of Helsinki. I have a question that, in a way, follows up the gentleman's question up front. I know you guys mentioned that informal sector is very diverse. There's a huge heterogeneity of different types of workers within the informal sector. And I'm guessing that the skills and training required to enter into and to increase the productivity in these sectors is also very diverse, but it's probably undercounted within the general education and training systems which are targeted at the more entry into the more formal economy. So how can we help prepare people to have the skills and the training required to do their jobs in the informal sector well and efficiently? How do we develop educational and training systems for that while supporting their informality at the same time? Thank you. Thank you. That's very close to Sam's question, which is great. Thank you very much indeed. Marty, may I ask you to start and then we'll go in the order of the speakers for just a couple of minutes each, I guess, at this point. Thanks for the rich and buried questions and comments. Informal livelihood and settlement, I think we need to, informal livelihood, and we need to understand the linkages there much better. Essentially, most urban informal workers work either in public space or they work in private homes. And so there's a lot of productive activities happening in the informal settlements. And we need to understand those linkages, especially under conditions of relocation. And yes, women's responsibility under most social norms for unpaid care responsibilities does two things. One is it means that more women workers than men workers work in their own homes. A full 30% of women workers in India and Pakistan work from their homes. And we have a program that Francie leads looking at the costs of the lack of childcare on the economic opportunities and productivity of women in the informal economy. On taxation, two things. One is many informal workers pay taxes. So there's a myth that they don't and they would like benefits in return. So it can't just be taxation without incentives. The other is that taxation per se is only part of the definition of informal employment. So informal enterprises are defined as unincorporated enterprises. Nothing said about taxes, although by implication, if you're incorporated, you may have to. When it comes to informal wage employment, it means that the employer is not making contributions to the social protection of the worker. And then you get into payroll and other kinds of taxes that employers are supposed to do. But if you remember the figures, only two to 9% of informal workers are employers. So much of that evasion of employer contributions is happening either by formal firms or by households that hire domestic workers. So it's a much more complicated thing than we think and it needs a lot of work. On the government and informality and on other vested interests that have an interest in Paris comment, in the urban literature, which I now follow quite closely, there is a concept of elite informality, which is when the state colludes with elite powerful interests to create exceptions to formal rules. And the classic case is the state creating informality deals with the private real estate developers by privatizing public land, right? And there is a whole school of thought that the state is really encouraging informality. In terms of other vested interests, one dimension of formalization that the informal workers would like is the right to be part of collective bargaining, tripartite negotiations, all of that. And I am reluctant to say it in Finland, but the European trade unions were blocking the right of organizations of informal workers, including trade unions of informal workers to have a direct voice in the ILO tripartite. So there are vested interests that don't want that. And I'll leave it at there, there's a lot of rich questions. Oh, the skills training, sorry, that's the last one. The notion was, and Richard Jolly was part of that early ILO mission that found that people in the informal economy often acquire their skills informally outside the formal system. And this is true when we have to recognize and certify and appreciate that. But we also know that informal workers are needing to adjust all the time, even for informal jobs. So the construction industry gets mechanized, so manual lifting and carrying is no longer very, there aren't many jobs doing that. The women who used to do the lifting and carrying would like to be trained as electricians and masons and tile layers and all the other kinds of trades within construction. And we are way behind on that. And I think we all need to get very creative about helping the informal workers keep pace even within the informal economy, and then, of course, to make the leaves. And I hate to say that in a country like India, which I know best, it's an IT-led growth. So even to get a job in a call center, you need English as a second language, right? So I mean, it's not just skills, it's the whole education system to prepare people for the formal jobs. Because if it's not manufacturing-led, it's another whole level of education and skills that are needed. Thank you, Marty. So Marty's sort of dealt with the bulk of them. I'll just say two things. I think on Per and Mika's questions about, and Sam as well, on kind of questions of access to resources and the state's incentives to keep people informed, I mean, I kind of do think that the sort of policy response from state officials to kind of all sorts of things that would have quite a big impact on basically improving incomes in the informal economy is the kind of starting point really is to get access to any resources you have to be, you've got to make yourself a formal enterprise. And I think that just loses the point that it's the wrong starting point. Just a kind of second thought on the tax issue, and it's really perhaps a question to Ravi and sort of building on Santiago's point. It seems to me what VAT does and what the VAT threshold does is to kind of regulate not whether the firm's paying VAT or not, but it kind of really regulates whether the firm has the kind of legal power fully to pass on the incidence of the tax to the final consumer or not. So if you're in the formal sector and you kind of above the threshold, the law saying you can fully pass on the incidence of the VAT to the final consumer, if you below the threshold, you paying the tax upfront and the kind of extent to which you can pass on the incidence is going to depend on what the nature of that market is. It seems to me informal people often operate in kind of highly competitive markets, so the impact might really be to rather than evade the tax, it's sort of forcing you to pay the tax and not sort of pass the incidence on. Thanks Ravi. Would you come in there? Thank you. I think the VAT point is very well taken, of course, fairly clearly. I mean, what we were trying to do was not in some sense to give a story to an analysis of the VAT, but in some sense any tax structure which has a threshold, below which certain things happen and above which certain other things happen, and below which there's a certain regime and above which there's another different regime, and what incentives does that give enterprises to sort themselves out into this side or that side, et cetera. But the point is very well taken, indeed, this is in some of your work in run, that in fact the informal sector as defined in this way does not then have the capacity to pass on, as you say, to claim those credits in the VAT, and that leads to the segmentation. So maybe I could have said everything without using the word VAT. But the basic point was that these tax regimes lead to this partitioning of the population in this way. And then your point about informal, about the labor regulation, and that's the sort of point I was trying to make towards the end, which is actually what we do in our, it's a theory paper where we'd now look at if you like two tax regimes, one with this threshold and one with that threshold. And you can think of the labor regulation as being an implicit tax regime where if you hire more than 10 workers, then you have to do registration, et cetera, and certain costs are imposed on the firm. It's just a different tax regime, if you like, quote, unquote. And then that's the question. If you have two regulatory regimes, the firm has to respond to both in some way. And how do we think about that? How do we think about that? And I think that's an interesting analytical question for economists, for technical economists to be thinking about. But there's also an interesting question for policymakers to be thinking about. If change in this regime affects incentives to locate yourself vis-a-vis this regime, and the whole point is that in the policy context, it's the labor ministry which fixes the labor regulation side of the story. And it's the ministry finance which fixes the tax side of the story in a very uncoordinated way because, of course, they haven't thought of it. They think of this as being the tax problem and this as being the informality regulation problem. And I think it's our task to bring that. So that was really the point that I was making there. On the hiding of international, again, a very, very good point. Our story would go through, it's a hide-and-seek story. It's not where the hide-and-seek can take place. But if the moment international hide-and-seek becomes available, then the costs and benefits of hiding and seeking will change. And that will then change the boundaries of the different categories. So that's a very good point. I think those are the ones that I... There were two outstanding hands from the early question, and I'll allow you the last question, Richard. And we need them to be brief. So there was you first and then you. First, this side, please. OK. Hi, my name is... And then we'll come in within time. That clocks a little fast. OK. My name is Beatriz Muriel. I am from Bolivia, from the INESAD Foundation. I'm talking because 75% of workers in my country, as I saw, was established that were informal. But I think it's logic to think that with the informality is low. It's logic to think that the formal sector can absorb the informality sector, or the formal workers. But in the case of Bolivia, I think it is very, very complex. Actually... It won't be complex and long, right? It will be complex and very, very, very brief. Sorry to do that, Gis. So I think we need to think in two other things. The benefit and cost, because many... I think that many informal workers in Bolivia prefer to be informal, because the costs sometimes are very high and the benefits are not low. And this also, I think, it is related with the quality of institution. But it is not only to have some rights, for instance, social protection, but the quality of social protection and so on. So you have to think not properly to reduce informality, but improving formal rules and improving the quality of institutions. Thank you for that comment very much. And yours? Thank you. I'm Evi Van Stolen, I'm from Finland. I am an independent researcher, so I guess I count to the informal economy. And I was very, very pleased with all your presentations, also the introduction of Viego, because I am struggling with the same questions in a post-industrial society. It's not as large, but it's just as important for the future. And I have been focusing on status of artists and work in civil society. And then I was very, very pleased to see that you have this law program where you will look at what are the obstacles posed by law. And you mentioned also the harassment that people face by legal system that does not recognize the work. And to cut a long story short, when I have been contemplating these questions, I have come to the conclusion that a basic income would be a good way of correcting the injustices in the system. And I'm curious to know if you have been thinking of these questions. And a final question or comment from Sirith? Thank you. I'd like to ask each of the panel members, in terms of what next, where would they like to see the informal sector concept go? If I'm allowed one comment, when I shave in the morning, I realize that's informal sector activity. Everything one does by way of care of oneself or health protection at home in another sense is... So I see the informal sector everywhere. How much of it these activities would gain from this sort of informal sector analysis? Thank you. Should we start with Ravi this time and move this way? And I think there were two comments as much as anything, and then question. So of course, there are national accounts type issues in Richard Shaving and so on. I mean, Pigu very famously said that if he married his housekeeper, national income would go down. And as precisely that it would then become from paid work, would become unpaid work. And the way that we measure national accounts, it would precisely be... So the whole issue of measuring unpaid for work, so to speak, is a very big and a very old issue. I'm not entirely sure that these programs that we're involved with are addressing themselves to that directly. Although of course in terms of childcare and so on, there are programs in terms of addressing those issues, so to speak. But not, I don't think, I may be wrong, in terms of technical issues of measuring that and bringing that into a measure of the informal economy. But I think that's a very good suggestion, perhaps, we should be thinking about that in terms of our programs in Uyghur. Thank you. I think that's correct that Uyghur's focus is very strictly on paid work, whether it's care work or not care work. We're trying to not dodge that line, although it comes very much, I guess, more in the social protection program than anywhere. Imran. So just all that I can do is to basically respond to Richard's challenge. For me, I think the last 20 years has brought an enormous amount of... Or some amount of clarity to what we mean by the informal economy. It's brought a lot more clarity to who's inside the informal economy and who's not, to what parts of our activities we can't as informal and which part we don't. So I think Richard's example is kind of clearly unpaid work rather than working in the informal economy. But the sort of concept still remains sort of quite clear and quite vague. So I'd like to think if we were all here at the 60th sort of conference of why that would be a lot clearer. Some of us have been the underground economy, but I don't think that's about it. Tisha, great. Marci been for your last comment. Just two or three. One is the concept of informality. I think we're a lot clearer than my colleagues are allowing. And it is a second best concept. We need something to show a spotlight on the fact that what we call formal employment is a very small share of employment today. And then, yes, we do need to disaggregate it for policy and analytic and other purposes. In terms of formalization, if you ask the workers and Imran alluded to it, they're not trying to hide. What they would like is visibility. They'd like voice. They would like legal identity. They would like protection. They're not trying. This is the working poor and they're not trying to hide. They actually want visibility and voice. And then in terms of cost benefit analysis, I think we have, it's like taxation. We have to go a lot further. We've done a lot of empirical work on the costs of informality and what the workers would like as benefits of formality and what formality would mean to them. So I think there's a rich agenda for further analysis of the costs and benefits. And then, yes, in the post-industrial societies, we're working very closely with European statistical community to get measures of informality in the European community. They're very receptive. And I think we're moving towards having sort of a global concept where we can do global definitions. So stay tuned. We're hard on work on many frontiers. And we appreciate your attendance today.


I'm Stephen Cox, I'm a sculptor and English and I'm generally known for working in stone and in particular I'm very very interested in working with the hardest stones in the world, in particular imperial porphyry. My interest in working in stones in a more specific way or historical way was to do with the fact that when I moved from England to Italy to begin work on an exhibition at the Palazzo Reale my work was out of a kind of conceptual minimal background and I was working with ideas of developing from a tabula rasa from big plaster reliefs made with building materials in the building process these things were not architecture, they weren't sculpture and they weren't painting or they were all of those things but precisely the activity of making these things was as a temporary installation, this was back in the late 70s using building plaster and as I say just common regard and building techniques so there was the demystification of the processes of art but one of the things that's developed from the very first pieces I made which were to do with relief, if you like, the minute a line is either engraved into a surface or a line is seen to evolve from the addition of material then the space of otherwise blankness becomes ambiguous in terms of spatiality so I was working on these panels that were leaning against walls and the reference on the surface by using illusionistic techniques through using Alberti's principles of single point perspective the images on the surface of these either carved stones or leaning slabs was an image of the space within which the panel was leaning so I was involved in a pictorialism which really opened up a whole idea of working from an idea of an artist being someone involved in the dialogue with contemporary issues so using Vasari's on technique I travelled around Italy visiting the quarries of the stones that he listed as being of interest to the artists of the Renaissance so at the beginning I was in Milan, I went to places that were of particular interest to Adrian Stokes so I went to the quarries of red Verona marble and subtypes like bronzetto di valpolicella which was a beautiful kind of champagne coloured stone from the Verona region and I suppose that was my main sort of interest in the land and then I went south to Florence and I went to visit the quarries that produced the beautiful blue sandstone of Piazza Serena, Piazza Forte and associated materials in that area and then when I went south to Rome where I was then to house near Bracciano, the place called Anguillara which was close to the Pepparino quarries and the building material of Rome before Travertine was written so it was a kind of very profound significance to the Etruscan civilisation and the interest in the historical as well as the materiality of these stones listed by Vasari and worked in these places and created exhibitions using these stones Interestingly the one stone that was not listed was not available in Italy but listed by Vasari was the very very hard deep red and liverish stone called Imperial Porphyry they knew I think that it came from Egypt but nevertheless no one had a source for it but its interest which Alberti became profoundly kind of obsessed by was how with the metallurgy of the Renaissance it was impossible to carve this material how did the Romans deal with it which they did with extraordinary imagination there was obviously a fantastic will to master this hardest of stones so these are things that became of particular interest to me and I had been working in Italy, I had a studio at the American Academy and I worked on this exhibition using at that time Pepparino stone and exhibited in Rome at a gallery called La Salita which was quite a well known radical gallery which coincidentally was the place where Richard Serra had his first exhibition when he was a student at the American Academy so as time went by I did some interesting exhibitions I hope in various places working in Florence, working on ideas with fragmentation the idea of archaeology being if you like as creative for the present as it's to do with trying to give an indication of what came down to us in the past so the scientific analysis, the sort of forensic look at fragments marks on stone what they mean with some fat somehow very reassuring that whatever happens in the past whatever comes to cause let's say an extraordinary change in the powers that be in directing how civilizations are going to go often require some kind of iconoclasm but the extraordinary say forensic analysis of things of the past enable us to rebuild a picture of the past and see how the passage of time is changed by all sorts of forces so I left to go back to England and out of the blue a couple of years after I returned I was asked by the Foreign Office the British kind of foreign policy department who we've always had an idea I think in England for the soft power of art and so the British Councils had a very very profound interest in politics in a subtle way and I was asked if I would be prepared to make a sculpture for the opera house in Cairo and I left to the Egyptian people from the British so this rang a bell and I was very very excited about the possibility of being able to negotiate access to the imperial porphyry quarries of the eastern mountains of Egypt which I knew a bit about I'd done some research and so this sequence of events enabled me to go meet some people it was amazing that amongst the people I met was the Minister of Culture in Egypt who had happened to have been friend of the Minister of Culture in Cairo I met a man who had been a very good friend and while he was director of the Egyptian Academy in Rome of Giovanni Carrendente who had been a great friend of many American artists and was very very significant in the selection the invitation to David Smith, one of my heroes to represent contemporary art 25 years before in this related festival so whilst I was in Egypt I was able to speak a bit of Italian and communicate with the Egyptian ambassador who was very very helpful to me and through the minerals, geological mining and mapping authority of Egypt I was given access to the quarries and negotiations with the military because this area was a militarized zone when I first went there so access to the imperial porphyry quarries was given to me and since then I've tried to maintain access to the material through various people who collect stones in the desert and sell them through various sources in Egypt and so here we have in my studio in Shropshire about 20 tons of porphyry about 15 tons of which came back just a couple of years ago to go with the material that I brought back after I had finished my project for the opera house in Cairo I'm pleased to say that the sculpture that was made for it there's a pair of sculptures are still standing and one of the pieces that I brought back which wasn't selected for that particular job is in the collection of the Tate Gallery and another piece, a very large piece is here with us here which we can see later Now you've seen Stephen Cox discuss Peregrine Sentinel and I wanted to bring in a few more views of that sculpture that I didn't capture in the video that I made when I was there in his house so here we're looking at the front and sides of Peregrine Sentinel and you can see the wonderful variety of textures one of the things that Stephen emphasizes in his work is the relationship that he has with the material and it's a great deal of respect as I'm sure you've noticed by now for what it took to form this imperial porphyry for how rare it is, for how difficult it is to work and for the weight of history and symbolism that it has and so a lot of that is reflected here you might notice the wonderful sort of abstracted bird shape but you might also notice that the form here also resembles that of a female figure a lot of his work tends to explore really sort of classic abstract forms that could be read in a multitude of ways and the other thing I want you to notice is the attention being played to different textures and to sort of responding to the different faces of the stone so here we see those views and here we have a slightly better detail here we're looking at the side of the sculpture and a detail of the front and top you can see the unfinished texture that we have at the top of the sculpture and also down at the very foot of the sculpture and then the entire back has been left in that sort of unfinished broken state that you would have for stone coming directly from the quarry I love this particular detail of the stone in Peregrine Sentinel here this is at the base of the sculpture and you can see this very rough, unfinished piece of the sculpture and it shows all of those working marks and you can get a sense from this of just how difficult it is to work these hard stones like porphyry, basalt and diorite the normal tools and techniques that would work on softer stones like the alabaster and marble we'll cover later are completely ineffective they're completely ineffective against this sort of stone it all has to be worked with sort of punches perpendicularly against the stone and those tools wear out very much more quickly even if you're using power assisted tools the process is much, much slower so there's a real awareness here and a desire to show the evidence of the difficulty of that working here's a short video from Steven's sculpture yard and we're looking at a piece that is a similar size and shape to Peregrine Sentinel and you can see here how he has marked up some of the forms on the stone with the intent of carving in and creating a finished sculpture here's Steven with one of his larger and earlier pieces in Imperial Porphyry this is a work called Dreadnaught and it's a piece in which he's been exploring the Imperial Porphyry and sort of its condition and the things that have happened to it over its history the pits and hollows that you see in this work are from pieces of tuff that he gouged out and dug out of this enormous piece of Imperial Porphyry it also had a split down the middle and that was then gilded by Steven you can see that gold shining in the sun and then if you notice there are a bunch of sort of parallel stripes on the face of this piece and those are tool marks from the Roman quarrymen who were originally sort of roughing out this piece it was ultimately abandoned in the quarry until Steven brought it back to Britain and worked with it now I'm showing you a closer view of Dreadnaught and you can see that line of gold there to call your attention to that split in the porphyry and that may well be why the Romans abandoned it in the quarry also all of those large inclusions of tuff might have made this a less desirable piece of stone for the Roman masons but you can see their initial marks from drills that they used to kind of cut down in and used to split the stone and we'll see some wedge marks on the other side in just a moment here on the backside of Dreadnaught you can see some of those tuff inclusions that haven't been removed by Steven they look like big chunks of marshmallow in a jello salad for example and more of those sort of drill marks from the Romans there are a few sort of square cut marks too that are evidence of wedges that would have been driven in as part of the stone splitting process and what I think is so interesting about Steven Cox and his work is that for one thing he's one of the only sculptors currently working in these hard stones today his assistant Tim is following in his footsteps in a way using basalt and deliberately working with hard stones but these are materials that in many ways are materials of the past not of the present and in Steven Cox's work we see a dialogue between a present day sculptor and these very ancient important materials he has tremendous respect for them and the work that he does represents a sort of conversation that he has with these materials and when you examine his work and really look at it and we'll see some more work when we get to alabaster you really get a sense, a better sense of those materials thanks to Steven's intervention as a sculptor


Kako, welcome back to Energy Justice in Hawai'i, the bi-weekly, every two weeks, definition of bi-weekly, video interview that we have here on Think Tech Hawai'i. Today we're going to be talking about community ownership and circular economies with special guest Ikaika Hasi. Ikaika is a good friend of mine and fellow conspirator in the community-owned clean energy space, and he is also the president of Hawai'i Federated Industries. I might have got my title wrong, but we're really glad to have him here today. Ikaika, can we start the conversation maybe with a little bit of background on you and Hawai'i Federated Industries, and correct me if I got your title wrong. Oh, that's great. Thank you so much for having me, Ali, and aloha kako. Ikei manawa, oko hola elua, kei oka po, aioa oma Iceland, so nui ko oha oha oia, Hawai'i. I'm not sure what time it is back home, maybe 4 p.m. Is that right? Okay, all right. Yeah, so I'm from Hawai'i. I just happen to be in a very different part of the world at the moment. I live in Kalihi Valley. My background is in community organizing, labor organizing, and a few years ago, my wife, who most recently was at the Sierra Club, she came home from a talk that Bill McKibbin had given her or that had given, and she was sharing that in the talk, Bill McKibbin said that climate is different from every other issue, from any other issue that I had ever worked on, sovereignty, decolonization, sort of stuff. And it's an issue that has a deadline.  And so that's why I decided to pivot my own personal energies and my own mission towards addressing as much as I can just as a person, the climate issue for our people in Hawai'i, but also thinking about how Hawai'i can really lead the world in addressing some of the key questions, like community ownership, circularity, those kind of things. Awesome. And thank you so much for being awake at two in the morning, your time to be with us. Just for our audience who's not as familiar with the awesome kind of range of projects that Hawai'i federated industries is working on, can you give us a kind of a sample of what projects may be without any super top secret specifics that you find? No, it's okay. I like sort of an open source ethic. So we publish all this stuff on our own website, hawaii.federated.industries. Basically, the big thing that we're working on is we want to think about how do we decarbonize aviation.  It's something like 34% of our global, of our GHG emissions. It's also a thing that we're completely dependent on. We get back and forth on airplanes. And our entire economy is based around, sort of unfortunately, it's based around tourism, which is also obviously aviation dependent. And it's a major source of economic risk for us. We spend something like $2.7 billion a year on jet fuel. And that's money that we are basically sending to Libya, to Russia, places that don't necessarily share our values. And so, these are all, you know, big kind of questions that frame how we're thinking about aviation and about the role that we can play in climate because aviation is one of those things that is regarded as a hard to decarbonize industry. You know, along with agriculture, marine shipping, those are all very difficult to decarbonize because of the relative energy capacity of batteries versus liquid fuels. So, our goal is by the end of this decade is to try to decarbonize Hawai'i's aviation contribution. Amazing. That's an amazing goal. Just a couple of years away, but we can do it. We can do it. Yes. I'm curious about community ownership and how you see community ownership fitting into the work that Hawai'i federated industries does. You know, so, I'm here in Iceland. One thing that I've learned from my conversations with the the various companies that we've met with here, their geothermal hydroelectric carbon sequestration initiatives and companies is the importance of the fact why I guess, the thing that they all share is that they are either owned by the municipalities or owned by the national government.  And I think what you get with that is a sense of community, you know, it tends to be sort of more democratic, more centered in what the community wants and needs. And also, I think more responsive to the interests of the community. You know, it's something that we've experienced a lot in Hawai'i where we see energy projects come in and we see the money flow out, right? And we also see oftentimes, like in the situation in Kuhuku, there's one or two turbines that really created anxiety for the community. They asked for there to be relatively minor changes to the way in which those projects, those specific turbines were deployed and located. My sense is that the community wasn't really listened to. And I think that if the ownership structure were more grounded in the community, I think we might have seen a very different outcome to those situations. So the way that we're focusing on this is to try to build as much local ownership into the basic corporate structure of Hawai'i federal industry, sort of high-fives, we call it, just to ensure that sort of accountability. And frankly, Ali, you know, I'd like to hear about how things are going on Molokei, because your work on Molokei is sort of emblematic and illustrative of both how we can do community ownership and also why it's so important. So can you share about how things are going there? I would love to, absolutely. Yeah, I think about community ownership in a lot of the same ways that you just expressed. And I think the group that we work with on Molokei, the Hohaku Energy Cooperative Molokei, is this new entity that has formed just for the explicit reason of owning renewable energy generation. There might be other projects that the co-op might pursue in the future. But for now, we're just talking about this one solar and battery storage project. And I think that and the project would be owned by a newly formed cooperative of just residents of Molokei get to be members of this cooperative. And I think that responsiveness that you talked about is exactly one of the benefits of having community ownership because nobody else is going to make these decisions for where the project should go and what it should look like and which kind of solar panels should we buy other than the community group itself. And I think we're still kind of figuring out what is the format of that decision making look like. I think that's pretty new to go down to the very technical like should we choose this solar panel or that solar panel? And if it's from this company, should it be this wattage or that wattage? But we found that community members broadly have been super curious and empowered by the idea of understanding what the decisions are to be made and then making those decisions. And of course, we have some decisions that don't go like so smoothly that there's some back and forth, there's some discussion and trade offs between decisions. But I think for the most part that responsiveness has led us to be able to move pretty quickly over the last year and a half going from project idea to now some support, a pretty good amount of financial support and organizational support to be able to do a pretty impressive project for the scale of the island for sure. Yeah, I mean, I mean, we see that I think in the energy market in general that you can be a massive, well-funded corporation and still run into problems getting an energy project delivered. And we see a lot of problems with that right now. I think actually there's a greater possibility of these projects coming to fruition with a real community base because it's clear who wants it, right? The people of Molokai want this project to be delivered.  So it's really important for it to be a demand-driven project. Yeah, sorry, there's one other point that I was trying to make, but why don't you keep talking at all? I'm sure it'll come out to me. Yeah, great. I'll make a little plug here also for anyone listening live that might have questions for Ikaika and I on community ownership of Clean Energy, email in your questions to questionsatthinktechhoi.com and we will do our best to answer them here in this discussion or we'll have to schedule a follow-up session if you ask us any stumper questions. Did I give you enough time to think of your other point? You did and I appreciate that. What I wanted to mention is that we've, I think in Hawaii, we've gotten out of the habit or we sort of lost our knack and our familiarity with this sort of community-driven approach. It used to be really common for us to do large engineering projects as a community and what I'm thinking about when I talk about that is are things that are beyond our lifetimes but not beyond our memory. So for instance, I grew up in Kaneohe and just up the road in the Palo Alto area from where I grew up, it was a heia fish pond which, you know, is 2021. I think it's about 800 years old at this point and that's an example but only one of many of these examples of Hawaiians coming together to do incredible engineering projects and to do it collectively. You know, a few years ago, there was a community workday where the organizers of Pai Pai Ohae asked for volunteers to come to Puni Kupu to close the hole. There was a gap in the hole, in the wall on the fish pond and it was a beautiful day. There were hundreds of people all carrying stones, you know, and the stones were different sizes, different sized people can have different sized stones but to see everyone come together, it reminded me, I think, of something that was probably a much more common site back in the day, back in the day when we were, you know, just a little bit more self-governing, a little bit more self-sustaining, where we recognize that our future lies in each other. It's not about money, it's not about even technology, it's actually about us as a people working together and so these efforts are going to take, you know, there's going to be some tripping up, you know, we're going to make some mistakes, we're going to learn from those mistakes but ultimately it's about building a stronger community and that's the key, I think, for us fundamentally, of dealing with this massive transition in order to deal with confront and ultimately reverse the climate crisis.  I'm curious in prepping for this session, I thought of three specific pros of community ownership and I want to read them, well, list them to you and hear if you have any others to add to that or any nuances there. The first one is kind of the one that we've just been talking about that responsiveness that like community members have better knowledge to build better projects that use our resources better and they kind of, they solve the problem, they fill the puka way better than somebody externally could, I believe and I think we're proven that out. So one is better projects because we have better local knowledge. The other one is better like more equitable decision-making because the person who financially owns the project gets to decide who do we hire, where does it go, what does it look like, where do we source our equipment from which historically a lot of those decisions can have reverberating effects in a community and so if the local community is deciding who gets hired we can hire more locally and so the decision-making is really important about where we build things and then as well the last one that I think is really important is the wealth creation and kind of distributing right now our big companies that are that are owned by maybe a few individuals have kind of have centralized the wealth in in a few individuals and I think community ownership can be that great way of distributing collective wealth is across a community and keep retain that wealth that like incremental amount of money that a community otherwise might have paid that got extracted to a bigger company outside of the community it kind of remains circular in the community and helps build that wealth and keep that wealth locally. Do you have any additions to that or like nuances there or do you not agree with any of those? I may get a habit of agreeing with the host of any talk show that I'm on but seriously you know the you know these projects wouldn't happen there wouldn't be so much external interest in doing energy projects in Hawaii unless it were a good business right that's that's that's how we that's the only way to understand I think what's going on and so it makes sense for those projects to be to be benefiting local people fundamentally it has to benefit our our community or we got to change the you know the way that we're doing these things yeah absolutely yeah absolutely. Great I love to be agreed with. I'm curious about hi-fi I know that you have expressed to me in the past an interest in you know community ownership of not just the projects that you guys create but of your company as well how are you thinking about that and like what do you think the benefits of that are? Well you know the benefit is is it's just about alignment you know I come out of a community organizing background and so for me being aligned with with my community is it's the only way that that I can sleep at night you know it just it keeps things copacetic and it feels polno if it's grounded in our community so that's the benefit of it the way to the way to do that is to structure the finances of the company such that the owners are the folks you know around us our friends and families our you know the the soccer coaches and the the ministers and just our neighbors that's that's who should be controlling and and driving frankly the direction of our work it just seems to be the most consistent way to do it and you know if you want I can expound a little bit more about kind of what I'm imagining for the future and obviously so we're starting with a really tough project right we're starting with this thing that's like a that's a decade long project we do have a few other things that we're that we're thinking about working on and we mentioned them on our website a little bit we're we're looking at some opportunities with regards to the invasive eucalyptus plantation that was planted in the hamakua coast about 20 years ago I believe and you know we're we're trying to figure out a strategy that would allow for the community in hamakua on the big island not not hamakua on Oahu to to begin to kind of reposition their natural resources away from a plantation system you know previously with sugar now it's eucalyptus to something which is more regenerative more based on on native trees and native plants and more about kind of feeding the economic needs of the community directly so I'm sorry economic and also cultural you know needs so we're looking at different products that can be made out of the eucalyptus since we're doing a couple of what we're calling R&D projects just straight up research and development looking at for instance biochar which is a way of basically paralyzing a some biomass or a tree and turning it into a carbon neutral or even a carbon negative soil additive basically burying the carbon in the soil so we're looking at doing biochar we're also investigating and researching and developing different kinds of furniture or or building materials that can be manufactured from the eucalyptus with the goal of essentially monetizing the biomass and and allowing for the land to be returned to native forestry and to regenerative agriculture so that's that's another project we're working on from amazing that is awesome when you think about a specific project like that in a specific area do you think about a hi-fi as like a broadly community owned company across the state of Hawaii that then owns a project on big island owns a project on Oahu or do you think about it more locally in terms of like the folks who live in Hamakua owning that projects and the folks who live on the Kona side owning a different project how do you how do you think about that I guess the way that I think about it is you know I take the word federated I think that it's a fun word for me what I'm imagining is that if if we can accomplish our goals with the R&D like that's a big if and I don't want to oversell it you know we are we our goals to do essentially scientific research to figure out can we make a useful product in terms of biochar and building materials etc but once that's you know if we can prove it out then that becomes a little business that can be structured as a cooperative like a formal workers cooperative or just as a more generally you know small business with with employees etc but that entity you know would hire it would have its own group of people that that work with or work for that group and it would generate livelihoods for those people in you know wherever they are and if they're in Hamakua then it is to the benefit of the people of Hamakua I think that is a really cool I think about community ownership sometimes like at the at a wide scale like a national government is also community ownership in in a way but sometimes like the the farther away the many levels between the individual person who gets to give input on a project and the powers that be somewhere in that power structure sometimes the like responsiveness gets lost and and the distribution of wealth equally gets lost and I think that what you are describing is a good way of kind of like layering co-ops to to keep that responsiveness wait what when we were one way that we've been thinking about doing it in Hamakua and it depends frankly on whether we can prove out the numbers so that is an if I don't want to you know I want to be kind of real about that is if it does prove to be a good revenue source to do biochar for instance then we've been thinking about essentially building what we're calling like a permanent fund kind of like with Alaska you know that there's the oil revenue from the Alaska oil wells which go into a permanent fund which then benefits the people of Alaska on a sort of perpetual basis you know it's an endowment we're thinking about doing something like that for Hamakua because really what what that community needs and what I think a lot of our communities that are going through an economic transition need is a dependable source of revenue that can fund the future changes that you know whether that's planting native trees you know doing more energy projects you know supporting cultural and educational programs raising up new group new generations of young leaders these are all things which require funding and you know there's this interesting opportunity with lots of particularly above a thing that people don't want anymore which in this case is the eucalyptus and we can essentially convert that into a usable material that also has financial value and use that that financial value to endow you know the perpetual perpetual fund I just think it's a very interesting opportunity whether it's financially whether it actually works it's something that we're that we're you know examining right now through the R&D process and I'm hoping that it does. I think that endowment idea is such a powerful one from a community perspective because we're talking about communities who have been historically disinvested for like decades to centuries to probably longer than that and one of the biggest hurdles for the Molokai project that we have to give over is if our project costs several million dollars where are we going to get that several million dollars there's not just you know 20 million dollars hanging out in a disinvested community just waiting for a project like this to come around and so to create a fund that could support other community on projects that are maybe harder to capitalize what a powerful thing. Yeah I think it is too you know it's it's we're in this crazy economy where ultimately the only thing you need is money and I've always believed that actually people are more important than than money and if we can organize our communities so that we can you know transform the relationship to capital you know where the people are more important than capital than then that's the economy that I want to build. I just think that's so much better. We've got just a couple of minutes left. Do you have any closing thoughts you want to share with our audience or things we should ponder for next time? Well you know actually Ali can you share kind of what are the next steps with Molokai? Yeah I would love to. So we just found some news out a couple of weeks ago that we're looks like we're aiming for a February due date for our proposal to the utility for this community owned solar plus storage CVE project. So we're kind of ramping up to to put in all of our deliverables and make sure that we have commitment for financing for that project and have a clear picture of where it's going to go and and what the engineering diagrams look like. There's a pretty heavy lift between now and then. We've got four three meetings left before the end of the year and then in January we'll kind of be tying up loose ends with the community group about the subscription model and the precise layout. And then and then once we submit that proposal we kind of wait for six months while working on to hear whether we get the contract from the utility and then we get to move along there. And then we're off to new projects like micro grids and workforce development training and all sorts of other programs that they're really excited about. That's great. I'm really glad to hear about the progress that Molokai is making. Yeah it's really you know you guys are setting the the course that I think a lot of us can follow behind. Well thank you and Mahalo for joining me again at 2 a.m. from Iceland.  I really appreciate it and I look forward to chatting more about community ownership in the future. We'll have to have you back on. Sounds good. Thanks so much, Hallie. Thanks to ThinkDec. Yeah thanks.


The following is a production of New Mexico State University. One of the newest degrees at New Mexico State University, the Master of Fine Arts, can trace its roots back to the early years of what was then called New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts. The college guidelines stated, Agricultural students at this college shall be required to practice free-hand drawing five days a week during their entire college career to train their powers of observation. Graduating seniors do all of the technical illustrations in their thesis papers. Although the performing arts such as music were not offered for college credit until the turn of the century, botanist E. O. Wooten organized vocal music classes. Stage performance and public speaking was required of all students. For the early years, I'm Carla Aragón. This has been a Centennial Celebration Minute from New Mexico State University. The preceding was a production of New Mexico State University. The views and opinions in this program are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the NMSU Board of Regents.