Okay, everyone. Welcome back to the Monero Village. We are starting our next talk with Francisco Cabanas from the Monero Core team. He goes by Arctic Mine. He'll be talking about the block award in Monero and what happens in a few years. So please let's quiet down in the back and let's give our attention to Francisco. Thanks. But also how it relates to a lot of the other coins. And I'm talking specifically about Bitcoin like coins and also coins such as other crypto coins. And what happens when this thing goes to zero and what are the risks? So this is kind of an overview. I will do a review of fee and block weight scaling in Monero now. This is quite unique to Monero and is very different from what people are used to. If you, for example, you're used to fees in Bitcoin. And it's also quite subtle. And for this reason, I will spend some time in it and how it relates to the penalty, etc. My next topic will be the rational miner. What is what is a rational miner in Monero and how does a fee market in Monero actually work? What is the block award goes to zero? I mean, this is a very interesting question overall. And it also, what kind of limits do we have? I mean, Sartel mentioned good enough. Implications from Monero. Monero like adapt the block, block weights and also implications for Bitcoin and Bitcoin like small and large block weights and the Satoshi fee market. So this is an overview of fees in scaling review in Monero. There are some significant changes from the last time I spoke on this in here at DEF CON in 2018. There has been some changes. I'm going to cover those for the sake of completeness or understanding how this process works. The Monero uses what's called a crypto note. It used to be the crypto note. Now I'm going to refer to it as the Monero penalty. And what essentially the Monero penalty does is it actually takes the, let me see. I can show you this here. It takes the base reward and it penalizes essentially the percentage increase in the block size over the median square. So when you mine a block that is larger than the medium over the last 100 blocks, you will pay a penalty essentially for fading part of your block reward if you're a miner. And this is the driving force for how fees work in Monero. This is the driving force for how scaling works in Monero. Now a couple of the changes is we, the median is actually capped temporarily. So there's actually two medians. One is over 100 blocks and one is over 100,000 blocks. And this is primarily to ensure that certain types of attacks cannot work in Monero. Those changes were put place this year in the last hard fork. So it's actually very recent. And this is where I will spend a bit more time covering this because it has been some changes. Okay. So what do we have here? We've got the base reward, which is basically your block reward. And then we have the reward that's paid to the miner. And essentially what you're doing is you're taking out this penalty. And then you say maximum allowed block, total block weight is twice. And essentially when you give up the entire block reward.   And what you've done if you mined a block that's twice the size of the median. The penalties only apply when you mine a larger block. And you do not get a rebate for mining a smaller block. This is very important. And so the change that we introduced in was introduced this year in the spring of this year was that we're capping the median as 50 times the long-term median, which is 100, 100,000 blocks. And then it has the scale and the much lower scale rate in order to prevent sort of out of control, out of bound scaling. So for simplicity, I will define B as this ratio, which is essentially a percentage increase in the block that you mined. And the penalty becomes RB times B square. So basically the square of B times R is your penalty. And you can think of it as the percentage increase in the block weight. Okay. So now we have what happens when we add a transaction. So let's say that we already have a series of transactions. And we add an additional transaction and we're somewhere in the penalty. And we look at what is the incremental penalty from adding that transaction. Well, it's a fairly straightforward quadratic equation. You just expand it out. And what you get is 2BBT. Now B is the increased block size percentage before adding the transaction. BT is the transaction size. So that is the key parameter that a miner has to deal with when she's looking at the transaction. Okay, if I'm going to add this transaction, how much is it going to cost me? And then the question becomes, how much fee do I get from the transaction in return? And that is the essence of what a miner has to deal with in this situation. So there's a couple of things that are done. One of them actually is that we have to define certain fee structures. And one of them is that we have to look at, okay, do we have enough space in the fees? So if you take a typical transaction at the minimum block weight of 300,000 bytes, can we actually scale it? So is there enough there in fees for a miner to actually go to add this transaction on? And that effectively is what sets the normal fee in Monero. Now, going back a minute to Reha's talk, this is a question of sort of why don't you just take a higher fee? And the answer is people don't. And in fact, at one point in the past, people weren't doing that and the blocks were just getting stuck. Because nobody was clicking on an interface and simply adding the next level fee that would have done the solve the problem. So this is part of the simplicity of design from the back end element. So this is why we have to set the normal fee at this point. Essentially, we're setting it the optimal level to add one transaction just at the penalty. Okay, so then there's a low fee and high fee that it sets. The key difference also from last year is that we're basing the fees now on the long term median as opposed to a short term median. So basically, here's the interesting, the high fee per byte. The maximum, if you max the whole thing out, it's actually twice the entire reward. And then, so it's a very high fee to twice our beta or ML. And then you get all the other fees that we pay. Okay, so the changes were the introduction of the long term median, copying the growth of 50 times, of the short term, meaning 50 times x. The long term median only grows at 1.4 times. So it's restricted, it's equivalent to keeping it restricted, effectively controls the rate of growth of the block size over time to prevent certain types of attacks. So this is kind of my review. The implication is basically that we are limiting this to prevent these, to prevent attacks. So now we're taking a close look at the rational minus. So what is a rational minus? The rational minus is neither altruistic nor malicious and acts in her enlightened self-interest. She's also dealing with rational users who wish to pay the lowest fee to get their transactions mined. This is the basic dynamic of a fee market in Monero. You have the Maya, you have the users, and you have the penalty. And essentially, the users are competing against the penalty in order to get their transactions mined. So the problem, you're a rational miner, the problem is given a finite number of these transactions and transaction pool. I have a distribution of weights and fees. What is the optimal set of transactions in a block in order to maximize the return to the miner? And this is not, this is essentially what's called a discrete optimization problem. You can actually solve it exactly, but there's also a relatively simple approximation that is pretty close to where you want to be, but not 100%, which I'm going to go over, kind of explains it a lot more efficiently. So you make an approximation. And the approximation that we make is that the transactions are small compared to the block size. So you order the transactions and fee per byte. Okay? You add them to the block starting with the highest transaction first. The idea there is you take the highest paying transactions and you give them priority, the most profitable one. Then you test that age transaction for profit. And then you test when you got into the penalty, then you look at it. Okay, I add an extra transaction. Do I get, I get a fee? Does it attract more penalty than that fee? If the answer is yes, then you stop. If the answer is no, then you keep adding transactions. And of course, if you run out of transactions with or without penalty, then that's fine also. So the rational miner does is take the best highest paying transactions, gives them priority, and then works away right up until they get a point where there's no longer profitable to add more transactions. So basically, the penalty level is determined by the lowest paying fee transaction. And this is a critical point. All the transactions are up below, actually paying a higher fee per byte, because the miner is already giving priority. So this effectively creates every time the penalty is triggered a profit for the miner. The miner makes a profit on the transactions because they need to get ahead of the penalty. So they have to pay this so that the miner will include them. But the miner gives priority to the highest paying transaction. So the rational user is basically going to figure out where in the penalty do I want to be. And then ask the question, okay, this is how much I'm willing to pay. And this is how much I'm willing to push the penalty to get my transaction might. That's the decision the rational user does. And then it offers that penalty as a fee. Okay, now, here's a key element of all of this. The total fees that are collected are proportional to the block reward, because what's driving it is the penalty, which is a portion of the block reward. That is what's constraining the size and growth of the block size. So here's the interesting fun part. What happens when the block reward goes to zero? And the answer is really quite simple. So do the fees, because the penalty is zero. So now, if you drive the block reward to zero, you get no fees. And how do you incentivize the miner? Okay, we may have a problem here. Essentially, there are two scenarios. One of them is that the miners try to form a cartel to protect themselves. And they go ahead and they try to protect fees. Cartels are historically being fined to fail because people cheat. And so that is not a particularly stable. The more likely the overall scenario is simply the whole thing collapses. The base goes to zero. The total fees goes to zero. You have a tragedy of the comments because of competition among miners. And here's a really interesting part. You have no incentive to secure the network. And that's scary because you have no security, none. Okay, so how does Monero deal with this? Well, what Monero actually does is it sidesteps the whole thing. It simply says, we're not going to allow the block reward to go to zero. And then that makes it actually the point that it's talking about a particularly interesting coin because actually Monero solved the problem by simply sidestepping it. And this is why it's so critical to have this minimum telemission or block reward. Because without it, you will not have the scaling in Monero. And in fact, as I will discuss later, we have serious problems with some of the other scaling ideas that have been put in place. So I'm going to deal with it first with one coin, which is a bit interesting in the history of Monero. And that's Bitcoin. People might have known Bitcoin as a heavily pre-mined scam because over 83% was either a pre-mined or an instant mine. It was launched just about the same time, just before Monero. And actually, Monero was forked from Bitcoin. And there was a script on all reference. One of the key differences that Bitcoin did that Monero didn't have is that Bitcoin doesn't have a tail emission. It followed the Bitcoin model of allowing it to smoothly go to zero. And because it tried to set up this pre-mined, linear-mined thing and make it look like a linear-mined over two years, so it was 2012 to 2014, and it went at 83%. So they had to decry the total block reward by 83% in two years. You have this really, really fast falling reward curve, which makes it the perfect canary in the gold mine to look at this problem fee. And so you look at it and you say, okay, we have the block reward went to about 808 BCN. Now if you actually look at the code, there's a 10,000 factor between bytecode and Monero, which is sort of rough, comparable to .08 XMOP of block. So that's roughly the comparison. And this then is about 12% of Monero's tail emission. They still have a falling block reward, because there's a really fast block reward. They panicked, they had to do something, otherwise they're going to become insecure. So they said, okay, fine, let's have the minus boat on the median, effectively trying to set up where it's going to look like a minor cartel. A little more interesting history of bytecoin is there was a bunch of ASICs on mining Monero, there were four of the network, and these last year actually, and these ASICs ended up in bytecoin under primarily the control of bitme. So essentially what we have is a minor cartel in bytecoin. And then what we're likely going to have is, sooner or later the ASICs are going to run out, the block reward is still going down fast to zero, there's hardly any transactions, and nobody's going to bother building new ones, and the thing might just go into tragedy of the commons. So now we're going to talk about the Bitcoins. Now Bitcoin originally introduced the one megabyte block size in 2010, and this is one criticism that I do have of the Satoshi paper. It says, incentive can also be funded with transaction fees. Yeah, fine. If the original value of a transaction is less than the input value, the difference is a transaction fee that is added to the incentive of the block containing the transaction. Once a predetermined number of coins is in the circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation free. This is a straight quote from Satoshi. My opinion on this is very simple. The fact that you include a statement in what is otherwise a work of genius does not make the statement true. There is no justification whatsoever for this statement, no theory, no references. What is the game theory? How is this supposed to work? None. What happened is about 20 months later, 2010, the one megabyte block size was introduced in a hard fork in Bitcoin. That's what actually happened, and it was actually introduced by Satoshi. Then the birth of the block size debate in Bitcoin started. Very interesting. So what has happened? Well, you have this maximum number of this limitation, and one of the interesting results is that from Monera is, well, okay, so if we're going to have the Satoshi fee market, whatever penalty we're going to have, whatever price to increase the block size, it better be stiffer than what Monera has, because we've already shown that Monera was zero, so without a block reward. So we need something as harder. We need something as stiffer. And what better than just a fixed block size, which is essentially what Bitcoin has done. But this, of course, creates a problem that you can't scale the coin. And Bitcoin essentially failed as a transaction currency, mostly failed. I mean, you can still use it for large amounts. It's still cost-effective to do that. In fact, I've done it, and I do it regularly on a very regular basis. But it is not particularly effective for small transactions, because the fees are right. And so it's been transitioned as a store of value, which has been a major, I mean, I consider it a major success of the Bitcoin community, because they managed to save the value of Bitcoin. But so there's great response in that regard. But basically, because of this security issue, the only prudent response from Bitcoin Coach is basically to leave the one megabyte thing in place, at least until you can show that you can actually generate this Satoshi Fimo. Having said that, there are still potential attacks. And one of them that I consider is what Amazon Christmas Day. Well, on Christmas Day, you have all this high shopping, and all of a sudden, nobody's shopping, nobody's transacting, nothing's happening in the network. So if you have a fee-based solution, if you want to attack the coin, then that is what I want to do it. So I looked at if you're going to attack a coin that's just based on fees, the day to do it is Christmas Day. So you get to play Scrooge.  So that's interesting in Bitcoin. Now, if you look at Bitcoin, you see they just took off the limits entirely. So there, what they did is they have an effectively infinite site. But wait a minute, you have an infinite block size. How are we restricting this? Nothing. And then they're going to say, well, okay, there's no limit on the size. Well, he has to question how this fee market is going to develop. I did a rough estimate and it'd be roughly about 8.8% of the block reward in 2043, which is basically the 200th anniversary of Charles Dick and Christmas Cow. It was published in 1843. And then we're not talking 2143. So we're talking something within our lifetime. And they're already very, very low. So that begs the question, how? And what I end up getting is there's a lot of questions and very few answers. And some people might say minimum fees, and I should backtrack on that in our previous slides. Minimum fees do not prevent the miners from giving out-of-bound rebates. So that's not a solution. Because a miner can basically say, okay, I'm going to rebate your back if you submit the transaction directly to my site. So that's not really the answer. So what you end up with is lots of questions and very few answers. So my conclusion, the Monero emission, tail emission, is absolutely vital. It actually makes Monero work. And it may be very close to optimal because of the amount versus the fact that it's less than the inflation rate of gold, which is considered a hard money. So you have the hard money argument sort of handled. The Satoshi fee market is totally unproven. I may not even work at all. We don't know. I mean, the best chance is in Bitcoin, if they managed by keeping the block size small, that they may be able to make it work. We don't know the answer. There's no evidence for this. There's a lot of evidence for cryptocurrency working with a block rule. We have 10 years of evidence in Bitcoin for that. But we don't have evidence for this Satoshi fee market. And basically, what you get if you have a maximum number of coins on all block rewards, you've got more questions than real answers. So at this point in time, I'm ready to take some questions. If anybody has questions, no discussion. Any questions? Yes. Well, I mean, the price that you pay is that you have a linear inflation, which is less than the historic inflation rate of gold. And that's the argument, that's the hard money argument. I mean, that is what scares people because a lot of people love the idea of the finding number of coins. It's very saleable.  And if you're going to go for the gold standard of hard money or Austrian money, which is essentially what we're trying to say here, the implication is, well, if you can beat gold, you're okay. The other thing is because it's linear and it's not exponential, you actually might get a situation where you get a stable stability between the total number of coins, lost coins, and the inflation rate. So what you end up actually very likely is some kind of equilibrium between price, lost coins, and the inflation rate. So you'll actually end up with exactly a flat amount of coins. But you still have that bound by the inflation rate of gold. So as long as you're ahead of gold, you're harder money than gold, then you're okay. But it's just kind of the argument that that one can make. Any more questions? Well, unless you have a penalty or a cost of increasing the block size that is stiffer than Monero, because if you show in Monero that this is what happened, you need a stiffer penalty, a stiffer cost of increasing the block size for the fees to go to zero. So for example, Bitcoin Core is done, it says, well, we're going to keep the block size at 1 megabyte. Well, that is definitely an infinite penalty. So it could work there. But then you get someone like, say, Bitcoin Satoshi Vision, we're going to let this thing grow to infinity. They just mined a 210 megabyte block. Well, that is way weaker than what Monero has. So you have a bound. You have a bound saying if it's stronger, the penalty is weaker than what's in Monero, then the fees are going to go to zero. That's essentially the the thesis. There is nothing to restrain that block size. There is nothing to create scarcity. So either you go back to the Bitcoin scenario, either you have a mining cartel, or you're going to try to do the comments, all could probably happen.  Any more questions? Any more questions? Don't talk about two minutes left. Okay. Well, thank you.


Hello, everyone. We're just going to give all do get started with intros and as we give folks another minute to sort of file into the virtual zoom room. But for those of you who I haven't had the pleasure of meeting my name is Kendra Albert. I'm the director of the initiative for representative first amendment if Ra, which is the host organization for this panel today. And I'm so so excited to be hosting this conversation and basically getting to sit back and learn from this incredible group of panelists. And I want to just sort of like open with a couple of thank yous and then sort of tee off our topic and then I'll turn it over to often to actually run that run the conversation. First, before I get started want to thank call it be doing enough son or a goat who provided both like logistical as well as substantive support for planning this event really grateful. Really grateful to them for making sure that we knew could pull together this incredible incredible group. And I wanted to sort of say a little bit about if for us at how excited we are about this event and our support of this event, you know when the sort of more recent social media censorship of pro Palestinian voices was happening. It was not surprising to folks who had necessarily worked on social media censorship or surprising to folks who had worked on pro Palestine issues advocacy before, but it, I think, resonated for the first time with a new group of people about how this might impact advocacy and who was being heard. But of course this work goes back a long way I remember when I was actually sort of researching for putting together this panel finding Palestine legal report from 2015 on seeing some nuts on what they called the Palestine exception to free speech law. And so our goal with this event is to sort of maybe I don't think in one hour we're going to remedy the Palestine exception to free speech law. But to bring to folks who may come at this from more of a First Amendment angle. So the issues and questions and concerns that folks doing pro Palestine advocacy have seen around social media but also offline speech censorship. And to do that I'm super thrilled to introduce Ahmed Abuznit, who is the executive director of the US campaign for Palestinian rights. And he'll be moderating today so I'm going to get it to take a backseat and listen and learn. And I'll just be wrapping up at the end, like with all if for events please put questions in the Q&A box and, although we have such amazing panelists that may only have time for one or two questions. We'll see if we can get there, but over to you. Thank you. Alright, thank you Kendra. Thank you to Khalid be doing a jazz shot. And everyone who's been a part of putting this together, really excited for this conversation. Once again, I'm Ahmed Abuznit I direct the United States campaign for Palestinian rights, aka us CPR and one of the reasons I'm most excited about this conversation is I feel like we've had it. You know, a bit segregated we've talked about offline stuff and we've talked about online stuff and today we have a collection of individuals that are going to help us put it all together and understand what's at stake for advocates for the Palestinian cause for Palestinians themselves. And in the many ways we're seeking to, you know, disrupt this oppression by advocating for justice. So we're going to go around and actually ask for our panelists to introduce themselves. What I'd like is for each of our colleagues here to say their name, where they're, you know, communicating to us from and then a little bit about their organization and the work, so that folks can have the background context, needed for when we get into these questions. And so I'm going to ask that we start with Della first, and then we'll go to Radhika, and then Nadine. Hi, so just introduction time everyone my name is Della Shammas. I'm a staff attorney at the Center for constitutional rights were illegal and advocacy organization based in New York. I've been in a range of issues at CCR but sort of generally at the intersection of what's called national security law and and sort of human rights law or immigration law. A lot of my work has been around Palestinian rights, whether it's defending Palestinian advocacy here in the US or working with Palestinians sort of on the ground in the West Bank Gaza and in Israel. Thank you Della Radhika. Hi everyone. My name is Radhika Sinoth. I'm a senior staff attorney at Palestine legal based in our New York City office. We work closely with the Center for constitutional rights and Della. For those of you who don't know much about Palestine legal. We are basically legal defense for Palestine activists in the United States. We provide legal support for people who are censored punished falsely accused for speaking out for Palestinian rights and I oversee our intake in casework. Thank you Radhika Nadine. Hi everybody my name is Nadine Nashif I'm the director of family family is a Palestinian digital right organization that works to defend and promote the Palestinian digital rights, basically through monitoring and researching the policies and actions of the different three governments, the Israeli government, the Palestinian Authority and the de facto Hamas government in Gaza Strip. We also do similar work in front of the internet companies specifically the social media companies and digital economy companies and their policies towards Palestinians. And we do work with the Palestinian civic society to empower them on digital advocacy tools. So, I'm going to actually stay with you here for this first question, and then we'll get get a chance to hear from Radhika Nadine what have we seen over the last few months that's felt different to you and what has been more of the same. So, before speaking about the different I think it's important to see the picture in general that there is ongoing fight fight and war on narratives. There is an ongoing in the last few years and attempt to suppress Palestinian voices on the online. And this takes in many shapes and forms but it's important to understand that there is a systematic effort that has been going on in the last few years. The government has been using different tactics and strategies to to implement this part of this is our legislation that criminalized human right defenders of Palestinian activists part of this of this is developing and encouraging a whole industry of surveillance against Palestinians in the last few years have been a kind of a laboratory for the Israeli security establishment and Israeli companies to develop these technologies that actually later on are sold abroad, including to some of the Arab regimes. We know the infamous company of NSO and any vision and others. Other kind of tactics and strategies that they were used is basically to put heavy pressure on social media companies to adopt their own definition of incitement and their own definition of what is terrorism and what is kind of not legitimate speak on those platforms. Other tactics that have been used in the last years is to organize different groups. We kind of congos basically governmentally supported NGOs that are supported financially and also coordinated like act IL for IL and others that basically together they do mass reporting on Palestinian content, even without understanding what's the content about or knowing the language. And obviously, publishing lots of pages and content that is supporting the Israeli narrative as an opposite to all what they have been doing with the Palestinian narrative. So this is normally what's happening and this is the fight or the war that's happening in the last year on the narrative, but on the other hand, what we saw in May, it's the same war but in steroids. So basically, heavy pressure on the companies that Israeli cyber unit working. I mean, according to the director of that unit, they had seven times more requests of takedowns from the companies than what they are usually doing. So to understand that the Israeli cyber unit under the Israeli Ministry of Justice, through the different secretive agencies they are systematically as I mentioned, surveying Palestinian social media and basically asking for takedowns, or what's the voluntary takedowns without any due process regarding Palestinian content. And this is what happened in May basically was like, you know, as happening usually but in so many, on so much more cases, I mean, Hamlet Center alone documented 600 cases in three weeks. We assume that there were thousands of cases. So basically, everything was amplified in that in that time, and all of these kinds of directly from the Israeli government or whether it's like NGOs that are related and supported by the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs, or other groups were into intensifying their work to suppress the Palestinian voices in that time. Thank you Nadim and thank you for the work of Hamlet to be able to give us some data and some chances to learn from some of these tactics of suppression. So I'd love to shift over to, you know, our folks based in the US. Let's have the allegor first and then we could get to radical. And I'll just step back even one more bit because I'm not sure what level of familiarity folks in the audience have around this is general situation on on the ground in Palestine but it in some what we have been seeing in the in the late in the previous months has been fairly unprecedented uprisings in not just where we're sort of more used to seeing them whether it's the West Bank or Gaza but also in Israel right in in the what we call what Palestinians call 48. So areas where Palestinians who live there are citizens of Israel, and where we've been seeing, I think in many ways unprecedented connection of the, the issues that affect and impact Palestinians and Gaza Palestinians in the West Bank both occupied territory, and, and Palestinians in 48, and, and a sort of moving beyond the usual international law narratives that have really focused on the law of occupation and speaking much more about, you know, fundamental questions of equality and justice so it feels like a really big background to to how what what we're seeing, and so it feels like an opening in many ways, and then with with new audiences to right people are hearing the message differently. Globally, so coming out of Palestine, and a lot of this was sparked by events in Jerusalem as the sort of process of the Israeli government policy of essentially what we call ethnically cleansing or removing Palestinians from neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, was reaching a fever pitch in a couple of neighborhoods share share provided sort of a neighborhood in East Jerusalem provided like a sort of particular example of this as they were facing some what are called eviction proceedings and forced eviction proceedings in Israeli courts, but also efforts to just massive marches by Israeli far right groups on to Jerusalem and then solidarity from Palestinians and Gaza. And, you know, in response to these or viewed our assaults on Palestinians in Jerusalem so that's all you know there there's there's been a lot of social media advocacy around these flashpoints right please like she's like the old city of Jerusalem and then of course, inevitably with the massive Israeli military assault on Gaza. civilian deaths. Seeing the sort of social media around that. So, with this increased attention you see the increased repression of efforts to go beyond to have Palestinian voices reach you know outside of the usual mainstream media those efforts feel successful, considering the amount of repression that's faced and generally how these voices really make it to more mainstream media channels and so I think that a lot of the suppression that we're seeing is in direct response to that kind of increased attention. Another thing that seems different has been known and D mentioned the way that social media companies have been removing contents in large part at the request of, you know, organized efforts by the Israeli government. What we've seen on the US side is how these efforts to get the sort of. I mean this is a to summarize really like to mean to mean like directions that this has taken. One is, and they're both long standing but again as Nadine mentioned kind of on steroids more recently. The use of the sort of anti Semitism framework as a way, and particularly the pushing of particular definitions of anti Semitism that equate any criticism of Israel with anti Semitism and hoping that social media companies and third parties, third party platforms adopt this definite redefinition of anti Semitism. Oftentimes we'll hear about it referred to as the IHRA and hoping right if I can get into that a little bit more. And so that's kind of one way in which this is done so we're seeing you know very active efforts to get these social media companies to adopt these these definitions, which then justify the removal of contents that is critical of Zionism and Israeli government policies and so on. And then the other direction that we're seeing, again, increase is the use of anti terrorism laws or regulations and the weaponization of these US anti terrorism regulations to remove content from social media platforms in the only ways and I'll talk a little bit more in in the ways in which anti terrorism laws are being used online and offline to suppress Palestinian speech but I just kind of want to flag these two things. Thank you so much DL a radical, you're up. So you know, sort of along the lines of what DL mentioned, you know, in Palestine right so you have a situation where Palestinians for over 70 years have been living in a situation of, you know, colonialism and apartheid and ethnic cleansing. And here in the United States, you know people have been speaking out in support of Palestinian rights and against, you know, ethnic cleansing and, and the political ideology of Zionism and what we've seen in Palestine legal over the past few years, you know, we started in is that the movement for Palestinian rights has largely been student led. And this makes sense. If you know, if you think about sort of US history and who leads social justice movements from the Civil Rights era to the Vietnam anti anti war movement to the anti apartheid movement in South Africa in the 1980s. So these students were on the sort of cutting edge of activism and sort of free speech right.  But we've, what we found was that about 80% like the vast majority of people who came to us were either students or professors. And, you know, in some ways this really made sense, you know where where change is happening where where where the activism was was also where the suppression was. And so you know, in some ways it's exciting to see this growing movement of Palestinian rights you know I just want to like zoom out a little bit and not be all negative like it is incredible to see how how I feel like the tide is changing in the United States you know I'm really like so positive living in the United States when it comes to policy and freedom. And I will just say you know I've been an activist on this issue for almost 20 years now I lived in Palestine during the second in Tabata in 2002 2003 for about a year and a half I lived in Gaza for a few months as well. So I've been involved in this issue for for a long time now so what I've really noticed in the past, you know, since May. Some things that have changed here in Palestine legal that we've been seeing is that people are speaking out more and it's not just people who might call themselves activists it's not just those student activists or those progressive groups it's lefty professors purely, you know we track incidents of suppression. And since 2014 when we started tracking these numbers we've responded to over 1700 incidents of suppression. And that by that I mean it's just really what people come to us and report. So that's just really just the tip of the iceberg. We've seen some patterns over time but what we really saw recently is is sort of what I'm going to call regular people getting censored and punished. So it's not like just leftist or people who kind of know what's up when it comes to speaking up for Palestinian rights in the United States. You know we've been getting calls from farmers from, you know, doctors and healthcare workers. You know people who work in in fashion and beauty, I mean, big law like private sector publishing media like you name it. Because people come to us confidentially I can't share with you all these stories but some of them are really high profile to just sort of you know regular people trying to go about their daily lives, who are really upset and horrified by what is happening in Palestine and maybe are new to the issue and hadn't really understood what what was happening there and felt compelled to speak out about it on social media, often, or sometimes it's really just in their workplace. And then they're called in by their bosses they're told you need to delete all of your tweets supporting Palestinian rights, or they're fired or they're told. You know, in a couple cases, we've had people who deal in mental or health services. And, you know, in the wake of George Floyd's murder and the uprisings last year.  And so their offices were trying to be supportive of their Asian clientele. And so they were like, Oh, you know now I have the space to do this for Palestinians, some of them are Palestinian Palestinians themselves.  And so they call us. So so so those are some of the changes that we're seeing here and you know the move from like sort of like public censorship, which is still very much there, you know I don't want to say it's not there. But we're really seeing sort of like regular people get involved in in in speaking out for Palestinian rights, and getting censored and punished for that so that's one trend we're seeing. Thank you so much. So radical we're going to stay with you. And we'll have you lead off answering this next question which is, what are some of the ways we've seen success in defending freedom of speech on the issue of Palestine. We're just getting that message out that there is a free speech issue and talking about Palestine. Right and I just want to say the report that Kendra mentioned the beginning we co authored it with the Center for Constitutional Rights so it wasn't just Palestine legal but that did come out in 2015. So six years ago, and that was like, no one had used that phrase, like I think you know Palestinians knew what was up and some you know people really, you know, involved in the issue as far as the censorship and how hard it is to talk about Palestine in the United States, but I feel like that's in the lexicon now more not. I mean we need to really need to get that that message out more. There's still a lot of problems, a sort of a both sides, sort of framing of it which is, which doesn't recognize the power and balance at all but I think I think those are some successes as far as just lawyers successes. But I also want to just bring it back to the activists because like, you know, we're lawyers we try to defend activists but I just really think, you know, you know, Palestinians have done amazing, as far as just like, continuing to resist and I think the activists in the United States are really just growing the movement and just getting the message out and I think we should be, we have a long way to go but I feel like the growth has just been exponential. And especially if you look at like the younger generation like millennials and younger on college campuses, like, there's just been a sea change. Absolutely. I share your excitement, Radhika. We are shifting hearts and minds and thoughts daily. So Dela, you know, Radhika touched a little bit about legal and activist success we've seen but particularly on the legal strategies. You all have served as counsel for the US campaign for Palestinian rights and we were obviously being sued. We spoke about material support and terrorism so you know what are some successful ways that we've been able to battle. You know for this freedom of speech on Palestine and in particular you can touch a little bit of on the lawsuit that would be great. And let me talk a little bit about that lawsuit, because it's pretty emblematic of what one form of the many forms of attacks on Palestinian advocacy that we've seen. And just noting because in the chat there's a lot of talk about, you know, the sort of the fact that there's plenty of Jewish Americans who are also being attacked. When we talk about Palestinian advocacy, I think we're talking about advocacy for Palestinian rights and the speakers are oftentimes not just, you know, Palestinian they're all sorts of speakers right. So that's a really important point to note but the US campaign lawsuit is a really interesting one for several reasons in addition to the fact that we have an amazing client. It was brought by the Jewish National Fund, which is and as well as some other individual plaintiffs who are all Israeli individuals. The National Fund is sort of in Israel it's a quasi state agency in other words it has legislatively acquired status where it sort of acts as a partial partially in control of significant swaths of land around 10% of the land in in Israel, the part that was established in 1948. And so they have also international fundraising branches I'm sure people are familiar with a little blue boxes across across the US very familiar in many Jewish communities. And the statute under which the, the lawsuit was brought is a US material support to terrorism statute, which is a criminal law, and then the civil provisions of JASTA JAS TA the justice against sponsors of terrorism act I believe, which allows individuals to bring civil suits against, among others, folks who are who the plaintiffs accused of providing material support to terrorism. So, under this theory, which we've seen a lot being used by banks, Iranian banks, Lebanese banks, by victims of terrorism. That's kind of been like the first gen of a lot of that litigation and it's still very much ongoing and it's pretty big multimillion billion dollar industry probably the sort of next gen of these lawsuits are being brought against organizations like the US campaign. So the allegations are meritless, and in fact a judge agreed with us. The Jewish National Fund claims harms to some of its trees that have planted along the Gaza border. The firm has come from the incendiary kites and balloons that Palestinian protesters and marchers in Gaza launched as part of the Great Return March which was a series of marches planned by by sort of vast swath of organizations and individuals in demanding the right to return of the refugee, the right to return of Palestinian refugees. And that some of those incendiary kites and balloons and rockets launched from Gaza into Israel have burned some of the Jane of trees and some of the plaintiffs property. And so that is a harm that is alleged. So this is the US campaign which is a DC based advocacy organization that does all sorts of amazing work had physically sponsored the boycott committee, which is based in Palestine. Through through a six degrees of separation theory. They are trying to sort of ping liability for the trees that were burnt. The Jane of trees that were burnt on to the US campaign. So I tried my best to give the summary of what is a fairly elaborate and frankly absurd set of allegations. The purpose of these lawsuits and this is kind of to the broader point is to silence and to chill and to deviate resources away from the important work that organizations like the US campaign are doing to sort of defending and putting them in a posture where they have to sort of address these various terrorism allegations and that is the crux of what we're seeing in so many contexts right sort of constantly lobbying these allegations of terrorism against anything that Palestinians say or do and distracting from the real issues on the ground that Palestinians are trying to talk about right to this position of their lands or historic dispossession. And, and there's their quest for justice. So, after you know we file the motion to dismiss. The judge agreed and granted the motion to dismiss. And of course because this is about exhausting resources. The JNF, how the motion to reconsider that is pending and so we continue to move forward we're pretty confident, but that doesn't take away from the, the distraction and their resources. And that's really kind of the point of these, these laws and sort of the material support to terrorism, civil provisions. So the ability of any kind of individual to bring a claim and lodge a complaint in a federal court that sounds and terrorism which is one of those like boogeyman words it's very scary it takes the air out of the room when people hear it. It's a big problem because even though not a lot of these cases aren't necessarily making it to court, but CCR and Palestine legal and many others know that organizations working on Palestinian rights donors who are trying to support Palestinian rights. And all this are, you know, folks who are basically being targeted by this network of Nadim called gongos right organizations that are like NGOs that are sort of affiliated closely with the Israeli government have a explicit mandate and purpose of a silencing support for Palestinian rights. Lodge threat ladder is constantly right there's a very active. And this doesn't make it on a court's docket so you're not seeing it necessarily but we're hearing a lot about it because people come to us, frankly, panicked about, you know their potential liability, and they're not used to hearing the words material support to terrorism. And they certainly have nothing to do with any of that but they are simply trying to advocate for Palestinian rights. And so, so it ends up being a lot of time and resources simply doing this defense work of advising people what to do trying to make sure that everything that people are continuing to continue to be able to, to whether it's fundraise or advocate or travel and do the things that they want to be doing to keep highlighting the sort of injustice on the ground in Palestine, when faced with these kinds of allegations and these lawsuits and a lot of these kinds of these lawsuits are also on the minds of in house council at every social media company that you all know about. And, you know, recently you all probably heard zoom removed events by by that involved a number of Palestinian speakers. Likely, and we don't know this but you know this this this idea that you're going to be maybe sued or maybe found liable under some various laws is sort of like in the back of everything. It's really surfaced and explicitly addressed when it is and when it has been. It's always been shot down by courts right and I think I'd love it if right it could say more about the sort of equivalent pattern we're seeing in the anti BDS legislation right I mean, it's it's not something the chill is way more significant than the actual concrete impact of legislations and lawsuits. It's the fact that people know that it's out there but they haven't really fully had a chance to understand the sort of details of it. And that makes people want to not even approach or touch the the whole issue. Yeah, thank you Dela. I will see you all see we have brilliant counsel and I'm thankful. Radhika. Do you want to address that point right now before we head over to Nadine. On the legislation side of things. Yeah, I mean, you know, since 2014 220 bills have been introduced in the United States. Targeting speech supporting Palestinian rights, most of them targeting the boycott movement for Palestinian rights. Now, most of those failed actually only 23 of those bills actually pass no I'm sorry about 23% of those past. But we right now in the United States we have 31 states with bills in effect, which is kind of nuts right. On the other hand, you know boycotts are protected First Amendment protected speech in the United States. In 2001 NAACP, the clear Claiborne hardware where the Supreme Court made that crystal clear right. So, because of that, you know, when we first saw these bills being introduced, you know they tried to do things like anti Palestinian groups tried to do things like you know if you allow an academic organization to pass a resolution supporting the academic boycott of Israel. You can defund your entire state school system of all funds like they were these really crazy things right. And you know, thanks to organizing efforts, including with like teachers unions and different kinds of groups, including a lot of Jewish groups like Jewish groups, those bills are increasingly watered down to where we right now have these bills which are just like, I mean here in the state of New York, for example, Governor Cuomo signed an executive order which says, Oh, you know, all companies who support BDS, you know we're going to make a blacklist and then New York's not going to do business with them. And if you look at the blacklist this is in 2016 it's like 10 companies they're all European. It's not really heard of them. It's not really clear if they do any business with with New York. It's not even clear if they engage in BDS. No, you know, and, and everyone in New York who wants to support boycotts for policy rights can continue and go about their business and do it as they should because it is their their free speech right to do that. But I will say at the beginning, people were really confused and we got a lot of calls and even today. We got a lot of calls and usually maybe it's, you know, from people who are newer to the issue or community members policy and community members that are not sure. And I think that's really the purpose behind passing these laws, or bringing these lawsuits as dialla mentioned, there's all kinds of complaints that are that are being brought in various contexts that have lost, and one of the architects of the process one of these bringing civil rights complaints to stop Palestinian rights his name is Kenneth Marcus. He was formerly in the Trump administrations as the head of their office for civil rights. And back before that, before he was in that position he was he wrote an op ed in the Jerusalem Post where he said you know it might seem demoralizing that we anti Palestinian groups are losing all of these complaints, but rest assured I'm paraphrasing here he said you know there's still these complaints are still having their purpose because no one wants to be the target of a civil rights complaint. And because we're bringing these these these complaints you know people are afraid to join students for justice of Palestine and they're afraid to speak out. And I think really ultimately at the end of the day, that is what these groups are trying to do they're trying to scare people from speaking up for Palestinian freedom and show people, because it can be scary to be a target of these types of lawsuits that are accused of terrorism or anti Semitism for taking a principal position for policy rights. Thank you, thank you and so just for everyone before I moved to Nadim. These are organizations well worthy of your donation, the Ella and CCR have obviously served as counsel for us. And of course for pal legal I've reached out to them several times personally when I was being defamed and targeted by different, you know, Zionist outlets so we're going to go ahead and shift to Nadim Nadim you posted a report for us here in the chat that I shared with everyone. I'm wondering if you want to talk a little bit about the report and also some of the successes that Hamlet has seen in engaging this issue over the last few months. Yeah, so so basically in the last few months we have been documenting all these kind of takedowns that I was talking about. And this report basically covers them and cover how the companies also react to our appeal. So basically Hamlet is a trusted partners of the social media companies as you know so the social media companies normally they need different stakeholders from the civil society and the different countries they operate and they want people whom they can consult. And basically we try to document all these cases and to appeal and try to put them back. But also in the same time I want to share with you another report which we basically did during this time together with actually an Israeli company. We were also observing the incitement and what was happening on the other side basically because what's happening is that there is this feeling that this is not being addressed at all. So it's a situation where basically the cyber unit like 95% of their work in the Israeli Ministry of Justice is to track and to monitor Palestinian content and to try to take it down as much as possible. And we know that there are these kind of very extreme right when fascist groups who are organizing these attacks and mixed cities like Haifa, Ramle, Lead, Aker and other places that the ILA mentioned earlier. So these attacks were organized and synchronized through these chat applications and through this Facebook. And there was this huge amount of racism and insight that basically this kind of is free basically I mean the message that the Israeli government is sending is that if you are an Israeli Jewish you are allowed to to incite as much as you want because nobody will really like the law enforcement would not happen with you all the time that you are inciting as Palestinians and Arabs. So out of the million 1 million 90 conversations that we monitored in these three weeks, there was around 183 conversations around 80% basically of the conversations that mentioned Arabs and Palestinians in these three weeks were including hate speech racism and incitement. So you can imagine like the high level of volume of this hate speech that nobody really deal with or address. On the other hand, I also want to speak about the issue of like the successes and the shifts that we are seeing in this period as a person who was following social media content moderation of these different platforms. I think that there is a change I mean things are not the same as they were in 2015 and 14 were basically we had like total. I mean, they totally ignored us and these platforms. And specifically in the last period in the last aggression the Israeli aggression I mean we saw lots of Arab and international influencers on the social media who were stepping forward and saying and being vocal about Palestinians and justice that should be happening on the social media so lots of also different people organizing themselves and speaking out and trying to be there and to influence in different languages. We saw international solidarity more and more. And from the global South, not only from Europe and the US. That was happening which is was not the case for example if I compare like 2014 etc. These phenomena is hardly existed. There was much more by the mainstream media coverage specifically regarding the content moderation policies articles and reports that were criticizing Facebook and other companies that they were talking about these kind of mob lynches in the streets of the mixed cities. I mean this was covered by the New York time and reports in Washington Post and other mainstream media outlets which was hardly existing before. So all of this, I think created the pressure certain pressure on the social media companies and specifically I can speak about Facebook that they were much more apologetic than before they were trying to excuse things and to explain things. So we saw, for example, the phenomena of shadow banning. This phenomenon where the reachability of the account and the pages want to dropping suddenly when they start speaking about Palestine. That was not happening before, especially with influencers. And about the hashtags that disappear. For example, on Instagram disappeared for three days. So later on the head of Instagram they published this PR communicates saying that there was a glitch and there was a technical problem and it's a global one. It's not related to Palestine etc. Which obviously was not true. It was the issue of them speaking about what's happened and trying to explain and having these meetings with different stakeholders, and then having meetings with Israeli officials but then after that having meetings with the Mohammed state the Palestinian Prime Minister. So all of these things that normally do not happen, they happen now and we see a shift now. It's obviously not the breakthrough that we want. I mean we really want to adjust transparent policy of equal policy of content moderation and not just, you know, kind of excuses. And we're not there, but I, we see that there are changes that are happening that are small, they're slow, but things are changing at least comparing for with couple of years ago. Thank you Nadine. So appreciative of the work Hamil is doing I think just the big the ability to be able to talk about it with the data to back it up is incredibly helpful for us as advocates. So we had a question come through the Q&A that actually situates perfectly with a question we wanted to ask so I'll lift up the question from the audience member, and then tie it in and I'm going to hand off to Diallo. So the question was, can one use material supports terrorism against settler funding fundraising organizations like the JNF, you know, such as they were doing against US CPR and so we also had a question we were going to engage with around, you know, how do we develop an offensive strategy or how do we go on the offensive against all of these mechanisms so I'm going to hand off to Diallo, and then we'll get to the rest of our colleagues. Diallo. It's my favorite kind of question, both because it allows us to talk about some of the problems with the using the terrorism framework right and not wanting to strengthen it. Like, I, you know, ultimately, material support to terrorism laws and various US terrorism laws are, if you look at the way that they're being deployed, widely being deployed against communities of color enforced in ways that are discriminatory and chilling, right. So if you look at the material support to terrorism statute. So as it currently stands, after the United Supreme Court addressed a constitutional challenge and holder versus humanitarian law project. Essentially plaintiffs in that case were a number of mostly humanitarian and peace building organizations saying we would love to we want, we want to be engaging with sort of providing legal training to organizations that are on the US terrorism list like the Tamil Tigers right so can we provide them training on international law and how not to run afoul to international humanitarian law for example. But we're afraid to do so because there's this law in the books and to us it feels like we might be running afoul to this criminal law and the Supreme Court, unfortunately in a very unfortunate decision upheld the constitutionality of that statute and essentially kept this really broad definition of material support to terrorism, which has largely chilled certain forms of charitable work important crucial life giving forms of humanitarian work in areas where where the where organizations that are designated by the US government as terrorist organizations operate so Afghanistan Somalia, certainly Gaza with Hamas and most Palestinian political parties are designated under the US terrorism system so anything that props that up is up is is generally some things that I would seriously question. In fact, a lot of our work and one of the things that I think we really need to be engaging with as, especially if there are folks here who are interested in sort of the First Amendment in civil liberties and sort of putting their legal minds to work around these issues is how do we start dismantling that regime, because of how how silencing and damaging it has been to some communities and not others. Now that is not to say that we shouldn't be thinking about creative ways to hold accountable a lot of these groups and these individuals and these organizations that are directly involved in violating Palestinian rights. And, and that's really where I want us to be spending our time and we're stuck doing the defense work, unfortunately, but I'd like to at least be doing 50% of my time of also kind of keeping the focus on where we wanted to be and not just just not just defending against false accusations, but also turning the tables and putting the shining the light back on to where it needs to be which is on what Palestinians are saying and what Palestinians are demanding. And a big part of that has been. What are you in the US doing supporting all of these organizations on the ground and Palestine that are, you know, and in Israel and Jerusalem which is occupied that are driving the settler movement that are actively involved in this is possessing people from their homes and these are US individuals US organizations and so. So we're, we're very actively thinking about that, not using terrorism laws, because, again, we don't want to sort of prop those up and validate them. But there are various other laws that are underutilized right and certainly the US has international law obligations and I think now, even though some of this stuff may have fallen on deaf ears deaf ears. Is that right again, yes, my aims are sometimes off the, you know, some years ago now now we we have more of an audience whether it's whether it's in Congress, and I think also there's just the developments on the ground also make it so that we have just a very clear evidence of this kind of direct engagement. So, yeah, that's where that's that's my happier place. And I, I'm really glad for the question, but I do also just in terms of engaging folks around thinking of not just what do we need to be doing to defend Palestinian rights but also how do we dismantle a regime of basically the sort of post 911 war on terror world right how do we move on from that because if you look at the regulations and the laws that have been passed like the material support to terrorism law. They've been weaponized against advocacy for Palestinian rights and other forms of advocacy. And the charitable giving has been a huge area of concern for many civil liberties organizations for a long time and it's under these laws. Most folks who talk about it are like in the humanitarian space in the charitable space. And not so much in the cyber space and in the human rights space and in the like advocacy space and I think we need sort of start changing that, even though it sounds scary. The terrorism laws are scary like we have to be like looking at the their impacts on on the work on the ground. Thank you Diala. So, I want to say, shout out shout out to the Institute for representative first amendment because we have a great audience with us with a lot of questions sadly we won't be able to address them all but radical. And I think that's something that's lifted up that relates to this question is about the Florida, the Florida State lawsuit that power legal has launched. Can you share with us a bit about that effort. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we sort of recently went on the offensive along those that those lines is that we're representing a Florida State University student named Ahmed Daraldic and he's Palestinian first Palestinian American to be Florida State Student Senate. Really incredible brilliant young guy. He got elected anti Palestinian groups, including mostly off campus groups dug through his social media profile, and found statements where he cursed Israel's occupation when he was a child. And other statements that he made as a child and he lived in Palestine was tear gas when he was a kid there like remembers having to protect a younger sister who had asthma when the Israeli army through tear gas canisters in their house. And so yeah, he cursed the occupation. And because of that, I mean he was subjected to just a storm of like incredibly racist harassing social media comments, mentioning his family and his aunts, and you know, the n word and just horrific things that no one should have to go through much less a student trying to support the community. And, and the administration, instead of helping him actually condemned his speech. And they put out a statement the President University put up a statement on FSU's website, first condemning him as anti Israel and then mysteriously and sort of quietly changed anti Israel to anti Semitic. And so you know, we, we, you know, we tried to help him for months. He eventually got removed and he got put back. And this is you know, during, during, during the COVID pandemic. And eventually, you know, we filed a complaint recently and this is we just learned it was actually the first of the, it's kind of title six complaint, alleging anti Palestinian hostile environment. And so title six of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for those of you don't know, you know, came out of the civil rights movement and the idea behind that. This was during a time when, you know, black students in the United States were facing abuses and really horrific racist acts, so that they couldn't get an education right and so under this, under this law, a university can lose its federal funding if it allows a hostile environment to take place that's so severe and pervasive, a student can't get an education. But you know that that's really what happened here with Ahmed. And so we filed the first complaint on his behalf we're waiting to see what happens with that it takes a few it takes a month long process but you know what we're hearing more of from students. We're hearing, you know, this is a free speech issue we do believe that this isn't just about sort of Palestinians right. It's really anyone who speaks out for Palestinian rights in the United States is treated differently and is censored and punished and this number of people who come to us are also actually Jewish, and often Jewish Israelis. But I think what we're really seeing recently as Palestinians who are speaking out on behalf of their families who are talking about their lived experiences as Palestinians being targeted in particularly discriminatory and harassing ways and so we're trying to use this this this law this complaint process to try to get them relief and to draw attention to the situation so that universities don't think that they can just get away with with throwing Palestinian students under the bus because because of pressure from anti Palestinian pro Israeli groups. Yeah, and also as another Ahmed that went to Florida State University I really, really appreciate you all supporting young Ahmed there. So we have just a couple of minutes left I'm wondering if our panelists want to address anything they didn't get a moment to address and then maybe just point to things that people can do to support. So Nadim I'm going to kick it off to you first what can folks do to support this advocacy. So I think, I mean, in this world of online it's very important to take part and to share materials and to raise awareness. I think we saw this in the last period how much this was influential and how much we raised the voice and we were more vocal than the usual and we created enough pressure let's say also on the companies to think twice that there are usual policies of silencing us and colluding with the Israeli government wouldn't work as smooth as it usually does and that's why again I mean I think we all have the role in this and raising awareness and coordinating and organizing and putting more pressure on the companies. I think to share the materials and as things are really like I mean everybody can produce materials and follow the right pages with the people on the ground. I mean we didn't speak much about also the people who were on the ground and doing the life. For example if we speak about the Kurds family and others who created really waves of solidarity by just like filming what's happening and this is what's so powerful. So I think we all have the role in this and documenting and sharing just simply follow the people who are on the ground and share it with your surrounding with your cycles. That would be really important. Thank you Nadim absolutely continuous center those voices radical. I just want to echo Nadim's words, keep speaking out don't feel intimidated. If you are censored contact him I just want to say how many has been an incredible resource. People contact us about social media censorship or like column. So we're really thankful that they're there and and contact us as well for up for other kinds of censorship we're there we have your backs. Yeah, don't be afraid keep keep speaking out it's so important. Thank you radical and the other. Yeah, nothing to add I mean these are all great suggestions like, particularly not. If you're in the US and if you're at an academic institution which I think a lot of the folks in this audience are. It's rare to have these discussions and not be chilled and not be sort of not be taken by a lot of the sort of boogeyman language that is thrown around and out there so really big thanks to Kendra and the whole team for hosting this event. It's rare like for what we're seeing a bit of a crossover finally where Palestine and the issues affecting Palestinian advocacy are kind of coming into and being put on agenda as a folks who haven't historically paid attention and I think that's an incredibly important and I hope that it's not fleeting so symposiums law review articles and legal academic context is really important, as well as everywhere like in your workplaces right. So that's the best way to sort of counteract some of the siloing of this issue from many of the other important human rights and civil liberties issues that we all talk about so regularly. Thank you so much. Thank you Nadim, Radhika, Diala, wonderful colleagues and amazing perspective. I'll just say everyone you have a role here. So we can't tell you exactly. You know what your role is but you need to do some digging and thinking and strategizing and figuring out how you can contribute because your voice and your action is necessary. With that being said I'm going to hand it back over to Kendra Kendra thank you so much to you and the Institute for Representative First Amendment. Thank you so much. I feel like I was clapping and, you know, emoji harding and you know all of those things. So thank you so much to our incredible panelists to our ASL interpreters. And finally, to my colleagues and a civil gallon who did a lot of the behind the scenes work. I, they would. I would be remiss if I didn't take this opportunity to tell you that in addition to finding the handles for our amazing panelists and their organizations you can follow us on Twitter and subscribe to our newsletter so you can find out about more of our events but thank you so much everyone and yeah solidarity with those folks in Palestine who are continuing to speak out. Bye everyone. Bye bye. Thank you all. Bye. Thank you.


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Has the HID headlamps, the LED running lights, the LED fog lamps, the front bumper parking sensors, there's your adaptive cruise control, I believe it's a radar sensor. You get the granite crystal outlined grille and the Jeep logo as well in that granite crystal. You get the SRT hood with the true coal induction on it. You get the granite crystal grand Cherokee lettering on the side. We'll take a look at the original buyer's guide here or original window sticker. Feel free to pause it.  There's your fuel economy 22 and 14 for an average of 17. Very safe vehicle, five stars almost all the way across and if you want to check out this window sticker online in the upper right hand party screen is a link right to our website but we're going to keep going on this vehicle with all the options. Limited X is one of my favorite packages, also one of apparently the internet's favorite packages too. You get the LED tail lamps, the towing package with the receiver hitch, 4 pin and 7 pin wiring, the rear load leveling suspension, the Limited X badging right there and Jeep and 4x4 logos are all in that granite crystal. There's the cover for the receiver hitch right there, back storage area very nice and clean and it does come with a spare tire.  Press that button it's going to beep at you three times and then come on down. You can see you also get LED license plate lights. Down here you get the granite crystal accents and around the taillight bezels as well. The gloss black around the windows and the roof rails also part of that Limited X package to make it look as good as it does. The enter and go system you just have to have the key in your pocket and that door will unlock. You get the blind spot monitoring, heated mirrors and built-in directional signals which are LEDs as well. The Limited X package gives you this bolstering on the seats here. Both these seats are heated both these seats are power and you do get a driver side lumbar.  As we hop inside the vehicle here you can see you get the 7-inch LCD display with the digital speedometer outside temperature and compass display, the heated leather wrap steering wheel, cruise controls and adaptive cruise controls on the right, Bluetooth and information center controls on the left. You do get the paddle shifters and the radio controls on the back of the steering wheel. This one comes with the 8.4 4C radio with the navigation from the factory. So that means that you get serious XM radio for a year. You also get serious Guardian for a year and then you get serious traffic and travel service for five years on this vehicle. This is also where your backup camera shows up. Those are dynamic grid lines which means that they turn as you turn the steering wheel so you can kind of see where it's going to be going in the future. AMFMN serious you got your climate controls that you can do here. You also have your heated seats and heated steering wheel buttons. You can check out your backup camera then of course your navigation system. You got all the other apps that are in here including these off-road pages which is a really cool feature. I'll show you how that works here. While we're waiting for that to load there we go. It's loading there. You got dual climate controls down here. This is your perpendicular and parallel park assist, your backup or your parking sensors. You can turn those off.  So here is the off-road pages. Watch this. I'm going to turn the steering wheel and those wheels are actually going to turn on the screen tell you what angle you're at. You can also do your pitch and roll so you can see exactly what type of terrain you're on. So right now I'm tilted a little bit to the right there on the roll and I'm actually looking uphill right now at about one degree which is really cool stuff. You also have your accessory gauges including your coolant temp, oil temp, battery voltage, trans temp, and oil pressure. You got your select terrain. Right now it's on auto and where that's looking at is down here at your Quadra Track 2 system. So if you go to snow, sand, mud, rock, when you switch it'll change on the screen up there. You also get four-wheel drive low downhill assist control and a neutral feature for flat towing. 8-speed automatic transmission.  Notice the gloss black accents around the radio. The rose green black woodgrain trim on the doors there. This one has the power sunroof with the vista roof, the second real fixed glass. Up here you get your home link buttons for your garage drawer security systems and lighting systems, your map lights, and your sunroof and shade controls. SOS and assist buttons in the mirror. That's part of that Serious XM Guardian service. You get those for a year. We'll take a quick look at the back seats. You get the bolstered seats back here as well in the limited X. Latch child safety system. Down here you get two USBs and 115 volt 150 watt plug-in. These seats do fold down for extra storage and they go almost completely flat which is really nice if you got a slide a bunch of stuff in the back here. And then you do get the child safety locks on the back doors. Capless fuel fill. I'm gonna take a quick look under the hood because I want to show you this hood here because this is a true SRT hood. They even have the heat shield there. It says SRT on it. Those are true co-inductions and the 5.7 liter V8 Hemi motor has a fuel saver technology or MDS so it shuts off the cylinders and 360 horsepower. We'll take one more quick walk around. I would personally like to thank you for checking out the video today and hopefully from this HD video. You'll have gotten a really good idea on the limited X package, the Hemi, and just what this particular Jeep offers all the way around inside and out. If you'd like to see more pictures of this Jeep or one of our other 450 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, Wranglers, half-tons, three-quarter-tons, one-tons, you name it we got it go to our website www.SummitAuto.com. Full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle from two locations all at SummitAuto.com. If you'd like to check out more HD videos you can go to YouTube.com slash Summit Auto remember to like, subscribe, and share on this video and all the videos that you see there. In fact in a second you will see a link to subscribe to our YouTube channel on your left. A link to more Jeep videos like this one on your right. If you have not been to our website on the bottom link to this video or this vehicle on our website click those check us out and we're super excited to be offering the 2020 Jeep Grand Cherokee especially the limited X package with the Hemi in it. Thanks again.


Welcome traders to another Tick Mill, charting up with me, Patrick Munley. I want to take a look here at the S&P 500 on the four hour timeframe. We've got a potential bearish scenario developing here in a broadening top pattern, which is setting up really nicely. Whilst we continue to hold the trend line support at 43.71, look for an upside extension through prior highs into the 127 extension of the last decline and this potential sending trend line resistance, daily range resistance and daily R3 coming in at 44.40. Watch for bearish reversal patterns there to play for a sharp correction to the downside looking for a test of the descending trend line support down into 41.81. As always traders, plan the trade, trade the plan, most importantly manage your risk. Until next time, thanks very much.


So, in the last class we started motivating the need for conditioning on a random time right. When we had defined a Markov chain, the initial one we defined it condition on a deterministic time and when we condition a deterministic time we said that future is independent of past given that stated that deterministic time. Then we also discussed ok maybe sometimes it is not always we are going to condition a deterministic time sometimes we will be faced with to condition on a random time then we wanted to see if the Markov property holds then we have to condition on a random time. So, we saw an example where when we are going to condition on a random time the Markov property need not hold right and then we said that if it holds then that Markov chain we are going to call it as and we are going to call that Markov chain to satisfy strong Markov property which basically said that there is that x t plus this one x 2 j 1 divided by x t plus sum this sum plus 2 j m given x naught equals to i naught x 1 equals to i 1 all the way up to x t equals to i what is this equal to we said that x of x 1 equals j 1 x of x n equals to j m given x naught equals to i as if from that time onwards as if the Markov chain begins afresh. Then the question is here what is this here t is my random time. So, I hope you guys all remember the notations here what I the way I have chosen this indices are this i 0 i 1 all the way up to i they are some states and also I have chosen s 1 s 2 all the way up to s m they are all time indices belong to time and also j 1 j 2 all the way up to j m they are all belong to count from state space s what s 1 s 2 these are time indices we have just said that s 1 is smaller than s 2 like this they are not subsets they are time they are indices. So, this is basically we are saying that whatever time you condition upon a random time from that s 1 steps further and this s 2 sorry s 2 is further s 2 rounds from my time t. So, now if this t is a random time our now the question is whether this condition holds for what random times. So, we have already seen a case where for arbitrary random times this need not be the case right. So, if you recall our example where we said that if I am t my random time is 1 step before visit 1 step before the time of my second visit to state j then this was not the case. Then the question is fine for arbitrary random time this property need not hold, but is there any special type of random time for which this property holds. It so happens that a random time if it satisfies the stopping time criteria then this property holds. Now the question is what is the stopping time. So, let me write this definition here a random time t is said to be stopping time process for all n greater than 0 there exist a function. So, let us focus on the definition of it is going to say that a random time t is said to be stopping time for a process I have right now I am not saying this process is Markov process or anything it is an arbitrary process here. If for any n greater than 0 equal to 0 greater than or equals to 0 there exist a function fn which takes n plus 1 states remember s is what s is the set of states. If you are going to take n plus n 1 elements into s that maps it to either 0 or 1 that is fn is just like binary valued function takes 1 gives 0 or 1 based on n plus 1 inputs such that if you are going to ask this question on your random time t what is the question the question is whether my t is less than or equals to n. If you ask this question you need to say s or no to this to say s or no I have made it indicator. So, if this condition this indicator is 1 if this condition is not correct or does not hold then this is 0. So, the left hand side is just s or no kind of answer at this depending on whether this condition holds or not. If I can answer this question using this function fn based on my n observations I am going to make tilde point n. So, what is this saying to answer question. So, to answer this question whether my random time t on the sample point omega is less than or equals to n all I need to know is we need to know x 0 of omega x 1 of omega all over to x n of omega. So, if this is just like expansion of this condition here. So, if there exists some function fn which tells you if you want to know whether t is less than or equals to n at sample point omega all you need to pass on is the n observations you have made about the state at the sample point omega. If you tell that then this function should answer this question. Let us look at some examples I will say like some some preview examples could be before that let us see this. Suppose let us say fix a state j and I am going to now define a random time to t to be first visit to state j. Now if I define t to be like this and if I want to answer the question whether t is less than or equals to n on a particular sample point let us say t of omega is it enough if I pass on you this much of state information till n. So, let us take a sample. Let us say this is a chain right this is a process evolving. Let us say in round one I started with i then I went to like another state let us call it i 1 then let us say I went to i 2 and all the way up to some i n state and let us say some of this that could be j here. So, the state j has appeared before n. So, if I ask if I if I have shown you this sequence can you answer this question yes or no. So, if you see that okay the j has occurred at the second slot itself. So, then and if let us say n equals to 10. So, whether t of omega is less than or equals to n that is whether my first occurrence of state j has happened within 10 slots that is true right by looking at this sequence is enough for you to answer this question. If whenever this happens then I am going to call this random variable this random time to be what a stopping time. Time t is a random variable right t is defined on what t is which where is the random variable from omega to r. If you are interested in a sample point and on that sample point you want to ask this question whether on that sample point the random time is going to be less than n. What you are going to look at is you are going to look at this sample path you are observed for that sample point. So, this is a sample path for that sample point omega and then look at whether you can answer this question. You look at whether j has happened before n if that is the case then it is true. So, but this is a one case where let us say j has happened let us say none of the states contain j and j is let us say somewhere here i n after n plus 3 let us say j. But when I ask this question I am only going to tell you till this point I am not going to tell what is the value of my sample point sample path at x i n plus 1 i n plus 2 i n plus 3 they are not told to you. Can you still answer this question yes or no? Why? We are going to say no n this value is not less than n this has to be greater than n. So, either you you say yes or no right then in that case no this is not the case the other is the case. So, your answer is no. So, as long as I give you samples till time n or the first n samples you are going to you will be able to answer this question either yes or no. Let us look into another example let us say now t is the last visit to state j is the time of last visit to state j this means after this j has happened j is not going to happen after that at all is the meaning of this random time is clear to you this random time t is the last visit of state j. So, now if I ask the same question can you answer this question based on your first n observations why is that j might happened somewhere in between this, but it may still happen after that right that is not the end of happening of j it may still happen subsequently. So, you cannot answer this question either yes or no. So, in this case this random time t is not a stopping time we have seen another random time where we define t to be one step before the second visit to state j is that going to be random time sorry is that going to be stopping time check that yes no check that ok. Now those who said no can you tell me why that was not a stopping time right so it depends so to only when I have all the n plus 1 information I can affirm until you say yes or no till that I cannot say anything clearly ok now theorem says that basically the result says that this Markov property holds if I tell you a priori that my t is a stopping time with respect to my process xn with respect to my Markov chain. So, let us say we are going to say that probability that x t plus s is equals to j given x naught equals to i naught all the. So, then I can write this probability here even though this is a random time here I could write this probability that I observed all the way up to t and I have noticed that I have taken state i at time t then subsequently I am going to state j in the next s steps that probability is simply pij to the power s what is pij to the power s this is the s step probability right. So, now we are just saying that as long as this t satisfies this stopping time criteria this property holds whether this t here is a deterministic one or a random one yeah I mean that is the whole point of this right n was earlier in deterministic now that n is replaced by this random quantity t, t is the random time here earlier used to condition on a n which was deterministic. Now this is a random time here your a priori again not telling you what is the small n I am conditioning on any random t here yeah yeah this is what like this is what like this is what like we are replace this this is what this is a definition or on t here whether t is a random time we are saying if this t is a random time this property holds that means to define this t to be less than or equals to n I mean to verify this quantity t is less than or equals to n all I need to know c is the n observation the first n observations if that is the case you can whatever this t it is this is a random time it can take different different values. If you are going to condition on that random time t and now look at what happens in the next s states that transition is simply governed by your s step transition probability matrix that is what we are saying. So earlier what so just forget this earlier our definition was this right if n is a fixed deterministic quantity so the probability that I go to stage n n plus n given all this n first we said that okay it only depends on x and I does not matter on the previous one and we had called that p i j s now we are saying instead of fixing this n it could be arbitrary it could be any t a random quantity we have already seen that if this t cannot be arbitrary t for this property to hold we remember when we define t to be one step before the second visit to state particular state j this was not the case that did not equal to p i j s but now we are saying that if this t random time has a special property which we called as stopping time then this is true even though this t is also time index but this quantity is a random here we are to apply this all I want you to guarantee is first tell me t is less is a stopping time to verify that the t is a stopping time you are going to do whether t of omega is less than or equals to n once you did this then you have satisfied the hypothesis of this theorem then you are just going to say that okay if that then this property holds I want to apply this you need to have a stopping time that is where your question of whether we are going to say t of omega less than or that is already we have we have to have verified before we apply this okay now how to prove this why this is true okay so basically to prove this so what we need to show is okay just reorganize this this is a conditional distribution on my left hand side right this conditional distribution I will write as a joint distribution so what I need to show is this is equals to p i j s right so this left hand side I have just rewritten in this ratio format this is just definition of my conditional probabilities right so now let us start looking into the numerator here I want to show this and t here is a random quantity random quantity random time and we have specifically further assume that this is a random time okay so now let us try to exploit that property so what I will do is this t here is a random quantity but it takes values integer valued it takes integer values right it can take 1, 2, 3 like that so what I will do is I will just try to add it for all possibilities so notice that I have bought in this t equals to t event here and I have just added it over all possible t values so these are still an equality here okay now let us try to further unwind it what I will do is I am going to group it into I am going to group in this three parts 6 naught right and then yeah probability given what right so first I took this and I wrote this as a probability then this probability condition on this then this probability condition on the previous two all the way to x 0 to x t and then x t plus s equals to j okay so first quantity I am going to return like this why is this quantity now we are saying that now see the t is a deterministic quantity here and I have written this thing yeah so this is I go to state j at time slot t plus s given that at time t I am already in state I and all the previous states are also given but if I already assuming that this x 0 sorry this makes sense is x n sequence is dt mc right so what is this quantity is going to be of s now let us focus on this now what I have given I have given my dt mc all the way up to time t and further I have also given my dt mc value at t plus s now to answer my question whether t equals to t now I have to basically compute probability that t equals to t right or this is same as knowing whether my t is equals to t if I know something about this now if I am going to apply my random stopping time property on this to answer this question whether t is equals to t what all the things I need to know here I need to know only till t does it depend this this t equals to whether t is equals to t does it depend on x t plus s no right so I can get rid of this term here to answer whether t is equals to t whether my random my stopping time is t equals to t all I need to know is only the sample still here so this guy vanishes right and now I can write it as simply okay I will just rewriting this now let us reorganize this a bit I am going to pull this guy PIG outside because that is independent of t summation t equals to 1 to infinity this is basically for all values of t right now focus on this what you have probability that x i equals to i not all the way to x t i and then you have probability that t equals to t conditioned and only these many terms so now can I write it as a joint distribution joint probability of these two quantities so this is going to be probability that t equals to t and now further this has been somewhere all possible values of t right this probability so if I remove the summation then what is this quantity is going to be so what is this quantity is going to be see when I started this from this step to this step I added the summation because I have introduced this event right now I want to just reverse that process so then what is this quantity summation will be not there but what is going to remain here till then x equals to i right so are we done now we have this quantity take this quantity on the left hand side this is exactly equals to PIG and that is what we wanted to show so notice that like the crucially crucially we use the fact that my random time is a stopping time at this factor so if I because I could do this I could pull out my PIG term in this fashion okay okay so whenever we want to like whenever we are not certain that at from which point I want to see the future then I will definitely need to you make use of this property like because if the point here at which I am going to look is a random quantity and then I want to use the standard whatever the Markovian properties we have then if I want to do that I should first ensure that the the random times that I am conditioning on is a stopping time.