Good morning everybody. Welcome to those who were able to brave the rain. I know that we'll be expecting more, but we want to get underway. My name is Nancy Lindborg. I'm the president of the United States Institute of Peace, and I'm just delighted to welcome everybody here this morning. For those who are watching online, you can follow us on social media with at USIP. And for everyone, especially since we have innovation and technology in the program, you can tweet using hashtag rule of law tech. And I encourage everyone to check out the new USIP podcast at usip.org backslash podcast. That will include today's event, as well as other programs that look at similar topics. For those of you who haven't joined us before, USIP was founded by Congress in 1984, dedicated to the proposition that peace is very possible. That it is essential for our national and international security, and that it is very possible. And part of what we do is work on the possible, on taking good ideas, research, innovation, and translate that into policy and into practice by working with partners around the world to find out how to make peace possible. And one of the things that I think all of us see over and over again is that in countries that are convulsed by conflict or stuck in those spin cycles of conflict, what they are all uniformly missing is a state society compact that assures the citizens that they can rely on security, that they have access to justice, that there is a rule of law that enables them to have confidence in their government. That's really the core. Every conflict country is different, but they almost all uniformly share that characteristic. And we therefore established what is called the IMPROL project more than a decade ago. And I hope many of you are either watching or with us here today. It's now an online global community made up of more than 3,000 rule of law practitioners from 100 and 20 different countries and 400 organizations. And this is an online community working together to understand how better to improve rule of law in conflict affected environments. So we continue to work on these issues as well through projects with peace tech labs and with our global campus online platform which will host a rule of law course later this year. So all of that is to say that we are delighted to be co-hosting this event today with Justrack, the justice sector training research and coordination program. And we're delighted to partner with Justrack. We share a similar dedication to promoting rule of law and to looking at how to reform rule of law in conflict affected countries around the world. We have adjoining missions and we are natural partners. This is the second year of the partnership. Last year we convened to look at some of the very tough issues that practitioners face in the field. How do you deal with the lack of political will? What are the incentives for rule of law reform and how do you deal with often very limited resources? So I'm happy to be reconvening today with our partners to look this time with the view to the future. Especially at a time where you have a lot of focus on the data breaches, on privacy concerns, we've just had the Facebook hearings. We don't want to lose sight of the fact that technology is also an important tool for good and how do we leverage it to accomplish the rule of law goals that we all share. All of these topics, innovations in law enforcement and how social media is changing the relationships between citizens and governments are essential for understanding how we can use technology to build legitimate, inclusive and accountable institutions that build justice and security. These are the heartbeat issues of our work. So before I introduce our co-host for today, I just want to give a quick shout out to Senator Lindsey Graham. Justrak is housed at his alma mater, University of South Carolina. He was instrumental in launching the rule of law collaborative that oversees this. And importantly, he's been a champion and a voice on the Hill for these kinds of issues. So a shout out to Senator Graham. And with that, I'm delighted to invite our co-host, Hamid Khan. Oh, you're going first. I'm so sorry. With that, I'm even, well, let me just also say I'm very happy to be working today with Hamid Khan, who is an alum of USIP and the director of Justrak. And himself has an illustrious legal and academic career. And so let me then pivot and welcome Harry Bader to the stage, who's the acting director of the Innovation Lab at USAID and doing excellent work there, moving technology and innovation into the development field and particularly looking at many of these issues. Harry, it's wonderful to have you here. Please welcome Harry to the podium. Well, first of all, I'd like to thank Nancy and Hamid for convening us today on this important topic. One of the things I'm going to be focusing on today is the role of USAID and working in the technology sector to help combat corruption. Corruption weakens institutions and undermines stability. It has a corrosive impact on the rule of law and erodes citizen confidence in the ability of their government to deliver essential services. The emerging digital economy gives us a new opportunity to use tools to thwart corruption. But as Nancy mentioned, technology can be a double-edged sword. But what we're working on at USAID is to build a global digital infrastructure that is affordable and accessible along with mobile services to provide unprecedented opportunities for more transparent and efficient systems that can build the role of civil society, that can foster democracy, capital economy, and the ability for individuals of freedom of expression. The four key things that USAID is working on within the Global Development Lab is on digital payments, distributed ledger technology, artificial intelligence, and digital identity systems. At USAID, we believe that supporting the development of an inclusive digital economy is essential with our partners, both in the field and other donors, for the progress of humanity to realize their aspirations around the globe. Digital financial services offer us the opportunity to build a transparent environment that can save millions of dollars in the process. Every year governments around the world pay out billions of dollars in cash. These payments include, among other things, government salaries and pensions. Payments in cash are incredibly difficult to trace. They're insecure. They're insufficient and are susceptible to leakage from corruption. When governments make the switch to digital payments, they realize huge efficiencies. In the Philippines, for example, USAID has helped two different provinces digitize their payrolls, reducing disbursement costs to the government itself. In the case of the Philippines, those who have adopted digital payments for their government workers have reduced administrative costs by 90%. In Afghanistan, when we helped digitize payments of police without any greater expenditure on the part of the government, the police saw their salaries miraculously increased by 40%. That is because we removed the vectors of corruption that were in the cash pipeline. So not only do you increase government efficiency, you also increase reliability and accountability. And since digital transactions are inherently more traceable than cash, there is also the ability to improve our processes for tracking illicit financial flows. This helps not only the United States government but like-minded partners to combat cartel activity, money laundering and terrorist financing. Distributed ledger technologies, as most people know as blockchain, is also helping, we believe. And we're working very closely at USAID within the lab to find applications of blockchain to international development. We believe that by increasing the number of individuals and organizations with access to these records, that these technologies can enable greater visibility and can therefore reveal attempts to delete or tamper with data. We believe that more audible records that may present themselves through this new technology is another opportunity to fight corruption. Likewise, artificial intelligence can help financial institutions more efficiently identify suspicious transactions and instances of money laundering. Again, artificial intelligence is one of the priorities of the U.S. Global Development Lab to see how can we use artificial intelligence in the development sector. But again, it's a double-edged sword because it's only as good as the people who designed them. And if you can use artificial intelligence to build an inclusive digital economy, you can also use artificial intelligence to build an exclusive or oppressive digital economy. Through our reg tech for regulators accelerator, USAID is supporting countries such as, again, the Philippines to develop prototype chatbots that can help in this process and thus improve accountability. And then there's digital ID systems. Again, something to be used for good or for bad. Comprehensive, well-regulated digital identity systems provide the opportunity for citizens to have access to formal services like business registration and land titling. These systems can help create a basis of trust and inclusion that strengthens democracy and free markets. In Liberia, USAID has supported the development of a biometric ID system to aid the Ministry of Education in its personnel management. The system exposed widespread corruption leading to the elimination of scores and scores of ghost workers. And so doing not only did it save the government Liberia money, but also broke the bonds of corrosive corruption in this case to help improve the ministry's responsiveness to the public. As we said, digital technology is revolutionizing development around the world. We don't have to look any further than here. For example, it was just mentioned the peace tech accelerators work to scale innovations focused on accountability, transparency and anti-corruption to fight conflict. And this has enormous potential, but the potential for good is equal to the potential for evil. And again, as we build a global digital economy, we have to talk about the enabling environment and how these things are applied. We want the digital global economy and infrastructure to build the capacity of civil society. We want it to expand the opportunity for economic capitalism. We want to foster democracy. We want to create a platform for truly free individual expression. But the digital future that I've just described is not preordained. There are other models that are being championed, championed by China, Russia and Iran. That is why the U.S. stands firm with its allies and like-minded partners to build a global digital infrastructure that sets us free. Free from corruption, free from want, free from ignorance, free from pestilence, and most importantly free from tyranny. So I welcome today's meetings and roundtables to discuss how can we use technology to expand the most important thing and that is the ability to free the individual from these vicissitudes of violence, conflict, corruption, poverty, and ignorance. Thank you very much. I look forward to hearing more about the work that's going on. Good morning. My name is Hamid Khan. I am the deputy director of the rule of law collaborative at the University of South Carolina. I am pleased and very heart-worn by the fact that everyone is here. This event is being live streamed as well and recorded for posterity, so please don't feel that the lack of presence in the seas necessarily negates the impact of this message. As part of our ongoing commitment with the U.S. Department of State in a cooperative agreement known as JustTrack, we have convened a group which we hope today will bring together both policymakers, scholars, tech individuals, and savvy individuals who care about the development issues across the world. The rule of law collaborative based at the University of South Carolina is collaborative in its nature that it brings forth both a variety of experts, academics, any university setting and stands unique among institutions across the United States. JustTrack seeks a similar goal, which is to bring about the inter-coordination of our federal government, our counterparts in academia, and various disparate actors to bring together both knowledge and understanding on the challenges and issues facing the justice sector community. In addition to the event today, the JustTrack network, which has already been established over the past four years, combines a variety of different trainings in a number of different fields and comparative legal systems as well as introductory understanding. We also provide resources for research on challenges and issues that occur across the board and then there are events like today, a symposium aimed at bringing about scholars, government, private and public actors on the issues that challenge us. And today, this marks the third in our innovation series. Innovation and rule of law and innovation in general have always been challenges that we face, but today it's also uniquely combined with the issues and challenges of technology. As has already been mentioned by both Nancy and Harry, this can be a double-edged sword, one in which we confront both the potential opportunity to reach out to more disparate populations in more far-flung areas of the world than ever before. And as today's event will be broken down, there are three primary pillars that we will focus on. The first being on law enforcement and the advantages and perhaps some of the pitfalls that occur within the law enforcement community and the use of technology. The second will look at engagement. Whether it's by through our phones, social media, or the like, we will bring together a host of actors to look at how social media and mobile apps have moved the level playing field to an even greater degree involving greater populations, greater interactivity, and their involvement. And then finally, the last panel today will focus in on e-government. This idea that government should be at the forefront and their engagement with populations has become a new and lasting challenge for both governments that seek to enhance their ability to reach their populations as well as those who are on the recipient end. And all the while, we are still confronted by the perennial challenges that confront rule of law, access to justice, fairness, equity, and the host of other resources that are related to the rule of law challenge. In addition, because of our gracious host at the U.S. Institute of Peace, and which I am proud to call myself an alum, we also have the opportunity to actually directly engage with some of the tech savvy individuals in a variety of different development spheres. And as you look towards your agenda, please take note of the fact that after this first panel discussion, we invite everyone that in addition to commiserating over coffee to engage with some of those who have graciously donated their time to talk about their work and to give examples of the application, including the work here hosted in coordination with the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Peace Tech Accelerator. In addition, and unusual to D.C., we're also offering lunch. And in that regard and in that spirit, we also want to offer the opportunity to hear from the remarks of a former U.S. ambassador who has been both wedded into the issues perennial to the challenge of law enforcement but is also cognizant of the challenges of technology. So today we will have a very full day. We will have multiple opportunities and we invite you to both participate in our panel discussions which will not only engage the various speakers who we invited from various agencies, public and private sector audiences, but for you, the audience to join in on the discussion, to ask the relevant questions that need to be asked and to push forward the substance of knowledge. Again, thank you to the U.S. Institute of Peace for serving as gracious hosts and we welcome you. Thank you. Good morning. Can everybody hear me okay? I'm Lindsay Freeman. I'm a lawyer and research fellow on the Human Rights and Technology Program at the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley School of Law. I'm also a member of the Technology Advisory Board of the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court where I used to work. In line with today's symposium theme on innovations and new technologies in rule of law programming, this panel is focused on enforcement. Innovations in law enforcement and in particular the obstacles and opportunities of new technologies in the fields of digital investigative analysis and forensic science. We have three very impressive experts here who will address the emerging approaches in law enforcement in forensic science and digital evidence. So we have first Joe Varani is a digital investigative analyst in the cyber crime lab of the Department of Justice. He provides digital forensic support to federal prosecutors on cases involving computer crimes, intellectual property crimes, and other crimes that involve digital evidence. Before joining the cyber crime lab, Joe worked in IT security at the DOJ. We also have Mark Grants who is assistant to the special agent in charge of the U.S. Secret Services Washington field office. He's been with the U.S. Secret Service for 18 years and is 24 years in law enforcement. He's overseeing high-level international investigations, managed intrusion detection and video surveillance systems at the White House and other protected facilities, and is presently the supervisor of the Washington Metro Electronic Crime Task Force. Finally we have Mark Mogul who serves as the deputy assistant director for special operations of the Department of Justice's international criminal investigative training assistance program. He's coordinated forensic development programs in Europe, Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East which support investigations related to corruption, human rights abuses, cyber crimes, sexual assaults, trafficking, and other transnational crimes. Prior to working with the Department of Justice, he served for 14 years with the Pennsylvania State Bureau of Forensic Science. And so before we get started each one will present and then we'll have some questions mixing in some follow-ups that I have along with audience questions. I just want to highlight a few themes that arose when I spoke to each of the panelists beforehand. So one is the dramatic increase in the volume of digital information and evidence. There's been a proliferation of digital devices and they're collecting more information than ever about our daily activities. This volume of information obviously presents great opportunities for law enforcement and investigations, but it also has huge challenges of how you separate the signal from the noise and effectively get to the information you need for your cases. The second is the pace of change of new technologies changing. The rapid transformation of tools and for government in particular keeping up with every new tool that comes out and having the regular training so that they're trained on new technology and keeping pace. The third with the rise in concerns of privacy and security, new technologies have increasingly effective encryption technology. Encryption is now a default for many devices and a lot of new technologies make that digital material increasingly ephemeral. So there's concerns about how you identify what is important, how you collect it and preserve it. The fourth is working in cooperation between agencies, which is a challenge as well as cooperating internationally. The field of cyberspace and the international is a borderless by its nature and so there's challenges with working with international law enforcement in addition with private companies. Obviously the field of technology has raised many interesting issues out of the role private tech companies play, what their responsibility is and how they interact with law enforcement. And finally there's an increased expectation among judges, lawyers and juries of how you can scientifically prove crimes using digital evidence and explaining when it's more of an art versus a science and how conclusive you can be particularly with attribution, which is difficult. So with that I'll let the panelists speak and we're going to start with Mr. Varani. All right, so my name is Joe Varani. I work in a digital forensics lab in the Department of Justice. It is the cybercrime lab and the cybercrime lab is part of CSIP which is the computer crime and intellectual property section of the Department of Justice. And so CSIP is a group of about 30 or 40 attorneys and they have different focuses either on a computer crime team or an intellectual property team. They are focused on policy, some deal with litigation. They work on international coordination and training events. They are the contact people for the 24 by 7 network so if there is an emergency request that comes in from international request then they are the ones to respond to it. And then also as sort of a self-contained group in CSIP is the cybercrime lab. So the cybercrime lab is a group of non-attorneys that has a different focus than a lot of forensic labs out there in that we are dedicated to the needs of the prosecutor. And so normally when you think about an investigation and a trial case all the way from start to finish, you have a lot of work that goes into it up front from the investigating agency. They do a lot of research and investigation and they get their search warrant and they are able to seize and image devices. And they have a lot of these cases going on and so if something gets all the way to trial they may have to shift their focus to another case that they are currently working on. But the attorneys, the prosecutors may need more assistance getting ready for trial and that's where we try to step in. We've also developed our lab around a team-based approach to forensics so we have groups of three or four that work on our cases and so we can hopefully turn around these cases faster by splitting up the work among a few people who can work together with their areas of expertise. So one of the issues that we kind of have to combat is this idea that we're ever really completely done with digital forensics. There's not really a full forensics where you say, okay, we found everything that we could find, that's it. There's always more that we can do. There's always more that someone else, another analyst, could find if they had more time to really dig into things. So what are some challenges that we see when collecting digital evidence these days? First, as was mentioned, there are more devices out there. Earlier this spring we got a case into our lab that all of the equipment that was seized from this guy's home filled an entire one of our offices. And so that's way too much for us to look at. And so it's also not really critical for the entire case that we look at every single piece of equipment. The dusty computer that was found under the bed, that is a super low priority. But the question then comes is, okay, we have all of this equipment to look at. What do we look at first? What's the most important? That's where communication with investigators is really important because they have, you know, they knew this was the computer that was actually running, that was on the guy's desk. So you may want to start here. The second thing that we have to deal with is the increasing storage capacities of devices. There's a micro SD card that is small enough that it fits on your fingertip. Back in 2005, you could get 128 megabyte micro SD card. 11 years later, 256 gigabytes on something that fits on your fingertip. And so that's a 2,000 times increase in the capacity of something that's so small. As a comparison, what we say is that one gigabyte of data printed out on paper would be a stack of paper about 1,000 feet tall. So you have something this small that is 256 stacks of 1,000 feet paper. That's a lot of data to look through. Another issue that we have with increasing concern these days is encryption. And if a device is really well encrypted, you know, you have iPhones these days that come encrypted by default. You have the newer types of tablets like from Microsoft. If you have a surface tablet, there's a good chance that it comes with bit locker encryption enabled by default. So the users may not have even known that or set it up, but it comes that way. And so with good encryption products, it becomes very difficult to bypass that encryption. So if we're dealing with we don't have any information, here's an encrypted hard drive. It makes our jobs much more difficult and that can take, you know, months or years for it to actually complete. And encryption is being used not only in the devices but in communication as well. People are using messaging products and a lot of them are turning on their encryption. So that if you try to intercept the communication, well that's encrypted too. And so that makes it much more difficult to get access to the communications. Encryption also changes the way that we respond on the scene.  If the computer is up and running, we want the first responders to take some different approaches to image RAM because that is where the encryption key would likely be stored in a running computer. We want to check for encryption to see are there encrypted drives that are mounted in an unprotected state on this system. And then we can act appropriately and create a forensic image while the system is up and running. So we get all of those decrypted files while the system is running. Another thing that we have to deal with is the accessibility of the storage as well. So it used to be that everyone had a desktop computer and you could pull off the lid and you could pull out the hard drive and connect it to a write block, which is what one of these two devices are. And that write block gets connected to our forensic workstation and it's great. It was really easy to copy all the data off of the hard drives. But these days devices are not made to be opened up by people, especially very easily. So you've got phones, you've got tablets, you've got computers, especially some Macs these days that are really difficult to get open. You need special tools. There's glue everywhere. There's special screws. And so it's not just as easy as opening it up and popping out the storage medium and then imaging things. And especially with cell phones, what we need to do is that cell phone needs to be running. It needs to be on, which is much different than our normal process of having a computer turned off and nothing's changing. But the cell phone has to be on so that the computer talks to it and it basically says dump all your data out for me. And so that means that our cell phone forensic tools have to be aware of lots of the different cell phone makes and models and features and security features that might be trying to protect data there. And there's a lot of different types of cell phones out there. The other thing that we need to keep thinking about is that we're finding all of the potential sources of evidence. Specifically, I'm thinking of syncing and syncing to the cloud. So we grab a computer, but the data might not actually be on the computer or the computer or the cell phone might be encrypted. And so we need to go somewhere else to get access to that data. So that might be in cloud storage somewhere or the computer might be syncing to the phone. The phone might be syncing to the computer. So if we can't access the data on one, it might be on another device as well. So that's a little bit about the collection of the data. Now in terms of the analysis that we do back in the lab, one of the challenges that we have is really understanding the request that is being made by the prosecutors or the investigators that want us to work on their cases. And it's important because it drives the rest of what we do. And so sometimes it's trying to figure out what does the customer actually need. They may ask us, can you find this IP address on this computer? We can and we may find it, but does that really help them? Our bigger question is what do you need to prove? Because then we have the expertise and knowledge of knowing where to look to find things that happened on the computer. So if the request is we want to find out if someone remotely logged into this computer, then I know that I can look in several different places that may include those IP addresses, but it may include other things that the prosecutor and the investigation team haven't really thought of. And so then once we actually understand the request, we want to make sure that we fulfill the request. There's millions of files on a computer, and so we can't just start looking around at things. We have to make a logical approach and make sure that at the end of the day, we can say the request was met. We have an answer for you in a clear language that they can understand.  We want some user attribution. We want to be able to say this is how this information got onto this computer. We might be even able to conclude who was using the computer or where the computer was at the time. This background information is very helpful to help understand what was going on at the computer at the time and how it relates to the rest of the case. Another one of the challenges we have is keeping up with technology as things change. There are about three million apps on the iOS app store and the Google Play store. And so the forensic tools that we have don't know about all three million of those apps. So it requires us to play with the technology to test things out, to try and test and learn and verify. And if we need to, be able to make our own tools to interpret some of the data. And so the final point that I'll leave with is that I should say specifically digital forensics is sort of a combination of science and art. So we have to have the background about the technology to know how it works. But then we also have to kind of have that investigative mindset to think about where the evidence could be and to think about how it relates to the rest of the facts of the case and how it relates to evidence in the real world. And then if we come upon a hit on a computer from like a keyword search, like this in the green box up here, we found through a keyword search on remote detonator. This was an attempted murder case. We find that and we see all this text in the green box and we're not really sure what that is, right? Except we're keeping up with technology and the research that is coming out and we're able to recognize the bits of information that are in there. Like the thing in the red box that series of numbers is actually a date that's been encoded. So then we were able to tell, oh, this is a Google Analytics cookie that was on a cell phone that was backed up to a computer that shows that even though the user cleared their Internet history, that they searched for homemade remote detonator, visited a website, and this happened the night before that they went and purchased the equipment from Walmart the next day. So it's finding out about these weird hits that you see on the computer and then kind of making sense of that data and being able to describe what it actually is and why it's meaningful. So being able to learn and test things is important, making your own solutions is important, and then of course at the end of the day being able to explain it to a non-technical audience, a judge, a jury, your prosecutor or your investigating team is very important as well. Let's see where we're at here. Might need a lifeline for this one. There you go. The other mark. So I just wanted to start by sharing a quote and I think this quote really captures what I plan to speak about today. Having worked in forensic science for 26 years, I believe the contributions that forensic scientists make to the criminal justice system are critically important. Their work improves our safety and ultimately our quality of life. When I started with the Pennsylvania State Police in 1991, violent crime was peaking in the United States. DNA was just beginning to be implemented on a wide scale basis in most state forensic laboratories and the FBI would soon pilot a national DNA database. Also a national ballistics database for gun related evidence would follow later that decade and advances in algorithms were improving the accuracy and search capabilities of our fingerprint databases. Did these advances in forensic science contribute to the decrease in violent crime? I'll leave that for the social scientists to debate, but there's no debate in the tremendous technological advances seen in forensic science over this time. The field is far from static even for techniques that have been used for decades. So on the other side of the equation, the innovation on the criminal side, we can look just at drug evidence. When I started and I did some drug analysis testing, our drugs had names like heroin, cocaine, the occasional PCP or LSD. Today we have synthetic cannabinoids, the synthetic opioids, and drugs with names like U47700. On a related note, I shared with Lindsay a seizure that happened in the state of Nebraska, fentanyl seizure. And with a lethal dose of two milligrams, this fentanyl seizure had the potential to kill 26 million people. One seizure. So just think about that. It also impacts how the forensic scientists deal with that type of evidence in the laboratory. On the innovation on our side, a DNA test of a known reference sample could take a month when I started working in the laboratory. Today with new rapid DNA technology, this could be done in about an hour at a police booking station. So without even a forensic scientist doing the work. So as we implement these new technologies, we must continue to strive for quality and excellence. So just a little bit of background. My office is a tap is within the criminal division of the Department of Justice and our sole focus is international law enforcement development. Essentially our mission is to strengthen our partners around the world so they are better able to address transnational issues such as terrorism, organized crime, trafficking of all kinds and human rights. Our work is in all areas of forensic science. So I won't focus on one discipline today such as digital evidence. Rather, I'll highlight our approach to ensuring that forensic evidence is reliable and should deserve the public's trust. So why is forensic science important to our mission? I believe the answer is most people to in this room and watching online. We use and share forensic evidence to investigate and solve any number of transnational crimes. To meet these challenges, we help countries implement new technologies such as techniques to analyze digital evidence or create a national DNA database. But I would also ask you to think about the indirect contributions that forensic science can make which are important to the rule of law. Does public confidence in convictions increase when forensic evidence supports other testimonial evidence? Does public trust in the rule of law improve because of non-bias scientific evidence? Are sexual assault survivors more likely to report a crime and believe they have access to justice because there is a forensic DNA laboratory in their country? I believe the answer is yes to these questions. Ensuring the exchange of reliable forensic information between countries including multi-jurisdictional use of evidence is a key reason why my office provides assistance in forensic science. As a result, we believe in the importance of international accreditation under the applicable standards issued by the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO. ISO accreditation allows a laboratory to demonstrate that it is conforming to international standards and best practices. Accreditation is also important for the sustainability of our government's investments. Best practices are incorporated into laboratory SOPs and the continuous improvement model provides a management framework that will build upon our efforts long after our assistance ends. The importance of accreditation in our work has been reinforced by our own domestic experience, which is filled with many examples of amazing applications of science to criminal investigations as well as some work that quite frankly misrepresented the science. Seeking to improve the practice of forensic science, Congress asked the Department of Justice to fund our National Academy of Sciences to do a review of forensic science in the United States. They produced their report in 2009. The report may have been more critical than some of the community expected, but it has been shaping our work ever since. The report had a number of recommendations, some only relevant to the Organization of Forensic Science in the United States, but others relevant to all forensic laboratories. A particular interest, the report recommended that ISO accreditation should be mandatory for all forensic laboratories. A related recommendation focused on what quality assurance systems should identify, namely mistakes, fraud, and bias. While the report recommended mandatory accreditation, many people in the field recognized that accreditation wasn't the final solution, rather a minimum level that all laboratories should attain. We are not alone in recognizing the importance of international accreditation. The European Union has stated the importance in several council framework decisions. The EU acknowledges that forensic evidence may be used in multiple jurisdictions and international accreditation should allow evidence produced in one country to be seen as equally as reliable as being produced in another country where it might be introduced in a trial. In fact, in a 2016 decision, they reaffirmed this position and focused on forensic evidence and databases where evidence that can be exchanged at an international level, such as information related to guns, drugs, and explosives. They went on to say, and I quote, beyond traditional forensics, recent events have highlighted the urgent need for a swift exchange of reliable digital forensic data that can be used as evidence in court beyond the jurisdiction of the member state of origin. Therefore, accreditation of forensics procedures should also be pursued as a matter of priority in this area. Ensuring the exchange of reliable forensic information is a significant reason why my office provides this type of assistance. We have had success working with countries to obtain this achievement. So far, nine of our partner countries have obtained ISO accreditation in at least one area. Many of the countries are using the same accrediting body that we use primarily in the United States, A and A B. Mexico is our largest program, and we obviously have shared security interests. In Mexico, I am proud to say that eight states in the federal attorney general's office have achieved ISO accreditation in at least one forensic discipline. The state of Puebla just became the first state in Mexico to obtain accreditation in our six focus areas of DNA, chemistry, ballistics, fingerprints, question documents, and crime scene investigation. With this success, I am often asked how we help facilitate these results, what is our model? First, we emphasize that we are peers in the international forensic community. We are not exporting American standards, rather these are the norms and the best practices of the international forensic community. Second, we try to simplify the process in our language, but not the rigor. For example, one of our advisors breaks down the accreditation process to 10 steps, which psychologically seems much easier to achieve than trying to meet the hundreds of individual ISO requirements. Lastly, we turn our partners into leaders. We have scientists visit partner labs that have already achieved accreditation to learn from their experience or to observe an internal audit. We also push our partners to assume leadership roles in the international community. Just last week I was joined as a keynote speaker by the laboratory director of Costa Rica and the quality assurance manager from Baja, California, Mexico at the annual awards luncheon of the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors. Pushing our partners to be leaders and mentors simply reinforces the first point that these are the expectations of the international forensic science community and not just the United States. Accreditation under the ISO standards provides a framework for a high functioning quality system. However, accreditation is more than standard operating procedures, validation studies and chain of custody records. For excellence, a laboratory needs leaders that value the culture of quality. In fact, several of ISO's foundational management principles are related to the values of the organization and its leaders. In particular, ISO says that leadership should create a unity of purpose and direction for the organization. It also asks leaders to commit to continuous improvement as a permanent objective. In other words, ISO is asking for the organization to have a culture of quality. Why is an organizational culture of quality so important? It's important because in the end, this is still a human endeavor and as such, nothing will always go perfectly. Like many forensic professions, forensic science requires strong leaders. When potential issues come to light, which they eventually will, the leader may have a choice between addressing them immediately or hoping they go away. But as we have seen, ignoring issues ultimately leads to larger problems at the end. And given the consequences of our daily work, the public deserves forensic laboratories that strive for excellence. Thank you. All right. Now the other, Mark Grant's Secret Service. Thank you very much for the invitation today. I'm going to start out with a quick history lesson just to make sure I fulfill my contractual obligations to promote the agency. I do a lot of these presentations. Inevitably, there's always a handful of folks that are unaware that the Secret Service conducts financial investigations, let alone cyber investigations. So everybody probably recognizes this picture, Curry or Knives lithograph from April 1865. Interestingly enough, at the time, there was no national banking system. So the $1 bill from the bank in Washington, D.C. was markedly different than the $1 bill from the bank in Philadelphia. And what happened, what became affecting the economy was Conor Fit was running rampant. Again, if you don't know what a dollar bill looks like, it's difficult enough as it is today. But if you don't know what a dollar bill is going to look like, it's hard to tell what's real and what's not. Numbers at the time indicate that Conor Fit bills in circulation were close to 30% of the total currency in the United States. So obviously the president and the leaders recognized that that was an issue. So on April 14th, President Lincoln signed an order for the creation of an investigative arm under Treasury to create a group to specifically combat Conor Fitting and essentially secure the nation's financial infrastructure. April 14th, he also had a date with Mrs. Lincoln to go to Ford's Theater, and we all know how that ended up. But the ironic part is the day that we were created essentially, the day that President Lincoln was killed had nothing to do with us being involved in protection. Obviously that's what we're most well known for. That really didn't happen for about 40 more years when we kind of slowly took over that. But we have been doing financial crimes for 150 years. Incidentally, we were actually doing digital crimes before the internet. Before the internet, I believe it was ARPANET, and we've got a case going back to the early 80s where we were working with DOD resources and helping them out. So we've been doing it a long time. We're very good at it. So what I'm going to talk about now is I'm going to kind of elaborate on a couple of things that Joe and Mark talked about. The first one is accreditation. Again, Mark just talked extensively with that. When I started Secret Service in 2001, I was fortunate enough to be trained as a forensic examiner. And when I came back from training, I think Ovi Carroll was one of my instructors who's still in DOJ today. I had an office. They were nice enough to take the carpet out of the office and put the anti-static tile in, give me some extra power strips, a different lock on the door. But that was my lab. Obviously that doesn't necessarily meet today's accreditation standards. But backing up 20 years or so, kind of in the mid-70s, is when this ASCLAD certification kind of started to take hold. And the goal at the time was to create a framework. Again, as Mark discussed, to have a set of standards that can be applied across the board. The issue that we have today that I see specifically in my world is when ASCLAD was designed, as we talked about, it was for blood. It was for DNA. It was for ballistics. Fingerprints haven't changed in a long time. DNA hasn't changed for hundreds of thousands of years. So what you're testing is a constant. The technology changes as we talked about, you know, what used to take a month to do a DNA sample now takes hours. But what you're testing is still the same. The issue with digital evidence, though, is if you took a time machine and brought my lab back from 2001, it would essentially be useless today. Everybody's cell phone in here. I would have zero ability to look at that cell phone. Far less the ability to look at the smartwatches that everybody's wearing, the Alexa device that everybody has in the room, or even the vehicles that we drive. Vehicle forensics now is a growing industry.  The hardware connections, the right blockers that we've talked about, all that stuff has changed over the years. Part of the accreditation issue is standardization. And again, when you're looking at DNA that hasn't changed in hundreds of thousands of years, you know what you're looking at. In the digital world, things change frequently. So it's the issue that the service has. And again, we agree with 95% of the accreditation argument. But our tools are changing literally daily. Again, I talked about my tools from 2001 not being applicable today. The tools that were assigned in 2017 oftentimes aren't applicable today. Example, we're working a case right now looking at some Romanians that are creating gas pump skimmers. Gas pump skimmers are kind of the scourge of the cyber crime world. They're tangible. We see them. We see them in the news. And it's a giant pain. The guy that we're looking at is building them in his basement. He's buying parts on eBay. He's grabbing some old cell phones that have, you know, the batteries have kind of died on. And he's cobbling something together to make a device. And he's making 10 or 20 at a time, shipping them over here and then they're being used. Every time we find new skimmers, it's a new skimmer. I can't go to the forensic store and buy that device. It's going to interrogate that piece of hardware because this is the first time we've seen it. And our issue with ASCLAD certification, with accreditation is the tools that you're using, letter of the law, and Mark and I were talking earlier, there's some interpretation that these are open to. But letter of the law is these tools have to be tested. They have to be rigorously tested to be verified. Sometimes it takes months, years to verify that a tool is going to provide the results that it should on a consistent basis. If we're getting a device, we're seeing it for the first time. I can't wait a year to do the forensics on that device. So it's something that we look at. Again, 95% of accreditation we feel very strongly with. We try to match as much as we can. Our forensics laboratories across the globe have a very strong track record. Again, I guess you could say fortunate enough to testify as an expert witness in federal court and had no issues with my display of the evidence. But it's something that there needs to be flexible. Again, we talked earlier about digital forensics being kind of a mixture of science and art. Not every piece of regulation can be applied to it. You do need some of that flexibility. The other thing that I want to talk about today is encryption and data privacy. Obviously, this is something that we could talk about all day long and is kind of exhaustingly discussed in the news on a daily basis. But just to touch on a few specific issues and how it applies to investigations. As investigators, we're all always playing catch up. Rarely do we see something, a new emerging technology, a new emerging opportunity for criminals. Think ahead and know what the criminals are going to do and have a plan, have a practice in place before that crime occurs. We're always one step behind. That's the lot of an investigator. We've come to accept that. But what we're concerned with now is encryption is getting two, three, four steps ahead of us. Increasingly, there's areas where we're completely dark. The level of encryption, the level of technology is advancing quicker than we can keep up to. And we're getting to the point where there potentially could be large swaths of evidence of data that are completely out of reach for law enforcement for the courts. Historically, there's always been privacy. Everybody in here can have a safe at home. Everybody can have a lock box at the bank.  And we're rapidly approaching a time where we just don't have that capability technologically anymore. Interestingly enough, last week I was at a conference in Las Vegas, and James Comey was the keynote speaker. Everybody remembers 2015, the San Bernardino shooting, and the iPhone was kind of the center of that controversy from a privacy and encryption standpoint. Initially, the FBI couldn't get into the iPhone. There was a very strong concern that there could have been additional members of this attack group. And so there was pressure put on Apple and eventually a court case that compelled Apple to provide a backdoor to this device. At the time, Mr. Comey came out, and he was very outspoken, and plainly stated that, yes, absolutely, the government should be able to compel private industry to create backdoors. The interesting thing, last week Mr. Comey has kind of softened on that stance extensively. And I agree with him that there has to be a balance. We can't completely let the government, and I represent the government, we can't completely let them into our lives and be able to monitor everything. But again, there has to be a balance where in the right situations with the right side of approvals, the government can step in and can look at your most private investigations. Private investigation, private information. As I mentioned before, though, Secret Service law enforcement is always playing catch up. And in this instance, in 2015, we were able to catch up. Private company out of Israel Celebrate was able to develop a tool that could get us into that iPhone. But at the same time, as soon as iPhone, as soon as Apple saw that, now they begin creating something that Celebrate's not going to be able to defeat. And again, we're in that constant cycle. And as long as we're in the ballpark, it's not a major concern, but I think we have to look closely at the potential of a time where we do fall significantly behind. And if we do, the question is going to be, does public opinion change? Right now, the obligation is on us. The obligation is on law enforcement, on the government to find that solution. The question that I have is if crime increases rampantly, if there's unfortunately significant terrorist events where we can kind of definitively say that encryption aided that crime syndicate. Encryption aided that terrorist activity. If that happens enough, potentially that court of public opinion shifts, and now there is an agreement that, yeah, maybe we do need to force Apple to force Microsoft to force Google to create a backdoor. Again, right now that onus is on us. Apple will argue that if they create that backdoor, that's essentially just creating a vulnerability which creates more weakness, which then makes the entire system weak. I would argue that if Apple creates that backdoor, if we look at a device, a digital device, just as if it's a structure, if you put a good lock on that door, if you reinforce that door, you put an alarm system on that door. Again, this is all my background from working on alarm systems at the White House. You can make that door every bit as secure as that solid block wall. The issue there is, again, the public sentiment, and from a business standpoint, if Apple were to secure that backdoor, that's a significant investment, and it's probably one that they're not going to make a profit on. So, again, that's a discussion that hopefully it never comes, but potentially in the future you look at those issues, and again, public support could sway that. The other thing that I would argue is, you know, right now everybody kind of has that concern about government peeking over your shoulder in your emails. The reality is most everyone probably in this room has already kind of opened the door for Google, Microsoft, Apple. Again, just a few weeks ago we saw the story with Cambridge Analytica. It's a little frustrating from my point of view, again, that you see the comments, you see the talk in the news about law enforcement and government being big brother, but at the same time everybody is allowing Google, allowing Facebook to see everything that they post, everywhere they're at, everything they talk about, all of their friends. And we've seen, again, within the last couple of weeks that potentially that information can be used to manipulate us, to manipulate public opinion. So, to me, that should be as big of a concern, if not more than government. And finally, when you look at the way the feelings are with encryption and with privacy, someone can be concerned that it can go too far one direction or another. Everybody is familiar with GDPR, coming out of Europe right now. I'm sure everybody's email boxes are full of privacy updates. Mine, too, a lot of accounts that I didn't even know that I had or had completely forgotten about. Obviously, that's a massive piece of legislation. Lindsay and I were talking earlier, apparently it's a boon for the legal community, because a whole group of lawyers have kind of sprouted up to manipulate, they're not manipulate, to understand GDPR. One of the things specifically that law enforcement is very interested in is GDPR's effect on ICANN. ICANN, I don't remember the exact acronym. It's the organization that handles internet naming conventions, the IP addresses, the domain names. Historically speaking, if you created a domain name for the US Institute of Peace, you had to register that domain with ICANN. You had to provide them a name, an address, a phone number, email address, all the contact information. And then ICANN would publish that in the who is directory. And that is an amazing tool for law enforcement. I've used it thousands of times. The current interpretation, though, of GDPR and primarily our folks in Europe, is that publishing that who is data is then a violation of that person who's registered that domain. And so there's a very good chance that who is may go dark. So now if I'm doing a phishing investigation and I've got a domain that someone registered and I'm looking to see, you know, where is that domain registered? Who registered it? Where can I send subpoenas to?  And it's even gone a step further. There's actually a lawsuit that was enacted on Friday last week. One of the online registers in Germany has the interpretation that not only are they prohibited from sharing that domain registration information, the contact information, they're not even going to collect it. So if you open up a domain through this German, you know, web service, they're not even going to ask you your name, your address. And again, from an investigative standpoint, this is something that really needs to be addressed. Unfortunately, do we have any ICANN lawyers in here? I know they're based up their own little ways. ICANN and honestly law enforcement is probably linked to the table at trying to lobby for changes in this. So just another indication of how rapidly things change in law enforcement, especially in the digital world. So I look forward to our discussion. And with that, I will turn it over. Thank you so much. So we still have about 40 minutes for discussion and questions. There's two microphones on either side. And I highly encourage asking questions so we can get a discussion going. But if you do have a question, just raise your hand. And there's two people helping who can bring you the microphones. But I'll just start with a question that's perhaps more aimed at the two of you. You both brought up the issue of encryption and that it makes your jobs much more difficult in the investigation and prosecution of crimes and also the new data protection laws that are getting stricter, particularly in Europe. But have you seen... So this encryption is being put in place as a protection for privacy of those individuals and to increase security of companies that hold your data. In the prevention of crime and cyber crime, identity theft, all of those issues, are these encryption technologies helping? Have you seen a decrease in the amount of crime themselves, even if it makes you harder to go after the criminals? Are there fewer criminals to go after because of it? You want me to start? Sure. All right, I'll jump on this one. Absolutely not fewer criminals. That's a growth industry. My area of focus for probably the bulk of the past 10 years or so has been Eastern European cyber crime. Not so much election interference, so no questions on that, but the Eastern Europeans specifically, obviously the Russian speakers, have been very focused on our financial infrastructure, credit card industry, banking industry. I see them effectively using encryption more than industry uses it. There's probably a good argument for that. For that single Russian hacker that's in his basement, in Akaterinburg, he's got one or two computers that's relatively easy to keep that secure. And he's, to some degree, behind the giant firewall that is Russia itself. Whereas an industry group, a large corporation in the United States or in any Western civilization, has a massive infrastructure. And that massive infrastructure has a lot of doors, a lot of windows, a lot of openings that takes significant effort to ensure that all of that is secured. One of the things that I see a lot, unfortunately, is organizations don't know everything that they have. There's a lot of, especially in the smaller groups, they're looking for that silver bullet. So something as simple as strong passwords, which is kind of a building block to encryption. If you have a fantastic encrypted system and you maintain the default password that was on there when that system was installed, it doesn't matter. And unfortunately, we see that kind of time and time again. So I would say that their adversaries are probably more effective at the use of encryption than customers. Just to follow up on that, because you said one of the issues is the companies don't even know all the data that they have. They're collecting so much they don't know what's in their possession. One of the things in my understanding of the GDPR is companies will have a much better idea of what's in their possession because they need an affirmative legal justification for everything they collect. So they'll be collecting less and they'll know what's there. So for just looking at these breaches like Equifax or Sony, these huge breaches, had they been compliant with the GDPR, would those have been less harmful? Is there anything of value that you see in that? You want that one, Joe? I'll try to offer a suggestion. So knowing what you have is certainly step one, but then protecting it sufficiently is another clear step beyond that. So it would be making sure that they have enough safeguards implemented to actually protect the data that they now know that they have. And that's in terms of the perimeter, but also detection and quickly responding and being aware of what's happening on your network as time goes by. Companies often see that compromises occur, have occurred a long time ago once they see that an intrusion has taken place, that someone hacking in has been around for a while having seen the data on the network. And so early detection on those sensitive areas is certainly important. If I could add one kind of thought to that. GDPR, I think maybe one of the advantages, again I'm not completely sold on it, but one of the advantages everyone is aware is there are significant fines that potentially could be levied against your organization if you aren't securing your data securely. I think the problem in the United States that we see oftentimes, and I kind of touched on it earlier, is if it doesn't lead the profit, it's not a priority for these companies. And you look at a lot of the large data breaches that occurred, it's front page news for a couple of days, the stock generally dips for a couple of days, sales dips for a week, two weeks. But unfortunately in two or three weeks there's another data breach. And now the heat's kind of off of that company. And now the shoppers come back and the stock price comes back up. And so it's a simple return on investment. Do we spend tons and tons of money on network security? My apologies. Thought I turned that off. So we spend tons and tons of money on network security that essentially is just money going out the door and doesn't lead the profit when if we do get breached the worst that happens is we take our beatings for a couple of weeks in the media and then everything goes back to normal. And I think a lot of companies, you know, when they're sitting around at board meetings, I know from friends that are in the financial industry, credit card industry, they look at the beginning of the year at their budget and they go, we're going to lose $100 million in fraud. And that's just the cost of doing business. I think, like I said, GDPR may be a bit of a game changer because now, especially the folks that are doing business with European customers are under the gun that, yeah, there could be sufficient ramifications that's going to hurt the bottom line if they don't comply with the rules. Great. Thank you. And on that kind of theme of thinking about privacy and data protection, you mentioned rapid DNA and some of these newer technologies. When we spoke, there was also something sequencing. Next generation sequencing. Next generation sequencing. Those were the two kind of new areas that you highlighted of importance. Obviously, it's kind of a cliche at this point to say the law lags behind the technology lawmakers have been very slow to legislate things in cyberspace and new technologies. So when you're coming up with these new technologies of rapid DNA and the next generation sequencing, you could describe those a little more of how you foresee them being used and are their considerations of the ethical implications where maybe the law hasn't caught up to the technology. Sure. First, I'll say that I've been pretty much a scientist at a desk for the last 12 years. So my work in the laboratory is a bit stale. But the trends, the first thing to appreciate when people hear the word DNA, they think of something that's very personal. The first thing to keep in mind is that the traditional DNA that is conducted in the forensic laboratory, we are looking at areas of the DNA that don't code for anything. That's why there's a lot of variation and that's why we can individualize someone. So we are not looking at things that we all have in common. So if we're just looking at eye color, do they have the DNA for brown hair? That doesn't help us individualize a person per se. However, but there's always ways to push the envelope. So the ethical debates come up from time to time. A few years ago it was familial searching. So let's just say you have a sexual assault case. The person that committed that crime is unknown. We have a DNA sample. We put it through the national DNA database. We don't get a hit. However, they match in every allele that we are looking at except one. And that would indicate that the person that committed the crime is probably a relative, maybe a relative of the person that is in the database. So what should an investigator or laboratory be able to do with that information? So people think of it as being very personal when you're talking about DNA. But then on the other side, prosecutors will say, this is really not that much different than getting a partial license plate. And so is it unethical if you have five digits of a license plate to look at all the similar cars with that license plate and to be able to hone in on the person that committed the hit and run, if you will. So there is a number of things. But there's also, because we touched on this as far as some of the things on the genealogy and that aspect, this type of technology with the next generation sequencing will have more access to do this type of testing on a regular basis in the forensic DNA laboratory where we haven't really focused on it because it wasn't aiding us in the identification of an individual. With the new technology, you'll essentially be able to do both. But this has been used in less controversial areas, the remains that are found in a grave. People have done facial reconstruction to be able to identify the person, but they have been reluctant to add any features and interpret that. Having some of the ancestry markers has helped them provide a little bit more information and really identify the person that has been in that grave. So there's a number of different angles that it could potentially go down, but at least in the forensic scientists, we are always just constrained and working by what our legal teams and the investigators allow us to do. Does anyone have any questions? So the DNA conversation makes me think of some of the other applications as well with the interplay of basically private law. We're talking about regulations, we're talking about the EU, et cetera, but we're also talking about, especially with mobile telephony, we're talking about a lot of apps that have a very long pseudo contract between us and the company that we all click on without being able to negotiate. That is seen as binding law. That's something that was certainly in the DNA match for the Golden State Killer recently was pointed to by the company saying, well, there's one word in there saying other uses, and so therefore you would agree to this, so there's not any privacy issues, as opposed to there wasn't something specifically saying this will be available for this type of law enforcement use, et cetera. And so I'm wondering whether it's everything from what we saw with law enforcement agencies basically having to sign away their right or their ability to even tell the prosecutors where they were getting evidence, when they were using Stingray a few years ago, to user agreements, whether it's in apps or in telephony, how that plays into what we assume is the rule of law, because these are seen as binding legal contracts, but they're not necessarily coming into what we're used to thinking about, because there's cops, prosecutors, judges, and open courts where we can see rule of law happening. Instead, there's this other layer of law that maybe isn't as transparent as our assumptions when we're talking about rule of law in general. One of my thoughts specifically with that and a lot of the other topics that we talked about today is, unfortunately, my vision of, especially American society is we have a very short attention span. A month ago, Cambridge Analytica was the hot topic, and companies left and right were ditching Facebook, and people were canceling their Facebook accounts because of some of the exact same things you talked about. When you sign up for the Facebook account, it's an understanding that you're agreeing to their terms and conditions. You've got to click the box. You've got to accept. Obviously, nobody reads that 20-page document and looks for that other uses clause that's in there. But again, unless there is a consistent messaging, consistent stories, I don't think there's going to be enough of an uprising among the public that's going to make a whole lot of changes. Again, if we string a handful of those stories together, Cambridge Analytica, the Golden State killer is kind of a mixed bag because I'm sure most people in here that have done the DNA testing never imagined that it could be used for that. So on one hand, they like it that we caught a serial killer, but on the other hand, do I really want my DNA in a database that law enforcement is going to be able to look at? But again, my opinion is unless we see consistent issues, consistent coverage, I don't expect much of a change. Hi. I'm Jim McMillan with the National Center for State Courts. One very short comment and then a question which I hope will lead to some interesting conversation. One thing you have to understand about civil law countries, because this is where GDPR is coming in from EU, is that they are constrained by the whole concept of civil law, which is you can't do it unless we tell you you can. So this is why you were seeing the who is reactions and things happening from the European countries because they're waiting for guidance. They're waiting for the rules to be passed by the EU to give them guidance to tell them it's okay. You can do it. So I think that this will all sort itself out here in short order, but I'm sure that our friends at Europol and Interpol will be giving them some encouragement in those areas. My other question, my actual question for you is that I'm really fascinated by the whole idea of what's the digital evidence package that's now being done to put together by the prosecutor for the courts to prosecute the people, but also where do you think that this digital evidence package is going? How are we going to be working with it and that sort of thing? So I'm looking maybe toward our friend from the Department of Justice, but I'm sure that there may be some thoughts from all the panelists, so thank you. So with so much data available on computers these days, there's only a piece of it that is relevant to making the case and you'll quickly overwhelm a jury and judge and all of that if you offer too much. And so if we can minimize it down to what actually makes the point, then I think that would give the best chance of removing distractions from other stuff that just gets in the way. One of the things that I've observed with my squad, I've got a handful of forensic examiners. I had one individual, absolutely brilliant, but he had a little bit of a disconnect in conveying that information. I've sat in on grand juries on numerous occasions and it's particularly difficult when you're talking these cyber cases because you kind of have a mixed audience, hopefully they're awake, not always the case, but you're trying to explain IP addresses and that attribution. Unfortunately, I've even had the issue with some of my U.S. attorneys where you're trying to tell them that, yes, this guy, this Ivan is the guy sitting behind a keyboard in Russia and to draw that line from this credit card that was used at Walmart to buy a stolen TV all the way back to Ivan over in Russia is difficult. So that final report, to me, one of the things that I emphasize with my young forensic examiners is not only do you have to be accurate, but you have to be presenting that information to whatever your audience is. If you're talking to the CISO at the company, maybe he's very tech-savvy and he understands, but again, if you're sitting down in front of a judge or you're sitting down in front of a grand jury or jury, you need to be able to present that in a way that they can comprehend. And then reports are useful for the detail, but then anything that we can do to help visualize what's going on, if there are a sequence of events that we can put into a timeline that people can understand by looking at it rather than reading a bunch of dates and times throughout a report, that might give them a better overview sense of what's going on. So I've had a trial within the past year where there were a bunch of network logs and remote logins and you're seeing these router logs with these confusing commands, what it essentially is when we boil down to it is someone remotely logged into this router from some location and then they switch to a different user account and they logged into a different router. So if we can create a little map that shows the entry point and then the access of another system on the network, then that's a lot easier to visualize than just looking at a bunch of text-based logs with weird commands and terminology in them. My name is Shabnam. I'm with the Syria Justice and Accountability Center. We do human rights monitoring in relation to the Syrian conflict. So with social media, there's so much information and potential crimes that are being posted online that it's maybe hard to do user attribution for. But there's also so many NGOs and civil society groups that have cropped up that are focused on doing investigations and this is kind of broadening the scope of who's an investigator. And also with just normal people, individuals like you saw in Charlottesville, it was crowdsourced information that led to arrests of some of the perpetrators. What's the role of law enforcement in working with civil society groups or working with the public now that it's kind of diversified, who has access to information and who can look for information online that can lead to arrests? I'll kind of jump in with social media. One of the things that we've seen in explosion, obviously, you know, Twitter, Facebook, all that stuff, it affects us directly with our protective mission. Back 20 years ago and then beyond that, if you wanted to threaten the president, you had to sit down and write a letter and send it to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The Secret Service little bragging right here has the largest ink library in the world because that's how we did forensics back in the day. When we got a letter that was threatening the president, we did, you know, we took it to our forensic lab, they did the analysis on the ink and were able to kind of narrow it down to a geography or a specific company that distributed that ink. That was all fine and dandy. Then the explosion and the internet happens and now it's as simple as a drunken tweet and now there is just an overwhelming amount. Just like every other agency, you've kind of got to cut through the chaff and find what's real and what's just people venting. The difficult prospect is if you don't jump and make the right conclusions and then somebody that we thought was maybe just kind of running their mouth and pushing the border of free speech and now two weeks later, a month later, they do something, then it's, you know, why wasn't that person under surveillance? Why wasn't that person arrested? Why wasn't that person, you know, had a more thorough job? Not so much social media. We had an individual that showed up at the White House and he had a hatchet in his belt. Clearly a mental health consumer, but he didn't make any threats. He didn't cause any problems. He didn't threaten the president. He didn't threaten himself. It wasn't a danger. So we're kind of hand strong right there. We can't do much with him other than tell him that the president's not going to see him today and you need to move along. A month later, he jumps the fence and then days later, our directors up on Capitol Hill asking us if you knew about this guy a month ago, why weren't, you know, why wasn't he under surveillance? If anybody's been to Lafayette Park, the vast majority of the folks in Lafayette Park, again, unfortunately, are mental health consumers. And we just don't have the resources to follow every single one of them. So it's very similar that, you know, and again, maybe AI, obviously AI is kind of the cutting edge, one of the big topics, and it applies to presidential threats. Hopefully it can apply to school shootings. I know we see that a lot where it seems like inevitably when somebody shoots a school up, we look at their Facebook accounts and there are some indicators. So I wish I had a better answer for you. I wish we did a better job at it. But again, that's something that is on the horizon. And again, maybe, you know, maybe AI is the solution because obviously Facebook's not doing a fantastic job or putting enough assets towards it as we've seen in the past. And one thing just to respond to that, actually, the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley is spearheading an effort to develop an international protocol on open source investigations to begin to kind of set minimum standards in that field where civil society is working, as well as professional law enforcement and how to effectively use that digital online open source information in investigations, which is actually focused very much on war crimes, crimes against humanity and what's happening in Syria. One of the things though, we're trying to balance between setting standards and the speed at which the field is kind of developing and new tools are coming out. You know, right now we use YouTube, Facebook and Twitter as the examples, but in a few years those names might be obsolete, you know, if we put, if we use tools. So we're trying to focus on specific principles. But that kind of brings me back to this issue of setting standards and the quality control aspect and how you balance that with the fact that you have new tools coming out every day and not necessarily the luxury and time of testing them to the degree that you want before a case goes to court. So how do you find that balance? Sure, I'll start with that. So, you know, I think digital evidence is the extreme, but, you know, we focus on the ISO standards and generally these are developed for essentially international trade. So that a company that is buying a product or apart from a company in another country that they can ensure the reliability of, you know, what they are buying since everything is, you know, depends on each other when you're building a car or an airplane. But what we always say in forensic science, you know, it's one thing in an industrial setting, give you the example of the inks, you're making pen, that pen manufacturer can control all their inputs. In a forensic laboratory, we don't control any of our inputs. So whether it's digital evidence or whether it's DNA from a crime scene that's on a dirty rag and perhaps it's a mixture of five different individuals. So having that appreciation for the flexibility and again, this is where even in the traditional forensics, you know, I don't necessarily say art, but I say that the person has to be creative in their use and application of science. So all these, you know, things that come up using the ancestry websites to be able to solve a cold case, you know, a serial killer. I mean, that takes some creativity, whether it's on the forensic sciences part or on the investigators part. But having that standards, I think it really comes and it comes to light and what we've seen with the problems with forensic science in the United States is when you come to the trial, there's getting the investigative leads and we're always concerned that in the forensic laboratories our customers are the courts and the investigators and we want to be timely with our results. But when it comes to court, we have to be very precise in our language both so that we convey very complex topics and scientific topics in a way that a jury can understand, but then also that we are not misleading them in what we have to say and the significance of our findings. And that's where we've had some of the challenges. And that is part of the accreditation process. We labs do monitoring of testimony to make sure that the scientists are not misrepresenting their conclusions. But then there's also the Department of Justice is enjoying some uniform reporting and testimony guidance that they're pushing out. Now, from a federal level, the state and local forensic laboratories aren't necessarily bound by that, but it's a pretty good guidance. I think I saw a question up there. Just a follow-up to the comment you just made. How do you do uniform standards for presenting evidence for another country? In most cases, it will be a bench trial. There are very few countries that have juries. But how does ESA TAP work with that? Yeah, that's a challenge. Many labs don't have true admissibility standards for expert testimony. But we provide training in that. And what do we try to reinforce? Essentially what we said. I mean, there are many different professional organizations have code of ethics. And just going back to my experience when I've testified in court and what I share with other younger forensic scientists is that it is not our job to make the prosecutions case. And we have to accept that the defense can make points. But we have to really just focus on remaining objective in the work we do and actually to be true scientists. One of the things that the National Academy of Sciences report that I mentioned, one of their recommendations was that forensic laboratories should be independent of law enforcement and prosecution. That is probably easier said than done. If you're starting a forensic laboratory in a country where you haven't had one, that's probably wise advice. But in our situation and with the history that we have, it's probably not going to happen anytime soon. However, those independent standards and the accreditation process I think forces you to be much more conscious that you are really an independent scientist and not only working for the prosecution. We're trying to help find the truth like others in the court system. Well, I might move this to Joe in talking about the independence and not specifically working necessarily for the prosecutor's theory of the case. When you have this huge volume of data, so many devices, so many places to look and so much content being collected that you can't possibly look at at all, how do you make sure that your investigation is independent and that you're catching potentially exonerating information as well as what's incriminating, and then how do you convey that to the judges? Sure, so certainly as we're conducting our search with our tools, it lets us search across or view lots of data pretty concisely. So if we are looking for programs installed on a computer to see if one was used recently, then it would be easy enough to see the other programs as well and if there's one that proved innocence, then that's something that we could definitely make note of. Or if there's a search term that we run against all the data on the hard drive, we would get results back really quickly and if there was data in there that was exculpatory in some way, we could certainly include that in our analysis, in our report. The other thing that we deal with is defense experts and so they will look at the same data and they will be able to provide their own analysis and find points that help their case and so we are able to review those and respond to those and even participate in trials if needed to respond to the defense's claims as well. Okay, I think we have time for another question. Anyone else? Questions? Okay, well I guess are there any other points you want to make just as a final statement on what people should be focused on looking out for. I know artificial intelligence was mentioned as a few times is kind of one of the newest topics. But any final remarks? I would just ask, I know in our experience in testifying in court what we have to deal with is what's called the CSI effect. It's basically that the jurors have sometimes an unrealistic expectation of what can be done in the laboratory and really what needs to be done. Sometimes they want and demand that an unreasonable amount of work can be done to prove something that everyone has already agreed to has happened. So that is a challenge for us when we testify. I'm not sure if that's come to play in the digital evidence realm yet or not. It probably has. Enhance this picture. My bosses certainly have the CSI effect. When we're given evidence it's like why can't you find what you're looking for? I think from a broader picture, and I touched on it earlier, about the constant changing focus. I mean that would be my push we're talking earlier. I get invited probably once a month or so to come to presentations like this. I enjoy coming out. I enjoy talking to folks about current trends in cyber crime. It's kind of the generic title that I often use. And I hope that it continues to grow, to gain legs, to be a point of focus so that people in positions of power far above me make significant changes to allow for better freedom, for better transparency for folks. Again, a lot of that's driven by policymakers in this room, policymakers up on Capitol Hill. But I certainly don't mind coming out and talking about it. And I'm frustrated, unfortunately, more times than not, that we aren't doing more, we aren't doing better. But hopefully the continued discussion leads for an improvement over time. I think the importance of providing education to all of those involved is something that we need to continue to work on. Our lab educates prosecutors and other attorneys and judges on digital evidence. And so they're aware of what's capable and what's possible, what is stored on a computer, what's stored in the cloud so that they have some idea when they get a case that they're working on or hearing that they know kind of what's reasonable and what's possible and what to expect. So that kind of thing is really important. Great. Well, thank you so much. Let's give a round of applause to the panelists. Let me also thank Lindsay for doing this appropriate job in moderating. This concludes the first panel of our discussion today. Next, we'll move to a networking break and also engagement with a variety of different actors in this field and you'll actually have the opportunity. In order to effectuate that, we need everybody to actually go up the stairs in order to go to the main concourse where the platform has been set up and, of course, to aid in your adventure. There's coffee and refreshments. The other thing I want to mention because we are obliged like everybody else to both monitor and account as well as being low tech is that in your folders you will see an evaluation form that's in bright yellow and we ask that those participants, individuals here, please take a moment throughout the course of the day especially if you're leaving to take a moment to fill out the evaluations which are substantively very helpful, they gauge our interest. And then finally, remember that in addition to coffee and engagement with the host of actors, again, the list is in the materials provided to you. We will proceed immediately to the keynote lunch where lunch will be served and then we'll have the opportunity to engage in another heady discussion. So please continue and we look forward to it. Thank you very much. And please continue to enjoy your lunches. Also please indulge in the food. It was intended for the purpose of being consumed so don't be bashful. In thinking about the topic of the event and in thinking about discourses about the rule of law we're always at a point in which we're discussing both the rule of law and we're also talking about the contours of the subject which itself can be quite challenging. And so raising the bar and getting or having someone who is as qualified and well respected as Ambassador Dabaca is really our treat. His extensive biography, again, is in the materials along with all the speakers but I want to predicate this discussion with a very long and storied career that began in the fight for civil rights and has taken him to a unique position in the Obama Administration on one of the perhaps perennial challenges that we face both here and abroad and his expertise has looked at a wide variety of different areas that touch on today's subject. So Ambassador Luis Dabaca is the former ambassador at large to monitor and combat trafficking in persons and former director of the Department of Justice's Office of Sex Traders, sentencing, monitoring and as you can imagine just with the titles however extensive they might be, the responsibilities are even greater. So in that regard, I think we all owe Ambassador Dabaca first a round of applause for his willingness to come and speak here today but also I invite all the participants to please listen in on the sort of challenges and experiences that he can bring to bear in a very fruitful discussion and so with that Ambassador, the floor is yours. I love how the water matches the podium. So the last time that I was here for lunch at the U.S. Institute of Peace, the keynote speaker, Ambassador Paula Dobryansky, who is a giant of the State Department and a giant of democracy building, was Undersecretary of State and a lot of other important things, was standing basically here at the podium and we were all out watching her talk and a derecho storm came barreling into town and she didn't notice it and we were all horrified because we saw what looked like tornadoes starting to form out over the river. So we should probably have a signal if you see a huge storm, just raise your hand and let me know and we could all jump in the basement or something. All kidding aside, I want to thank U.S. Institute of Peace for this wonderful place to learn and to come together but what U.S. Institute of Peace represents for us who have worked as diplomats in the United States service. The idea that peace is something that is a goal in and of itself, not simply that peace is the time that you rest and reload between the exciting times in diplomacy but rather that peace is what needs to drive us and that's why I think it's very appropriate to talk about rule of law when we're here at the U.S. Institute of Peace. I'll talk a little bit today about rule of law kind of as a concept but I definitely want to thank the South Carolina rule of law collaborative as well as the former colleagues from the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement at the State Department for the JustTrack program itself which we're of course all here as part of and JustTrack is not simply kind of skills training. JustTrack is not simply programs here in the United States or around the world but to me it's very much trying to take this ethos of rule of law and put it into action and so I'm going to talk a little bit about what that ethos actually is. But first of all and I guess it's probably four hours into a rule of law conference it'll seem a little strange but let's talk about what rule of law is. Now Vince Lombardi every year at the first day of practice would raise a football up in the air and all of these professional football players at the top of their game had played ball for their entire life he would then say gentlemen this is a football and I think that that's one of the things that we need to do we always need to start with first principles. What is rule of law? Let's think about that a little bit before we think about innovation and before we think about technology to advance the rule of law. Now a simple definition is that the rule of law is the restriction of the arbitrary exercise of power by subordinating it to well-defined and established laws. A little more granular the folks from the World Justice Project break it down into four pillars. Accountability, that the government as well as private actors are accountable under the law. Just laws, laws are clear, publicized, stable, applied evenly and that they protect fundamental rights including the security of persons and property and certain core human rights. Third, open government. The processes by which the laws are enacted, administered and enforced are accessible, fair and efficient. And fourth, accessible and impartial dispute resolution. That it's delivered timely by competent, ethical and independent representatives. Neutrals who are accessible, have adequate resources and reflect the makeup of the communities that they serve. There's another way of thinking about rule of law and it's something that we often do. And that is as a practice area, an infrastructure, sometimes as a business, funding opportunities, grant management and oversight, maybe even as a buzzword that comes up in development projects and foreign assistance and international meetings. And you can see that in how one well-respected and active non-profit institution describes their rule of law project. And I quote, we seek to strengthen legal institutions to support legal professionals, to foster respect for human rights and to advance public understanding of the law and citizen rights. In collaboration with our in-country partners including government ministries, judges, lawyers, bar associations, law schools, court administrators, legislatures and civil society organizations, we design programs to respond to local needs and to prioritize sustainable solutions to pressing rule of law challenges. We employ rigorous and innovative monitoring and evaluation approaches in assessing the quality and effectiveness of our programs. Not exactly the stirring rule of law challenge that gets us to the barricades, but sufficient for a grant application. I'm going to use my speaker's prerogative instead to kind of mash all of these concepts together into a definition of rule of law that you should not follow. You should follow what the folks from University of South Carolina tell you. Thank you for coming to this session. I heard you had a very good morning session and lunch speaker, so we hope to keep this after lunch session as exciting to keep you all engaged. So this is a panel discussion and we're really going to be talking about how technology, specifically mobile and social media and what kind of impact it's had on the rule of law. So if we could maybe have my slides put up here. Actually, okay, this is an older version, but that's fine, we'll go with this. So the official title is Innovations in Engagement, How to Social Media and Mobile Apps Impact the Rule of Law. So I'm Rohini Shrihari and I'm the Chief Data Scientist here at PeaceTech Lab. And for those of you who are wondering what PeaceTech Lab is, we are actually right here within the USIP and our group focuses on data, technology and media for peace building. So I direct all the data programs and we're working on a very interesting platform. Maybe I'll briefly speak about it. But if we could just go to the next slide for a second. Pardon? Oh, okay. Which one is it? This one here. Okay, great. I'll try again. This big green button here. Okay, could we have the next slide please? Thank you. Okay. So what I thought I'd do is just sort of briefly introduce the topic and give you some examples which are really interesting I thought in terms of what has been already accomplished. But most of it is going to be a discussion with some great panelists, some of them who I just met for the first time today and I'll introduce them to you in a few minutes. So the way we're going to run the panel is I'll give a brief intro no more than 10 minutes on the topic. Mostly some examples. And then we're going to have each of the panelists introduce themselves and give some opening remarks. And that will be about 30 minutes. And then after that we're going to have a discussion session where I get to ask questions and they will respond. And then after that the audience has an opportunity to also ask questions. So I think there's plenty of time for discussion. We want this to be as interactive as possible. So with that we'll get started. So if we could have the next slide. I just wanted to give some examples of different kinds of technology that's been used in this area of rule of law. Press this one right. Really hard. Okay. I think I'm going to have to start with the Me Too movement. It's been incredible how fast and how rapidly this has taken hold of our society. I think in a period of two weeks there was something like 3 million references to this on Twitter and social media is really what caused this to really explode. In the media and discussions we only hear about the celebrities and the big cases. But I think many would agree that the real impact of this is not on the celebrities but other people, other women who really have now feel empowered to come forward and express what they've been experiencing. So I decided to showcase this as an example of really social media and how it's making an impact in terms of justice. So some other examples. Okay. There we go. Hate speech. There's been a lot of work on hate speech.  Mandola is focused mostly on the European Union. Our work has focused on South Sudan, Kenya, South Africa, primarily the African continent. And the important thing really is that we've shown actually that a rise in hate speech can be directly correlated with incidents of violence in some of these countries also. So this is an important type of initiative and I know that Facebook is also doing quite a bit in this area. Just moving forward this is one of the earlier efforts that many people were probably familiar with. I paid a bribe where citizens can actually report and provide analytics and so on. It's a good initiative but in the discussion session I think we're going to come back to some of these sites and really talk about have these really been effective? Have they made an impact? Do people feel empowered to report? Are they worried about reporting these kinds of things? There are a lot of issues here but nevertheless it's a great example of social media being used to report in this case corruption. And unfortunately the corruption seems to continue despite these efforts. Hafez this was a mobile app that emerged during the 2018 Iranian protests on our site so people can send news about human rights violations but the mobile app also provides really useful information to people in terms of where to go for help if they're arrested or if they are persecuted. Names of attorneys, things like that something that is really caught on this particular one, fairly recent one. I respond with digital identity all about how people including people in refugee camps can be provided digital identities and through technologies like blockchain and so on which would then enable them to get help and the kind of assistance that they need. Just in case anyone's going to be here tomorrow there's a major conference tomorrow being held at USIP Blockchain and Social Impact so if anyone's here and would like to attend I think that's also kind of interesting. This one I'm not going to talk much about because we're very fortunate to have the founder and CEO of this platform right here with us today who will talk more about this IKMEC so this I wanted to highlight because this is an organization a company actually that we run an incubator here called the PeaceTech Accelerator which is an incubator for companies both non-profits and for-profits who are doing something in terms of making a social impact globally and it's actually for those of you who have been in this building it's in the basement of this building which we affectionately call the Bat Cave it's a pretty cool space actually and about four times a year we have cohorts of companies, seven, eight companies from all over the world who come and spend eight weeks here and they are mentored in terms of business technology, marketing, financing all of that with the accelerator called ICMEC but basically they work on it's the center for missing and exploited children and when they came here one of the things that we were able to do was introduce them to folks at Amazon Web Services who have technology for identifying faces in crowds and people have seen maybe not so good uses of this but in this case they're able to pick out children in these photographs and match them against reporting and we had a really success case a few weeks ago when someone actually came forward and said I believe that I was kidnapped 17 years ago or something so it was amazing so this is a really nice example of how we're being used for good so I think with that I'm going to sort of stop talking there's a lot of challenges some of them I've sort of briefly mentioned in terms of the data there's issues of how you collect the data privacy of data, regulations and most of all impact of all of these types so we're going to turn it over to our first speaker who's Jeffrey Arresti and he's the president of internetbar.org so Jeffrey, over to you thank you and I'll just look for the slides we have the video queued up by any chance there's a video, a link that we wanted to run this is the work that we do we go to a place like Timor-Lest and this is the work of an international human rights lawyer, David Levy who was able to document the transition of Meli Fernandez from a child fighter who was in the hills there was no respect for the rule of law there was no respect for the government Timor-Lest, there was no and yet through music we were able to at least start the process of creating trust and identity and give a group of people the chance to put down their arms and build a culture of respect for the rule of law which in a place where there is no law is the first step that you have to take in getting started Meli has turned not only into an artist but also an incubator of change for social justice in his own community but just a little bit of background about myself I'm an international business lawyer for 40 years that means that I go back to the time when the PC first came out the TRS-80 first came out the first Mac came out and I had all of them from the very beginning when I saw the first killer app I was working in an accounting firm the PC-1 came out along with an electronic spreadsheet called VisiCalc and literally hundreds of computers arrived to Coopers and Librand within the course of three or four months with auditors running around the offices giving each other high fives saying you just press the Recalc button and that would save them hours and hours of painstaking pencil-like work so I was very interested and got active I was in Massachusetts as a lawyer for all these years and growing up in that environment and I was one of the founders of the American Bar Association's tech show so I can speak confidently by saying that in the years I've practiced there has not been a killer app for the legal profession in fact law is the reason why technology can't innovate law basically stops innovation because of the jurisdictional nature of what is going on and so when you start thinking about it you ask yourself the question well if several times this morning we hear that technology is so fast and law can't keep up and yet we keep throwing technology at it aren't we missing half the equation probably the most important half how we make laws and how we enforce laws is what needs to change and that's pretty much what I would like to talk to you about my background as a lawyer though began representing my dad in the shoe business so back in the 70's and 80's he traveled all over the world and with letters of credit and telexs he basically was doing e-commerce we just now have e-commerce democratized in that kind of a setting but all that same type of technology has been available for years and we've been able to do it there's a professor of law at USC Jillian Hadfield who wrote a book called Rules of Law for a Flat World and what she essentially said in that kind of environment is that in order for there to be a new way to make laws we need to rely much more heavily on the private sector and mobile phones gives us that ability well I'm going to just click through to get all the points up on the slide if we can mobile phones essentially are in the position of connecting all of us with each other around the world this sense of hyper-connectedness that exists in the world as spawn revolution so if there's any question about the potential for making rules of law change with this hyper-connectedness you just have to take a look at the revolutions now they created voids and in the absence of law in those settings unintended consequences could occur so there needs to be some thoughtful process as we work forward now I work with mostly millennials in a small organization you'll see a couple pictures of the people that I work with a little bit later essentially millennials want to radically collaborate with each other they do not want to have silos that bind them in any way to each other they want to just connect regardless, aim at a particular solution and then make it happen in real time regardless of the platform that they're using and so when law becomes an issue in that kind of setting it's because of the paradox of reform most of the conversation about reform at the institutional level when you're talking about government and reforming law only affects a handful of people the enfranchised the disenfranchised can only reference societal norms and then they have to make change from the bottom up if we want to engage people like Mellie in the context of making changes in laws we have to give them that kind of access and then come up now you've heard of course all about the top down efforts which exist at the international diplomacy level at the public international law level but if you think about bottom up efforts from the ground up the most important things that I will have or at the bottom of this slide which are mobile phones self sovereign identity blockchain smart contracts collaborative environment we have companies that are ready to work on all of these areas right from the beginning and all we have to do is put a deal and put them all together so let me give you the names of companies that you'll see that we're already partnering with to get this job done the world justice project was actually the first seed funder of the internet bar and giving us the opportunity to focus in on how arts and culture could become a foundation for reaching normative behavior in a society and to use music as a platform to express that so that even though music is not the place where you typically think of as a lawmaking society it happens to be universal language and of course if you grew up in the 60s you know that music was really the foundation of a major revolution of thinking in this country so societal norms certainly start in that kind of a setting but now if you're in a place like Timor-Lest or any other of the developing countries that we're in and we'll talk a little bit more about that you're going to places where there are people that have no identities half the world three and a half billion people do not have any kind of an identity so as we talk about digital identities and all the problems that you're facing with digital identities the choice to make of working in the developing world where the justice system is not an obstacle to change is a much not only is a smarter choice just from a legal development standpoint but it's a smarter choice just because it's the right choice to make from a social justice standpoint and so we work in those kinds of environments self-sovereign identity which is a global public utility that's been created by a group out of called sovereign in the global public utility setting there are other groups that have also adopted the self-sovereign identity model is a model which essentially reverses the whole concept of identity from the ownership that we've all given up when we clicked I accept to every terms of service for every social media platform and every email service and every place that we've gone we're starting with self-sovereign identity in the context of we each have to make our own claim about ourselves think about it in the context of the Syrian nurse who's worked for 25 years now finds herself in lesbos and the public international legal framework for refugees and the national laws do not give her a chance to ever be a nurse again not only is that a travesty for her personally it's a travesty for the world as a whole because she has a lot of skills that should not be stopped because of the ravages of war yet how can she in an environment of a refugee camp establish her identity the self-sovereign identity approach has the notion of making verifiable claims the term verifiable is a term that every lawyer should grab onto if you want to see where the future the practice of law is going to be that term verifiable is where you're going to find it because as she is there next to somebody who has to receive information before it gets put up into this immutable blockchain that's not going to change ever how do you know that she's telling the truth that she worked in this hospital doing this kind of work for the past 25 years she's going to bring some people around her she's going to give herself some indications of support of people that can verify what she did but that's only going to be a starting point and then maybe if the camp in some way she'll be able to get a chance to work and maybe a doctor from the developed world doctors beyond borders comes down and a LinkedIn kind of environment starts giving her check marks for work that she's doing and little by little she might be able to build up attributes of identity which she herself controls because the way the blockchain works nobody else will have access to any of those attributes except for her so self-sovereign identity is an aspect and evidence sovereign.org has made that open source platform available to all of us internet bar the organization I founded with several others in 2005 we are the folks working on the identity for all best practices concepts of best practices of course would be focusing in on that nurse how do we establish identity and verifiable claims in that context how do those best practices applying different environments that might be other types of camps orphanages other countries around the world eventually they have to make the way to some international standard and we're talking to the international standards groups from the very beginning to make sure that that works now if you have an identity you then also want to have an ability to use that identity and if you have to demonstrate it we partnered with a group called odem.io which is an incredible group that has already built out ways to take these claims that people make about themselves and turn them into certifications so those certifications could exist in lieu of diplomas or other forms of certifications and then once you meet certain tests and standards that can also go up in the blockchain they partner with us that as we go from camp to camp or orphanage or different country environment they're going to be different paths of certification that we're going to have to take before something goes up on the blockchain another group that we work with is Vipo now this is interesting because if you have an identity what are you going to do with it that fellow Melly Fernandez is singing isn't there some digital asset that's being created there some intellectual property that's being developed of course there is and we want to be able to make sure that Melly Fernandez can benefit from that and that's a big part of the property well years ago there was coming out of Harvard law school there was a group called Second Life and they started building up this whole notion of let's see if we can take law and play with it in a virtual environment and a lot of people played there and law firms were built inside of Second Life and a lot of people ended up with skills and of course the gamers as you know are very successful in these online environments at very high rates and guess what intellectual property disputes started to arise the woman who ran one of the law firms inside of Second Life is now running our music projects she's brought all types of contracts enforcement mechanisms that she's built in the Second Life environment over with us and now we're partnering with a group called the Accord Project and with the Integra Ledger to take those what we call fair trade music models which you'll hear more about in a few seconds and put them into the blockchain in the form of smart contracts let me just so the piece stones process which I'll just tell you very briefly essentially has us going into those communities and identifying the local musicians and giving them the opportunity to take their music and put it up online the most important part of this particular process is the ability to give people there the opportunity to to get out of their own way the current problem that we're working with is in the Cox's Bazaar in Bangladesh where 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have been transferred from Myanmar into Bangladesh and we're giving technology tools so that they can use virtual currency to incentivize each of them to be able to govern the camp itself as they may not be in a position yet to develop some intellectual property though we're working with some to do that there so the fair trade music model these are the kids in the Bangladesh camp that we're singing allows them to benefit from the social justice fair trade music platform and then through innovation they will be able to gain their own identity how can you all get involved in this we decided hyperconnected means that each one of us needs to reach out to you the idea that you're raising public awareness in this environment of the problem there is not enough each one of you can be a digital pen pal to some individual in those settings and work together every one of us is going to need an identity and we can learn from each other so part of what internet bar is doing is establishing this kind of a program so that we can develop that there and as you can see radical collaboration gives us the opportunity to bring a lot of people together all at once to do this thanks thanks Jeffrey so we'll move on to Karen I think they just have to I'll get started so good afternoon everyone thanks to the organizers for bringing us together I work at Physicians for Human Rights and maybe just by way of background until the slides come up Physicians for Human Rights is an international NGO we use science and medicine to document human rights violations around the world and yep and we have used the evidence that we've collected in various investigations to help support accountability mechanisms in many many cases around the world we were established more than 30 years ago and over the course of doing this work we very quickly identified that sexual violence cases were some of the hardest cases to prosecute as many of you know it's very very difficult for survivors to even dare to come forward certainly in the context of a conflict or fragile environment or even post-conflict context the stigma is so great from their families, from the community and there's incredible risk of reprisal among many many other hardships but what we identified is that there are still cases of survivors who are willing to take those risks and have their day in court and this photo that you're seeing 14 survivors who wanted their day in court in DRC to face the accused what is so devastating about so many of these cases is that they fail because there's a lack of adequate evidence to support the allegations of the survivors so many of these cases fail because there are numerous obstacles to adequately gathering evidence to support these prosecutions forensic medical exams are rarely conducted in many of these environments people are not adequately trained medical charts fail to document meaningful findings that could help inform investigations and prosecutions there are very few if any storage facilities at a medical facility or at a police station or even in court there's a lack of clarification about the legal law enforcement and legal communities about what each of these professionals roles are within the course of a justice process and there's an absence of a shared language as you all know even from our work in this country and your work in other countries as well the medical community has their own professional jargon the law enforcement community and legal community have their own professional jargon these communities can truly understand their counterparts from other sectors so all of this goes to the notion that there is a need a serious gap in coordination across all these sectors to work on sexual violence cases so in 2011 we established the program on sexual violence and conflict zones at Physicians for Human Rights the goal of the program is to help the process for the police and clinicians, doctors and nurses, lawyers, judges to be able to more effectively collect and document and preserve forensic evidence of sexual violence to help support local prosecutions of these crimes and also the critical component of this work is to be able to cultivate networks of collaboration among these professionals so that they could work together with each other more effectively on a case by case basis to better support the survivor at the center of this process we do this work in Kenya and in DRC and we started to also pilot this program in Central African Republic I'm going to share with you some updates about our interventions on the low tech side and on the high tech side and how this is played out in court so we run very robust training workshops on low tech capacities that clinicians and police and lawyers and judges can do within their communities with the resources that they have so how to ask better questions during a patient encounter how to do a full head to toe exam for example in order to do a proper forensic medical evaluation we also train on how to do pediatric evaluations pediatric cases are very common in these communities we train on crime scene investigations how to document a crime scene, how to collect evidence and package it and maintain chain of custody we also focus a lot on documentation documentation is critical to do our work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo we saw that there was no standardized medical intake form to document sexual violence cases so we work together very closely with our colleagues from the medical law enforcement and legal communities to create a standard form to document sexual violence cases a forensic form and we borrowed from Kenya and from South Africa the United States, Canada, many other places that had a forensic medical form and our Congolese partners identified those aspects of the form that would be most useful to their context and they developed this medical certificate this medical certificate is now being used in the eastern part of Congo in military and civilian courts and it has had a transformative effect on cases going to court cases are succeeding more and more because there's more data that the clinicians are prompted to ask by virtue of having this form so it's a low tech solution but it is transforming these cases and the judges are the most thrilled to have this form because it helps them adjudicate these cases by virtue of having more data to help them in their decision making nevertheless we are functioning in environments where there are external factors that still make it very difficult to pursue these cases effectively so if a health facility is several kilometers outside in a remote area of the country it can be very difficult for the police to actually navigate roads like this in DRC and elsewhere where this is a common site because they don't have for example access to vehicles or even money for fuel to get to the health facility to be able to pick up this medical certificate so there are a range of infrastructure challenges that we have encountered that also present as an obstacle to justice so we started to identify that in places of low income countries, middle income countries certainly where we work in eastern Central Africa there's incredible mobile penetration in these communities and so we've developed MetaCapt it's a mobile app that pairs a standard medical intake form with photo capture capacity to allow the clinicians to actually document their findings on a digital platform and to be able, this is what the a screenshot of what it looks like so they're able to document their findings and identify which parts of the body the injuries are sustained and it prompts clinicians to take forensic photographs during the patient encounter the app can work without Wi-Fi connectivity the clinicians could use this and create as many records as needed eventually to upload it to the cloud they do need Wi-Fi connectivity to be able to upload it to the cloud but one of the big innovations that we have that we have developed through working on this tool is how to also in a paper full environment how to be able to provide a copy of the form to the survivor at the center of this process and so we had to develop a mechanism to allow the clinicians to be able to print directly from their tablet or phone to a printer without any electricity without rooting the data the confidential data through the internet to be able to allow the survivor to take a copy of her own certificate home with her and then the police and justice sector officials would be able to access the data from the cloud and it's been very challenging to determine who should have access to what data because the workflows are very different in very different communities but the idea is that the data that's gathered in the medical facility can directly inform the police investigations and the prosecution we have developed the tool, the app using collaborative design or co-design that's the ethos of working with the end users as we design and develop this tool so we are constantly working with our partners in DRC and Kenya feel testing the app getting their feedback what's working, what's not working for you what do you need to be able to be valuable for you at the end of the day when this product is completed and so this has been an incredibly helpful tool for us to learn about their needs but even more effectively for them to feel like they're invested in this process too and this tool they can directly see their feedback and input into the final product we're hoping to build out this tool to be able to allow us to do aggregation of de-identified data so that we can do crime mapping to be able to use the data to identify for example perpetrator troop movement or what uniforms the perpetrators may have worn languages spoken or the injuries sustained by the survivors all of these items are really critical for tracking trends or patterns in the violence that are critical helping to support allegations of crimes against humanity for example where we need to identify evidence that can support widespread or systematic crimes taking place it's also really critical to show that who may be in charge as command responsibility for these cases I just want to end by identifying how this has played itself out in court in Kovumu a small village in DRC we started to see cases of young girls some as young as 18 months old to 11 years old being targeted in really brutal cases of sexual violence they were taken from their homes in the middle of their night and brought to a field and brutally violated and abandoned there eventually they were taken to a nearby hospital a pansy hospital where they were treated and the clinicians who we had been working with documented every single one of these cases using this medical certificate over the course of three years 42 cases of these young girls came to the hospital they didn't happen all at once but they happened systematically and all of the girls had the same mode of experience of the violation and brutal brutal injuries it became very difficult for this case to be investigated because it surfaced that a very powerful militia group was responsible for these crimes and the leader of this militia group is a sitting member of provincial parliament in South Kivu so it took years but with advocacy with the community with the medical and legal professionals we worked to have his immunity stripped and finally it was and he along with 17 other members of the militia group stood before court last November evidence was collected and beautifully labeled and victims and witnesses went very strategic innovative protections but ultimately in December of 2017 11 men including this lawmaker were convicted of crimes against humanity for rape and murder ultimately we see that small steps can actually have a big impact and so it's been very heartening to see how medical and legal community by virtue of working together can help to secure greater likelihood of success and prosecutions but really significantly help to bring meaningful access to justice respect and security to survivors and the communities affected by these crimes thanks that was quite compelling so next we have Antoine good afternoon everyone thanks to the organizers for inviting me to share our experience the sometimes I get asked why what's the name Ulula refers to the relation that women make in East Africa and Northern Africa and other cultures for funerals of weddings because the idea behind Ulula when I started it five years ago was how can we give a voice to people that are typically invisible or completely silenced in supply chains or in the deep in emerging markets that came from working ten years in these countries and thinking that I was the white men preaching things that were never going to happen and I saw technology as a means to an end not as an end in itself I'm an economist so I have my own problems but I didn't drink the Kool-Aid of technology if you will so I started Ulula about the time that the Rana Plaza happened which is something that is typically vivid in your memory where a thousand and a hundred Bangladeshi workers died in the collapse of the Rana Plaza complex and the idea that we had I mean was broader than that actually we started with ideas around raw materials which I knew best and I still have we have quite a bit of experience in with the idea that we would use very simple mobile phones so very similar to you that you needed to go super low tech first to provide a way for workers and communities to have a voice in the way they were treated at work or the impacts that other big companies may have on them so we created this mechanism that can do that in a way that I'm going to describe the background to that is I think Ambassador Dibacca gave a very extensive overview of the problems that he has spearheaded but the backdrop is 40 million people are victims of modern slavery a lot of them are women and so I have real problems in getting their voices heard and that's a big weakness if you ask a company whether there is modern sla