justice systems and the head of the panel, and I always get the first name right but the last name I fumbled with. Well it's actually A-ton. A-ton. I get the first name wrong too. So and Rebecca Turner here from the panel on racial disparities in the justice system. And you have filed your report and it's on our website, the committee webpage, the report is. And right now I'm actually looking at appendix I which are basically your where you think we should be prioritizing. But committee members, we can follow it there. If you'd rather we can have Phil try to post it right here on the webpage. I don't know what people prefer. Okay, well please go right ahead with your report. Ah, okay. Good morning. I thought that what would be useful was giving you some background and then going through just sort of an overview of what the panel did with this particular document. We it of course. I just want to as way of introduction represent that Brad and I are going to invite you to, assuming I'm chair of judiciary again, assuming she's chair of judiciary again in the new legislative biennium, we would like to have a joint meeting of both committees. Great. Okay, go ahead. This all went back as has everything in 2020 to the pandemic. Really, I believe this bill was s 338. It's hard for me to remember all the numbers just like all the acronyms I get lost. And that this became then act 148 and we were told, I was told before the pandemic that this was a shoe in. And then when the pandemic struck, I was told that nothing that was not pandemic related would go through. I live down in Putney. I'm not a legislator. And so I have informants who run around the state house and every so often I get a phone call and email going, Oh, you really need to worry about this in regard to the RDAP, which I am very grateful for because otherwise nothing would happen if I were the chair. So this summer in a very serendipitous moment that I did not expect I was suddenly informed that the bill had gone through was signed and was now act 148. And I mean, I literally did not know someone said asked me in a meeting that I didn't think was about this. And so what is the RDAP doing about act 148? And I literally said, What would that be? And I guess nothing. But that changed relatively quickly because it became clear that the RDAP had responsibilities in regard to this new act. And specifically in section 19, which directed the panel to consider data that could be used for the amelioration of racial disparities in the criminal and juvenile justice systems. Before this task fell to us, we were as a panel looking to amplify many of the points that we had made in our report that we submitted to this body. In fact, almost exactly a year ago, that really asked us in fact predominantly initially to focus on data. And there was a feeling on the part of the panel at this point this year that there should be a deeper dive in regard to a lot of the recommendations that we made in that document. And we were at that point, and this is, oh, I don't know late June or so, starting to turn our attention to this proposed deeper dive. When we looked at act 148, of course, section 19 asks us to consider data again. And for us, this was a reconsideration of data. Given that we had spoken and had been directed by statute to speak very directly about data in act 54 of 2017. So this really wasn't a stretch and it wasn't completely out of what we were hoping to do. The timeframe was quite a reach, I have to say. Doing it by the first of December, when we were told about it in early summer was a bit difficult. And we weren't sure that it was possible. And we spent a great deal of time discussing what could and could not realistically be done. I'm happy to say I'm really pleased with the result. I think people did an enormous lift on this. The entire panel did. Put in a lot of extra time. We meet two hours a month. And five members of the 13 are community members. So it's really quite difficult in some ways to get this kind of work done. And yet we did. There was some initial feeling that we were repeating ourselves and some irritation about this. Endless reports are something that tend to annoy people of color who would like to see more emotion and perhaps a bit less verbiage. But we did turn our attention to producing whatever it was that we could produce in what was then roughly 10 hours of meeting time with the full panel. And I'm spreading that out over around five months. The lack of time meant that we convened a subcommittee to do a great deal of the heavy lifting. People who were particularly concerned about this and who felt that they had the extra time. We were meeting weekly. Sometimes a little more than that. We did that with the assistance and the support of the council of state governments. And also quite notably with the tremendous assistance of the crime research group, which was statutorily required to help with the data collection that this new report would necessitate. And as I say, that group met weekly. And we were also on the phone in innumerable times between the weeks. Initially, even a smaller group of this subcommittee met with Kristen McClure, the head of the agency of digital services, without whose help, frankly, this document would not exist. That smaller group met with also a collection of IT officials from various state agencies to get a sense of several things. First, what data do exist at this moment? In what form they exist? And three, the possibilities of communication between the various data systems that exist in the criminal and juvenile justice systems. The result of those meetings, and I believe that there were two of them, that's my memory. I should ask James Pepper about that. He was central to those. The results of those are contained within appendix four of what you have. It's entitled the current state of data and data flows regarding racially relevant data among various state agencies in Vermont. If you have that particular appendix up with that chart, you'll note this was created by Kristen McClure, and it's really quite suitable for framing, I think. But it more importantly shows the unbelievably tangled web that are the data flows regarding racially relevant data among various agencies. It is crazy. I use that word in the technical sense. It is crazy when we began this meeting. Kristen started out with a very, very clean document, and as people would speak, she draw another line. And I remember at about 45 minutes into this, I started in with a migraine. And I thought I was getting an ocular one and realized I wasn't. It was just all the lines she was drawing. A lot of the data don't exist. There are very peculiar systems that conflate race and ethnicity, which as an anthropologist made me cringe. No one should ever make that mistake, by the way. And as the report notes, this is a snapshot of a state of affairs from September, and it cannot be said to depict matters as they presently stand, because several agencies were in the process of changing data systems over, even as we were speaking, and are still in that process now from what I understand. They are getting better from what I'm told. They're changing not necessarily because of the need for cross-agency communication, but rather because of internal needs that the agencies themselves have. So it won't help to assume for the purposes of this act, Act 148, that the data flows are more comprehensible or indeed usable. The subcommittee continued its work from this point of looking at this chart that just gave me a migraine. What do we do? That would be the huge question here. It seemed to the subcommittee and to the full panel that without some sort of standardization, which by the way is a point that the RDAP addressed in its report of December of last year, that this would be another failed effort concerning the effacement of racial disparity. That standardization is truly central to this effort. This had been and continues to be a dominant theme for the panel as the current report makes quite clear. Without some serious and focused standardization regarding data, the aims of Act 148 with reference to data cannot be achieved. That cannot be overstated. This was perhaps a guiding notion that shaped the panel's efforts throughout the summer and fall as it prepared the present document. Another important moment that concerned the panel had to do with identifying high impact, high discretion moments in the criminal and juvenile justice systems at which either conscious or unconscious bias can make an entrance. This was a task that had occupied our collective imagination in last year's report. But we certainly did not take it as far then as we have here. All of the lawyers that are on the panel put their heads together to make an extremely comprehensive list of these high impact, high discretion moments. And you have those tables in the report, in the body of the report. And this took no small amount of time, as you can imagine. As I say, we tried to do this for last year's report and for whatever reason, couldn't quite pull it off. We did here. And the community members were able to add other moments that might seem to be outside of the legal framework. Moments such as interactions between students, students of color and guidance counselors in the school, which for many people is the beginning of the school to prison pipeline. It's easy now, of course, to give you a resume of these acts. And I really do have to note the enormous amount of time it took to compile these lists. And I'm very glad that Rebecca Turner's here because she was really central to a lot of this. It seemed endless and people dedicated enormous amounts of time and energy to this compilation. What happened at the same time was the compilation of the data that do presently exist. And with the help of the crime research group, we created a sense of where those data might reside. The crime research group also worked to give us a sense of what data just don't exist. And that's in fact something you're going to need to look at because there are places within the system that data just isn't there. And once the panel determined what data would nevertheless be of great importance, crime research group went back and filled in on our tables, what was there, what was not there, and so on. Again, it was a focus upon the high impact, high discretion moments, sentencing, charging, arraignment, you know, those, I mean, that's just to mention three, you know what I mean. In the end, the panel came up with a compilation not merely of those data, but their locations as a result of working on the creation of this report. We joked actually about printing these documents out and then burying them in a kind of time capsule that was secure somewhere up on Campbell's Humph because it had taken so much to get this together and we were like, oh my god, it's all in one place for a moment here. What subsequently became clear were the relatively high number of high impact, high discretion moments in the criminal and juvenile justice systems. We were also mindful of what might be perceived as the relative impossibility of getting to all of these moments in one fell swoop. We then set our minds to prioritizing these moments to the best of our abilities. And that was a difficult task. You're saying at certain moments in a way, at certain moments in a way racial disparity doesn't matter. And that's a very hard thing to say because it's not true. It's just a question of prioritizing. Where should our efforts initially be focused? We deeply believe that all of the moments are of great concern and need focus and attention, but we show the moments that we believe to have the greatest priority and what data do and do not exist concerning those moments. At this point, we had a spread of the high impact, high discretion moments and racially relevant data or lack thereof. And the question became what to do with this kind of mess in a way. It seemed clear to many of us that there was no one presently in state government who could on their own do the huge, and I mean really, truly enormous. Once you look at this, I think you'll get a sense of the enormity of what I'm talking about. There was no one who on their own could do the huge lift that was required here, not only to just create the needed data, but even more fundamentally and radically to define it, to define the data, then to gather it and certainly then to analyze it. Given that there is data that simply doesn't exist, or we're not sure where it is, or it's not easily available at this point. And there were moments in this where people just couldn't find things even after spending two or three weeks working at it. From the early meetings with Kristen McClure and those IT officials, it really became clear that no one actually has the time to do all of this. Again, I'd say refer to that lovely flow chart on page 24. That's the one that gave me a headache. The council of state governments came to our rescue, or at least to mine at that point, because I was a little overwhelmed and losing sleep. This work, it turns out, is already underway in Connecticut, quite nearby. And also, I believe, and Rebecca can correct me on this, I believe also in Colorado I was reading. And the council of state government people facilitated a meeting between the panel and three officials from the state of Connecticut's Criminal Justice Policy and Planning Division in the Office of Policy and Management. These people are involved in the implementation of that state's own efforts regarding the collection and analysis of data concerning the effacement of racial disparities in the two systems, criminal justice systems. The panel had a very productive meeting with these three officials. I believe it was on the 3rd of November, and they offered rather useful insight. And the panel felt that their input gained from actual experience in exactly the process that we're being asked to consider would be invaluable. And we met with Mark Pelka. This is in the report. He is the Undersecretary of Connecticut's Criminal Justice Policy and Planning Division in the Office of Policy and Management. And two of his colleagues, Kyle Bodwin and Kevin Neary, who are planning analysts with whom he works. That meeting led to several additional recommendations from the panel to the legislature. We felt that building upon their experience would be useful and that there was no need to reinvent the wheel, especially since the movement on the matter of disparity is really so pressing. And you have those recommendations there. And it's a big lift that a body be charged with the definition, collection, and analysis of data pertaining to racial disparities. And Connecticut has shown, as those individuals with whom we met would demonstrate, that they needed three staff people to do that work. Also bear in mind, Connecticut, in terms of population, is rather a great deal larger than Vermont. That this body is housed in an entity that is not subject to the vagaries of the political process, nor in any entity that is politically constituted. Disparities, we really felt, must not be seen as a partisan issue. And there must be no opportunity for them to be so seen. That funding be provided for positions within state agencies that need to extract the data concerning racial disparity. And that that would be provided to this new body. That extraction is both time consuming and possibly quite lengthy. We were also hoping that, as Connecticut does, that this body would produce timely reports. They do things monthly that are distinctly and deliberately aimed at the legislature and also at broader communities, including historically impacted communities, pertaining to racial disparities in both justice systems that are concerned, certainly with basic demographic information, transparency, we felt must be prime in the reports. We also felt that there should be an advisory body. And Connecticut has this, of course, consisting of stakeholders from historically impacted communities, BIPOC communities, neurodivergent communities, communities of gender and sexual minorities. And that that body would concern itself with definition of data, because it's not always clear what those data should be. An example of that would be what I mentioned earlier, this notion that somehow race and ethnicity in certain systems can be combined. I cannot tell you how horrifying I find that.  I'm both. And then finally, that the legislature both expect to create this body and further be prepared to consider legislation that supports its work as its needs change over time. I'd finally just like to put a little post-scriptum in here about funding, because I know that that always makes everyone's eyes cross. And I did a little bit of research, because that's kind of what I do in life is research. And I want to point out how much disparity, the maintenance of disparity cost. And I want to point it out in the middle of the 19th century. And I want to start by noting that in today's dollars, a very common salary, and this was for a laborer in the South in 1850, was $6 a week, which comes to what? $312 for a year. Slaves themselves cost, depending on what source you're looking at, between $23,000 and $40,000 a piece. Many plantations had 50 or fewer slaves. But even at the low figure, 10 slaves means $230,000, or the annual income of just under 767 free laborers. $50 would mean $1.15 million in today's money. Now, slave ships that came out of Bristol cost $62,000, roughly $83,000. And again, the annual salary of 277 people in the United States. None of this addresses the cost of feeding slaves, feeding the slavers, maintaining the ships, which of course had to be cleaned and refitted after the transport of slaves to transport goods such as cotton or sugar to Europe, as was part of the triangle trade. The point that I want to make here is the outlay of capital. It is huge, absolutely phenomenally huge. The dedication of capital to an economic system in which white supremacy played a central role. Sadly, the resonances of this system are still with us today and are not anachronistic. These are huge sums of money that have gone into the perpetuation of racial discrimination. And one can profitably ask what it cost to support the repressive efforts that went into reconstruction and Jim Crow. None of this is ever free. To undo this is also not going to be free. It's not simply a matter, as we all know, of not buying slaves or slave ships. If it were, there'd be no need for this report or this hearing or anything that we're doing. What there does need to be, as this body recognized when it authored Act 148, is a move toward understanding through data personal impacts of white supremacy and racial disparity upon people in our own systems of justice. But this is going to involve an outlay of capital. Justice the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did. And it continues to do. There are constant arguments involving, and you can find all sorts of legal articles about the extent to which employers can legally justify discriminatory practices on the basis of cost containment and profit maximization. And put another way, what kind of costs can courts ask businesses to sustain in the effort to enforce equal opportunity? And that happens all the time. So there's obviously a cost to undoing this. What I'm trying to say here is that to say that there's no money may be two things at once. It may certainly be true. But it also supports the very system that this body seeks to interrogate and to dismantle. It becomes a question of an extremely hard and likely intensely creative and probably unprecedented decision. But I do want to make very clear that when we say that there's no money, we're actually making an ideological statement when we're discussing the dismantling of systems of oppression. There's no money means that the money's being used elsewhere, and that choices are being made about the dispersal of capital, just as they've always been. If that seems reasonable, if saying that there's no money seems reasonable, I'm asking all of us to consider why that's so and how that's so. And I'm asserting that none of this, none of this effort, nothing that's in this report, is going to come for free. Justice slave ships and indeed the slaves themselves cost the ruling establishment money in the first place. And I'm done. Thank you. Abolario has to leave. And so I want to thank him for everything this year in justice oversight. And all his efforts. Thank you very much. I wonder, I'm sure there's questions, but holding on to them until Rebecca has an opportunity to make a comment if she would like. Thank you, Senator Sears. And I'll try to be brief. I understand though, if maybe 15 more minutes, I want to make sure that there are issues. We can go to 1130. Okay, great. Great. Well, thank you, Rebecca Turner, head of the appellate division defender generals office and the defender generals designate on this panel. And so I'm here in my capacity as a member of this panel, a town asked me to join him and I appreciate the invite and also appreciate hearing Senator Sears that the intent is to have the panel or a town come back to talk with the judiciary judiciary committees more about this report. And as a part of that team that pulled together this report, I have to say that I'm happy to have this report filed with you. It is extraordinarily satisfying to have pulled together sort of what I see a tangible amount of information on how you could draft, legislate and pass and move forward a comprehensive data collection analysis system for the criminal juvenile justice systems that I think would be would have profound impact here. And I wanted to just start with where Etan mentioned, which was the process of this report led to us pulling various studies, data analyses out of the closets. And what we realized was that, well, we're all well aware of the national pervasive problem of disparities. Right. What we didn't realize was how much we had in various different capacities come up with our own snapshots of data analysis of racial disparities in our criminal juvenile systems. You know, we are well aware of the traffic stop data that we now know, based on the legislation that was passed. And that's been fantastic to see that snapshot as to traffic stops. We got Burlington Police Department shared with us some bail data that they were collecting out of the Chittenden courts between 2017-2019. Again, just a snapshot in time of one court where their data tracking showed disparities in bail being imposed based on race and gender, but race for these purposes as well as who was who was being granted bail, as well as disparities in the amount of bail. And that was, again, one snapshot. There we also came across the recent reporting from, again, Burlington Police Department in terms of racial disparities in arrests in 2019. And I think that data showed that black people were being arrested at a rate of about 3.7 times that of white people in Burlington. So just our quick look, trying to pull together, we were seeing the disparities in our known data analyses. And so the exercise that the panel and the subcommittee went through was, well, what is going on that results in these disparities? What decision-making points, along the way, from one case enter as a system, whether it's the juvenile delinquency system or the criminal justice, what decisions are involved? And we went about identifying all of those decisions. And as you pointed out, it's captured in appendix one, where we have two different charts. And we just wanted to identify every possible point. So the initial encounter that brings someone into the system to when they exit, later down the round to who's getting the dispositions expunged. So we were trying to be extraordinarily comprehensive. And in that, we were trying to understand, well, why is it useful to identify these decisions? And implicitly, we're recognized that there are values-based judgments that are being made at these decisions. And that discretionary decision-making points is happening everywhere, not just at the point of stopping a vehicle, not just at the point of making the initial charges. But it was to extraordinary terms of, who's getting diverted to pre-charge or post-charge diversion programs? Who's getting accepted? Who is finishing them? Who's having to move around? All of this missing data as to giving us a full picture of what's going on. How do pretrial decisions impact upon ultimate sentencing dispositions later on? And so one of our questions we had is, how do these decisions compound the effect of racism, as a particular case, as a person moves through the system? And we wondered, does less discretion, will that show that that results in less disparities? Does more transparency and accountability result in less disparities? Of course, we don't know. But this is the process of identifying these decisions illuminated the potential of what we could stand to learn. And really what we are trying to stand and learn is understanding what it actually means when we say systemic racism, when we say institutional racism. Where are these decisions happening at an individual level? But where are they being tolerated? Because once they come into the system, why isn't it being corrected by the subsequent decision makers? And so that it is our beginning in terms of addressing and identifying those decision-making points. I think one of the things that we learned specifically talking with the Connecticut folks in their sharing of their process, both in developing the draft legislation, getting that legislation passed. And now they're one year out of implementing that legislation. So they're starting to get the data and they're starting to report back what they're finding. What was fascinating to hear from them was their identifying benefits, such tangible benefits right away from the data that they were collecting. The data was informing policy decision making in terms of where were the needs greatest? Which programs were people being diverted to more and less? Where was there a need? And so that was interesting. Essentially provided performance metrics to give insight into whether these programs are working, whether recidivism rates were happening here or there and they talked about projecting correctional population forecasts as well. So they also talked about how you can better understand and manage hopefully better your case flow. Where cases are getting stuck and sitting. And understanding where to devote resources to get things moving. Again, the obvious benefit was seeing where there were trends and patterns between blacks and whites. And specifically they looked at trends with the original charges that black and white defendants faced and what were the ultimate dispositions at the end. So a lot of interesting different layers to look at how the disparities came about. Not just the ultimate sentence and was there a difference between similarly situated defendants. But really seeing how the disparities played out in different ways. So you have a pretty comprehensive list. And we thought it would be useful for the legislature to see what we thought could be a prioritization of data collection areas. And in that regard, you can see it as highlighted in the appendix. But as a theme, it's basically decision-making points that are front-loaded pre-trial. Again, because we thought that that would be having that information have the greatest impact in terms of getting ahead of it before the compounding effect of the decisions. Kind of took a case away from correcting it as easily. And Nathan also talked about this. But I just wanted to stress another great thing that we discovered through this process of preparing for this report was that how much we're not starting from ground zero, right? We had CRG, of course, providing support. And in the appendix too, I just want to make sure that you see there where we identified decision-making points that should be collected. CRG provided a second column there to say what data was already available on those decision-making points and what data wasn't. CSG, by the way. CSG? Yeah. But I think, Aetan, will you correct me? No, are we a different group? No, no, you're right. C, it was confusing because we had both CSG and CRG. And I think this part, but Aetan, I want to make sure we give credit to CRG. That was CRG. That was CRG. That was problem joy in particular. Yes. So once we identified the decision-making points we thought should be collected, she and there may be some other helpers of her who went to the different organizations and asked is that so. But what's useful there is that it's a reveal that we don't have to, it's data already there, right? And what we realize that there's a lot of silo data that just isn't being connected, that isn't just isn't being shared. And so that was illuminating. So again, not starting from ground zero, but we have this data available. Another fun thing to have discovered through this process was the National Center on Restorative Justice. The National Center on Restorative Justice is an organization that was established just this year in April, one of the bright spots of 2020. And if you're not familiar with Center yet, like something that should be on your list, it's an organization, it's actually three academic institutions, Vermont Law School, University of Vermont and the University of San Diego have come together and formed this National Center on Restorative Justice that is being hosted by VLS. And they received a fantastic grant from USDOJ for the next few years. And they came to talk to us about what they're doing. Again, talking about sort of the thinking about what resources are available in state to build and improve upon the capacity to undertake this kind of project. And what they shared with us is that they have their principle and their focus is on improving the criminal justice system and policies in the United States. And they're doing this partly through education, but there is also a research arm research and data arm of this project. And that is particularly being handled by the UVMs Justice Research Initiative. And so they came and talked to us. And we learned that not only is this this organization just newly up, but it's building upon what UVMs Justice Research Initiative has has already been working on. And they've been looking at data for Vermont criminal justice data as well. And so it was interesting and useful to hear from them that they're they're prioritizing head work that will hopefully address disparities in the in the journal. Well, I don't know of journal justice systems, but certainly the criminal is justice systems. Again, overlapping interests, overlapping work areas that we discovered. Etan talked about Connecticut, and they are a wonderful resource. And I bet they would be willing to come and talk to committees about about the experience. But I wanted to just point out in this report, we did include a copy of the legislation that they passed. And so you can see an example of what data collection legislation looks like after the fact, after the hard work of getting that through. That was, as I understand, a result of of considerable support consensus across the board. And I just want to are you both suggesting that we should introduce something similar to Connecticut's legislation? Yes, I think Etan, I think that was really, I think that was definitely a feeling that the panel had as a whole. I'm happy to do that. I'm sure the House members are as well. Bryn, if you could make that a drafting request and anybody on the committee who wants to sign on either version. I realize you may not be the drafter, but that enforce those based on Connecticut. One thing that jumped in my mind and such Woodside's closed, I feel free to speak about it. It would have been interesting to know the restraints at Woodside, which was one of the reasons probably not.  Were they not able to deal with that? Who was being restrained? That would have been interesting to know, but also to be able to deal with that particular population. I don't know that we know that. I don't either. I don't know that you know. It would be, I have a sense, based upon what I've heard from people at a program here in Bennington that I used to run, that the majority of the restraints are on a small number of the residents. In other words, most residents don't get restrained, but some get restrained numerous times because of behavior or whatever, but I don't know. Even that little data point would be helpful to know. That's basically what you're talking about. We learned through that process that DCF has mandatory reporting requirements to the federal government on various points, including race data. Again, I'm definitely don't know about the specifics you're asking about. I'm just using that as an example of a point where we don't know exactly because I don't know. Maybe they do have it, but I was using that as merely an example of places where we don't know. But how useful would it be to know? Also, what we realize is how easy it is potentially to just capture that information and then to be able to review it. As Ayton said, one of the key suggestions here is not just what decisions and data points to collect. I'm going to go take care of the dog who's working. But to make sure that we get timely reporting, that it's not something that you work and work and work and work and work it up for a final report once a year because how much usefulness is that ultimately to all of us, whether it's the policymakers and you, the legislators or the attorneys on the ground, the officers and corrections, all the judges, to make real-time adjustments and to correct as quickly as we can these things. That was another important recommendation in there in terms of what we're hoping is not just what data to collect, what is the prioritization, but who and how this data will be collected and analyzed. And Ayton stressed it, having whatever it is, the body have the capacity, looking beyond what we are doing now, but looking broader because we have some potential help in state, learning from Connecticut and our nearby neighbors how they're doing it. We've learned that and it was shocking how quickly they got this spot up. And it was pointed out to us that certainly in some respect, some of that data, they were collecting in a larger amount and so it was easier to collect, but also they weren't under perfect environment there too. I think the prosecutors were getting a new data system, right, database system and so that was holding things up. But we learned that they had help or others have had help with sort of the preliminary planning where they would hire essentially a data mapping consultant to come in and quickly identify and suggest how to do it. And then there was the actual body that got created to sort of analyze it. So it was interesting. It wasn't some multi-year project where we could expect not until 2030 to find the results, but it was one year later. Senator Lyons has a question. Excuse me. Thank you. This is really terrific, but what I'm hearing you say, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, is that as people were exposed to the information that it automatically made a change in behavior? Is that in Connecticut? Is that accurate, inaccurate? And then I do have a couple, I do have a couple questions. Hey, Ton, I don't know if the Connecticut folks shared how quickly or what they were doing to adjust it. I know that they issued their first report in January, right? Right, but what they did say was it certainly got legislative responses extremely quickly. In terms of actual changes in behaviors out in the real world, we don't know yet, but it certainly did get it got legislative responses very quickly. And it may be in the future we could see if Pepper would be willing to talk on this point. I know that the Connecticut prosecuting office did a training for national training for prosecutors that Pepper shared with us. And they shared the data and the conclusions that they learned and how that was impacting their management of cases, of how they were dealing with all sorts of things, right? And I mean the decisions to defer. You know, that's another data point. If we find out and see through this that there aren't the numbers being sent to diversion, does that support, again, policy decisions in terms of expanding who can send folks, right, to diversion? Again, the data will be the start, but it will be so informative in terms of how we choose to use it to then address the issue, right? And that's going to be a different set. But the data itself will certainly raise questions. I'm looking at page 24 of the report. It's the appendix four. And it has the current flow state high level data flow system. And you brought up the idea of having an integrated IT. I think you said something about that. But communication is absolutely key here. Having criteria for assessment and how to interpret information is absolutely key. So someone has to do that. But then having the linkages so that people don't fall through the cracks, but there's some consistent data flow and data information. And that for me, then it begins to suggest, I know that it's a step down the road. Obviously, I think first data collection interpretation and then working with people to make some changes. So important. And we've seen that in my district in particular, I'm in Chittenden County. But then the reality hits us as legislators and the cost associated with doing some of this is there. And Etan mentioned the cost. And the cost of not doing it, I think, is even more significant. So does Connecticut have any sort of printout or indication of the initial cost to going through the data collection and then what they may be doing beyond that in terms of IT? Certainly, we're smaller. Might be less costly. We got so many. The documents we got are the documents. I don't think we asked for that. I'm afraid. Forgive me. I'd be afraid too, but that's okay. That's good. I'm sure they'd be willing to share their experiences. And again, it's not to just overstress, but I think that there is a lot of potential supporters out there, partners, in terms of this, who are already doing the data collection. Again, I just learned about the National Center on Restorative Justice. So just one. But the other thing I wanted to leave, I wanted to point out, which is that, yes, this is going to be hard. Right? Yes, this is hard. But I think the reason why is not only worthy. I mean, we're trying to understand, I mean, how can we understand and fix systemic racism if we don't know how to effectively do it, but also how to efficiently do it with our resources, right? Our limited resources. If we're going to try to fix it, let's really have the targeted sense of where we should put those dollars or shift things, if that's where the problem is. But the other thing, I know it's hard, but one of the things I'm left feeling after filing this report, Atan, is that this was a consensus report, right? I'm coming from the Defender General's Office, but I referenced Pepper. Judge Grierson didn't have one point on it. I forget what it was, a decision-making point. Yeah, he abstained for the judiciary on section three. But ultimately, there's a consensus across the board. And again, for what it's worth, that was also the case in Connecticut. And I think you have to have a consensus to get something this big to work. But I think we're there. I think all of us understand. I hope we do that. Yeah. You first have to recognize there's a problem, and then you have to fully understand the problem before you can fix it. And to me, most of us recognize there's a certainly a problem. Now getting the data to fully understand the problem and try to fix the problem is the step. And I really appreciate the presentation this morning. I don't know if there's other questions. I did want to save a little time to thank one of our committee members who's no longer going to be with us for a service on this committee over the years, represented past as represented so ably. I want to make sure we mentioned that before we adjourn our last meeting of the year and turn it over to the House members for the next year as leadership. Thank you so much, Sandy, for everything you've done and your work on this committee. Thank you. It has been a great, great pleasure to work with all of you for all these years. Yes. And I did want to make sure I said that before we break, but I know Senator Hooker, I believe that's a question. Just a quick question. Eitan, you mentioned that you wanted the body to be housed in a place that was nonpartisan. And where does the Connecticut body sit and where would you suggest? Well, I'm not sure we have the same thing. It is in the office of policy and management. They are the criminal justice policy and planning division. That was, I believe, under the governor's office. I think Mike Waller used to be. And I believe that's an appointment from the governor, so it is an administrative office if I got the right office. I believe you do. He was more like the defender general and that his survival, I don't know, depended upon the governor. That's one way to make it more independent, make it like the defender general for a certain amount of time. And speaking of which, I believe the defender general is not the new planning division. But it's every, I think it's every five years. And so it doesn't, it doesn't get that political. Butch, did you have a question? Comment? No, thank you, Senator. I will say. I know Representative Hooker just wrote a note to all of us on the chat, but those of you who can't see the chat, I would second that. I think the entire committee really thanks both of you for your presentation, for the hard work on this. And thank you very much. And it doesn't end here. This is the beginning. Right. And hopefully we will see you in January. Great. Till then, have a happy holiday, both of you. Thank you. Thank you very much. You too. Bye-bye. Committee, we made it. Two minutes to spare. Bryn and Phil, Philip and Peggy, thank you for all your help in making this happen the last two years. Without you, it would have been impossible. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's been a lot of work and we all appreciate the time that you put in to make it so effective. Well, with that, I guess we're adjourned and say goodbye and happy holidays to everybody. Oh, Senator? Yes, Representative. I do have something to say to the committee and I want to bring this forward before Sandy goes upon her merry way and leaves us since I've been on this committee. Anyway, for many years, every time this committee met, I would pick Sandy up in Rochester on my way to Montpelier. We were able to solve every problem in state government, maybe not the same way, but we were able to do that and I have missed that over this fall. We haven't had our spirited discussions, which always ended up friendly, with many times no agreement, but I'm going to miss that, Sandy, and I wish you well. Thank you, Bush. Very helpful. Sandy, thank you. All right, I guess we're adjourned. Thank you all very much. Thank you. January. I know. Until January.


Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2018. Brought to you by Cisco. Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. My name is Lauren Cooney, and I'm here today with Matt Johnson, who is a technologist at Cisco with Cisco DevNet. Hi Matt. Hey, how's it going? Good to see you again. Pretty good, good to see you again too. So what's going on here? What is, what's going on at the show and what are you working on? Oh, sure. So the show in general is just this ability for us. You know, Cisco DevNet have always had quite a large and well-growing presence at Cisco Live, kind of Cisco's Europe and US yearly conferences, but this is the second year we've done Create and it's really an opportunity to kind of take the real developer angle, the makers, the API integrators, kind of the real kind of developer ecosystem that's growing around Cisco's products and our APIs, and just kind of focus on that audience. So, you know, all the content here is developer for developer, and so it's just really nice to be able to experiment in a bit more of an open format. Yeah, exactly. So it's kind of that DIY environment of developers that are coming in and really doing all this stuff and starting to innovate on their own. Yeah, absolutely. And what I'm really excited about here, we have kind of a two-day hackathon running at the same time as the event. And so instead of that just being a little bit of time spent between sessions, these are teams that have already kind of been working behind the scenes on the run up to the event. So they've already kind of met each other virtually through collaboration. They've already worked out what kind of problem space they want to solve. They've already started working on kind of sample and POC code. So the idea that at the end of a two-day conference we could actually see some working solutions to real problems that our partners and our customer ecosystem are seeing, I think that's quite an exciting idea. Yeah, Mandy Whalen was just on with us and she actually talked a little bit about that. And so these guys will be up for 24 hours hacking on stuff. Hopefully we'll see some great solutions come the end and we'll talk about it here on theCUBE. So tell me about what you're doing today at Cisco Dev. Sure, so from one style of hacking to another, we're actually running this demo called the Black Hat White Hat Challenge. And I went to, I've always been a bit of a kind of hobbyist pentester. I've liked breaking things from a young age. And I got to attend my first DevCon in Las Vegas last year. And coming from an evangelism background, coming from kind of doing workshops and talks and demos, I was absolutely amazed at the interactivity of pretty much everything that goes on at the Black Hat hacking conference, sorry, the DevCon hacking conference, my apologies. They have hands-on IoT villages where you can go and try hacking against all the hardware. There's kind of labs and tutorials for people that are maybe just getting into kind of that side of hacking and penetration testing. So I kind of brought that back and I've always had a passion for security. And IoT nowadays, we're in a situation where a lot of these devices we're starting to bring into our homes and our businesses and things are built to a budget. They're built cheap. They are not security devices. People aren't thinking of security. They're thinking of functionality when they're building those. So someone that makes fridge freezers isn't going to be thinking about the 10-year security roadmap for that fridge freezer. They're going to be thinking about selling the latest smart freezer. Exactly. And so I wanted to kind of bring some of that hands-on DevCon style hacking into a real-world scenario. So at security conferences and at developer conferences, we always talk about things being insecure and we talk about needing to think about security. But what we have is a booth here where we actually take off-the-shelf IoT devices and in a curated path, we are getting attendees with no background in kind of pen testing to use real-world hacking tools and real exploits against those devices to build their access into that network and eventually get to the goal which is getting into a little safe with like a prize inside. And all of that is real off-the-shelf IoT. It's real security. And the aim of that is to kind of... So they're actually cracking the safe. They're cracking the safe. They're cracking into Wi-Fi. They're getting onto the guest Wi-Fi and then finding a vulnerability in the router which gets them onto the wired network. So that'd be like a guest network in a corporate environment or a guest network in a hotel. Getting you onto the hotel's infrastructure network and then to a camera. So this is like straight up hacker one, right? Yeah, exactly, right? Which is perfect. This is great. Yeah, exactly. So that's what we're doing. And the idea is just to kind of stop talking about it and start showing. This is not stuff you need to be super good at. This is stuff you can Google. The tools are out there. The tools are getting more and more easy to use. And also vulnerabilities are becoming more and more common because of the growth of IoT. There were double the number of CVE, like known vulnerabilities in the wild in 2017 than there were in 2016. And that's because of this constant pace of new devices. So we're kind of showing that these are really crackable by anyone with a bit of time and research. And then also showing kind of what can be done about that. And even without kind of the proactive and firewalls and things like that, just getting a developer audience thinking about this stuff, getting them fresh in their mind. These are the kind of places we should be focusing on IoT security because it's these developers that will be writing code in those products today. I think that's great. And I think security is so important today with everything going on. And there's Facebook and testimonies that are happening today and lots of different things. Now, what are you using to actually kind of fill these holes, fill these kind of security vulnerabilities that you're using with these off-the-shelf IoT devices? Sure. So what we're showing is how kind of, if you know you have these devices on your network, obviously layering things like Cisco's next-gen firewalls in line with those devices has signatures that will detect it's not going to patch the device itself because that might be from another vendor or an IoT camera or a light switch or something, but it's going to detect the malicious traffic trying to attack that device and drop it. So you're kind of protecting your perimeter, you're stopping a vulnerable device becoming an actual hack. Alternatively, from a personal perspective, as we start looking at how we consume hardware in our homes and businesses, I actually really like kind of the Maraki model and the Nest Cam model and all the other camera vendors which charge you a subscription. Because if you buy hardware one off, you have no idea whether that price for that hardware, a lotted budget for the development team to keep thinking about security or whether that team doesn't exist anymore and they're off building the next product. Whereas if you're buying something on kind of a subscription basis, even though the hardware's in your home, you know that their profit is based on them keeping your product up to date. So you expect real-time updates, you expect timely security updates. And so I think that kind of a software-as-a-service-style delivery of on-prem hardware is definitely a more secure approach. Yeah, and the Maraki model is definitely moving forward is one of the prevalent models that Cisco has. And it's, you know, that plug-and-play, easy to use, get it up and running, et cetera. Exactly, and then on the back of that, you know that there's people working on those security things, which isn't something you think about when you buy it for its APIs and its plug-and-play and its ease of use, but just knowing that that is there and it's, you know, you're paying for that development is a good thing. Where do you see most of these vulnerabilities? And, you know, I know you have a lot of background in cloud computing and, you know, in these arenas.  So, that's a big question. Yeah, I mean a lot of the hackers are going to wherever, you know, is easiest for the amount of time and effort, you know. Certainly when we see kind of malicious actors kind of looking for a large footprint, large building botnets, et cetera. You know, there could be a very, very clever attack that requires a lot of time and effort, or there could be an IoT device that you know there's going to be four million of them sold online. They're going to go for those. And like I said, these devices are low power built to a budget. You can get them into your hands and like a SaaS service online, so people can take them apart. They can have a look at the code inside them. They can have a look at the operating system. So, it's quite easy to find vulnerabilities on these IoT devices. So, that is definitely a growing area. Also, the level for harm on those kind of vulnerabilities if we're talking about internet connected healthcare, internet connected hospital equipment, you know, control valves for factories that may or may not be dealing with certain kind of materials. You know, that is definitely a focus both from a security industry perspective and also kind of where we're seeing hackers targeting. That's great. So, tell me a little bit about what else you're working on right now. I think I always find it interesting to hear from you what you're kind of hacking with. Yeah, sure. So, that's my kind of security hobby come part time role, I guess, within DevNet. I quite like that kind of hands-on security evangelism. A lot of other stuff I'm doing is all around kind of open source and microservices and containers. So, we're doing lots of work internally with Kubernetes right now, proof of concepting some new user space networking code. Oh, great. Which would allow basically the network your traffic takes from your application in the container right out to the network card to be a user space app. So, you know, you're not stuck with the networking that a cloud provider gives you. If you want to test your application fully like pack it to app back to the wire and know that that network is also going to go with you when you deploy anywhere, we're going to be able to do that. That's fabulous. And there's also some real performance benefits to kind of not going in and out of the Linux kernel. So, we can kind of saturate 40 gigabits a second from a container straight down to the wire on kind of commodity compute like UCS or like, you know, any x86 server. So, really excited about that. It's in development at the moment. That's all open source. It will be all open source then. It's all open source already under the FDIO project. FDIO.io. The integration into Kubernetes is ongoing. And obviously we'll be open sourced as it gets developed. But that's super exciting. Also, just that whole mirac-ification, if I can say that this idea of turning on-prem devices into kind of black box, you know, cloud managed, cloud updated, you have an IT team. They're just remote and kind of paid for in a SaaS model rather than having to manage and patch those devices on-prem. Oh, yeah. You know, we currently do that with switches and routers and cameras, as I'm sure you know, the Meraki product portfolio. I don't see why we don't do that with on-prem compute. Why don't we do that with on-prem, you know, Kubernetes clusters? Why should a Kubernetes cluster, just because it's sat in your data center, be any different in terms of usability, billing, management than the one you get from Google Cloud Platform or Azure or AWS? It should have the same user experience. So, across those two areas, yeah, that's where I'm spending most of my time. Great. Well, we're kind of wrapping up here. Tell me, like, what is the most exciting thing for you that's coming down the path in the next six months or so? Can you tell us? I cannot tell you the most exciting thing, I'm afraid. It has to do with everything I'm talking about, kind of the networking, the Azure service. Super excited about user space networking. We have customers that are looking to do kind of real-time video pipelines for broadcast in containers and being able to do that on-prem or in cloud or wherever. And this FTIO VPP technology, I think we'll really unlock that. That's great. So, real use cases and yeah, super excited. Great. Matt, thank you so much for coming on today. It's been a pleasure. Yeah, my pleasure as well. This is Lauren Cooney and we'll be right back from the show here at Cisco DevNet Create.


Welcome to the Voice of America's Newswords. Canadian actor William Shatner recently became the oldest person in space at 90 years old. Profound Shatner played in the television series Star Trek. The ride on the Blue Origin rocket ship lasted about 10 minutes. Shatner was emotional with Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos after the flight. What you have given me is the most profound experience I do in space. Profound describes something that is very great or intense. A profound person or statement is deeply thoughtful and intelligent.


So hi, I'm Patrick Kiley, Senior Security Consultant at Rapid 7, and I did some research on Canbus and Avionics. So I'm going to skip over the Avionics primer. I can go over that over there. Everyone knows kind of the components of an airplane. If you don't, I'd be happy to educate anyone that wants to. I'm just going to go into Canbus. So Canbus is a shared medium. Typically seen in transportation, so automotive, it's insecure design by design. The idea is you want it to be fast, you want it to be lightweight, you want it to be resistant to interference. But once you have access to the Canbus, you can do anything that any other device on the Canbus can do. And I had the idea a couple of years ago when I was at an aviation event, they were talking about some modern avionics they were putting in a system and how it used Canbus. It was really easy to hook up and only used two wires. I had already done some research in automotive. I knew the problems with automotive Canbus. And I said, I have a pretty good idea that this is going to be subject to the same vulnerabilities that exist in Canbus itself. It's the nature of how Canbus is created. And basically what it means is once you have physical access to the Canbus, you can do whatever you want. Incidentally, the other thing when I was doing the research, I was like, okay, has anyone done any research on Canbus in avionics with regard to security? There's very little written about it. In fact, I couldn't find any really good security documents about any of the aviation protocols. So another thing that we wanted to come up with and show is that if this exists in this medium, what about the other protocols? Let's get some security researchers involved. Let's get the community to look at the other protocols that are out there. Airing 429, 629. There's Ethernet used all over the place in aircraft. Let's get the community involved, the people that are actually attacking stuff, instead of just the engineers designing it. So we can have the engineers design it. We can have our types, the hackers do bad things, and then the engineers will be able to go back and make the systems more secure. And hopefully we won't have any bad things happen on the aircraft that are out there. Yeah. There's Rob. So, jumping right in, hacking avionics via Canbus. So, yes, you have to have direct physical access to the Canbus, or you have to compromise the device that's on the Canbus. Now, the vectors that people have exploited to get into the cars, they've gone in through the infotainment systems. They have Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, LTE. Well, the avionics kit that I've built actually has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, so there's one particular access vector there. And then there's physical access. The whole point is physical access should not be our only control. Because if that's your only control, that's a single line of defense, it's not defense in depth. And we want something that's flying in the sky to have more than just one physical control around the bus that's controlling everything in the aircraft.  And then you wait for, you either transmit messages to it wirelessly, or you wait for a particular event to occur. So you're already on the bus, you can read data, you wait till you're at a particular altitude or a particular airspeed or over a particular location, and then you trigger an event and bad things happen. You know, if a bad guy were going to do something really horrible on an aircraft, I would think that this type of attack would be very difficult to detect. Whereas, you know, the more kinetic effects are much more obvious and are going to generate a different kind of investigation. Well, we want to get ahead of this, and that was kind of the purpose of all this. So, we have some example CAN bus messages right here. If you see on the right, we have the arbitration ID that's like your network address for CAN bus. And we have a preamble of in hex of D4714. That identifies on this particular system that I have back here, the oil pressure. And it's in little Indian, so the most significant byte is on the right instead of on the left. And as the oil pressure decreases, the value goes up. It's backwards. I had to throw this in there. So as our oil pressure is going down, the value of the oil pressure is actually going up. And the reason why is because it's inverted. Anyway, fuel level. This one is actually increments normally. So, same arbitration ID, 103, 4, 2200. Same first two bytes, D47, but now it's 11 instead of 14. So, 14 controls oil pressure. Same controller, 11 in the preamble controls fuel level. And the same thing. We can actually hack both of those. We'll do the demonstration of this right after. So how do we spoof messages? Normally this is where I jump into a demo. This is a particular piece of software called Vehicle Spy. Once you've actually reverse engineered the message, all you have to do is inject those messages onto the wire. And now you'll either show a higher fuel level than what you actually have, or a lower fuel level. Same thing for oil pressure. You'll actually be giving incorrect results to the instruments. And there's no real way I did a tech that. It'll show a false signal. Autopilot. Something a little bit more substantial and immediate. The autopilot servos on the system back there use a different arbitration ID. And there's just one single message with three bits that DC0103 turns them on.  And then there's a steady state message of DC0C. That just basically means nothing's changed. And that's all you need. You do that and it'll actually engage the servos. Now, any aircraft that I've seen that has an autopilot, you press one button, it's autopilot disconnected, flashes a warning. But with this, you can continuously send these messages on the wire and that disconnect would not do anything. You'd actually have to physically pull the breaker that's connected to the autopilot and sit there and try and manually fight the servos. And oh, and by the way, we can actually control the amount of torque that's going into the servos as well. That's also sent over the CAN bus. And you could potentially make it, depending on how the particular aircraft is designed, make it very, very difficult to try and overcome. Okay, so this particular system had a really unique way of handling complex messaging. We have the AHRS. That is the instrument that indicates the aircraft's attitude and flight. It's called Attitude Heading Reference System. It's basically like the old gyros. So when you're straight level, it'll show on the glass panel that you're straight level. You pitch up, it'll show as in the artificial horizon, it'll pitch up. There's one instrument that controls that. It also has the inputs for the airspeed, the static and angle of attack if you decide to configure an aircraft with that. This one is different. It uses a single arbitration ID as a header, and it's easier to show you over here. So we have arbitration ID 10242000 with the fifth byte over 3C being the message size. Then another arbitration ID 1024200 and then 60 bytes of payload as a bunch of separate CAN messages. This is very non-standard for CAN. But the point is, even though there's some obfuscation here, I was able to figure it out and reverse engineer it. All the messages for heading, for altitude, for airspeed are hidden in this message that comes on every so often. So how would you attack this? You read the header in, store the message size variable, read the subsequent data frames in as an array, modify the bytes that you're going to change and dump it immediately back out into the wire. The nature of CAN bus in any type of telemetry system is the last message in is the most relevant and is the one that will be displayed. So if you're beating the actual instrument with messages on the wire, it's going to be your value. The one that you've injected is the one that's actually going to display on the instrumentation. So I'm in the process of actually having, of reverse engineering this. I figured out what the parts of the message are. I just have to write some custom software to inject it back out there. And this type of attack is the really dangerous one. If you're talking about someone who's an IMC and you don't have a backup instrument that you're immediately referencing and noticing, you could be flying at a different altitude than what you actually think you are. You could be pointing at a different attitude than you are. And it really makes the attack scenarios pretty scary. So set of recommendations. Don't rely solely on physical controls. You introduce a single point of failure here. There's a secure Canvas specification that's out there. It's pretty new in the automotive industry. But since autonomous vehicles are becoming a thing, it's getting a little bit more traction. In avionics, this is what we should have defaulted from the standard. It's a specification of secure underwater communication. It's not a perfect protocol, but it makes the attacks that I presented here orders of magnitude more difficult for an attacker to pull off. Because now you have crypto involved. You have authentication of the payloads. If a device receives a message that doesn't have the proper authentication token with it, it's not actually going to do anything. And then implement a security gateway. That's already present in cars today.  And have a security device in between those two. On a vehicle that's called a security gateway. It's already designed to operate real time. So the car is not affected by this being in the mix. And then separate your functions of Canvas. Put your autopilot on a separate bus from your engine controls. Your engine controls are in something that's more accessible. It's easy to open up an engine compartment and tamper and get into that. Whereas your autopilot, it's more difficult to get at those servos or anything else. And those are two separate functions that are entirely different. So if you separate those, you've got them on separate buses. And overall, you have more to attack to actually conduct a successful attack against a system like this. Okay. Thank you. I know that was really brief. We only had 15 minutes here. So at this point, I'm going to go to questions. Anyone have any questions? The stuff I talked about here. So implement a system. So kind of the whole point of this is Canvas, it doesn't appear to be widely adopted yet. It's in the system that I have built out there. There are some other systems because we looked at two separate manufacturers. They both suffer from the same issues. Don't rely solely on those controls. Put some additional security controls on your Canvas. Migrate to this. The existing hardware is supposed to support SECOC. And implement a security gateway. That's something that can be retrofitted into existing systems. You have your devices that actually have Wi-Fi and cellular. Separate those from the flight critical components of the system. Okay. Any other questions? All right. Thank you. For those who want to join me, I'll be right behind you with the avionics. And I'll actually demonstrate some of these techniques.


Thank you very much indeed, Liam, for those introductory remarks. And at the outset let me take the opportunity to congratulate the institutes for the work that it does, and particularly in this area of energy. I can't think of any other forum where the challenges facing this immensely complex sector could be teased out in such a constructive manner. These are perilous times for the European Union. As economics commissioner Ollie Rinn has signalled last evening, many of Europe's major competitor economies have entered a second recession in three years. And financial market turbulence and debt burden makes the road to European recovery much harder to climb. Putting national finances on a sustainable footing here at home and across the eurozone is the fundamental task. But urgent action is also needed to create a sustainable growth in our economies, address unemployment and create lasting confidence for citizens, enterprise and investors. The first priority of the government is to secure Ireland's recovery and to ensure employment for our people. The Tysiwch has been to the forefront in pushing in Europe for a new and urgent focus on growth-generating policies. The urgent need for job-creating growth is now right at the top of the European agenda and will be the key focus at the European Council meeting next week. It is vital that this work is advanced rapidly and seamlessly at national and European level, Ireland's membership of the European Union and playing a full, active and influential role at its very core is essential if Ireland is to prosper and grow. If the growth agenda is fundamental to Europe's sustainable recovery strategy, energy policy has a pivotal role to play in creating the conditions for a return to economic growth and job creation. The well-being of both our economy and society depends on safe, secure and sustainable and affordable energy. We therefore fully endorse the objectives of Europe's energy 2020 strategy for competitive, sustainable and secure energy. Since taking office last year, I've consistently supported the imperative for Europe to take all the necessary steps to meet this energy challenge. I believe that Ireland is a peripheral Ireland in terms of the energy market, that we can benefit from a fundamental transformation of Europe's economy to a low-carbon economy based around radically increased energy efficiency, accelerated deployment of renewable energy, smart networks and a well-functioning, well-interconnected internal energy market. The recent Energy Council meeting focused on progress in relation to energy efficiency and renewable energy and their growth and job creation potential. European leaders will be taking stock of progress reports from all councils and will undoubtedly call for more rapid and focused implementation of the agenda for jobs and growth, including accelerated delivery on the energy priorities across Europe. Early adoption of a robust and ambitious energy efficiency directive is essential. The economic crisis itself underlines the importance of energy efficiency investments to boost sustainable growth in sectors negatively affected by the downturn. We're already focusing energy efficiency improvements on key sectors such as the housing stock, the public sector and products and services. This will underpin market uptake of new technologies and skills development and thus add to competitiveness and job creation. It will also contribute to reducing emissions and contributing to energy security. And of course Ireland continues to promote cost effective development of renewable energy as a key contributor to sustainability, security of supply, competitiveness and meeting our climate change goals. As you know we must plan to ensure that between now and 2020 there is a steady progressive and measurable increase in the amount of renewable energy consumed in the electricity, heat and transport sectors. Expert advice suggests that Ireland has the capability to achieve its national targets for renewable electricity from onshore renewable generation alone with capacity to spare. This means both that our offshore wind resource should be developed as an export opportunity and there is also potential for projects of scale onshore for export markets. Our overarching strategic objective is not just to make renewable energy an increasingly significant component of Ireland's domestic energy supply by 2020 but also to make it a significant component of our export sector and help our balance of payments. We have an Ireland a rich and abundant wind and ocean energy potential which I firmly believe can be harvested and exported as a real economic opportunity for this island. The EU renewable energy directive is the framework under which Ireland can develop cross border trade in renewables. And I'm committed to delivering on that opportunity for Ireland through our ongoing work with the UK to develop a bilateral trade in renewable energy. That work is set to intensify over the coming months with the objective of achieving an intergovernmental agreement under the EU framework to underpin the export of renewable energy. I propose to outline that work in more detail as part of a renewable energy policy statement that we will publish within the next couple of weeks, two to three weeks. In order to maximize the commercial benefit, minimize costs and optimize use of the required infrastructure, it is conceivable that this energy could flow via large scale storage based on this island. In other words, rather than exporting energy only as and when the wind flows, it would be stored here and then exported as reliable, dispatchable and carbon free energy of premium utility during daytime high demand hours. Clearly this would be a lower cost source of energy and of great value to the British economy. Electricity storage of the scale envisaged would involve meeting technological, logistical and environmental challenges. If these challenges are met, however, there is already export market and it will be profitable. There is an ideal match between Ireland's resources and Britain's energy needs. There are as yet unresolved policy issues for both us and the British. Firstly, we have to be clear as to the strategic benefit in establishing an export market. Is it better that this country hosts a series of private projects linked via their own private interconnectors to Britain, to the British national grid, bypassing our domestic network, effectively off Wales wind farms that just happen to be sited on Irish soil? Or do we want to integrate these projects into our own national transmission system? Second, there is the question of state participation. Apart from any other consideration, the state and its agencies are the largest landowners in the country and wind farms need land. But our energy companies are also major participants in the renewable energy market. Should we be growing their participation with a view to reaping the major commercial benefits that are down the line? Or should we leave this market to be developed by the private sector and simply enjoy rental income? To draw on the language of our latest agreement with the Troika, the question is how we ensure that state-owned assets are efficiently mobilized to reduce the government financing needs and to provide some additional resources for reinvestment in job creation initiatives in the economy, while also increasing the overall efficiency of the economy. A related question is whether the present state participation involving at least four different commercial state companies, DSB, Bordgaig, Cwilch yn Borddemona, represents the most efficient form of investment in this market on behalf of the Irish people. Should we rationalize our participation and what strategy considerations should then apply? Third, state participation need not be active. It can instead consist of profit sharing perhaps through our taxation system. The starting point I think however must be the constitution, an article 10 of which states that all natural resources including the air and all forms of potential energy belong to the state. This legal claim is stated in the text to be subject to any private interest that are for the time being lawfully vested in any person or body. But the wind of course is not owned by any private interests. It belongs therefore to the state and its exploitation as a natural resource must be on behalf of the people and driven by the public interest. While it's one thing to have levees such as refit imposed on industry and domestic consumers to support developing sectors, the state can, if it chooses, have a different approach when it comes to fully commercial and profitable projects of scale. Whatever is ultimately agreed, the commercial exploitation of resources that belong to the people must be accompanied by very real commercial gain for the people. In both Europe and Ireland we must ensure investment in new energy infrastructure as quickly as possible. Investment in the national networks will underpin economic development as well as renewable energy. Investment in interconnection and smart grids will critically underpin the single European energy market and enhance security of supply as well as enabling trade in renewable energy. The proposed energy infrastructure package needs to be progressed as swiftly as possible at EU level. As regular visitors to this institute will be aware, the package may well fall to Ireland to conclude during our period as president. The energy infrastructure package is also a vital part of the Connecting Europe programme which includes transport and telecommunications. It's obviously critical to the Jobs and Sustainable Growth Agenda for Europe. It represents a very significant opportunity for Ireland as we work to address our national gas, electricity and renewable energy infrastructure needs. Finally, investment in infrastructure is critical if we are to achieve the most ambitious of our energy objectives, completing the internal energy market in both electricity and gas. The European Council has endorsed the goal of achieving a single integrated market by 2014. This is a major strategic challenge to Ireland. We need to preserve the important features of our existing gas and electricity markets while maximising the benefits which integration can bring for Irish consumers and the energy sector itself. One of the imperfections of the Great European Project is the tendency towards one size fits all. Sometimes there's no alternative given the nature of lawmaking. But sometimes this tendency becomes elevated to an economic doctrine that ignores whether the economy is major or minor, the local characteristics and experience. For instance, text book application of competition policy must be enforced even after the circumstances have changed. For example, we now have several energy companies serving both domestic and business consumers in this small market. Further, the government has decided that the ESB should dispose of some power gen capacity. Yet some will continue to advocate a further break up of one of our most successful companies. More significantly, we are on the cusp of a regional electricity market where the ESB will be a relatively small player indeed. Let me spell this out. Very shortly, in terms of our ability to plan for it, it will not just be renewables that will be traded internationally. Regional European Electricity Markets will be established in 2014 as an interim step towards a single EU-wide market. Ireland will belong to the France-UK Ireland Regional Electricity Market. This market will, of course, include two of Europe's largest economies. Ireland's consumption will account for just 3.5% of the total FUI market, a market that will stretch from Rassaville to Rouen. In other words, our energy companies will be competing in a market more than 25 times the size of our current all-island markets. Of course, the market will not expand by that size overnight. The size of the real functioning regional market will be determined by, for example, the capacity of interconnection. Some very fundamental issues need to be addressed before this can become a reality, that are technical issues to do both with the need to align fundamentally different market models and to overcome current interconnector capacity constraints. If these issues are dealt with, then direct interconnection with the European mainland becomes a real possibility. Greater interconnection will enable, but not necessarily guarantee, a gradual greater integration with the UK and France and perhaps even further. When such trading becomes a reality, relative prices will then influence which way the flows will go, whether we become a net importer or exporter of electricity. It is, for example, as of today, an open question as to whether Irish demand for cheap French nuclear energy would outstrip French demand for Irish renewable energy. It is already the case that France is the world's largest net exporter of electric power, exporting some 18% of its total production to Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Britain and Germany. And there are therefore high-level policy issues about the strategic positioning of Irish utilities, public and private, in preparation for a competition, for competition in a market of that size. I believe we need to reassess our concepts of market share and market dominance in view of this imminent reality. Under the memorandum of understanding agreed with the EU and the IMF, there is currently underway an independent assessment of our electricity and gas sectors. The assessment is required to take due account of the EU regulatory context. I very much hope that the International Energy Agency, which is carrying out this assessment, is looking not just at the current regulatory context, but at the reality that we are now in transition towards an entirely new and more challenging context. It would make no sense for that agency to be applying last century's regulatory criteria to a 21st century environment. Specifically it seems to me to make no sense to be arguing on competition grounds for a reduced market share for any of the major domestic players without taking some notice of the fact that the share reduction we are talking about would be a sub-decimal point percentage of the share of the regional market these players will enjoy in just a few years time. Do any of us believe that either the British or French governments are preparing for the imminent convergence of their two electricity markets by first downsizing their native electricity utilities? We must confront the challenge of what the inevitable change in the market would mean for Irish companies so as to ensure that there is an indigenous Irish energy sector. Finally, in looking ahead to Ireland's presidency of the European Union next year, I have no doubt that the economic backdrop for Europe and ourselves will still be profoundly challenging in ten months time. As president of the Energy Council, I will be working closely with the Commission, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament to ensure successful delivery on the priorities. These are likely to include the energy infrastructure package, as well as detailed discussions on setting renewable energy and energy efficiency policy after 2020, as Philip Low recently outlined here at the Institute. The ongoing implementation of the internal energy market will be part of the challenging agenda during our presidency. Given the fact that my portfolio covers communications as well as energy, I'm particularly keen that we use the opportunity of the Irish presidency to move forward the joint agenda for energy and ICT. The alignment of energy, ICT and innovation can unlock vast new potential for investment and employment for Ireland and for Europe as a whole. Ireland has distinct competitive advantages in this sphere, given the presence of so many of the multinational companies here. There are also significant energy, ICT opportunities for new innovative companies to start up and at SME level. Europe needs to extend and increasingly defend its leadership in energy technology and innovation. I want to ensure that Ireland seizes the competitive advantage within Europe in this area as a prime location for energy research and innovation. We also will continue to build R&D partnerships between energy and ICT companies and the research community. Europe's strategic energy technology plan, the smart cities initiative and the innovation union initiative and Horizon 2020 are critical to realising the potential for Ireland and for Europe. Ireland's energy policy remains firmly set in the European and global context. Ireland's security of energy supply also critically depends on the union's own strategies to ensure that Europe's energy needs are met and are secure at all times. 2011 was a wake up call if one was needed for Europe and the world on the centrality of energy for economic viability. The events at Fukushima and the upheavals of the Middle East and North Africa put security of energy supply centre stage again. The consequences of the proposed embargo by the EU on Iranian oil will pose its own challenges for EU and IEA countries and we are working in Europe and in the IEA to ensure necessary strategies are in place to deal with those consequences. Ireland's energy needs are best served by a strong European Union energy policy both internal and external. We will continue to strive to ensure that Ireland's energy policy priorities are met as we work with our European partners to build a strong and sustainable Europe in energy terms.


Hi, this is your host up in Bhartiya and welcome to another episode of TFR. Let's talk and today we have with us once again Wasam Tabara founder and CEO of a bound was some it's great to have you back on the show. Thanks Thanks for having me always always a pleasure and since it there has been a bit of a gap and you know We these in this we know this industry a lot of things change very quickly So it's a great idea to just remind our viewers What is a bound all about in today's word? So talk about the company so up ends the company behind the popular open-source project cross plane So maybe I'll start by describing what cross plane does cross plane is a Essentially a control plane a cloud native control plane and it's a project It's a CNCF project that that up on started and we donate it to the donated to the CNCF back in the May of 2020 cross plane lets you essentially standardize on Using the kubernetes control plane the kubernetes API to manage everything including the different cloud vendors or different services from cloud or Different cloud deployment models whether it's hybrid or private etc all of those can fit and connect up to a single control plane where you can standardize on access to you know all the different infrastructure and cloud vendors as well as standardize on policy and access control and cost controls and try to put everything under a single point of control, right? Because it's based on the kubernetes API that means it's immediately compatible with the entire Ecosystem, you know pick your tool pick your language pick your framework. It all works and What we see is people kind of using cross plane to build platforms That with cross been at the heart of them right platform engineering teams tend to be a thing These days and then you know Upbound is the company behind cross plane and we sell both products and services Around cross plane, but with the same goal helping platform teams Platform engineering teams essentially to build their own internal platforms using our building blocks and using our tools and services Can we talk about you know ever since you folks contribute the project to cncf? How has the kubernetes land escape evolved because It's in production. Of course. There's no question about that But the use cases are some something like beyond even our you know imagination So talk about how the the whole ecosystem has evolved and what role is cross plane playing today So the way I would describe it is that you know kubernetes obviously started As a container orchestrator right it won the container war as if you remember from 2016 17 And emerged as the as the standard for you know containers and running containers And is widely supported and deployed in different environments, right? In the last Five years four to five years. We're now seeing the approach that kubernetes took to manage containers Be extended to managing more than just containers and specifically managing Everything in the cloud right and that's where cross plane comes in cross plane You know extends kubernetes adds more capabilities to it adds new apis and controllers That let it basically manage infrastructure at aws or google or azure and everywhere else But the shift that we're seeing and no one the one way invested in early with the cross plane project and with upbound Is that transition that kubernetes? You know Expands to just being uh from just being a container orchestrator to becoming the standardized way of managing everything Right everything in cloud apps infrastructure tenants customers All fit and could be managed using the same approach that kubernetes pioneered right that That's you know, if you look at historically it's a the first five years of kubernetes What it's about it establishing itself as a container orchestrator And now it's basically trying to unwind everything about containers and go forward with The approach of a control plane and that's that transition is where cross plane came in and you can you know We'd like to think of cross plane as essentially continuing that charter that that kubernetes started and extending it to to you know managing everything how is Upbound itself evolving to serve this This changing market the first few years of up and we're basically creating cross plane and trying to you know Do all the things needed to create the community around it and the ecosystem around it In the last last two years we've been commercializing and You know, it's been super exciting the company went from about 20 people About a year ago year and some ago to about 65 70 people now. So we've more than tripled in size And primarily just Because we're seeing quite a bit of success with people that are taking cross plane to production People that are essentially re-platforming on cross plane And I and these are you know fortune companies household names that you see and recognize that that are doing this and you know As a company, you know, we had to basically put together a go-to-market team and start thinking about how we can support and these companies and grow our Solution teams and support teams and everything else But we also had to increase the size of our product and engineering teams And think about how we scale our product and ensure that we have a really healthy roadmap for our customers and Both balance open source and commercial the commercial side of this So it's been a it's been a busy couple years for for us here at Upbound and and and we're grateful to see the Both the adoption of cross plane and the You know increase in our customers that are that are using in production Can you talk about the growth of the company? Because you folks, you know, and also leaders also recently, you know, as part of growing the company I think one of one of the things that I had on my plate is so I also grow the leadership team And so you know, I was excited to for Tom Tom Anthony to join us And lead our go-to-market efforts, you know, both in terms of our enterprise sales motion All the way to the customer success and post sales Tom brings a wealth of experience here and and You know, probably one of the strongest names in the fields here and so grateful that he joined Upbound And then uh, oran or entire also joined us and he's uh, you know The way I've described it is that if you think about what platform engineers do They're all building their own platforms I would often joke about that as everyone's building their own heroku. Nobody uses heroku anymore, right But everybody's building their own version of heroku internally So oran Was actually at heroku. He was the sixth person in heroku and built out and was the gm of the entire The entire company and you know, even after after acquisition So he has a ton of experience and then went went to build You know cloud run and other developer-facing tooling at google So he joins us with a wealth of experience to Essentially take us to the next level in terms of, you know, the upbound product around cross-bind Super happy to have both of them on board and and at testament to kind of the growth that that we're seeing here at Upbound now, let's talk about The larger ecosystem market out there. You talked about platform engineering. We are talking a lot of discussions about platform engineering DevOps is that our SREs what I want to understand from you is that since you have been this space for so long How are you seeing the evolution of the culture people? organization structure of the companies and and when we do talk about of course DevOps evolution is quite clear with the cloud the whole developers versus operators, but talk a bit about This evolution DevOps SREs but from there and also do you look at look at it as an evolution? Or you look at it as a parallel disciplines that do, you know, so so let's let's look at it from that perspective Yeah, I mean look, I don't know if anything's dead But but DevOps or or whatever but but the the the more important point is I think We are definitely seeing a very clear pattern Across all our customers and a lot of people that are using cross-bind within the community and the pattern is organizationally These enterprises are forming what look like central teams Right, they're shared services teams and these teams are On one side, they own Managing cloud. They have the credentials to the cloud and you know, they own the bill Right and on the other side, they own and creating experience and experience for the developers That are within the company self-service experience that the developers have And so so that really hasn't changed right that that's there's a The folks working within these teams are the same folks. They're DevOps folks They're they can write code and they are really mindful about operations and scale and you know cost and cloud It's the same folks, right? But what they are what has changed is that We are increasingly seeing these teams building what look like internal platforms Which have an API which have a user experience around them Which centralized policy governance compliance, right? And it they're treating it more like a product as opposed to You know in an organic tool set or you know a plethora of different tools They're really thinking about it as if it was an internal product, right? In some cases, we even see front-end engineers working on this or you know, they're they have product managers working internally In other cases, they're using building blocks To piece together their own platform, right? So the in some ways It's a bit of a charter or architectural change. It's not a personnel change. It's the same folks Right, it's the same folks the same smart folks That that are working on all of this But the approach that they're taking is more of a platform and a product Approach, right? And that's why cross-plane is interesting because every platform vendor That's built any service or any platform of any scale uses control planes at the heart of it, right? That's why we're seeing the success of cross-plane is these platform teams that are now tasked to building platforms internally Are looking at cross-plane as a very structural piece Within their platform Assam, thank you so much for taking time out today and give us an update on the bone and also talk about platform engineering I really appreciate those insights and I would love to have you back on the show. Thank you. Yeah, thanks swap. Yeah, I've always a pleasure