Good morning, you're welcome to the breakfast on Plus TV Africa. My name is Romare Paulsen. And I am Nyamul Agker. You were sincerely apologised that we're beginning the programme a little bit late this morning. But sometimes you plan, like my brother would say, Man proposes God rearranges and that's what happened to us this morning. But we're glad that we're finally here and we're going to make the best use of the remaining time that we have. So we cannot say it's too late. We cannot say we cannot do anything anymore. But for the small moments that we have together, let's make them count. All right. Well, once again, we sincerely apologise. And right now we'll be going to our first hot topic. All right. And joining us to have a conversation is Nik Agulay. This one talks about IMF predicts Nigeria price levels to surge by 23% by 2025. Nik Agulay would like to welcome you and warn you beforehand that while we're talking on this topic, we might need to touch a little bit on some of the headlines on newspapers, just to butter what we will be discussing today. We may start off the press. So we might just mention a few things from the newspapers this morning as we're talking with you. Well, in the meantime, good morning, Nik. And welcome to the breakfast on this day. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning to our viewers globally. Good morning. Good morning to you. Okay. So let's just take some headlines here. And leading with the punch, it says, airbify marketers feel subsidy claims wrong. The writers on this one says, bring evidence of subsidy payments. Look what we retell is airbify marketers. NNPC insists is recovering full cost marketers pegged petrol at 900 naira per litre. Another one here on the punch says, carousel links depleting reserves to debt repayments. And the writer says CBN stops banks from lending 50% of deposits. On the Guardian, we have poor funding model. Positis stole $3.2 billion Eastern Rail project three years after. Another one here is talking about what's happening with the PDP. It says, all eyes on PDP, PDP governors as are you lawsuit withdraw? Autism balance for Damagom. Another one says, federal government kicks as canalist conditions for resumption of trial. Court affirms, can do this sack APC kicks. Why Nigeria's foreign reserves dipped by carousel? If we move over to the Guardian, we have CBN not using reserves to defend Naira. And that is by carousel. We'll also have the train eight. Well, it says contract dispute threatens Nigeria's LNG expansion plans. And also for the PDP says PDP governors move to a vat implosion. Also, the rising price prices of foodstuffs FCCPC deploys operators to markets. And then on the Daily Trust, well, it leads with governors at TECU, we can test strength as PDP neck meeting holds today. And the writers on this one says, are you withdraws suit against party? NWC passes vote of confidence on Damagom. And the North Central insists on completing our use term. So those are the stories, some of the headlines on national dailies. So before we enter into what we're really talking, which is part of the headlines, would like your general comments on some of the headlines that we have on national dailies, rather this morning before we delve into the issue at hand. Thank you very much. Let me start with the foreign reserves. Foreign reserves are depleting, but the civilian governor has come forward to say that he is not using the foreign reserves to defend the Naira. That is to push dollars into the market so that it will show up the value of the Naira. That they are using the foreign reserves to pay debts. That's his explanation. I'm not in a position to say it's true or not, but I have come to understand that governments do tell you something, but the reality is different. And this very government has done something like, for instance, they told us the subsidy is gone. Now we hear that they are paying as much as $600 billion per month for the subsidy. And that is actually in line with the reality because oil prices, as we speak now, are nearing the $90 per battery levels, and so we cannot continue buying petrol at the same price if there were no fuel subsidies. But if it turns out that they are actually using foreign reserves to defend the Naira, I'm not supportive of such a policy because I always ask the question, in whose benefit is a strong Naira? What people see as beneficiaries of a strong Naira are those who want to import stuff into Nigeria or who want to pay foreign school fees or want to pay hospital fees or travel abroad. Those are the people that are interested in a strong Naira. Otherwise, a weak Naira is the one that will help Nigeria to export more things because then our goods will be cheaper. And what the government needs to do is instead of defending the Naira, the government should just roll up their sleeves and start creating the enabling environment to return Nigeria to productivity because the basic problem that this country faces now is low output. We are not producing enough and that is why there is unemployment and that is why there is inflation. Once we return to productivity, then things will begin to sort themselves out and we cannot produce with 3,000 megawatts of electricity. So that is where they actually need to go back to. Talking about politics, for me it is very concerning that the parties cannot even manage their own parties. Parties that want to manage Nigeria, the APC, the PDP, the Labour Party, they want to manage Nigeria, but they cannot even manage their own parties. If you cannot manage your party, then how are you not going to manage Nigeria? So all these parties are embroiled in all sorts of internal issues and they are all bordering on lack of internal democracy. Parties that cannot even conduct elections into their National Working Committee, they look at INEC and they are talking to INEC, you cannot conduct elections in your party. So why am I not a spokesman for INEC? I am saying maybe they perhaps need to go and start cleaning up their own houses before they even think about what happens at the National. So those are some of my first thoughts on the Nisopa headlines. Okay, so how about we move over to the one about fuel subsidy. So it says, L-Refai marketers fuel subsidy claims wrong and that is by the federal government and NNPC. And in fact, Lopubiri has told L-Refai to bring evidence of subsidy payment. He was speaking to L-Refai and the marketers and NNPC insists it is recovering full cost of marketers per petrol at 900 naira per litre. So how about this? Because some people are saying that there is a quasi-subsidy that has been paid because if you're looking at how the dollar had gone up, if we're still paying the same amount, which is about 568 naira from NNPC, then it makes no sense. For every single time when the dollar rises, we expect that fuel should also go up with it. And when the dollar comes down or when the naira gains strength in this case, we expect that it should be better as well. So what do you think about this? Do you think there is a quasi-subsidy that is being paid by the federal government without us knowing and no one is being transparent enough to let us know? There is some sort of magic that is happening in Nigeria that we can continue to buy petrol at the same price when global oil prices are rising because the oil price is actually the biggest factor, contributory factor to how much you pay at the pump. And in Nigeria, it is compounded with exchange rates, since we are importing and not producing it locally. But you will see that within this time that President Chinibu said, fuel subsidy is gone. And we started buying petrol, like you said, at NNPC depoprise of 500 and something, and then the price at the pump of 600 and something. That was almost like a year ago when the president made that announcement and then we got these prices to this level. Between that time and now, oil prices have swung from the $60 to the $90. And there is no way oil prices will be swinging like that. And the price that Nigerians are paying at the pump remains the same. It's impossible except it is some magic. If we are magicians who can work at the mass, but if we are not magicians, I can tell you that the refineries are broad where we are going to buy petroleum products. They are not into charity. They are into business. So immediately oil prices begin to rise. They increase their cost of refining and they transfer those costs into the cost of petroleum products. So there's no way Nigeria can say that, oh, despite the fact that oil prices are rising from the $60 range to the $90 range, the refineries are broad and still not increasing our prices. So the evidence is empirical. Even if the government does not provide any evidence that they are paying subsidies, the evidence is empirical. You can see that there's just no way you can continue buying petrol at this same price. And imagine that dollar rose to $1,800 and still petrol was at the same price. The mass simply doesn't add up. All right. Okay, so let's move over to the crux of the matter this morning. And this is talking about Governors' Way barring PDPs at TIKO weekend from NEC meetings. Now, concerned groups of people, People's Democratic Party PDP, you know, have called on the Board of Trustees about this. What is your take on this whole issue? Yes. So my take is, I take off from the point I let it off during the New Super Review. You know, it's a shame that the political parties in Nigeria who are yearning for our votes to govern Nigeria cannot govern themselves. They are unable to govern themselves. I think they can't govern themselves. They can't conduct primaries, for instance. Political parties conduct primaries amongst their members. And these primaries are so far from anything democratic and it ends up in all sorts of legal cases in court and all that. And these are parties that now say, oh, I have the capacity to rule Nigeria. It's impossible, you know. So all that is happening. And like I said, all the major parties in Nigeria are having these issues. The APC, you know what is happening there now. The PDP is what we're talking about now. The Labour Party, you see what is happening there. Parties that have no coercion. Parties that can't even fix themselves. So as Nigerians, we're in re-trouble. And for me, the citizens need to get more involved in the governance process. Citizens need to work up from where they are sitting. Because where we are sitting now, anything that is thrown at us, we just take it, you know. And we're looking at parties who cannot even sort themselves out. And then tomorrow we're going to trooper to be casting votes for these parties. We should punish these parties at the pause. The parties should be aware that what they are doing, we are watching. And when the elections come, we will punish them. It's better for Nigerians to even go and cast their votes for unknown parties to sweep elections, to punish these major parties. So what's happening in the PDP is not usual. This is the problem. There's a power play between the weak group and the rest of the group where perhaps some of the governors are. This party has never had a next meeting for a long time and the man who is there, a certain chairman, has been there. They have been trying to have the next meeting. It has not been possible. Let's hope that this time around, their terms that they are making, they will be able to have this next meeting.  Otherwise, this is simply too shoddy. Too shoddy, an arrangement, and it's very helpful. I am Professor Chris Mustafa Wokobia Jr., a convener of Country First Movement, and he will also be lending his voice to some of the things that we'll be talking about today. You see, today we're looking at the headlines and also at one of the very prominent headlines here. So we are going to be joined by, we're being joined actually by Chris Wokobia Jr. Good morning and welcome to the program, sir. Professor, okay, as soon as we are able to connect with him, we are going to bring him on to also give us his thoughts on some of the things that are happening right now. We've seen the situation. We'll come back to what we're talking about. We've seen the situation where the APC, these are some of the headlines, the APC is a national chairman, has been suspended by his ward, which eventually carries his name anyway, Ganduja ward in his state, and then the local government executive said no. The state executive said no, and the national executive said no, and now they're blaming opposition party, even though these concerns are coming from the EFCC, some of the allegations that are leveled against him. That's on the one hand. And then we see an ex-governor, who was supposed to be arrested yesterday to face the court this morning, who was smuggled out of his residence by a sitting governor of that state, and we're just concerned about what this art democracy looks like to the outside world. How would you describe these two scenarios? An APC national chairman being suspended and every other person, apart from the word executive, is saying that that cannot stand, even though the court has pronounced it. And then another one, who is supposed to be arrested, an ex-governor, is being smuggled out by a sitting governor, which means they are resisting arrest, and the governor is aiding and abetting, well, for now, forgive me if I call him the criminal. Suspected criminal? Suspected criminal, yes. Yes. So, these are the kind of headlines, these are the kind of headlines that make us to worry. As much as we have the confidence about Nigeria, we have hope in Nigeria, we believe that Nigeria, we rise up from the ashes and take its rightful place in the community of nations. News like this, you know, step us back from that optimism that we carry. Because first and foremost, for the APC national chairman, yes, it is in the right of his word executive to suspend him because that is where your party membership begins. Every party member registers at the world. And the world is where matters that are related to your membership of the party are decided. So, if the world executives have sat and said this man, based on all the corruption cases against him, is no longer worthy to lead the party at the national level and therefore, we are suspending him from his duties as a party man. They are in their right to do so. And for those who are now trying to reroute the world executives who are now trying to stampede the world executives, some are even raised somewhere that they were removed from the office and all of that, they should follow due process. And the due process is either to follow the party's internal dispute resolution mechanism or they should go to court. But coming now to make a kind of grandstanding statement that shows if you are above the law you can do what you want to do. You can decide irrespective of what the law says or what the constitution of the party says it is your word that will be heard. These things are things like it cannot think that should happen in military regimes where you have some military strongman who wins a gun and just gets his decision done whether people like it or not. They should never have a place in a democracy. And for me the parties just need to get their house in order because the way they are carrying on they are showing the whole world that they don't have the capability to be able to manage Nigeria. Now coming to the other issue that happened at the residence of the former Kogiste governor again this is the kind of lawlessness that is being perpetrated by people in the highest levels of authority in Nigeria people that are public servants civil servants the word servant means these guys are serving us they are our employees but the law did over us they run roughshod over the laws the laws that they place their hands on the constitution they buy what they could run and saw that they would defend they are the first to break it and the action of the Kogiste governor yesterday is shameful and we can understand that he is doing everything in his powers to be able to pay back to his master who run roughshod over every structure in Kogiste to make him governor but this is not the way to pay him back he don't pay him back by stopping the arms of the law from getting this man and I wonder how far he is going to run with him is he going to take him into exile outside the country or he is just going to keep him somewhere without the man ever coming out because once he comes out he is going to be in the house of the law and actually the law must take his course if he is found to have wrong things then he has to he has to stand for that he has to pay for that until we get to that point in Nigeria we are not going to have a good country I tell people former US president Donald Trump he is in court he is successful your Biden he is in court his own son is in court that is the way democracy runs whoever you are the law should be above you but what happened yesterday at the residence former Kogi state governor shows that there are some people who are above the law in Nigeria and that should be the case I understand because a group came out to say that it is an opposition party that is trying to rubbish the APC national chairman so that the president will have no option then to remove him from office and I was just laughing what business does the president have to go and influence the party constitution and remove a party chairman in those days party leaders used to be different from political appointees or political office holders now it seems as if if you have the highest office in the state or in the country you automatically become the leader of the party which means you can do anything that you want to do I don't understand how these have things changed or this is just because Nigerian politicians just choose to do whatever they want to do does the president even have that kind of power to remove a chairman of a party the president does not have such powers the president can only influence the removal of a party chairman because like we said he transforms his world and goes through the state executive to the national executive so the party constitution is very clear as to how a chairman is appointed, is disciplined and is removed and the president unilateral on his own shouldn't and I say shouldn't because in Nigeria anything goes who knows if the president decides that a large Ganduja is no longer wanted to be a party chairman but that body language alone the fate of the chairman will be put paid so what we are looking for is that instead of coming up with differences like an opposition party is throwing all sorts of things at the party chairman the party chairman if he didn't do anything wrong should approach the court and plead his innocence because those who are accusing him or wrongdoing they are expected to bring evidence to court to show that this is where he was wrong this is where he did the wrong things and if he didn't do the wrong things he can also show evidence and prove himself and get himself out of the arms of the law that is the way he will pray what can't we just let the law take his natural course this whole issue of saying nobody should be charged some people even go to court to say the court should stop a court process you know it's in Nigeria I see this kind of things and you know and we can never make headway with the development of this democracy if we don't want to be a nation that is being run by the laws until the rule of law reigns supreme I don't think there's any nation in the world that is doing well that is prosperous is thriving that the rule of law does not reign supreme the rule of law has a direct link with the prosperity of nations and the stability of nations and the security of nations and not in Nigeria gets there I don't think we want to even start yeah well we may come back to that the political angle that we're looking at in all these issues but whatever happens in politics affects us as well today there's one of these headlines that is saying that consumer protection agency has deployed its men to markets to go and see how they can make sure that prices come down and I'm just wondering we have we still have a case of the woman the tomato reviewer and the Erisco foods and all that I hear the case is going to be called up today or something like that consumer protection seem to have done nothing actually and today they are deploying people into the markets because the prices of things are really high I don't know what you think about that move because that's what the government is giving as far as we are concerned it's a wrong move a totally wrong move we cannot have a government that is saying I am quoting investors they then coming and the same government is raiding markets and saying your price is too high what is the determinant of the price what is the determinant those federal consumer protection people that are going to be in the market what is the criteria if they see a module of Gary and it is 1000 what how do they not determine that oh this module of Gary should not be 1700 what is the basis what are they using are they the ones that went to the market to buy are they the ones that are cultivating the cassava are they the ones that are not paying jesus at one five to grind the Gary are they the ones that in the light of fuel price hike are they transporting the Gary from the point of production to the point of sale and at how much are they the ones that are not paying electricity at these new rates to be able to produce the Gary are they the ones that are paying the rent in the in the stores where the Gary is being sold what would be their basis for saying your price is too high so you see the problem the problem of inflation in Nigeria you know it's about productivity so I will talk about productivity so go back again full square to productivity you know the basic economics says the price of any commodity or service is determined by demand or supply now in Nigeria supply is what is the terminal prices but people in government think is demand is not demand is supply they are not looking at the supply side of the economics if the supply of a commodity is small the price of that commodity we go up and you know the other day I was talking about telecoms at night providing telecoms telephones to Nigerians because night was only able to provide about 500,000 lines to all Nigerians the price of telephone was very high because the lines were so small people were scrambling for them to the extent that I sold my own wife's phone for 150,000 more than 20 years ago the empty ends and when they came in they increased the supply as we are speaking today there are close to 200 million active telephone lines in Nigeria and the price has collapsed you know just think about 500,000 to 200 million and that is why a sim card now is almost like for free and you don't have to pay what you used to pay so if Nigeria wants to deal with inflation we need to go and look at the supply side of the economics this country is not producing especially food you know in the last data that was released by the national bureau for statistics MBS it says food inflation is now above 40% and what is the reason? 1. the farmers who were in their farms producing small small food for us are not there again driven away by bank-dictory and all sorts of criminality into RDP camps and under presidentinibu it has continued 2. even the farmers who are in farms today they are producing so little food because it is not mechanized they are using their manual labor a farmer who is using his manual labor can only produce as much if you give him a machine like a tractor he can produce 1,000 times more food than he is currently producing 3. we are importing food but because of the increase in the cost of the dollar it has been transferred into the cost of the import so this is the thing that is making food inflation to gallop to this level and if Nigeria wants to solve it it is not by sending federal officials into the market to go and harass business people it is by saying what are we going to do to increase the supply of food in Nigeria and there are short term medium term and long term measures and those are the areas that the government needs to be looking into the policies that the government is making are the ones that are affecting us so much so much so just to wrap up about what we really intended to talk about this morning what will be your recommendations for internal party politics because when they don't get it right within the family they cannot get it right in the national space so what are your some of your recommendations as fast as possible so that we can wrap up my recommendations are that all the political parties in Nigeria must allow internal democracy to happen it is possible they don't like people they don't like each other as a family they have their squabbles but everything has to be done under the law and if they follow due process then it is a signal to us the electorate that they are a party that we follow due process if they are handed Nigeria or the state or the local government to manage and until they do that to me it is very shameful that we have the kind of situation my recommendation is that Nigerians need to come up from where they are we are sitting to those side the parties and the political leaders have no need to fear us and once a citizen regains themselves into that position they are never going to get good governance the difference between Nigeria the UK or US or Germany or France or elsewhere is that the leaders they know that the citizens are fully engaged in the governance process and the leaders are constantly monitoring the mood of the people they are watching the reaction of the people and their actions are based on what they think the reaction of the people will be until we get ourselves into that position where our political leaders will begin to fear us in Nigeria who will begin to look at us and say if I do this kind of thing Nigerians are going to punish me until we get there we are never going to get good governance from Nigeria so for me it even goes beyond the political parties this game has to be played by the people and it is the people who we say no and even their body language we show that if we do this we are going to punish you like this until we get to that position where politicians fear us we are never going to get good governance in this country very much Nick sorry that we had to bide a lot of things on you we just combined a lot of things bombarded you that's the word but it's been a pleasure having you on the show this morning thank you so much it's not a problem Nigeria is ours and everything that is needed to get Nigeria working we will all do it thank you and nice day to have thank you Nick we have been talking with Nick Agule we were concerned about what was happening in the PDP and so many other parties that are supposed to take the lead in our political space but we were combining that with some aspects of the press and we are going to continue with that because we are being joined by Chris Wokubia Mustafa Wokubia Jr the convener of Country First yes we will go on a short break and when we return we will have Chris joining us and we will take more stories from the headlines please stay with us


Hey guys, welcome back to my channel. Welcome back to another fun video.  Before I started baking though, we went to a Christmas festival that was near us and just enjoyed that and got some food to take home and eat lunch before we got started into the baked goods. I love this time of year and enjoying every minute of it right now.  I wanted to bake them for our neighbors.  And then also I'm going to be doing a cookie exchange. So I wanted cookies for that as well. And then just to have them in the freezer for anywhere we might go that we need to take something with us through the holidays. And of course I have my little helpers around. So you're going to see them in and out of this video. So the first cookies that we are going to be making today, if you guys have watched my channel for a while, you already recognize them. They're one of our family favorites and that is maple cookies. If you don't know what maple cookies are, you definitely need to try out this recipe. If you like pancakes, you will love this. If you love waffles, you will love these.  And then you cook the icing that goes on the top. And I would consider it almost more like a glaze. And this recipe is got brown sugar and maple flavoring in the glaze or the icing that you cook to melt on top. So I did actually multiply this recipe by four. So you're going to see here after a while how many cookies this made. But it made for a lot of cookies to give away to different friends of ours and for a nice stash in the freezer that of course will be delicious through the winter time because maple cookies are good anytime of year. But I think they're especially good when you have a hot drink to drink with them and just enjoy, I don't know, it's good seasonal cookies. So it's pretty simple. I will leave the recipe linked below with all of the other recipes that you're going to see in this video.  I didn't as much, but now it's something that's kind of gone into our family. So I am putting these Amazon silicone mats down on my cookie sheets. And I actually didn't end up using these the rest of the day. I just felt like I had washed them in my dishwasher and they smelled a lot like my dishwasher soap. So I was a little concerned that that taste of the dishwasher soap could potentially transfer to my cookies. So I decided to go ahead and just use my pans. And these cookie sheets do so well for the non-stick factor. They really do good even without the silicone mats. So if I can remember, I will leave the link for these cookie sheets below because they are on Amazon.  I know they have them at Lowe's. They are a food grade two gallon bucket and they are so incredibly convenient for having extra dough to just be able to put the dough into the buckets and then still use your mixing bowl to continue on with the next batch of cookies that you want to mix up. So obviously here I'm putting the maple cookie dough into the bucket and then I went ahead and made another double batch because I did them kind of in double batches at one time because I couldn't do any more than that in my mixer or it would have overflowed. And I wanted to show you this cookie recipe. It's out of my mom's cookbook and as you can see it is well worn. So take a screenshot of that but I have a picture of it there and it is our favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe. It's the one that she made growing up and it just doesn't match any other recipe I've ever tried, tasted nothing. And the secret ingredient is instant pudding. So I actually like to get my instant pudding from Aldi. You all know I'm all about giving you all of the budget friendly tips when it comes to cooking and baking because we've got mouths to feed and a penny to save. So I like to get my pudding at Aldi. I find that most of the time it's about half the price of my normal grocery store. So instead of a dollar or a dollar 25 for a pack of the pudding you might be paying more like 59 cents which is an excellent price. So you use a vanilla pudding but I need to tell you you can get very creative with these cookies. So obviously for a traditional chocolate chip cookie like what I'm making today you would like the vanilla but you can make a double chocolate cookie by simply just putting a chocolate pudding in the mix instead of the vanilla pudding. I know my mom has made so many varieties of this. You can get a Oreo. I've done that in a video before where I've gotten an Oreo pudding and crunched up Oreos through that in the mix instead of the chocolate chips. You can do pistachio pudding without the chocolate chips and adding some nuts in. You can really go crazy with the pudding. You just switch up the type of pudding as long as it's the same amount in the box you'll see the ounces there on the recipe. You're good to go and then you can trade out the chocolate chips or take them out. However, you want to do that. So you saw Kailia working. She was my biggest helper this day and did a great job at scooping cookies off the trays when they came out of the oven and putting them on the cooling racks before we transferred them to some flour sacked towels. So here on the stove top I am putting together the maple cookie glaze. I'm gonna keep calling it a glaze because that's really what it reminds me of. And you just melt down the butter along with the brown sugar. You get it all melted together and you're also going to add in some powdered sugar as well. But the main reason in cooking this down is you really just want it to become a very smooth consistency. Get rid of that granular texture throughout and just have a nice smooth sauce that you can pour over each individual cookie. And the way that I have found that this is easiest to do is I get myself a big serving spoon or something like that where it's easy to just kind of ladle it over the cookies.  So I have never tried emitting the milk from this and putting an almond milk in but that's definitely something you could try if you're going for a dairy-free version. I don't see why that wouldn't work but I have never tried it myself. So as you can see, like I said, I made so many maple cookies but these are going to go into the freezer beyond all that I gave away which I did give a lot away more than what I even showed in this video to the neighborhood containers and to friends. I got some other disposable containers to make up cookie trays and it's so fun. I feel like it's something, an art maybe, a home-making art that has been a bit lost in the last couple of years. So I encourage you, whip up some cookies for someone. You will make their day, particularly older people or people that maybe can't accomplish baking anymore. You can really put a smile on their face. So any guesses of why we're dumping out a bunch of Hershey kisses? If you make these every year, I'd love if you comment below and let me know. And these are the Hershey Kiss Cookies. That's what we call them around here. I know that they are also referred to as the peanut butter blossom cookies but they are just delicious. I feel like they are a cookie that has to be made around Christmas time. My mom always made them around Christmas time and we just love them in our house. So the girls, I set them to unwrapping the Hershey Kisses and of course they had a few in between so this job was really fun for them and it was fun for them to press them into the cookies which you're gonna see here in a moment. So these are the containers that I picked up from Walmart. They had them there. I felt like they were nice sturdy containers. I wanted something that if someone wasn't home we could leave it on the doorstep and not have to worry about the neighborhood. Cats getting into them or anything like that. So I just started to put some of the cookies in as they were cooling and just started putting them together so they weren't sitting out and drying out too long and they were already in the container in a somewhat air sealed container. So here you've seen the finished product of the chocolate chip cookies and I actually did them with a smaller scoop. I kind of wanted more of a mini version of them just because I think this time of year bite-sized stuff is kind of fun since we're already getting into a lot of sweets and things. Sometimes you want a variety and to have a few of each so having smaller sizes is also really a great idea. So if you're making up cookies and maybe you're just making one of your favorite recipes make it a little smaller. That kind of gives it a more cookie tray look. So here I am mixing up the peanut butter Hershey. I keep saying Hershey but it's Hershey. Hershey and we do live in Pennsylvania. So we've been to the Hershey Chocolate Factory times before but it's been a while and we've been talking about going again and counting it as a field trip since I homeschool for this year. So we will see since we live only a few hours away from there. But this recipe is extremely simple and it just calls for some shortening, some flour, some sugar, some peanut butter obviously. And I think you could swap out that shortening for butter if you wanted to. I just had shortening on hand. I wanted to use up. I'm not one that normally purchases shortening unless it's something, unless there's a specific recipe that I really need it for. So I just had it in the pantry and I wanted to use it up and this recipe did call for shortening in the recipe. So this is another job that little hands can do.  And I decided to make these a little bit bigger. Sometimes the cookie is almost the same size as the Hershey kiss depending on who's making it. And I prefer to have a bigger cookie with the Hershey kiss in the middle. So that's what we went ahead and did. And then this first batch, I actually baked up exactly like they are on the pan. And then the second batch, I took my palm and just kind of smashed them down just a little bit because as you're gonna see here, when we're pressing the Hershey kisses into each cookie, they kind of sunk down into the cookie. They didn't, the cookie didn't, I don't know, smash out enough or melt out enough when it baked. So the rest of them, I just took my palm and kind of padded it down a bit before I baked them. So here I am putting some of those cookies after they had cooled and hardened into these containers, just adding to it so that I could fill them up. And I know that these are not the most colorful looking cookies. They don't have a lot of sprinkles and icing and all of that. But personally, I don't care for those types of cookies normally. There is a few that I do like that have sprinkles and that stuff on them. But I think a lot of times when I'm looking at a tray of Christmas cookies and picking out what I wanna eat, it's usually things I know that are gonna taste really good and not necessarily something that is going to look really fancy and colorful. So here I am oiling a cookie sheet and I will leave a link below for this oil dispenser. Every single video I put up, I get questions for this link. So I'm going to try to link it for the next couple of videos to make sure anyone that was looking for it can find it and especially it would make a really great Christmas present because you do not have to have cooking spray on hand when you've got that little dispenser because you can just smear it right on and you don't have to have the extra cost of cooking spray. Plus you can put any type of oil that you want to inside of there. That one contains my avocado oil. That is the one I generally use for baking if I'm going to wipe something down with that. It just has a very mild taste and you really can't tell whenever you are baking with it. So now what I'm whipping up is one of my favorite baked treats. I am thinking I'm going to do a sugar-free version of these for my birthday at the end of January just because I'm eating a very low sugar diet just to help out with some of my health problems.  I'm just kidding. But they are so yummy. So basically I'm whipping up a sponge cake. That's what goes on the bottom. So that's very, very simple. It takes very few ingredients. It's a very inexpensive type of cake to make. And so once I have the batter all whipped up here, I'm going to be pouring it into the pan. And while this is baking, we're going to whip up some fun homemade candies, Christmas candies, and the girls will be helping with that. That was their favorite part of all of this. So we'll get back to the next step on the candy cakes. But I decided to double the batch, double the recipe I will be linking below, and make a very, very large pan of these. So you're going to see after a while how many little cakes that made. And here I'm getting out some wax paper because we're going to be dipping some wafers. And this is where I felt like I could pull in the sprinkles and the part that was fun for the girls. This is the part that children really look forward to when it comes to Christmas cookies and things like that. And it's a way to add some color to your cookie plates that you're going to be giving out without having them all over the cookies. So I found these fun mixtures at Walmart. This one was a peppermint mocha mixture. And the girls said that it tasted minty, which it smelled minty with the little marshmallows. And then I just had some of the little rounds, red and green and white sprinkles. And then the other one was called a Christmas tree mixture, which had some golden stars and some other things in them. So they were really pretty. So to dip the wafers, I decided to go ahead and use a vanilla or a white chocolate, white dipping chocolate. And it just was a good neutral. I know that I did some peanut butter things and I always am thinking of different people that don't care for peanut butter or maybe they don't care for mint, that there might be something in the plate that they would enjoy. So I melted this down with a little double boiler, little DIY double boiler. I just put one of my glass mixing bowls on top of one of my sauce pans and threw it in there. And then I transferred the wax paper to a large cookie sheet because I thought, you know, we're gonna be putting a lot of sprinkles on these. We probably should have something with edges so all the excess sprinkles don't end up all over the floor.  And oh, the squeals and giggles and laughter that this project brought on. It was such a fun memory. And I'm so glad that I filmed it so that in a couple years, when they're not quite this little, I'll be able to look back on this and remember how much fun we had in getting ready for Christmas and just enjoying creating something to share with other people and to make someone else's day. So you could do this with other combinations. You could get another flavored wafer. You could use regular chocolate instead of white chocolate. I just chose the white chocolate because I thought it would make the sprinkle colors stick out a bit more than the regular chocolate. Once we had sprinkled them all up, then I just sat them on the table to cool and to harden. They really hardened quickly. I feel like the almond bark chocolate, that's what I usually get. It's in the baking aisle, hardens pretty quickly. So we just sat them aside. Then the next candy that we're gonna make, I don't really have a name for it, but you get the buttersnap pretzels, I almost said cookies. The buttersnap pretzels, the square pretzels, and some Hershey Kisses and some M&Ms. And this is also a very fun project for children. I don't know, there's something about unwrapping Hershey Kisses that my girls love and they find so satisfying and fun. So you just take a cookie sheet and I didn't even put any oil or anything on the bottom. I just did an ungreased cookie sheet and we laid out all of the buttersnap pretzels and then you can put a Hershey Kiss on each pretzel and you're going to set your oven for 200 degrees and you're gonna put the pretzels with the Hershey Kisses on them in the oven for around five minutes. And I'm going to tell you this just because I had not done this before where we did different types of Hershey Kisses, but if we did this again, I think I would do each type of Hershey Kiss separately because they melt at different rates.  You can see them with some like red and green sprinkles in them.  And I don't know, you may be able to see once we're pressing the M&Ms in that they are melted kind of differently. Like the chocolates ones were not quite melted good enough. I probably would have had them in a bit longer, but the sugar cookie ones were very melted. So we pulled them out. So we just did our best, but you wanna press the M&Ms into the Hershey Kisses as quickly as you can. So it was great to have multiple hands doing this because till we were done, they were starting to harden and would have been a little harder to press the M&Ms into. So basically when you press the M&M down into the Hershey Kiss, it kind of forces the Hershey Kiss to melt further into the pretzel. And you have a fun, sweet and salty treat that also adds a lot of color to your cookie plates. All right, so now we're back to finishing up the Tandy Cakes.  You could also try microwaving them. I just find with the double boiler that they melt a little better than trying to do it in the microwave. So while those were melting, I just took some regular creamy peanut butter and I topped off that sponge cake. And you can do a thick layer of this. You can do a thin layer of this. I actually wanna try a different variation of Tandy Cakes where in the place of the peanut butter, I do like a green mint frosting and do maybe like a chocolate mint Tandy Cake. I feel like that would be really delicious. I'm a mint lover, so that was the thought that came to my mind. But once you have your chocolate chips melted, you're going to evenly pour it over the peanut butter. And you wanna be a little bit ginger as you do this because you don't want the peanut butter to kind of mix with the chocolate. You want them to be separate layers because you'll see once I cut into this that you can kind of see the layers. But the part that makes Tandy Cakes so yummy is that chocolate layer of the melted chocolate chips hardens into almost like a chocolate bark on top of the sponge cake. And it just gives you this wonderful texture where you've got the soft spongy cake underneath but you've got this crunch of biting into a layer of chocolate on top, a little hint of peanut butter, and it's just so delicious. So to get that chocolate to harden a bit more, I actually put it into the refrigerator for a few hours to really make sure that it was hardened and I wanted to make sure whenever I cut it that it was in nice squares and it wasn't going to melt all over. So you can cut this into whatever sizes you want to. I will admit, I wasn't quite happy with how thick the sponge cake got on this. It's supposed to be a thinner bar, not quite so cakey looking as you're going to see when I pull these out. But either way, it's fine. It just has to do with the fact that I doubled the recipe and then put it into this pan. I think if I doubled the recipe, I would put it into a slightly larger pan. This is a half sheet, half baker's sheet, I think is what they call it. And I think I maybe would do a full baker's sheet and double the recipe. So it calls for a jelly roll pan for one single recipe. So that's what you may want to follow. But here you can see how perfect and satisfying they look. So perfectly square and these are just so, so yummy. I hope this video gave you guys a bunch of ideas or even just inspired you to bake something for someone else this holiday season. Even into January, after the Christmas craziness is over, you can bake things for people. I think with the cold weather, it's such a nice treat. And so if you're new here, don't forget to subscribe, leave a comment below, let me know what you're up to this holiday season or which of these baked goods looked the most delicious to you and give this video a like and I will see you all in the next video.


Did you know that around 7 million people worldwide lose their lives to heart attacks each year? It's a massive deal because heart attacks are a leading cause of death globally. But have you ever wondered what exactly happens during a heart attack? Sit back and relax because in the next 60 seconds I'm going to walk you through this heart-pounding journey. So keep watching. Imagine your heart. That tireless organ, always working, always pumping. It needs oxygen to do its job, just like any other organ in the body. Now picture the coronary arteries, the vital pipelines carrying oxygen-rich blood to your heart. As we get older, these arteries can start collecting fatty deposits. Over time they can get really chunky or even inflamed. It's like a ticking time bomb inside your arteries.


Hey, welcome. Thanks for coming to our session. We're going to be doing a talk on the Internet censorship and what governments are doing around the world. And we're going to stage it to be like a conversation. So the idea is us three or four with different perspectives are having a conversation. I'll try to be the moderator and create some runway for the three panelists to have a conversation.  No, no, no, stop. So we think we've got some fun things to talk about or at least we think it's fun. So to kick it off, I want to start on my right with Roger and everybody is going to introduce themselves and then we'll just jump right on in. So, all right. So thank you. Okay. Hi, everybody. I'm Roger Dingledine from Tor. I founded Tor long ago. I wrote the original Tor code and now I wear all sorts of hats and I've been paying more attention to the anti-censorship side of things, the anonymity research side of things and the policy side of things talking to governments and trying to help them understand that end to end encryption is important and things like that and that's how I find myself on a policy panel. Hey, I'm Chris Painter. I've been doing cyber stuff for about 33 years now. I started as a federal prosecutor. I didn't start life as a federal prosecutor, but I was a federal prosecutor for a while doing cyber crime cases. Then I went to the mother ship at Maine Justice in D.C. And then I was at the White House creating the cyber directorate and then was the world's first cyber diplomat at the State Department. And now, among other things, I run a foundation that's devoted to cybersecurity capacity building. And Jeff and I share a love for a movie called Colossus the Forbidden Project, which you haven't seen. It's like one of the best movies out there. A little kitschy, but great. That's the original movie where the intelligent computer takes over the world to protect humanity from itself. And all the stories kind of come from that. It's based on a three series of books, but Colossus 1970, 14 years before we're getting determined. That's right. I'm Joel Todoroff. I'm a Fed. I've been a Fed for some time now, working on technology issues really all around government. Right now, I'm working for the office of the National Cyber Director in the White House and some of the projects that I work on relate to this, relate to these questions of internet censorship and countering the misuse of authoritarian technologies. There is one caveat I do have to provide. They're letting me speak, but they said I have to put in a plug for ONCD and the work we're doing and to tell you all to go to the website and look at the documents we've published. And so please don't stop me. You actually have some requests for a comment, right? We do. It's not just look at the documents. Yes, so there are areas where you can actively contribute. We'll talk more on this topic later, but one on open source security. There's a request for information out. So if people are interested in that topic, you can look there. One on workforce and the cybersecurity workforce. So if you're interested in that, please do give them a look. There's really a lot on there. Okay, so let's kick it off. Let's get this party started.  You said censorship and other authoritarian technologies. What are authoritarian technologies? Do we know? I mean, it's not, everything is dual use. So is it really just the way in which the commercial off the self technology is configured? Like the way the router is filtering? Or is it we can actually make that distinction? I feel like we're starting with a really hard question, and I love it. So I don't have, I think a great answer, but I have a thought. And the thought is the general sense we come in with is that technology starts as being value neutral. That we imbue it with values by creating it, by operating it, by owning it. And so a technology or a protocol is not itself going to be authoritarian or democratic. And I think there's a sense in which that is certainly true, right? Maybe that's DNS blocking or IP or something like that. You can certainly imagine a lot of entirely legitimate uses. And you can also see instances where an authoritarian regime would misuse the same technologies, the same protocols to do something like target ethnic minorities or surveil journalists or prevent people from accessing LGBT information on the internet, right? Those would definitely be problematic. And we can say, okay, the values that we're ascribing to this are those from the owners and operators. But, but different than say, I don't know, command and control, commercial command and control for ransomware or NSO, you know, things that have made it there seems to be a threshold that gets you on a sanctions list or on a commerce, you know, was in our arrangement list, right? So there are some. Yeah, so you can definitely do things that are really problematic with a technology. And so I know Chris has some specific thoughts on this. But one of the things that I'll also flag that I think is interesting is this question of our default state of saying technology is value neutral. One of the things the Biden administration is looking at, and you'll see a resurgence in, is this focus on things like standards bodies, which gets to this idea that the value neutrality of technology is a really good first pass. But then you have to start asking, is that the case always? Or are there things where really early in the design and implementation, you might build something in a way that it's predisposed to be used by an authoritarian regime in a way that it's predisposed to enable an anti-democratic or an anti-liberal use of the technology? And how do we think about ensuring that our values are put into the tech stack, are put into protocols, are put into standards from the beginning? And that I think is certainly an area of ongoing interest and an area of ongoing effort. I mean, I think that's right. I think that the technology is largely value neutral. And we've always said that. It's been like a talking point for forever that people said. And I think it's largely true. There is some technology, some things that are clearly designed for purposes that are to subvert civil liberties or to enable unreviewed and undemocratic sort of surveillance of folks. But the problem is whenever we've talked in the past about, oh, we need to regulate this, oh, we need to make this illegal, that's really problematic because of the dual use issue that Jeff talked about. And to give you a good example, we tried this years ago now with the Vasanar. The Vasanar arrangement is this export control issue that's used for lots of different things. But we tried this with software that could be used to either launch attacks or to surveil and the protective liberties. And the U.S. was a big mover of this and we did it. But the problem was it really didn't work very well because it also inadvertently covered security software. So this is attention, which I think is very difficult, but I do agree with you. I think there's some ways you can architect the tools, the technology that clearly are meant in a bad way. But at the same time, it's a pretty slippery slope. So figuring out where that line is, I think is very difficult. And I'll disagree so that we get a good panel here. So I keep hearing that technology is inherently neutral. It's what you do with it that matters. But you have to look at the architecture. Some technology is inherently decentralized that empowers a broad group of people. Some technology is inherently centralized that ends up centralizing power. So you might start off thinking the technology side is inherently neutral, but no, technology is inherently political. And you need to think through what people are going to use it for. Because so if you're going to end up, if you're not thinking it through, then you're going to end up reinforcing the existing power structures. And if you want to build something that changes the power structures, that's political. And you need to think that through with the architecture. Wait, I have to challenge it a little bit. And I would agree with you it's political, but I would also say it's inherently now commercial. And so the commercial pressures are centralized for efficiency. And the market forces now are essentially creating pools of technology then that it's like an attractive nuisance. If you only have to provide one subpoena to Gmail and you get half of the email accounts on the planet, boy, that's really convenient.  And so maybe it's not also political, it's a side effect. Or the political side sees the market force and says, wow, this is great for us. Yeah, that centralization is super scary. And the centralization is a choice made by people when they're building their architecture to centralize the power or decentralize the power. And that central is it's not just one email provider, it's not enough CDNs, not enough undersea cables between continents, not enough app stores. Yeah, I mean, look, I think decentralization is one area. But when you get beyond that, I think it's tough to draw that line again and say, okay, it's you're right. But then how do you actually get to that next mile? And it looks this and that technology is policy too. I remember having a conversation with the state department with the Chinese and the cyber administration of China. And for some reason we were talking about public-private partnerships, which seems like a pretty good thing, right, normally? And they said, oh, you're absolutely right. We need public-private partnerships because we can't monitor the internet alone. We need their help. Not what I had in mind, but... Yeah, just to pick up on that quickly, riffing off some work that my colleagues at the state department have done, if you look at censorship around the world right now, more than two-thirds of the world's population is, you know, is having their human rights on the internet infringed based on these repressive regimes, surveilling them or censoring them on the internet. And they are spending billions of dollars to build out ecosystems that enable surveillance and censorship at scale in real time, right? There is a clear push for... I wouldn't... I think I would use like the idea of centralization versus decentralization a little differently. The idea of moving away from a free and global internet to essentially a series of isolated networks of censorship and surveillance that an individual repressive regime would want to run often against their own citizens. And they would want to centralize in the sense that they want the authority, but not centralized in the sense that there would be global interconnectivity where they would have to reach out to a different central location to engage in their sort of mass surveillance. And that's been going on for a while, because, you know, Hillary Clinton, when she was the secretary of state, gave a speech launching the Freedom Online Coalition, a group of a lot of countries that championed Freedom Online, and she talked about digital bubbles, authoritarian bubbles around the world. And that's just been accelerating, I think, since then. And that's, you know, again, it's hard to stop that from happening. And we've gone from the promise of the internet's the greatest thing in the world. It's the greatest democratizing force in the world, too. It's also the greatest way that repressive regimes, and not just repressive regimes, we'll get into this later, can do things that are not great, and includes monitoring and controlling their citizenry in ways that they haven't been able to before. The... just one other thought on the centralization, the thing that really bothers me is the, um, we have no plan B for, uh, Roger served me to say this, we have no plan B for, uh, certificate authorities. So, if, if something goes wrong with TLS or certificate authority structure, there's no, like, we'll use DNSSEC, and we'll push out Dane, TLSA records, and then the web will keep going, right? There's no agility. We're all in, and the browsers win away. All the browsers now have removed support for Dane and TLS certificates. The only thing that's using it now are, uh, mail servers. So I guess if the certificate authority system sort of collapses, or is under attack, or is subpoenaed, or, you know, uh, let's encrypt blows up, and that's 90 something percent of all certificates. If let's encrypt goes down, we'll be able to change mail. These mail servers use Dane, but nobody else will be able to browse the web. That really worries me, that we have no backup planning. Governments know this, and governments that want to suppress know. I, I just saw a, uh, a takedown against an onion domain name for, I think, a white supremacist website. The registrar in Greece pulled the TLS certificate name for, it, that's just, that's gonna be the start. I'm, I'm happy they did that, but I'm just saying that soon we'll be seeing subpoenas, or we'll be seeing takedowns on TLS certificates, and since browsers are now default, that is the gateway, right? And we don't have these conversations, and we build these technologies that now we have no agility, so don't be surprised, you know, when the world you describe happens. Um, and so when I look at my Rolodex of who do I call what's the backup plan, I get Roger. I don't get five Rogers, I get one Roger. There is one option kind of in its tour, and it's not perfect, but we don't have a thriving ecosystem of five tours, you know. Uh, that, that worries me. You know, I want you to talk now about your unbounded adversaries. Yeah, so part of the, the reason why I am thinking about the policy side of things, and it, it's fun to have the balance here, because we've got a policy person saying, yeah, yeah, we're, we're, we've got the policy stuff under control, but if only you could build better tech for us, then we'll be able to keep people safe. And here I am, the technology side, saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're, we've got tools and they work pretty well, and millions of people are using them, but if governments are unbounded, if they're breaking their own laws, if they're, uh, attacking everything at will, if they're putting billions of dollars into harming people, uh, we can't solve this with technology alone. If they, like in China, uh, in the Uyghur province, if they end up sending a person to live in the house of each of the families there, I can't, Tor is not going to be what they need. This is, uh, like a social problem, a political problem, a policy problem. So, yeah, the reason why I'm, I'm thinking broader than just the technology is, uh, increasingly we're seeing governments that, uh, that do more than technical attacks, and we need to tackle that at every layer. This is, this is your, um, censorship implies surveillance models. Yes, so, uh, we used to think of this, so Tor started as a way to let you browse the web more safely, meaning metadata, communications, metadata protection, so people watching, you can't learn what you're doing, and then it, it morphed into a censorship resistance thing, and the key to realize is, they're actually the same thing.  So, it's actually two sides of the same coin, um, so if you're only thinking about censorship, you should be thinking about surveillance. If you're thinking about surveillance, the next step to think about is censorship. These are both, uh, uh, two sides of the, the same issue, and that leads me to also think about end-to-end encryption and other attacks at the, the policy layer that are related to both censorship and surveillance. I, you know, I, I think that the issue is, you know, there's policy for liberal democracies, and there's policies for repressive regimes, and it's much harder to change the policies of repressive regimes, and so, uh, you know, but, but there has been some good work that's been done. But, but if they're buying the technology designed for a liberal democracy. Well, that, that's what I was about to say. So I think there's been some good work that's been done. I mean, for instance, the White House issued this anti-commercial spyware executive order, got 10 countries initially, I think it's up to maybe 15 or so now, or maybe more than that, countries have signed on to this. Now, they're all the, the good people, or the, what we think of as more of the good people. But there are things you can do to exert pressure on these more repressive countries. Maybe not China or Russia is easily, but a lot of the countries are sort of in the middle where you can have an impact, and you have to use the full suite of policy tools you have. And that's not just cyber stuff. That's trade and other things you can do. And I think there's been much more awareness and movement toward that recently. I think the other problem though is, you know, we think, we think that the world is binary. There's the bad guys and the good guys.  They're worried about misinformation and disinformation. By the way, my, my suggestion to Jeff earlier was, next year, the misinformation village should have the, the sign out in front of a different room. So that would, I think it would be, they did that when the, when the Soviets invaded Prague, they changed all the street signs. So it's good misinformation. So, you know, so I think that the problem is you have to target the repressive regimes, but you also have to think of the liberal democracies and where they're going and what paths they're taking on these issues. And that involves the gnarly debate around encryption and all these other things. But where, where can we make sure that we have the kind of transparency rule of law and they're actually following the laws, as was said too. And that's, that's not just an issue for the cyber community. That's an issue for the entire, you know, policy community and all the tools that we might have that might change behavior. Yeah, I, I largely agree with what everyone was saying. I think one of the things we're looking at in the office of the national cyber director is that question of what's the backup plan, right? Because to some of these points, Tor is an excellent tool in certain instances. But if a government sends some people with guns to the one cable landing site in a country and says, turn it off. Tor doesn't help you. So the question is, what do you use when the censorship model is a man comes in the room with a weapon, right? Or a complete internet shutdown. And there will be things that we can do with technology. There will be things we can do with policy. And for us to have efficacious solutions, I think we have to work it together. That's part of why we're here. I hope that's part of why we're talking about it. That's part of why there's going to be a workshop later today to hear from you and to get an exchange ideas. But I also think we need to think of this almost from a network stack sort of layer. To say, if someone is going after layer one to engage in censorship or surveillance, how do we ensure that there's security at that layer? If people are targeting, you know, another layer of the stack, how do we ensure there's appropriate security at each of those layers? So I guess we didn't talk about this in the ready room, but maybe just talk about domain fronting, maybe first, why it's useful, but then why now it's people are not supporting it, right? Vendors are not. Google, I think, is stopping it. A lot of cloud providers don't domain front anymore, and that's what Signal Messenger really relied on for some protections. So we're not a repressive regime so much, but again, market forces are making it harder. I'm looking at you. Okay. Yeah. So domain fronting is one of the tricks that we have at the technical level for getting around censorship. And the way that it works is you find a cloud provider like Google or Azure or Fastly or Cloudflare, and you do a TLS connection, and on the outside of the TLS connection in the SNI field, you list a domain that they're not going to block. And then once you've done the TLS connection inside the encrypted channel, you do a host header for the domain that you'd actually like to go to. And technically, this is violating some sort of spec somewhere in IETF land, but it works in most places until a few years ago when Telegram was using it to get around blocking from Russia. And then Russia said, hey, Amazon, could you quit that? And Amazon said, why? Yes, Russia, we will turn that off. Thank you, Russia. And so Amazon stopped it. They convinced Google to stop it. They convinced Microsoft to stop it, but Microsoft said they were going to stop it, and then they didn't, which is pretty cool of them. But they're eventually going to. So some CDNs allow it, but many of them don't these days. And it's one of the better working tricks, though you have to pay cloud prices for the bandwidth you send across it. So some circumvention tools like Torr use domain fronting not for all of the traffic, but just for the signaling in order to have a reliable channel to set things up, and then you fall back to some other channel. But yes, it's a trick that is closing down as the Western huge companies change their mind about letting it work. Right. And so no fight in the UN necessary, right? That's how much we really care about these technologies and the rights that they can support, right? ITF is not racing to formalize it into a thing to support the human rights aspect. It's just disappointing. Although participating in a lot of UN negotiations, getting consensus, because the only way to get consensus is near impossible, because all those repressive regimes are there. Right. And just for people's awareness. What do I mean? It's not even brought up. We're not even saying, is there a letter from the White House saying, hey, Google, don't worry about it. We got your back, right? Or some, I know, 50 state's attorneys general saying, don't worry about it. We'll tell Russia, you know, to go stuff themselves. No. There's not like a state or a local tribal territory. I mean, there's nothing. And I don't know if it's because these are kind of technical things, and it just doesn't reach awareness of policymakers. Or is it actually like they thought it through and said, no, that's not worth a fight? I mean, I suspect it's part of that. I suspect that the policymakers just don't understand the technology and what it's doing. I suspect part of it, too, is when you go to the companies, look, they're there for profits, right? So it's much easier. But the poor is paying for it. No, no, but it's much easier now with Russia for them to say, no, that it is for China. And so we have to kind of come over that. We have to figure out how to disincentivize that contract or incentivize the good conduct. And part of its government, what governments can do, including our government, but if it's just our government, that's not going to do it either. And just again, for people's awareness, there's a lot of discussions in the UN now on all these different issues. One is they're now negotiating a cyber crime treaty, which is pretty far in the negotiations. And these issues, the procedural issues of cyber crime and how you get evidence, some of these issues are being covered, not in this technical detail, which is part of the problem, I think. But this may be a way to push the more repressive regimes to have more things that allow them to do stuff or not. And so I think the West is very concerned about enabling repressive regimes to get more access, but at the same time trying to get law enforcement access. And that's a difficult issue. So this community, I think, should follow those kind of things and make sure that you at least aware of what's going on. Just like you should comment on the documents that you talked about. One thing that I'll add is, so in March, there was a big event in DC, a summit for democracy where countries around the world came together, there was one before. This year, one of the focuses included countering the authoritarian misuse of technology. And there was a call to action to the private sector that went out. That did not talk about any one specific protocol. They talked about things that is sort of slightly higher layer of abstraction for a lot of reasons. But certainly there's an administration interest in exactly this. And you are seeing press coming from the White House saying, we need to figure out ways to counter this. There was specific discussion of things like VPN and ensuring VPN availability and that you could connect securely and safely to things like VPNs, along with some other things sort of explicitly identified and then otherwise an invitation to engage primarily with our colleagues at the State Department on how you could do this and how you could work collaboratively with the government to ensure that people did have freedom to access securely and safely the real internet. Do you think the government then could use sort of the power of the purse to sort of set priorities so like your cloud provider, I don't know, is in alignment with Russia proposal one, two, three for censorship. So we're not buying from you until you are not in alignment with authoritarian censorship model one, two, three. And the cloud provider wants to have a seal on their home page that says, look, we comply with the we're not censorship friendly. Then, you know what I mean? Like, it doesn't have to always be a policy. It can be a choice. It can be a labeling regime. It can be a way of the government saying, hey, we only buy from, you know, green energy providers. I don't feel like I have like a fully established answer, but I'll say microcosm of this that I think is pertinent does circle back to that executive order about commercial spyware and certain commercial spyware entities that were taking actions that were viewed as problematic, really divergent from our interest, enabling things like the surveillance of journalists or dissidents and the administration pushed out this executive order saying, hey, we're no longer going to be using these technologies that pose a national security risk that pose these sort of broader risks to us. And I think that is perhaps an example of this power of the purse of saying, we're no longer playing with these entities. And it was followed up with sort of more discreetly with some entity listings. So those are the Department of Commerce label certain entities making it very hard for them to do business that ends up being sort of export restrictions and really just sort of gums up a business. The combined entity's list or what do they call it now? It used to be you had to watch two or three different lists to see if you're having a personal felony. Now there's a combined list, I think. I think that's right. Yeah. But your idea is an interesting one. There's two questions about this sort of labeling thing. The federal government is just recently, and we've been talking about this for 30 years, or maybe 20 years, moved this idea, maybe a good housekeeping, seal and approval for cybersecurity and stuff. That's been, you know, Singapore's done that. It's happened in other parts of the world. The EU has an act. And the US is moving forward and there's been legislation on the thing. So that's, that may be a way to deal with it. But I wonder how much that's going to actually affect the market. Are people going to, outside of a smaller group people, are they going to value software more because they say we're human rights compliant? Hopefully they would. I would hope they would. But it's more about signaling the values of the government. And look, no authoritarian cloud provider has that seal. What a, what a shocker, right? You've got to draw some bright lines between the difference between team rule of law and team authoritarian. Because if you don't, they're just going to be bled together. They're all sitting in the same room in the IETF, right? They're all sitting in the same room, wherever. They're all whistling when they have standards. Yeah, so we need a way to say, look, how we are different. I think labeling is an important step here. But more and more, we're seeing a shift in how the arms race goes. So it used to be Western companies sell deep packet inspection tools to repressive regimes. And they use them to harm their citizens. And so it would be a technology, like they look for this header. We change it to this and go back and forth. But here are two examples that we've seen recently where we're shifting how the arms race goes. One of them is in Turk Menestan over the past few months. So the Ministry of Censorship in Turkmenestan is basically block listing the whole internet. They block Fastly. They block Cloudflare. They block Akamai. They block most hosting providers. And so we've been running some tour bridges on residential IP addresses. And it kind of works sort of. But it turns out that they're taking bribes to unblock certain people in Turkmenestan.  And now you get real internet. So this is not something I can solve at a technical level. Another challenge that we're seeing in China recently is it's not. So China has a policy to censor the internet, sure. But they also have accidental economic byproducts of how they're growing. Because so you're there you are in China. You want to use a website in China. Everybody wants to do that. So they buy more bandwidth. They make the pipes bigger. They make the bandwidth inside China really good. But nobody's adding pipes from China to the rest of the world. And that means that if you're in China trying to get to Google, even if they didn't explicitly block it, you've got 15% packet loss because too many people are trying to use two small pipes. And for economic reasons, they're not bothering to add that bandwidth. So that's a case where it doesn't matter what code I write. There's not enough bandwidth for people to do what they're trying to do. And that goes back to the economic challenge. There was sort of a comment maybe, or maybe we can look at it just briefly from the other lens. Who are the people that are being censored? Because when we say that, we don't necessarily mean bad guys. What are these people just exploring the internet and the regimes are afraid they're going to learn about equal rights or something? Like what is the danger in these conversations you're having that justify this level of intervention and billions of dollars spent? What is the fear? I mean, there are lots of vulnerable groups. And depending on the country, they could be religious groups. They're often political groups that are being targeted. Back to what you said about the State Department. Part of the State Department, the Democracy and Human Rights Bureau, has for a long time funded a lot of projects, including yours, among others, to try to get around censorship. And it is kind of country specific. But it's not just a lot of countries don't have the capability or the bandwidth to censor everything or to look at everything. China may be a little different. But so they target a lot of these groups who they view as threats to their own political stability often. And those are the groups that are most at risk. But not only those. I mean, it could be LGBT. It could be there's a whole wide range of groups, depending on the country, depending on the authoritarian regime you're in, that are targeted. And you know, people don't justify it that way. They justify using it. They justify it on the basis of security. It's the security of the state. That's the overarching justification. One of the things they thought was a big advance at the State Department when I was there and it's continued in the new bureau they created is to integrate human rights with security. And a lot of times, when we go to other countries and talk about cybersecurity, they say, oh, that's great. That's a way for us now to control our citizens. No, no, no. You have to think about the human rights aspect. And you have to look at them together rather than silos. So, yeah, I think it's and again, it goes back to the point of like, well, how do you change that? You can change it by using the tools you have economic and other tools to try to change that country's view because basically the regime that's in power kind of likes to stay in power. And so it's hard to tell them don't do that because they're going to do it anyway. And so how can you exert pressure? And some of it's commercial pressure. Some of it's not just governments but companies too. As we've seen with Russia. Yeah, so in our experience, it isn't that the censorship ministry sits down and makes categories and goes to find websites that match the categories. It's more about the job of the censorship ministry is to never get noticed by the authoritarian leaders in charge. So every time something goes wrong, they're embarrassing the head dude. And they need to react and start blocking the things that are embarrassing at that time. So it grows organically where maybe some particular activities in the news and then they have to shut that down. And this same pattern happens not only in China where they have to guess what they should try to block next but it also ends up happening in Denmark and Australia and Sweden and so on where they don't have a censorship ministry but whatever they call their online security group ends up deciding that they need to block Pirate Bay or wherever it starts and then it bleeds into blocking more things based on reacting to whatever is politically embarrassing at the time. But it's also the multiplying effect of not just the state doing it but creating policies that are so vague that the companies, the ISPs, and the others and this is what China does doesn't know where the line is so they over-enforce. They go further than they need to do and it's even worse and the state's fine with that because they're like over-enforcements better than under-enforcement. So then how do we, going forward then I guess in your sort of utopian vision give us, give me a where are we at in five years? Where are we at in 10 years? I mean if the team rule of law undecided and authoritarian, if this continues to sort of metastasize, do we have sort of what, three buckets of the internet, right? Your model of where does this leave us? Because what I don't see is any forces that are, oh, everybody's going to have to use the exact same technology with no censorship built in. That's not a thing. So that means censorship will continue to evolve and so it's important that we have policies to either make technology instead of be neutral, let's make the technology at least if we're going to federal government, it's going to buy, it has a bias toward good, whatever good values are, it's transparent or accountable or so maybe one side we have to shift the bias toward good because we know the bad is going to continue. When you look in your crystal ball, tell me what you see. Do you want to start? Yeah, so I don't have as much optimism as Jeff hopes I do. I'll bring you a bit more pessimism. So the Iran thing that I've been watching, so Iran's goal is to build a halal internet. They want to isolate themselves, they want to cut off all the outside internet connections. And to do that, they need their own Facebook, they need their own Google, Gmail, their own everything. And they're not big enough as a country, as an ecosystem, as a software ecosystem to have that.  And then a previous administration in the US called up Google and said, hey, can you like sanction Iran? Can you like turn off all the Gmail accounts for people who speak Farsi?  And that means that when people in Iran tried to get to their Gmail, Google was the one that blocked them. And that was a sanction, but the result was it's easier for Iran to end up with their isolated halal internet because there's nobody complaining anymore. You blame Google for trying to turn off your Gmail account. You don't blame your own government anymore. And we're seeing the same thing in Russia where various telecommunication providers in the West are like, we're going to sanction Russia. We're turning off their telephone connections.  That'll show them. They'll have to stop the war now. And the result is that they're letting Russia isolate itself in the same way. So are we going to end up with one amazing internet that everybody's on? Or are we going to end up with each of these countries? China's doing great at not building the rest of the bandwidth for people to get to the rest of the internet. Russia is going to try to isolate itself. Iran is excited to do so. They haven't succeeded yet. So that's where we're going unless we figure out something at the not only technical level to fix it. So I'm a recovering lawyer.  But I think there are some good signs and bad signs. I mean, the bads, I agree with everything you said. If you also look at the Freedom House report of the reports every year on the state of freedom on the internet, and it's gotten progressively worse and continues to get worse. So that's not a great sign. And I do think that there's more and more countries who are turning to this more. There's also a lot of political churn where more right wing parties are winning larger and they're more disposed, predisposed for this kind of activity. And so that's not good either. And I do think you're seeing this kind of vulcanization, which I wasn't allowed to use that word in state because I couldn't say splinter that at the time. You're seeing this happen. I think that's going to accelerate, too. The good things, though, the positive things, I think there's more awareness of this trend now. I think there's more desire and ability and actual political will to use tools that we wouldn't use before to try to counteract this. And that's true both with cyber threats, but also with these threats as well. I'm really heartened by the executive order on commercial spyware. I'm heartened by the fact that a lot of countries signed onto that. I'm heartened by the fact that a lot of those countries said we're going to work together to promote this. When I go to these negotiations at the UN on the Cybercrime Treaty, I'm heartened that there are lots of countries who are banding together and saying human rights has to be a core part of this treaty. Now, if there's other countries that say no, well, not for the human rights already, but it's good that you have these countries do that because if it's a process where these countries are strong enough and pushing back, you're not going to get the kind of repressive language in an instrument that's global. But I acknowledge the challenges. And I wish it was going to get better. I think it's got a long way to go before we get there. But I do think there's more policy awareness than there ever has been. And so that will help. It's definitely going to be hard. There's no doubting that it's going to be hard. But I think it's important that we start with the vision for where we want to go and that we aggressively try to move towards that. And I think you're seeing some of that. The executive order, the National Cybersecurity Strategy, if you just look at the introduction from President Biden, it talks about this idea of an affirmative vision where everyone has access to this open, free, secure internet you're seeing from the Summit for Democracy to all of these interactions in the United States and with a cluster of allies around the world, a push towards saying, hold on, we are realizing this is a big problem. We're seeing the trend line is in the wrong direction. And we need to do something as a government. We need to do something in partnership with the people making the technology to stop it and reverse it. So, OK, I want to go back to something you can do. I agree something you said. One of the problems is if you try to restrict those countries, you're absolutely right. They develop their own capability. They become more isolated. And that's true with the technology generally. We've seen this with chips and other things where China is now developing this stuff because they can't get it. So you have to figure out where that balance is and how you can influence it. Yeah, so you mentioned something about, oh, no, I'm totally forgetting it. What in the world? Oh, so the companies are essentially saying, oh, we'll just disconnect fresher. We want to make life more miserable for them. And partially that's because there's no kind of coordinated message from the government saying, OK, IT providers, please help us block. They're doing it a lot of times because they think it's the right thing. And so it seems like maybe there's a role for government to say, no, we need very specific targeting against sanctioned individuals, not all of Rust Telecom. We just need to do it in these sort of net blocks or not the education ministry or whatever, but the arms ministry.  Yes, I know this isn't a perfectly satisfactory answer, but I think this is hitting on this really important topic of how the government message is when we might want something blocked or when we might want something enabled, even if that's counterintuitive to a business. And so later this afternoon, you all here at DEF CON, the policy space, there's a workshop. State Department is going to be there along with ONCD, along with Roger and some others. And we're going to be able to talk about that when there aren't cameras in some more detail. And so I would encourage those of you who are interested in this very particular topic to come down and we'll have more conversations about that. But it is certainly an area that the government is actively thinking about and is actively sort of trying to work through some of the nuances on, but where at this point there's not come for talking to a camera. And that workshop is this afternoon at 2 o'clock in the policy at DEF CON area. Okay, we're rolling into the final four minutes, four or five minutes. So I'm going to start on my right with Roger for any final thoughts, anything you want to leave the audience with?  Please spread this all with your friends. I'm going to, after this session, answer whatever tour questions you may have over at the tour booth in the vendor area. And as a last thought, EFF launched a campaign a few days ago to try to get more tour relays at universities in particular. So it doesn't have to be an exit relay, it could be a non-exit relay. So if you're connected to a university, please consider running a relay for EFF's campaign. And my positive thought is that like I said, there's more awareness of this. And I really think that this debate needs all of you. I mean, it needs people to be weighing in to raise these issues because a lot of times policymakers think, oh, that's too technical. I don't know what the implication is. So explaining what the real implications of this are and what this is going to mean is important because it flags as an issue. And that's the beginning of any kind of real policy debate. But you can only be in that conversation if you're in the room. So it's really incumbent on the people having that conversation to spit out these RFIs, right? Give us feedback. And I was going to say that. And that doesn't necessarily mean you being in the room, but it means that the people who are having these conversations, and increasingly they are. And we talk about this multi-stakeholder model, which means not just government people, but they should be talking to other stakeholders, including this community. And they're trying to develop mechanisms. Some countries are better than others. The US is trying to do a lot more of that. And I think trying to take advantage of those. And frankly, a lot of the US people are here at DEF CON for exactly this purpose. So making sure that there is that connection. And you're at least aware of it. And then you can raise the alarm bells in your own circles, too. And I think that helps. I think for me, one of the big points that I'd like to get across is the idea that security and human rights are actually two sides of the same coin. That they are not opposite sides of a scale. And if you are architecting a system, you're building something out, thinking about the security is not just going to be good for your users here, but can potentially enable people around the world to circumvent a censorship regime. That if you build an architect your system with, in the back of your mind, the idea that an authoritarian may be looking at this, may be trying to use it for a malicious purpose. But you might be able to build an architect in a way that enables someone to reach out and report government corruption. That enables someone to reach out and talk about human rights abuses going on in their country. That is good, I think, for business and also good for all of us, for the world, for human rights. And that is something that we can do as we ensure that our products are secure, sort of from the get-go, that encryption is strong, that the protocols don't have a button to say, you know, mass surveillance, click here, and you just click here, right? Those are things that we need to think about from a technological perspective.  We're in a policy space. You all are actually building. And building with that idea of human rights in mind, I think, is really important. All right, thank you so much for being at our panel on internet censorship and hope to see you around DEF CON. Thank you. Thank you.