My name is Sandy Baird, and I'm here with Beth and Lou, who are part of a little group who is trying to, hopefully, we're going to be able to establish a new institute called Vermont Institute for Community and International Involvement. And Robin is here, also Robin Lloyd, who is also very helpful in this regard. We've been doing this for a while. The virus sort of interrupted our efforts, but we're back, and we're going to be presenting this kind of semester, a group of legal seminars that the Attorney General's Office has agreed to participate in to get out some general education to our community, our whole community, about the legal system of the United States. It's currently very much in the news. And so this is what we will be doing this semester. And next week, we'll be hosting an in-person speaker who will be speaking on the whole controversy right now about bail. And that will be with the state's attorney here in Chittenden County, Sarah George. But with us tonight is Ben Battles, and he is from the office of the Attorney General in Montpelier, although Ben, you're not in Montpelier, right? No, I'm actually at my house in Waterbury. So I apologize if you hear any dogs barking in the background. He maybe can talk to you a little bit about his background. I don't know, Mr. Battles, very well, but I'm very happy that he's here to talk about tonight about the United States Supreme Court, the history of the court, its role, and it's basically its function in our system. It's very much in the news right now. And so I'm very happy to have Ben Battles here to talk a little bit about that. There'll be plenty of time, I think, for questions from our audience. So if people want to just say who they are, be very helpful. I see that there's Diane Gottlieb, right? And Peter Huber, all old friends and colleagues from millions of years ago. And then Joanne Murad and also Barbara McGrew. I guess I see Deb Bout maybe and Donna Pielko. Right, and Jody Albright. So we're all old kind of acquaintances. There's new friends in the audience who are also from this center. This is the Association of Africans Living in Vermont. We are within their building and their offices. And they are also co-sponsors of this series of seminars. And we thank you all really a lot for being here and for trying to understand a little bit about what's going on without really talking too much about the hearings today, but just about the importance of the court and its history in general. So, man, why don't you give us your thoughts on the court? Great. Well, thank you very much, Sandy. And thank you, Beth. And thanks to the Association for inviting me to talk with you tonight. Obviously, a very timely issue. So just briefly, I work for the Attorney General's office. And the Attorney General is the lawyer for the state of Vermont. So we represent the state and its agencies in a variety of all sorts of different types of cases, criminal cases, environmental cases. And my job is the Solicitor General, which is just a fancy title for being in charge of the appeals that our office handles. So I handle appeals in state and federal court. So that's at Vermont Supreme Court and the federal appellate courts, including when we have issues that go up to the US Supreme Court. Can I ask you a question? Have you been at the US Supreme Court? I have. We had a case go up several years ago that my predecessor in this job, Bridget A.C., argued at the court and I was the second chair. So I was there with her. I didn't argue the case. And we also have filed briefs in various cases when the state has an interest. Great. Wonderful. So I was going to talk a little tonight about the history of the US Supreme Court, how it has evolved over the couple hundred years that it's been there. And also talk about how justices are selected and how the court decides which cases to hear and how it ultimately decides those cases. So going back to the beginning, let's talk about in 1776 when the colonies of European settlers declared their independence from Great Britain, each colony had its own legal system. There was no central court for the colonies. And then that's the way things remained in the first constitution that the country had, which was the Articles of Confederation in 1781. And there the states, the colonies were really just treated as almost independent countries that had formed an alliance. And so each colony had its own court system. And that changed in 1787 with the ratification of the US Constitution, which we still have. And under the Constitution it created a strong national federal government divided into three branches. The executive branch, which is the president. The legislative branch, which is the United States Congress and the judicial branch. And Article III of the Constitution created the judicial branch and said, the judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one Supreme Court and such inferior courts as Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. So that's where the word Supreme Court comes from, is from that constitutional language. It doesn't really say anything else about the court other than to define the types of cases it can hear, which is limited. And generally cases arising from federal law and it didn't displace the state court system. So most cases still end up in state court. But you do have this federal court system that was created. In Congress in 1789 passed the first Judiciary Act, which created a number of the lower courts, which at that point were just the circuit courts they were called, with each circuit being responsible for a different geographical part of the country. And it created and it spelled out some of the details of the Supreme Court, including the number of justices. And it created one Chief Justice and five Associate Justices. So originally there was just six justices on the Supreme Court. There's currently nine. And with each justice was responsible for an individual circuit. And they would actually have to go out and ride around horseback and travel the colonies and hear cases in those circuits. And then they would convene a couple times of year to hear cases as the Supreme Court. The first time the court actually convened, it was 1790. And it was in New York City as that was the capital of the country at that time. And they didn't actually have any cases to hear yet because nothing had their primarily appeals from lower courts. So they kind of got together and figured out how they were gonna run things, but not much happened in those early years. The first Chief Justice was John Jay, who was one of the founders of the country. And he actually resigned from being Chief Justice to become the governor of New York, which is an interesting bit of trivia. You don't often see justices these days stepping down to get into politics, but times were different back then. And I just wanna mention one early case that's really important for understanding how the US Supreme Court works and how we talk about it today. And that is the case of Marbury v. Madison, which was decided in 1803. And it established the court's power of judicial review, which is their authority to look at a law and determine that it violates the constitution and then declare that law unconstitutional and invalid. Excuse me, Ben, can I ask you a question then? So there's nothing about judicial review in the constitution, correct? That's correct. Okay, so it was established by this very important case. Yes, right. And it really established that the constitution was law and supreme law and not just this kind of statement of principles. It was an interesting case. It grew out of the presidential election of 1800 between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. And it was a very closely contested election. And John Adams was of the Federalist Party and Thomas Jefferson was of the Republican Party. And it was very contentious. John Adams was the president at the time, but he lost re-election to Thomas Jefferson.  Might sound a little familiar. It's other situations we've heard about, but his party had control of the Senate and he put a bunch of judges through, including a man, William Marbury, and the Senate confirmed them, but they had not yet taken office by the time Thomas Jefferson became president. So their commissions, which was the piece of paper actually authorizing them to take their position as a judge, Jefferson refused to deliver them. And so William Marbury sued and there was a statute that said, this was the sort of case that the US Supreme Court could hear. And so he sued in the US Supreme Court saying, you have to order the president to give me my commission so I can become a judge. And the court in an interesting decision said, we agree that Marbury should get his commission and that he's entitled to it, but we disagree that we have jurisdiction to hear the case because the constitution just gives this court limited jurisdiction and the statute that Congress passed gives us more than the constitutional allows. So that statute is unconstitutional and invalid. And so it was a little bit of a sleight of hand in that it seemed to be the court saying, oh, we can't do this, we have less power. But in doing so, it actually gave itself one of the most significant powers that it has had, which is to strike down the laws of Congress if they're unconstitutional. So as I mentioned, when the court first convened, it was in the nation's first capital, which was New York City. It was only there for about a year. The capital moved to Philadelphia in 1791. And then in 1801, the capital moved to Washington, D.C., where it remains now. And for about 130 so years, the court didn't have its own building and it was kind of moved around different buildings in the U.S. Capitol building. And at times when there was construction and different things going on at the capital, it was burned down in the war of 1812, the court had to find other places to go and it met at different times in people's houses and even in bars. It wasn't quite as glamorous as it is today. Then in 1935, William Howard Taft, who had been president and then became Chief Justice of the United States, he lobbied for and got Congress to appropriate funds to build the U.S. Supreme Court building that we know today with the grand staircase and very impressive courtroom. So the size of the court has changed over the years as well. When it was the first Judiciary Act set the number at six justices for each, one for each judicial circuit. And then as the territory of the United States expanded in the 1800s, there was new circuits that were added by Congress. And so with each new circuit, there was a new seat added to the U.S. Supreme Court. So in 1807, a seventh seat was added, 1837, a eighth and ninth.  And so that was the most justices that have ever been on the court was 10. And then in 1866, Congress passed a law that said the next three justices retire, two retire cannot be replaced. So that then shrunk the court and two justices retired shortly thereafter. So it was down to eight. And then in 1869, Congress said, okay, well, you think there should be nine and we're gonna set the number at nine and that's where it's remained ever since. There was, as some of you may know, in the 30s, President Franklin Roosevelt proposed what's referred to as a court packing scheme. And under his, under this proposal, and this was a reaction to the court striking down a lot of his new deal legislation and finding it unconstitutional. So he was feeling, you know, that his good policies that were necessary for the country were being blocked by the court. So he wanted to get around them and this was his idea to do that. And he said that every justice who reaches the age of 70 and refused to retire, that would trigger a new vacancy on the court. And so that there would be a, another seat would be added up to a maximum of 15. That proposal was not well-received in Congress and it was never enacted. Although the threat may have worked because shortly thereafter, the court did begin upholding some of his new deal legislation. So you hear, you know, people are mentioning court packing these days and that's kind of what they're referring to is something along the lines of what FDR proposed. Although I think, you know, there haven't been any concrete proposals yet, but I suspect if we see any in the future, it's probably to be adding one or two more judges not to be adding up to 15 based on the age of the current people. But who knows? So I wanna talk a little bit about how the justices are selected. This also comes from the US Constitution. Article one, which describes the powers of the president says that the president shall nominate and bind with the advice and consent of the Senate shall appoint judges of the Supreme Court. So that's all the constitution really says about the process. The rest of it has as a result of traditions and the rules of the Senate as for what their advice and consent means. So in practice, what has historically happened is before the president makes a nomination, he will consult with senators and talk about his various options that he's considering. And then when the president makes a decision, he will send that nomination. He usually announces it publicly as we saw a few weeks ago with Judge Amy Coney Barrett. And then the nomination is sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is a committee in the Senate. And they, there's usually a longer period than we are seeing right now where paperwork is submitted and there's some vetting that goes on of the nominee's background by the Senate committee. But then the Senate Judiciary Committee holds a hearing, which was going on today and this week. And then after the hearing concludes, they will vote on the nomination and then send the nomination to the full Senate with their recommendation. The full Senate then debates the nomination. And under the rules of the Senate, the debate, there's no time limit on the debate. So that's where the term filibuster that means when they sort of let debate go on forever so that a nomination can advance. And then to end a filibuster under the rules of the Senate, it's a process called invoking Clotor. And it used to be that you needed 60 votes in the Senate to end debate. And now that has changed, changed first for lower court nominees, but, and then under the Trump administration, it changed for Supreme Court nominees as well. So now you only need a majority to end debate. And that's 51 votes. So then once debate has ended, the Senate will vote on the nomination. You need just a majority to confirm a nominee. 51, if the Senate may split, the vice president cast the deciding vote. Judges, federal judges and justices of the Supreme Court are appointed for life. That also comes from the constitution. The language there says, the judges, both of the Supreme and inferior courts shall hold their offices during good behavior. And so good behavior has been interpreted as forever. Unless they do something wrong, in which case the only way to force a federal judge or justice out of office is to impeach them. And that's essentially the same process as a presidential impeachment, although the chief justice would not be the presiding officer, but it would still, that's a congressional process to remove a federal judge through an impeachment. The court is in an appellate court primarily, so it hears appeals from lower courts. A case can come up from a lower federal court or it can come up from a state court if it involves an issue of federal law. And the process for getting review in the Supreme Court is another Latin term. It's called filing a petition for certiorari, which is often referred to as a cert petition. The court in any given year gets somewhere between seven and 8,000 cert petitions and it only grants review in about 70 or 80 cases. So that's roughly about one out of a hundred cases. Where review is sought, will the court actually hear it? And so that's their docket, about 70 or 80 cases a year. This past year was a, I think the term that ended in June, it was something about 53 cases. And that was because a number of the cases have been because of the pandemic were pushed to this year. So, but that was the fewest cases they decided, I think in a hundred years or something, but obviously there were extenuating circumstances. And what the court looks for when they're deciding which cases to review is, they'll look for an issue that has divided the lower courts where courts have considered the same issue but reach different conclusions. That's typically how cases get up to the Supreme Court. They'll also, it may be that a case is just of such overriding national importance that that justifies granting review too. Or maybe a situation where they view that there's a really clear answer based on a prior decision and the lower court just sort of ignore the law on that issue. The process that the court follows for deciding its cases is that after review is granted, the parties to the case will file written briefs setting out their legal arguments for why they think their side should prevail. Interested groups that are not parties to the case can also file briefs explaining how the court's decision may affect their interests. These are called amicus briefs or amicus III, another Latin term, and that means friend of the court. That's, I think, really somewhat unique about the US Supreme Court as compared to other appellate courts is that pretty much every case that the US Supreme Court decides will get a ton of amicus briefs filed because people pay close attention to these cases and they obviously create a rule of law that applies nationwide. So there's often lots of interest groups and individuals who have an interest in the outcome of the case and will file briefs to let the court know their position. After all the briefs have been filed, the court holds oral argument and that's in the courtroom where the lawyers for the parties, present their position and answer the justice's questions. Typically, each side will get 30 minutes to argue their case. And then after the argument, the case is fully submitted. The justices then go and have a private conference where they discuss the case and they will take a vote on how the case should come out. And then they announce their decision. It's usually several months between when the argument happens and when the decision comes out. And it's after that conference and after they vote, the decision is assigned to one of the justices to write either by the justice if he's the in the majority or the most senior associate justice if the chief is in dissent on that particular case and the case will be assigned, the justice in their clerks will get to work on writing an opinion and then the opinion will come out several months later and that announces the decision and provides usually a very lengthy explanation of the legal reasoning behind the decision. And that is a broad overview of the process of a little bit of the history and the process of how the court hears cases and that happy to sort of open it up to a more broader question and answer period if people have a question. Could I ask another question, Ben? And that is around judicial review. So the court's primary function, would you agree is to review the state laws or laws that are passed by the legislature and then the court gets the right in a way to review those laws and decide whether the laws are in conformance with the US constitution. Is that sort of a definition of judicial review? I think that's judicial review, right. I think that is a fair as to determine whether whether it's a state law or a law passed by Congress, whether that law is consistent with the US constitution. I should clarify though that a lot of the cases that the court hears do not have to do with the constitution. It could just be, this federal law court said, this federal law says X and this court said it says Y and the US Supreme Court needs to decide which one is right. So a lot of the cases don't have much constitution but those aren't usually the cases we hear about in the news and the big cases about civil rights and abortion and same sex marriage and things like that. Those are often constitutional cases. Right. Ben, did you have something? Do we have a question? The question. Yeah, Joanne or Tim does. Can you give us an example of one of those less important decisions that the Supreme Court makes? An example of deciding between two differing opinions of a state law, for example, rather than big name laws such as Brown v. Board of Education and so on. Sure. And I can give you an example of the case that the state of Vermont had that went up to the US Supreme Court a couple of years ago and it was the Green Mountain Care Board had an insurance claims database and they required all health insurance plans to give their claims data to this database so that state policymakers could use that data to figure out where the needs were in the healthcare system and things like that. And the company Liberty Mutual who is a national company and has employees all over the country said, hey, there's this federal law that's called ERISA that says we only have to, if we're giving our employees a health insurance plan we only really need to pay attention to this federal law and we shouldn't have to do what Vermont says and give our claims data to this state database. And so that they sued in federal court and the lower federal court, the second circuit which was appeals from Vermont said, agreed with Liberty Mutual and there was another case that raised essentially the same issue that came up I think out of Ohio maybe that had gone the other way and upheld their law and so then it went up to the US Supreme Court and unfortunately we lost but that's an example of a- Okay, thank you. Thank you. I have a question. Charlie, Charlie. In cases of admiralty law, who hears appeals and does the Supreme Court have jurisdiction? That's a great question. So in the article three of the constitution that's where it says the type of cases that the federal courts can hear and admiralty is one of those cases and so you're not gonna get and I apologize, I've never worked on an admiralty case so I don't really have a lot of experience there but I know that is a, that's an area that where those cases will be in federal court. Thank you. What is that? Okay, any other questions? I have one if that's okay with everybody else unless someone wants to ask a question before that. Okay, we heard a lot today about originalism and textualism, could you kind of address those two words and tell us what they really mean if you know? Sure. Yeah. And those are methods of interpreting the constitution and interpreting statutes and they really have become the dominant methods of constitutional interpretation in the past 20 years or so. And originalism as I understand it means that when you're looking at a phrase in the constitution like for example, due process of law or freedom of speech or something like that you go back and you look at what the original meaning the original public meaning was at the time that revision was ratified. So if you're talking about the First Amendment you go back and you look to 1789 and what did freedom of speech mean to the people who wrote those words and what did it mean then? And then the tricky part is how do you apply that in 2020? And textualism is closely related and I think textualism, it's really you're looking at the words. I think that's often used to refer to statutes as opposed to originalism being more about the constitution but it's still you're looking at the text of the words and trying to find out what the meaning of those words meant. I think our Supreme Court, the Vermont Supreme Court takes a little bit of a different approach when they interpret the Vermont Constitution and Vermont statutes and the Vermont Constitution they have a, I don't know if there's a name for it but they've said in different cases that you should look at a variety of things. You start with the text but you also look at the history and how the text has been interpreted. You also look at how different states have applied similar state constitutional provisions and then they seem more inclined than the US Supreme Court could say to do more of a balancing and look, is this, is the application in this particular case consistent with the sort of the policy behind this provision? So it's a little bit of a different approach. Okay, I'm sorry. Robin has a question and Peter Huber, I think does too, is that right, Peter? Yes, thanks. Okay, go ahead. Robin. Peter. Peter, I'm hearing about the shadow docket that the Supreme Court operates with and I'm wondering if you could tell me a little bit about that and does that conform with or contradict an open and free democratic exchange of the Supreme Court really? Well, how about you, Ben? I don't know how to answer that. Excuse me? Yeah. That's a great question and it's something that has really been noticeable during the Trump administration and I think how it's, as the Trump administration has taken various actions, then a lot of groups, including states, including Vermont have challenged those actions in court and a good example is the travel ban. Actually, I'll do a different one because that actually went to a full court decision but recently we were involved with a case about what was called the public charge rule and that was a rule passed by the Trump administration that said if you accept any sort of public benefit for a certain amount of months, such as food stamps or Medicaid, then you won't be able to get a green card essentially and that was kind of a wealth-based test for getting immigration benefits. And so Vermont and New York and Connecticut and other states and other courts but we sued in a federal court in New York. We got an injunction blocking this rule it was affirmed by the appeals court and then the federal justice department files a motion in the U.S. Supreme Court that says just they file a brief, they say this should be stayed, the lower court messed up and then the Supreme Court issues like a one paragraph or one line order saying, yeah, we're blocking the lower court, we're letting the rule go into effect. And so that's kind of the example of the shadow dock and it often comes up in these preliminary motions that happen but the effect of it is to let these policies go into effect for years until the whole case can go up on appeal but that often takes several years. So a similar thing happened with the border wall where states sued and other groups sued to block the border wall, one injunction in the lower court and the U.S. Supreme Court issued a short order saying, oh, you can go forward and build the wall while these cases are litigated. Okay, I think Robin has a question. Okay. Oh, Peter, I'm sorry. No, well, it was just a follow up but am I correct that it's the case that you don't necessarily know how the decision was reached what the number was for and against and there's no opinion or interpretation necessarily, it's just a statement of condition. It often is, which is very frustrating. If you're, I mean, it's frustrating for a lot of people but particularly if you're involved in the case and had a decision below in your favor but it can just be as short as like a one line like the order is state. A lot of times there is a split so one of the justices may write a decision setting forth their views but there's no rule that says the court needs to explain why it takes an action in those types of cases. Okay, Robin. Thank you. Okay. Hi, I wonder if you could give just a brief dissertation on the second amendment. This Amy is a constitutionalist, I think is what an originalist which would mean she would go back to the wording of the second amendment which I don't have right in front of me but it talks about militias being formed and so on. Isn't there a substantial trend in our justice history of disagreeing with the way that's interpreted now and if she were to go back to the wording, if you could talk about how it is worded and some people say it's a matter of where the comma was placed in that statement. Anyway, just curious what you think about that. Thank you and you actually, I'm currently working on a few gun rights cases at the Vermont Supreme Court so you hit on an area that I'm happy to talk about. The second amendment says a well-regulated militia comma being necessary to the security of a free state comma, the right of the people to keep and bear arms comma shall not be infringed. So not clear from the text exactly what that means at least to a modern reader, to me. There was a, I think it was 2008. The US Supreme Court issued a decision in Heller, Columbia, which really previously, I think the general consensus was that this, the second amendment did not protect an individual right to own a firearm. It was more about the right of the people and the states to form militias for their defense collectively. But in the Heller decision in an opinion by Justice Scalia, he disagreed and for the court and the court held that it protected an individual right to own a firearm. And that case involved the District of Columbia had essentially banned handgun possession in the district and the person who challenged it wanted to have a handgun in his home for self-defense. And the argument was that this is the most popular weapon for self-defense. It's kind of a quintessential self-defense weapon and the second amendment protects my right to have it. And Justice Scalia and the four other justices agreed. And so that became the law of the second amendment. And that was an originalist decision, went back and looked at a lot of the history of what was going on in the founding era and concluded that this phrase about a well-regulated militia like historically that it was kind of the militia right and the individual right kind of went hand in hand because everyone was expected to be able to come when they call the militia forth and bring their weapons and be ready to defend. And that history has kind of changed things and the fit between the two clauses isn't what it used to me. That doesn't change the fact in the court's view that the right is still protects an individual right. I was just gonna say one other thing is that as you all may know, there was some gun laws passed in Vermont a couple of years ago and they've been challenged under the state constitution which has a similar phrase, although worded a little differently and cases are pending at the Vermont Supreme Court will probably get that decision within a few months as finding out whether the new, it was that ban on large capacity magazines that's been challenged. And so the Vermont Supreme Court will decide whether that violates the state constitution or not. And following up with that, I watched what the new apparently going to be confirmed, justice talked about that. And it was interesting to me that she said that an originalist position could go back to what was meant at the time of the adoption of the second amendment. In other words, you can read meaning according to her that an originalist position also includes a reading into the meaning and to the intent of the founders. Is that right? Is that also an originalist position? Yeah, and I think the Heller decision is actually pretty interesting because both the majority opinion by Justice Scalia and the dissenting opinion by Justice Stevens were both kind of took an originalist analysis and went back and looked at what these words meant and what was going on in the founding era. I think a problem that I have with that sort of analysis is that judges, I mean, it makes sense logically, I suppose, but judges are not trained as historians. And so when they try to do this historical analysis, I think it gets risky that they're overlooking things. Or looking into things that maybe they can and can't do, right? I mean, it was sort of, I was surprised at her statement that that meant looking into the minds also of the Americans, of people, of ordinary people and what did they intend by kind of putting that in the Constitution? And after all, it was a revolutionary period, right? And so you're looking, I think, into people who just won a revolution against the British and yes, they bore arms and they maybe did think that it was their right to bear arms. Anyway, any other questions? Yeah, any questions from those people on Zoom? Yeah? No? Okay, Beth. We'll go over here. I'm curious about a couple of things. One, has anyone, has any Supreme Court Justice ever been impeached and why? Can you, I have a few other ones, but you could start with that if you don't mind. I think one, and it was very early on, and it was Sam and Chase who was one of, and I actually was reading when I was getting ready for this, looking at some of the history, getting ready for this presentation, I saw it. And I think he was, this was like early 1800s, and he, I think was just very partisan, and he was kind of going around and riding circuit like I talked about and giving really harsh sentences to people from the opposing political party and just kind of acting really inappropriately for a judge, basically. And so he ultimately was impeached, and I believe removed from office. I'm sorry, I'm probably getting the details on that a little bit wrong, but I know that in the closer to current times there had been talk about impeaching other justices. And William Douglas was, there was threats of impeachment directed against him. And he was an interesting guy, a brilliant guy, but had political ambitions and also was kind of a man of about town and his personal life too. And I forget exactly what the reason was. I think it was more of a political thing because he had been contemplating running for president while he was on the Supreme Court, but that never went forward. There was another Abe Fortis who was on the court for a while, I believe in the 60s. It turned out that he had some questionable financial relationships that he was, while he was on the court, some business interest had was like paying him a retainer for legal advice or something along those lines. And he ultimately stepped down when those scandals were revealed. So I don't think other than that first early case that any justice has actually been removed from office through impeachment. Before I jump in, anyone else? I was just gonna say that Earl Warren, they wanted to impeach Earl Warren, the Southerners after Brown v. Board of Education. Yeah, I think that's right. And probably in contrast to sort of those other situations, I think that was directly- Oh yeah, he was not impeached, but- Yeah. And directly in reaction to his work on the court, they disagreement with his decisions. Go ahead, Barbara. You're on mute. Okay. Yeah, I'm wondering if you wanna talk about this whole issue of so-called activist judges and what is the province of the legislature and what is the province of the court? Because more and more I'm hearing, from this nominee, our job is to interpret the law, whether it's right or wrong, doesn't make any difference. And it seems to me this whole notion of, everybody has activist judges of its own side, but it's very confusing to me. Yeah, I had a similar question, which came up a lot in the hearings today about policy, because the Amy, Cody, Warren, whatever, Barrett, kept talking about, don't ask me to make policy. That's not the job rule, that's not the job of the Supreme Court. And so it's the same kind of thing, like where- Where is the line? Where are the lines? And I think it's the same as, are the lines getting more blurred between the three branches? Or does that, do you think so? Good questions. I think the term activist, speaking of Earl Warren, I think the term activist sort of first began being used in response to the Warren court and the decisions, they, in the 60s and 70s, a number or 50s, I guess was Brownview Board of Education, but they had a number of decisions expanding civil rights and the rights of criminal defendants. And the argument was made that these decisions were not grounded in any words in the Constitution. It was really more of these sort of broad statements of principle and what the court thought was good policy. And that was the argument at least. And I think that's where the term came from. But as it's, I think it's used mostly today to just to describe a judicial decision that you don't agree with. And, but I mean, as I understand it, it means that you're not making a decision based on law. You're making it based on the judge's opinion of what should happen rather than what the law says. I think when you get to the US Supreme Court and talking about what Judge Barrett has been saying and what all the justices say in their hearings, I think John Roberts was famous for saying, we just call balls and strikes. That's what a judge does. But when you're at the US Supreme Court, it's because courts have disagreed over the same law and the same issue. And so it's really a smart lawyer, a smart judge can decide the case either way and write a decision to explain that decision. So it really is choosing one or the other. And there's different, I mean, yes, there's different methods of interpretation, but if the question is like, does liberty include the right to end a pregnancy, there's not really any text that's gonna help you there. That's really kind of a, really is a policy decision. I think the Supreme Court much more than lower courts really has to make what are essentially policy decisions. Mention. So when Judge Barrett says that she's going to follow the law, is that is really the role of the justices, correct? I mean, I think to Barbara and best question, if the role of a Supreme Court justice is to look at the law, right? And precedent, legal precedent, it is not to create social policy. Is that your opinion? I mean, is that correct sort of? Yeah, I mean, certainly the role of a judge is to apply the law to a given set of facts and decide the case one way or the other. I do think it becomes very tricky when you get up to the US Supreme Court where these are often the hardest legal questions that judges have already disagreed about and there aren't clear answers. So I guess the question is what do you do? How do you decide the case in that situation? What do you look to? Do you look to history? Do you look to more sort of broader statements of principle or like legislative intent? And those are all ways to kind of, I think, cabin the analysis a little bit so that it's not just what do you think is good policy? But I do think it gets pretty blurry when you get up to that level as to what the law requires and what's more of a policy type decision. Okay, I think one more.  Barbara, yeah. Barbara? Well, a couple of things. One is that we work for the union and we wanted to do something. We used to tell our lawyers to say, this is what we wanna do now, you make it legal. And that's one of the jaded view I have sometimes of the law. The second thing is I think we shouldn't forget and maybe you have something to say about this too is how important public opinion and social movements are to changing laws. I doubt if there would be a law that the, I doubt that the Supreme Court would have ruled in favor of gay marriage 75 years ago, but so much has happened since then in terms of social movements and public opinion that made that ruling possible. And so I don't want any of us to forget that we have something to say about how things are ruled on too by what we do in the street. Right. Right. I think that's a great point. And I mean, that was really an amazing example of how quickly the law, I mean, on one hand, how quickly it changed from it seems like marriage being illegal in most states in the country to all of a sudden it's not, but it wasn't quick in the sense that people have been fighting for decades to change public opinion. And there was cases in state court, like there was the Baker decision in the Roth's Supreme Court in the 90s that dropped down Vermont's marriage law and led the legislature to create the civil union and then eventually legalize same-sex marriage. And all those things happening throughout the country, I think are very, you know, helped persuade the court when the issues come up there. I have one final question. When people talk about originalism, I heard this comment that kind of got me thinking and that was that they're thinking in terms of an 18th century Madison court, President Madison's court or whatever during that period of time. Well, does originalism include the amendments which were not 18th century, the amendments to the constitution were throughout the 19th and 20th century. So does an originalist just simply negate those amendments and go back to a time when you could have slavery? No, it doesn't include the amendments. I think anybody who's serious about originalism would talk about when that specific provision was enacted. So if you're, and what does the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment mean? You need to look at the 1866 or whatever it was. There's a lot more reason why, you know, we should amend the constitution these days. I mean, it's such a difficult process, but I think there's a lot to be said for making that effort to improve our democracy. One last question, Diane. Diane. I don't understand something. The Supreme Court decided on the right to marry or Roe v. Wade. They were final decisions that, you know, the Brown versus the Kansas, whatever it was. I thought that's like the final decision. So it helped me with that because we're now kind of recirculating these decisions that's absolutely final. Okay, Ben. So it's a sense that the Supreme Court decided those, you can't appeal that decision and, you know, and, but the Supreme Court does have the authority according to itself to disagree with earlier decisions and sort of change the law that way and overrule them. So that's what a lot of people have been talking about with this nomination of Amy Coney Barrett in the belief that she would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade and that now there's a majority of the court that would vote that way. There's nothing, you know, the court, you know, the court kind of can do it at once for better or worse. So if the court has the votes to overrule Roe v. Wade, it can do that. There's a doctrine called stare decisis, which you've probably heard about another Latin term, which I believe means like standby the thing decided, which is that the court generally should not overrule its own decisions unless there's really compelling reasons to do so. And I mean, the problem with that is if the court wants to do it badly and often they have the votes, they can write down the reasons that they think are compelling. So I mean, normally it looks at sort of maybe, you know, they decided a decision this way 50 years ago and then they have all this data showing about all the horrible consequences of that decision. That might be a reason why they overrule it, you know, but ultimately it depends on whether there's the votes to do it, which depends on the people on the court. Any final thoughts? Anyway, I think we're out of time. So thank you very much, Ben, for being here tonight and thank all our people on Zoom for zooming in and being a part of this community discussion. So next week, as I said, we'll have an in-person speaker to lead a discussion on bail and that's Sarah George, the state's attorney of Chittenden County. And we will try to also do a hybrid for those people who do not wanna be here in person, but she will be here in person. And so we welcome you to come back either on Zoom or in person. And this is 20 Allen Street at the Association of Africans Living in Vermont. And we thank them for the space to do this and for all the technological advice and thank Beth Sacks for putting it all together and others on the Vicki Board, Lou and Robin. And so please come back and thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Very good. Thanks for having me and your excellent question. All right, it. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye, Ben.


Hey everyone, welcome in to the top 10 objections to drinking ketones from the health and nutrition industry. My name is Coach Rob DeBoer, I'm a great friend. Mr. Duffston Gaffer, coming in live, I don't know, somewhere in California. I'm in Louisville, Kentucky. And we're excited about today's objection because it's one that, there's a reason it's number one. By the way, we did this in a very honest effort to provide value. And the feedback from all of you that overwhelmed me. We've had skeptic fitness professionals say thank you, I never heard it that way. I had these preconceived ideas and a clear lot of misinformation because let's make no mistake in a day of social media, entrepreneurship and enterprise, there's a lot of them. What we want to do is offer substance, not promote any type of sales. That is our motive, our heart. And with that, the top 10 objections comes down to number one. You know what it is. Number one objection to the health and nutrition industry with drinking ketones, the structure or this model of marketing. Many of you are going to call it direct sales, multiple marketing, work marketing, you know, pyramid and waste structure, all that we want. At the end of the day, here's what we know. It's a very valid business model that has created some bad reputation based on a few bad apples. Like let's just call this fate. When done right, it's about true substance. It's about true sales. And I will tell you our numbers have changed the narrative in the health and nutrition industry. I think social media has gone a long way in creating residual customers. One thing I think about this, we are a community based education company with a very big product that I would argue very few people are very well educated about. And that's where the conversation begins. Let me start by saying this and I'll throw it to you. Here's the litmus test of why this is such an incredible opportunity, assuming what we have today is real, assuming it's a real product, real value, with multiple applications protected by real patents that can be reproduced. Now if that's true, imagine this. What is the objection people really have when we say the structure of the business model? Sales. People don't want to be sales. They don't want to call up their friends. They don't want to sell something. Here's the litmus test for what we do.  I would argue all of them. I don't know anything about where anybody is tuning in as living, but I would argue if you've knocked on almost any door in your neighborhood, someone's tried a protein shake or they've had a bar, taken a cleanse or had a lotion or a potion or a pill and it was delivered by traditional business and retail or business. If we had a product that was just another protein, we would have to make you a good salesman and that is where the conversation begins because our product is very unique, very dynamic. In fact, what we offer wasn't available and didn't exist just eight years ago. So imagine if you knocked on a door and said, have you ever been in ketosis multiple days in a row, stop speaking and get the answer. I would argue the answer is no. I would argue the answer is I don't even know what that means or what the best might be and that's why this is a powerful company, Dustin, and that actually is a large part by proven to show the structure in the business model we did. We can call it whatever you call it. We call it community marketing and education because there's a lot of it that comes with this and it's not about telling, but just rather telling, here's what we have, why it's different and here's why it's applied to you. So I'll throw it over to you. Well, it's interesting that you say that. I agree. It's about sharing and caring, really. And when a little bit of my story, I, you know, as a traditional fitness professional health professional, I went from the gym owning or not working in a gym to then working underneath somebody paying them rent to work my own business, but spending time training time for money. At the same time, I was constantly looking for ways to make additional income. And I had some people reach out to me in this space, you know, direct sale space. And what I was, I was turned off by initially was like, I'm like, why are they bringing that to me? They don't even know what it is. Like they don't even understand it. So I was kind of like, well, that's like, like, I don't trust them maybe yet because I didn't understand what it was. Well, then fast forward eight years, my wife joins the Marine Corps, we're traveling, I had to restart my practice over twice. And I'm like, I need to make extra money, but I love what I did. I didn't want to quit and do something else. And every little online thing I tried doing, Rob, I, I, to be successful at growing an independent business, you have to invest a lot of time and energy. And most people actually fail at business. We were looking at franchising and I had an investor. It was going to be 1.5 million dollars. That's what my investment was going to be to franchise. And we were looked at two years before I broke even working 14 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week. That was my reality. And I'm like, well, I want to have a kid. I want to have family. Like how am I going to do all this stuff and still be passionate about fitness? That I would have to become a business person, not a fitness person. So long story short, I actually stumbled into a community based marketing meeting, not prove it, just a different random one in Rhode Island. And I was like, this is really neat. And then I looked at the product and realized, well, I can't promote that product. It's not at the standard that I'm going to go for, right? But I was like, there's something to this. So for three years, I literally investigated network marketing. I was researching and I wanted to be in health and wellness because I wanted to help people with nutrition and wellness and supplementation. Like that's something I'm passionate about. And when I found prove it, I didn't know it was this business model. And I had to call if you're a good friend, my good friend, our CEO, Brian Underwood and I go, why did you choose this model?  He goes, what chances did you really have of growing a strong residual income without having that infrastructure of knowing how to produce products, how to how to market and sale, how to be an expert at marketing, how to structure your business model. Then how do you didn't have that tools or the enough money to go find it all. He goes, what if we can provide all that for you at the same time? What if we can give you mentorship, focus on personal growth, which I'm very passionate about. If you're not into personal growth and then we're probably not the right fit for you, but you want to grow as a person. I want to be a better dad and a better mom. And he goes, then what if we could provide all the infrastructure so we could deliver the product for you? I go, he goes, all we have to teach you is how to basically attract people and how to get your voice out to more people. And I go, that I can get down with. And he goes, but the most important thing when you have a product is extraordinary as ours. If we don't educate people in the modern day world nowadays, we're not going to get them.  So we have to really find real education with real scientists, real doctors to support this. And, and Rob, that's when I was all, I was like, this is where I want. This is my new home. Now I didn't expect it to become my full time. I didn't expect to walk away from my career. That wasn't what my intention was. My intention was to create an additional income, leveraging my time. I had limited time with the newborn, especially his brother-in-law that just moved in, my wife working 70 hours a week. I worked a lot of time a week. I didn't have that time. So I had to be really effective in the time I had. And that's when I knew that this community-based marketing can, I could just be a piece of the puzzle and grow a residual income. And I was all in at that point. And the cost of entry is very low compared to a franchise, 1.5 million for the franchises that I wanted to get into versus well under a thousand bucks for this. I was like, it's a no brainer in my mind. I love it. You know, I think we're all this, Dustin, and I want you to run with this because you played a very mental part. Well, what I believe is oftentimes it's not the message. But sadly, and when ego pride in the way, and that's a lot. Look, there's a lot of pride ego. I already knew it all in the hell, right? Sometimes it's the messenger. It's not even the message because the messenger was the wrong person. Or this overweight person was trying to tell me about a health fitness nutrition product. I didn't listen to the message. So proof of the language so much so we've become kind of category king in the keto education space about the diet. We've far surpassed that conversant. It's not about a diet anymore, although super meta-voluntary official. This is about a journey. But proof it wanted really capitalized on providing value. They launched an initiative called Keto Academy, which wasn't just out the ketogenic diet and you kind of spearheaded. You've interviewed experts around the world that had no best improvement, that aren't part of this model. They just were passionate about the message we're sending in their industry of human performance. So maybe just touch on the length gone to people you've been able to interact with to provide and value so it no longer was the messenger. It was all about education. Yeah, that's what we have. The Keto Academy is and it's funny because that we're kind of like, should we keep it Keto Academy because it's so much more than that. There's so much more. It's really about human optimization, which is what you said. And human performance and anti-aging longevity. And we really want to create that platform. We were very fortunate, I think, because our mission is to help people live better. And that is the reason, I think, why a lot of these scientists have come to us and wanting to speak on our stage. And you think about Dr. Dom, you think about Angela Poff, you think about Dr. Andy Capitalli when a leading naturopathic doctor, you think about Colin Champ, I mean, Dr. Kenneth Ford, who is one of the most extraordinary humans I ever used to spend time with, Dr. Jeff Volike, who is one of the most prolific researchers in human performance and ketosis, all are and we have multiple brain specialists that come on and speak. Dr. Aiman and Dr. Kunein, Dr. Mary Newport, all these amazing researchers. And what's neat about this is that they're there to present what they are passionate about. We're not there to control that. We want we want to be challenged because we want to make it better. And what's important about this is that if if you get to this level, I think what happens, true story, Rob, if I would have been introduced to prove it 10 years earlier, I probably wouldn't have been open minded to the person that referred me or that introduced me. The guy that referred me to was 55 pounds overweight, goofy, didn't know anything about keto. I was just at the time of my life going, listen, I got to change something because it's not changing for me. I got to listen to more people. I got to be open minded and I'm thank God I was, right? So I did not judge the messenger. I really was looking for an opportunity for a message that I could fit in with. And Keto Academy is a catalyst for that. And now we're expanding that out to performance. What does it mean to teach your mom at 70 how to build muscle? Like, how important is that? We want to talk about happy, happy, happy, happy day. We want to talk about the big picture of helping people elevate their lives. We also spend a lot of time, Rob, and passionate about his mindset. You know, we work really closely with Joseph McClendon, the third. That's something that's worked with Tony Robbins for 30 years. Tony's son, Jerick, we work closely with David Goggins. I mean, Kevin Hart, I mean, it just goes Jay Shetty and Ed Milette. And we're really putting together a full package here. It's like wellness, it's fitness, it's mindset.  So it's the total package. If you're looking for a kind of a business in a box. The only thing is, is you have to decide however you're going to participate as a customer and plug in or as even a promoter that wants to do more with us, plug in. If you don't plug in, you won't get the resources. So, you know, I've heard our CEO, Brian, I would say multiple times. He gets messages from people that for whatever reason, they were a customer. Maybe they're still a customer, they're a discontinued customer. But they actually get their toe and plug in to our community. And they say, you know what? I'm no longer with it. I'm still a loyal customer or whatever. But the time I spend in the community and the education and the self-development personal development benefits made me a better car seal, made me a better mom, a better business owner, it may be a better franchisee. It made me a better fill in the blank and I'm more proud. I would say this. If you go back to the series and it doesn't for a health technician professional, it really is the objections from almost everyone every day. Dustin and I together have fun with it. Late night, Dave Letterman's now the top 10 list. This is number one. Very important question to consider because it shouldn't be an object. I think the closer you look at who we are and what we do and importantly, how we do it, the more interest you'll have in knowing the dust and what can some of you reach out to me, to you, to age?  Look, this isn't just about or a product. I will tell you, we all want to grow well and aging well, fat loss, keeping muscles. It's a form that is not just physical, but also a spiritual mental. We offer for everyone and it's something for someone that if you just want more, like our, our message is better. We just want to be better at what for you. That's where the name comes from. You know, prove it. Everyone has you want to lose weight, prove it. You want to be a bad prove it. You want to run. You want to raise awareness for cancer research, prove it. We create a platform for someone to prove whatever it is.  Yeah, I would say this is if if you're watching this right now and you're like, hey, I want to get more, I want to understand this at a bigger level. And we realize this could be step one for you is get back to whoever shared this video, if it's Rob or I, let us know. And I always tell people, like, let's have a real conversation about it. Let's be transparent. You know, are you like me when I was in my thirties? Financially draining and not knowing how I was going to have a retirement in the fitness industry, because they don't they don't really provide a lot of retirements in the fitness industry, right? There's we got to do some work here. And I was struggling there. And so if we had to sit down and talk about it and see what this could look like for you, then let's do that. But let's have the real conversations. Last thing I would just touch on Rob is, you know, and I wish you would have said this earlier is that a lot of people say, well, the people at the top make all the money. And you and I know that that's not that is a scheme. That's not the way this works. By no means. Now, typically people that grow the biggest to make the biggest impact will make the most money and that can create a lot of different ripple effects. But you and I both know on our structure, it's not the design that way. It's designed to you make your own. Your business starts from you down and it's designed that we're a community that's going to support you to do that. And I really think that's important that people realize that because people came in the same day as me that haven't made nearly the income that I've made, because that's not the way we structure it. We really structured it in a way that it's you get rewarded for the work you do. I love that. Dustin, I'm just going to mention this because I think it's very powerful. What are those symbols on the wall and what is movement to a million? What does that mean on the wall behind? I don't know that you had that initiative before. Maybe you had that vision or dream, but you certainly didn't have an opportunity that would bring that make that a reality. I think that's part of the point. This isn't about just finance gain. It's not about physical health. This is about broadening your ability to be who you are. That better to have or in, except greater. I think that is so important to lean in and listen to what we have to say. And how, look, this can become a business that you're in it for yourself, but you're by yourself. Like, that's the thing that I've found so powerful. I don't have to know everything. We invest so much in education. We invest so much in research. I need the mechanics in the block of, hey, how can I help my community? How can I help my family? How can I help pay off? How can I help lose some weight? Like, there are so many that come as part of this puzzle intervention. You know, just touch on that. Very inspiring. Yeah, I mean, for me, it's a mission to change a million lives. That was my first step once I realized that I wanted to help more people. Like, I talked to a lot of people that I just want to help more people. But I also, my wife's very financially motivated. I'm not necessarily motivated that way. I was motivated by that story of that person getting better. And I was like, I need to help a million people and I want to get behind that. And I can't do it alone, though. I realized that I was limited. I spent a lot of money trying to do online marketing, internet marketing. And honestly, I didn't have that skill set. And to this day, it's not where my home is. My home is getting in front of people, being a coach and spending time with people. So the mission to a million really started and we hit the million, which I'm very excited about. Now it's a mission to a million every single year. I want to help a million people every year. And that's going to be a mountain to climb. And the only way to do that is to find the like-minded people that really care about people. And there's a way to do it faster than just trading time for money or just talking to your neighbor. The way we build our business gives people the tools to be able to expand their business. And they don't realize that at first, and that took me some time to understand. But then these little signs below us here are our earnings. And it's something I'm very proud of because I didn't come into this to make millions of dollars. I came in this to help provide for my family. I came into this to help change more lives and something that I could be passionate about. And when you know ketones and the science behind it, it's easy to get passionate about it. But that's a byproduct of the impact that we've made. And now those are those are signs that represent our financial wins based off of the people that we've been able to impact through my team and throughout other teams. Now I feel like I'm more in a leadership role. I get to help leaders become leaders, which is even more exciting. It's an evolution of my own my own journey. And so we're just looking for more people that want to participate either as a customer or even as a promoter. And we're OK with where you start and we're OK if you don't start. We're just looking for the right ones. I love it. I'll finish with this.  There's so many great products, but this is one of them. And if you're looking for a key, if you're looking for a good or if you're looking for proof and parry in the right and sort of initiatives, you'll find you'll find it other places. We're not that there isn't other great opportunities, but I know this is one of them. So we encourage it. If something struck a chord with you, reach out to reach out to myself, reach out to the and share this with you. And hopefully at the end of the line, we will meet and we'll talk to you soon. Dustin, thanks so much for this series. Been a lot of fun. I'll throw this out there. You guys have any other lists? Like what are the top 10 fill in the blank that doesn't do? We just had so much fun doing that, according to the feedback, been a lot of positive response. In the comments below, what would you like to see from Coach Duster today from Rob DeVore come together and put a top 10 list together? I don't know if it's top 10 things that I hate about getting this top 10 CrossFit exercise I never want to do again. Whatever it is, we'll know and we'll see you soon. Dustin, thanks so much for tuning in and joining.


Excellencies, distinguished colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, it's a real pleasure for me to be here with you today for this launch of the fifth edition of ITU's flagship report, Measuring the Information Society. On behalf of ITU's Secretary-General, Dr. Amanant Wei, who unfortunately cannot be with us this week, let me welcome you all to this launching event which is taking place simultaneously here in Geneva. And at six other locations around the world, as well as online via webcast. So I must also express my personal appreciation to Mr. Burakima Sano, director of BDT for this wonderful organizing of this event. I see it becomes bigger and bigger. Compared with the previous editions, it's relatively modest. Now it's more than modest. It's quite good. Ladies and gentlemen, ITU is committed to connecting the world and to bringing the benefits of ICTs to all the world's people, wherever they live and whatever their circumstances. We are proud to note the impressive progress achieved in the first 12 years of the new millennium. By the end of this year, there will be almost 7 billion mobile cellular subscriptions globally. And we're over a third of the world's people will be online. But we still have a long way to go because 70% of people in developing countries and over 90% of people in the world's least developing countries will still be offline as we come into 2014. This is not about technology for technology's sake. It is about technology for educating people. It's about technology for better healthcare. It is about technology for gender empowerment. It is about technology as a means to reinforce environmental protection. ICTs will continue to play an ever greater role in social and economic development. And this will be even more important in terms of the post-2015 development agenda. Ladies and gentlemen, let me stress the importance of measurement. ITU has been collecting and publishing ICT data and statistics for well over 100 years. And we are the only organization that collects and analyses such a comprehensive set of indicators and statistics on a global basis. This is important not just in allowing us to see the progress which has been made, but also in showing us where gaps still remain. And it's useful and important both to policymakers and to the ICT industry. Let me also give a mention here to the partnership on measuring ICT for development, which is an international multi-stakeholder initiative to improve the availability and quality of ICT data and indicators. And which has been doing important work since it was set up in 2004. ITU continues to work closely with the partnership in our work on ICT statistics. In this connection, we note that the Broadbinder Commission for Digital Development has set a number of advocacy targets for broadband access, availability and policy, as well as gender equality. And the data in this new report provides crucial input to the Broadbinder Commission's work on measuring progress. Ladies and gentlemen, I do not want to take up too much of your time. Let me just therefore close by applauding the efforts of ITU's development sector in creating this new report, which brings together a huge volume of data and analysis, which allows us to encourage all countries to make strong social and economic progress by leveraging the power of ICTs. I sincerely hope that you will find this report very useful. Thank you very much.


Yeah, it's my pleasure to give the last talk in the micro corner deaf room this year And we will talk about Meltra and speck down. So this is actually a deliberate misspelling Because in early 2018 when we had a conference call with a customer The sentence came up. Okay, and we need to talk about Meltra and speck down and at that point Nobody really noticed this funny misspelling or pronunciation here So that's sticked with us when we talk about these yeah, vulnerabilities and The idea a better title for this talk then maybe should be the impact of meltdown and spectra vulnerabilities on the L4E microkernel system because everything I will show you here today is Relate to L4E and fiasco obviously so it's more anecdotic evidence instead of having a broad view on every or multiple different microkernel systems and how they deal with these kind of vulnerabilities So when I prepared this talk, I basically started with a couple of questions I wanted to answer and the first one is Where we somehow prepared for these kind of vulnerabilities so how hard did they hit us at the end and maybe some of the microkernel design principles that they help us or protect us from some of the vulnerabilities and At the end, of course, we had to implement mitigations. So what's the impact? Basically the performance impact of these mitigations To give you a quick spoiler No, we weren't prepared in any way Yeah, the time was ripe for these kinds of vulnerabilities to be discovered as we have seen throughout the last year but yeah, we Were not prepared Yeah, the design principles principles helped us a little bit and Yeah, the mitigations or the implemented mitigations. We will see later So let me first introduce you quickly back what meltdown and spectra is. So basically it's a set of Vulnerabilities and modern CPUs related to out of order and speculative execution and Yeah Yeah, these mechanisms are implemented in modern CPUs to Increase utilization of the computation units inside the CPU and to basically the gain performance advantages and Nothing on the Architectural side was wrong in these CPUs, but unfortunately these and out of order speculative execution caused observable side effects and these were the actual vulnerabilities So we had to implement mitigations and I want to start with meltdown welcome and If we look at the Classic virtual address space layout and I picked the 32-bit layout here as just an example So the actual layout may be different But that's sort of the classical layout where you have a virtual address space for the user Ranging from zero to three gigabytes and in the upper gigabyte. Usually the kernel is Visible in the address space and Of course The kernel memory is protected by setting a supervisor bit or some extra bit in the page table entries So that the user cannot directly access the kernel memory But the advantage is if your context switching into the kernel for a system call or something else You basically don't need to switch address spaces or context If you look a little bit further we see that usually a lot of kernels also completely map in the physical memory of the system for example for DMA or something like that so that's for example the case in Linux and the vulnerability of meltdown basically was that a user could start a short execution sequence which the CPU Without checking the correct access privileges caused to read in memory that actually was Yeah, protected by the kernel And then this content of this memory ended up being in the level one or second level cache And then using a side channel analysis The user could infer the data which was under the protection of the kernel and The unfortunate thing was that this was possible on a or is possible on a very high bandwidth in Yeah, where we speak about megabytes per second. So up to 500 megabytes per second So if we look at Alphoria, especially fiasco Fiasco only reserves a fixed amount of the physical memory for itself so for storing kernel data structures like page tables and Something the mapping database So it reserves certain percentage of the whole amount of memory and Maps this of course into the kernel So the first observation here is that not all physical memory is mapped into the kernel but in order to save on page tables and also TLB entries The kernel tries to use as huge pages as it can get on the particular architecture So for example on x86 where it is available tries to use one gigabyte pages so there may be an overlap between the memory the kernel is actually using and Some physical memory that is usually used by the user So this mapping may include some physical memory that is used by a user process and Then we ran. Yeah, this example meltdown example and we were also able to observe some of the data that was Mapped by the kernel or by this big mapping So it was clear. So yeah, basically this picture. So there's also a memory mapped into the kernel But not the complete physical memory So it was clear. We had to implement a mitigation and the obvious mitigation is here to implement a separate address space for the kernel In the Linux community, it's the kernel page table isolation so we call it also page table isolation PDI and basically we move the kernel into its own address space and we also decided to put The kernel into its local address space on each CPU. So each CPU now has its own kernel local address space and Of course, we need to map some parts of the kernel into the user so that The user process has the chance to enter and exit the kernel So we need some basic data structures like the GDT TSS and entry and exit stacks and of course the UTCBs must be visible there Okay, so what's the impact of these measures? So because now for every kernel entry and exit we have basically two context switches where previously there was none So before I show you the number numbers. I want to share some of the meter information So as the baseline for all these benchmarks I did I took the fiasco from January 1st 2018 so from last year before we started implementing all of these countermeasures and I compared it to the version of January 7th from this year You can go check out these commits on our GitHub if you're interested and yeah Verify or confirm these measurements. I used Clang 6 to compile the kernel the user land was compiled with the GCC 7.3 and For a platform I used in core i7 machine. It's a quad core machine with hyperthreading Running usually at 2.6 gigahertz and if you're interested I can send you the raw data I gathered so there are more numbers than I just present here So if you're interested I can share that with you So I then run a couple of micro benchmarks to Quantify the overhead incurred there But yeah, micro benchmarks are not really modeling real-world workloads very well So I also measured two scenarios and the first one is that I ran two alpha linux instances on this machine Each one gets two CPUs assigned exclusively so they're running on different CPUs and I have two fiber network cards wire PCI in this machine which where I one is each assigned to one of the Alpha linux instances when I connected them directly using fiber optics and I measured the throughput between those two VMs To create a sort of more worst-case scenario. I set up These two alpha linux VMs now with one CPUs one virtual CPU each Put them on the same CPU and connected them using a virtual Network link using what I own net so this component was already presented by Jakub earlier this day So they are connected with a virtual network connection also running on the same CPU So that when we are running this benchmarks, we have a lot of context Which is virtual interrupts going on there on this one CPU. So we should see a real. Yeah stress Or this overhead when there is real stress on on one CPU Okay, so to the micro benchmarks first So I used this ping-pong utility which has been there on L4 systems for ages I would say and I picked three particular micro benchmarks there So first sending an IPC message between two different threats running in different in different tasks So that there is a context switch involved we measured also the context or the context switch itself and The switch of a threat within the same context or address space And here you can see or we can see that IPC performance Yeah, dropped quite dramatically So it's only or dropped by 54 percent Basically, so that's more than double the amount Before these page table isolation also the context switch Suffered 30 percent and threat switching is 57 percent. So that's quite a huge overhead so how does that end up in some more Real-world workloads and there we can see so I measured using measured the Network throughput using IPERF And the baseline performance here was not exactly 10 gigabytes per second, but nine points 37 and With using kernel page table isolation, it's slightly dropped, but it's within one percent So I would consider this more of a measuring error or within the usual Yeah limits of these cards so it's not quite dramatic right now The picture looks a little bit different when we have this worst-case scenario running everything on one CPU So the baseline performance is around five gigabytes gigabits per second And now dropping down to three point one seven gigabyte gigabits per second Which is one point six increase in yeah time it needs to transfer these data So that's quite quite heavy all right moving on to to spectra the next guy in the house here and Yeah, just a brief and very very Yeah, high-level Description of what spectra is so spectra vulnerabilities are usually Or are Defined by having an indirect branch prediction which then speculatively accesses data It shouldn't access and these data accesses cause side effects that again can be Observed using site channel analysis and one of these indirect branch predictions is for example this piece of code where you have an index which is checked against an upper limit of an array and if that Index is within the this limits it is used to gather an Value from an array which again then the value is used to access data and within an another array If this is mispredicted or if this is yeah mispredicted so actually the actual index is larger than this Array size, but the CPU Executes this part code path speculatively the value from array 2 may end up in the caches which then can be observed All right for dramatic reason I now drop out of the yeah more causal order of things and first want to talk about spectra and G which was Discovered by Julian as our together with a colleague So they made the discovery that the CPU also speculatively accesses FPU state while the current threat or the current context running on the CPU is not the owner of the FPU so That's bad because fiasco uses lazy FPU switching which means that only Threats that need access to the FPU will get or become the owner of the FPU by the first excess Causing a trap which is then used to restore the original FPU state for that threat and then the threat can continue and this is a sort of your performance optimization because At least in earlier times not all threads needed the FPU so the expensive FPU switching Was avoided Yeah, the obvious mitigation is of course implement eager FPU switching on x86 And the question is does that incur any performance loss? so we benchmark that and now we can see that We add another overhead in the micro benchmarks here, so you can see that it is basically Yeah, 300 to 350 cycles extra which is the amount of Cycles you need to save the whole FPU state on this particular CPU Switching out going back going into more. Yeah real-world workloads. We can see that now We are getting some measurable performance loss here. So let me have a look into my Sheet. Yeah, it's another roughly. It's between 10 to 15 percent For these real-world workloads here and oh, no, sorry. I was In the wrong line here So it's actually four percent between the PTI and the PTI plus eager FPU mitigations So and now we're getting where it is. Yeah, some high performance Applications that might already start to hurt And the same picture is for this worst-case scenario It is also dropping a little bit As you may know or remember there is a lot of more lot more to yeah spectra vulnerability So there's a very long list already and we analyzed all of them and Found that most variants do not work across process boundaries.  So these Applications then have to implement countermeasures by themselves and we also found that usually you require code execution to somehow train the predictor in the CPU so that actually starts mispredicting Then your code so that you can actually start your attack on the on the CPUs so But anyways, we had to or we implemented the mitigations provided by an Microcode update from Intel. So they introduced new instructions to prevent indirect bunch prediction So basically putting in barriers So we implemented that Indirect branch prediction barrier when you enter the kernel and at a context which we implemented the full prediction barrier For that we also had to implement microkernel function loading microcode loading functionality in the kernel Because at that time not all bios is provided these microcode microcode updates. Sorry for confusing this again and Some of these bios is also are not updated until today. So it was a good decision to actually Put that into the kernel as well So we benchmarked that as well and Yeah, the results are not good So you can see that now the bar is even higher So instead of initially having an IPC roundtrip of Roughly 1,500 cycles We are now at 16,600 cycles which is more than a tenfold increase in IPC roundtrip time and So what you can expect from these numbers is that it now also Dramatically hurts real-world Workloads. Yeah, and you can see that here So for the Yeah Scenario one we have a 20% loss in performance. So Just raw throughput of packets between two virtual machines not doing something else and The picture is even darker looking at this worst-case scenario There we have a 75% loss So we are ending up with a quarter of the performance we had initially and that's quite Yeah, bad Before coming to my conclusion, I wanted to share some information on the foreshadow attack with you as well This one was also known as the L1 terminal fault so basically the CPU used Speculatively entry invalid entries from the page tables to yeah speculatively access data and This is bad because for example linux uses invalid page table entries to store for example information about page out memory pages By invalidating the entry and then putting in some matter information into this entry And the data in this entry then was used to access some memory and Indole acknowledged that this Problem or this bug affected the operating system and also as system management mode Also the virtualization extension and also SGX So SGX is not supported in L4 or E. So we didn't care So it was good for us and we also decided that the system management mode has to protect itself So by for example flushing the L1 data cache when returning back into the normal mode But we had to do something about the operating system and or analyze the Impacts on the operating system and the virtualization. So on the operating system. We were lucky We are not or we were not vulnerable because when we invalidate and page table entry We also zero out the page table entry. So there is no Address or any data in it which the CPU can use to do some speculation But VTX especially nested paging is nasty Because the problem here is that the CPU So the guest can now provide an invalid page table entry in its own page table and the CPU Then start translating that in hardware But it's not Translating it down to host physical addresses, but instead uses the translated guest physical address to speculatively Continue execution instead of giving a fault Which then later of course occurs, but at that point we have lost because there are already observable side effects So what we have to do here is we have to implement or load another microcode update into the CPU Which provides new MSRs where we can Read out. It's called CPU capabilities And there is now a new instruction for flushing the L1 data cache Which we then have to do on every VM resume. So every time the kernel Resumes a virtual machine. We have to flush the L1 data cache Yeah, sorry no benchmarks for that one. I Didn't make it for for stem to provide or to measure some some numbers here So time for the conclusion, but there's one more thing before I want to do that and As you may have guessed it already We implemented all of these features as configurable options and fiasco so you can still Go back to sort of the original state. We had an beginning of 2018 So we can turn off kernel page table isolation We can turn off eager fpu switching going back to the lazy scheme and we can also remove the support for these branch prediction barriers and So the interesting question for me at that point was so how do we compare one year later? To the 2018 baseline performance So that's the full picture. So let me put that or move that a little bit around So now the blue and the green bar are basically the interesting ones And there you can see that we slightly improved performance on the microbench marks here So I will tell you in the conclusions why or what I suspect the reason is this So as you may now also guess if You compare the numbers We don't expect much of an influence in the real world benchmarks or in the where we put on real load onto the machines And here you can see that basically the baseline performance is unchanged. So already again within this 1% Yeah window and also for the worst-case scenario. We basically get the same performance so it's if at some point in time we get fixed CPUs then we can go back and basically have the same performance as before Okay, conclusion to finish the talk Well fiasco is still not the fastest microkernel in the world and probably it will never be but We saw that we lost quite a lot of performance due to these implemented mitigations I Would say some of the bugs did not hit as hard as They were hitting other operating systems. So for example in foreshadow. We were quite Safe so especially our customers not using the hardware virtualization extensions. They were safe in the first place and Also for meltdown and we had to do something but it was not as bad as for other operating systems Part of the reason is that missing features helped us in a way that we haven't had them So we don't need to implement countermeasures Like for SGX for example Yeah, we saw a dramatic performance impact So especially for this branch prediction barriers We should consider alternatives compared to the implemented implemented measures via microcode While doing that we had to reconsider some of the legacy implementations within fiasco So it helped us clean up some of the code and we could see it in the microbenchmarks that we were also able to gain some minor performance improvements and the microbenchmarks So for example IO page fault support just We ditched that and moved that over to just general exception handling, which is fine We still have to think about what we expect from the future We were we are constantly asked also by our customers how we can proactively protect against such vulnerabilities because Yeah, there will be more because now this is a new field of to use the FPUs and The related question is what kind of optimization level the compiler uses Because higher optimization levels usually try to employ more at least FPU registers


It's my pleasure now to welcome to our conversation here at the conference Neil Greete from Collaborative Outcomes, a humanitarian engineering organisation. But Neil, you have a very extensive experience as a former Army engineer. You've worked in remote Aboriginal communities in East Timor, in PNG and in Iraq. So, welcome. We're here really to explore the role of engineers in the stabilisation and reconstruction of a community after either a disaster or a conflict. How crucial are engineers, if we're talking about reconstruction, both human and physical? Well, what a wonderful question, because the first thing I'd say as an engineer is it's always wonderful to talk about the profession and say how important it is, because I think it is, but I will preface everything I say and I understand that it's part of a very complex picture, you know. So, the engineering profession has its part to play in that continuum that you described of stabilisation. But I think somehow its importance has been lost a little and that stems a little from the way the engineering profession works. And in some ways the difficulty or the complexity of the problems that we've had recently. Look, could I raise this with you? We spoke to a senior Army person who's working in South Sudan who actually talked about roads. And why I raised this at the beginning is I'm interested in exploring the lessons you've learnt about the relationship between the human relationships, the governance and the physical engineering and reconstruction and getting that right.  Now, obviously that's the exact opposite of what you want to achieve. But tell me about the lessons about how you build the right infrastructure in the right places in partnership with your local country. Well, okay, that's all about understanding the community and the community's needs. So there's a line about in a humanitarian sense that doctors saves lives but engineers save communities. So when you talk about roads and you talk about community, you talk about the marketplace, you talk about the local economy. So you're not talking about the elites, you're not talking about the state and the formation of the state and all those other issues that are very critical in stabilisation. We're talking about that layer below, which is the community. And in fact, all of us, even people who live in a secure, prosperous nation like Australia, community and our roads and our infrastructure are very important. It's about engineers communicating with the community and getting the need. Now, that's something we'll practise at understanding. Now, you talked about how you connect that to the human and social aspects. So in a country that suffered some form of distress, people are looking at to get employment but they're looking to get employment that's valued, not just for the sake of getting a few dollars but something that they did before or something they can really grow into. So in engineering in that sense gives the person the opportunity to be back in an area where they wanted to work and an opportunity to improve themselves and become part of a middle class again, not just a deprived underclass. So it's lifting society up and giving them something to strive towards. So it has a whole social impact beyond just the road. Yes, it's engineering infrastructure to enable human development. Can you give me examples from your time in East Timor or PNG or Iraq where it was done well? What has to be in place in the civil-military interface for it to work well? Right. I'll talk about East Timor 1999 and I was in the Army at that point in time and I was in charge of an Army unit, 21 Construction Squadron, that was responsible for the repair of the roads during Interfet. And during that time we worked on the road from Dili to Ailu and that was the road that Jana Gushma worked. Now on that road there were several landslips that we were repairing. At those sites there was local East Timorese and Australian soldiers working together, hand in hand, labouring, building the walls, the Gabyan walls that you see on mountain slopes to stop slips. Now it was a powerful message to Jana Gushma who would talk about it because that was Australians and East Timorese labouring together to deliver an outcome. But more importantly, it was one that people could see directly. So it was something that was very visible very early. It was a true working together because labour with your hands together really sends a powerful message. But it was also helping the community in the long term because they needed that road. There's an interpretation when you can build things in the wrong spot and assume you know what the community wants. And there's two sides to that story. Sometimes you have to build things to know what not to build if that makes sense to you. Can you give me an example? If you were to actually open up a village and put a road through or provide some means of it, you know, moving things around, you can have a temporary road or a temporary structure or temporary facilities that allow that to occur. And then once it's defined and you've got the marketplace, then the market will evolve to be most efficient. Then that road might not be needed. Now I would say you see examples like that everywhere. And there's a famous example in the United States of a university which didn't put paths down in between the buildings for years. They let the people walk wherever they walked. Then they put the paths down. And so you've got to have a bit of a... Sometimes you shape the environment, the environment then shapes you. So it's not always a negative thing to sort of make a decision to put something in the first place. But it's a very... This is the sort of complexities and thinking you do have to get into. We hear about transitions. And again, I'm thinking about this role of engineering in the context of transitions, both I guess when people come in and that we tend to talk about that getting basic road infrastructure, but also transitions for international players to leave. And I'm interested in your lessons there about how to manage that transition. Yep. And I'd say to you with that, that engineers in that transition piece are one of those connectors that connect across from whatever you might have done, let's call it the military intervention phase or call it the disaster event. And then you have that transition we've been talking about and then recovery and ongoing development. During that phase, engineers come together and they talk to each other on projects. So there's a sharing of professional knowledge as a professional respect that goes across cultural differences. And I particularly would cite my personal experience in Iraq where you could talk as an engineer even though there was a vast cultural difference. So it's funny how you can connect at that professional level in different cultures. And that assists the transition in a way that's almost, it doesn't... This sounds funny. It almost doesn't matter what the high level is doing because it's going to happen at that local level where people communicate on a professional level about their actual deliverables. And I think... Is that similar for doctors? I would say doctors are the same. So I'd say the big professions are medicine. I would say engineers. I would say education. And the rule of lawyers and police. Police talk to police. And I think it's almost like... This is why I talk about that middle ground of transition and connection that occurs which is about community and it's about people. And we're part of that. And you said you were underutilised. So what are you advocating for at this conference in terms of the role of engineers in that getting the conversations going at the community level? There is no network. There is no technique that actually employs engineers to make those connections in that horizontal sense because when we look at everything like this, we look at it in a hierarchical stovepipe breakdown because we look at the structures from top down and we look at how we will have ministries, we look at how that will be all connected. So by the time you get to this layer I'm talking about, it's become very diffuse and it's become confusing and people replicate, they compete. We get all those negative effects. So what I'm talking about now is a different methodology that doesn't look at the traditional hierarchy. Why not concentrate on these networks and exploit them? So that is my key message. Build engineers into your methodologies. We're a resource you're not utilising to the extent that we could offer you value. In that transition, using it across the different phases instead of looking at all of it from top down. My last question is this notion of humanitarian engineering. You now run a company, collaborative outcomes. What's humanitarian engineering? So humanitarian engineering is to connect engineers across the entire spectrum of humanitarian work from disaster relief work, response work and Christchurch earthquake structural engineers, the work they do there through to development, disaster risk reduction, so right through because engineers have skill sets across all humanitarian work. Again, it's that point I was making. It's often done in silos, in particular companies and it's not connected. So we don't actually learn our lessons well as a profession nor understand well what we're doing across. So the essence of humanitarian engineering is connecting the profession and I might add at this point it's good for the profession because engineers were once upon a time great leaders of social change. The bridge is not far away, we're built in the depression. It was all, it excited social change and we've lost our way with connecting to the social outcomes. So this is about connecting to social outcomes. Because that's so interesting you say that because I mean in the end, the thing that fundamentally saves lives is sewage works and bridges, build economies. That's the sort of thing you're saying. You've got to start seeing fundamental infrastructure in its social context. Yes, and that's the lens that we're looking at it. So the profession exists but we're putting a different side to the lens and we're looking at it from a different way and encouraging ourselves to be looking at it more social. And that will therefore, sorry there's great spin-offs here too for engineers is if we can communicate that we do this work we'll attract more people to the profession. Look, thank you so much, thank you. Thank you.