Hi, welcome everyone. So today, I will be presenting how to revive the old Ken Thompson backdoor in modern OpenBSD make. So I'm Samuel Obertin, so known on the interwebs as cons. I work for IBM Security in France as a consultant. I'm a network and system engineer and a dropped out PhD in cybersecurity in France as well. I've been using OpenBSD at home for nine years now. And as well for my research, it's been a super nice tool to use for multiple reasons that I won't explore more. I like a movie. I would like to speak about you, about an old movie from Stanley Kubrick, which is 2001, Space Odyssey. And in this flick, there is a machine called R9000. And R doesn't really behave the way it should actually behave. Why that? What if R9000 got actually backdoored? Maybe someone influenced the way R9000 should behave as a machine. So the question is, how can we trust R9000? First, we need to think about physical security. Maybe someone entered the machine or the perimeter of the machine and modified the machine. Same for the actual hardware of the machine that has been shipped, maybe by a constructor or a vendor. The firmware as well is pretty interesting. It's the code that runs in the hardware, but you don't necessarily have access to it in modern computers. On your CPU, there are firmware that we don't have code for. And every peripheral as well has some firmware to make it run on your computer. This could be the kernel or the user land as well. Maybe the operating system of R9000 got modified to misbehave, or the actual R9000 program. It could be as well operations like the way all of these components are actually used by the end users or the administrators. But there is an interesting fact in this, is three of these components are actually code which is compiled at some point. And this code has been maybe audited. What about the actual compiler that compiles this firmware kernel or user land applications? And that's the whole subject of Ken Thompson 1970, 1974, I think, paper called Trusting Trust, 84. Sorry, my bad. The conclusion of Ken Thompson is quite straightforward, one is that we cannot actually trust any code that hasn't been written by ourselves, compilers included. That's quite harsh as a conclusion. And that's an interesting paper, which is quite old now, but I think it's still really modern in some ways. The Thompson paper specifies two features. The first one is for his backdoor to work, you need self-replication. And maybe you know coins. Coins are little games that you can play as a developer. And the idea is to develop a program that once executed will actually print itself or reproduce itself. So there is a little C example which will print exactly the same input it has been used to be compiled with. And a coin, there are plenty of different coins that you can find in the real world. Mainly, this is for games. There are golf games where you want to maybe write the shortest coin ever in a different language. You can visit, I think, there is a website called Rosetta Stone, where there are hundreds of coins in different languages. Some of them are not real coins. Some of them cheat a bit, like they read, let's say, the file macro in C, which contains the whole content of the actual file, which is expanded by the preprocessor of the compiler. But this one is a real one, where we use printf 10 and 34 in ASCII, which represents a new line and a double quote to actually reproduce the double quotes and the new line used between line 1 and 2. The second feature is what Thompson calls learning. So we have a way to say programming, actually. Compilers, they do actually carry knowledge obtained from their own sources to the next hereditary binaries. Like you can tell your naive compiler, anti-slash-m is a new line. And then once you've compiled this compiler, when the compiler will encounter an anti-slash-m, it will maybe print a new line return. So you've learned or programmed your actual compiler to do some things. And combining these two features, Thompson's create his factor. He says, OK, I'm going to learn my compiler, program it, in a way that if he compiles himself, he will create a coin. He will actually self-reproduce. And the second thing that the Thompson backdoors learns about is if you compile login on the Unix system, please make it misbehaved. Maybe if I type a specific username, my password will be right every time and I could enter the system. And the backdoor is not into the login.c program. It's in the actual compiler, which is used to compile login as a binary. So if we wrap up the things, we have a compiler source that we will call cs, which is compiled by x, and we obtain a compiler c. Then we use a second source that we modify to program to misbehave. And we use the newest compiler, which is c, to compile it. We obtain a new compiler, which is called bc. And this compiler is actually the Thompson backdoor. And the Thompson backdoor is interesting, because when you take again the first compiler source, which is saying that has been audited by a security or developer people, and you compile it with bc, you obtain the self-replicating backdoor compiler, actual real Thompson backdoor that could propagate across generation because of the self-replication mechanism that we've programmed into. So if we take again the compiler source cs and we recompile it with this new version, we obtain a second version of the same self-replicating backdoor compiler. And then with this latest compiler, we may compile login and login will misbehave. And the actual question we could ask ourselves is, OK, that's nice. Where does x come from? Maybe x is an actual Thompson backdoor. I never asked myself, oh, yeah, I'm going to compile my compiler with x, but where does x come from? And that's the real thing I like about this paper in this Ken Thompson presentation he made at the SCM. The origins of this behavior is quite interesting. The original Thompson paper cites a known Air Force document. OK? After some research, it's now available on the internet. And it's a very old paper, which is 48 years old, which is called Multic Security Evaluation to Neurability Analysis. And in this paper, there is an interesting quote about some trapdoors, backdoors now we call them, about the programming language one, PL1, which was used to compile the kernel of Multics. And in this paper, they explain the essence of the actual vulnerability, which is, even if we've got a misbehaving program, we are not able to really detect it. Because even if we recompile a trusted source, we are never, ever able to assess the origins of our X compiler. And there is an interesting thing about that. I was reading this paper and I was like, so Thompson used CC, the C legacy compiler, to compile CC from CC.C. That's a lot of stuff. And I was like, OK. So there is some kind of recursivity in this command. And recently, I came across like, I had to do this for my work. I came across an interesting command I had to type. I had to build Docker from source. And to build Docker from source, you actually need Docker. And I was like, hmm, that's interesting. There is something recursive as well in this command. And in fact, these compilers, per definition, at least C compiler, used by Thompson is self-hosted. So he's able to actually compile in itself. But other components which are not, compilers could behave this way as well, like Docker. And more recently, as well, on OpenBSD, I typed this command. Do you see some similarities between these different commands? And I was like, OK. But if X is not a compiler, but make, let's do that. So demonstration time. But first, I just want to show you the program that we will attack. If I'm in the directory, yes, I am. This is just a copy of HAL 9000 user loan program I just got. We'll compile it with the system make, which is same, I promise. And I'm going to execute my HAL 9000 program, which asks me for a password to open the pay door. So I type one of the things. And HAL tells me, I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. So if we look at the HAL 9000 source, the password is actually encoded in a hash. And the input of the user, which is somewhere here, is compared with the hash. And if the hash are the same, so if Dave knows the password, then the door may open. And that's this program we're going to attack with our make command that I just typed there, but using a slightly modified one, of course, make version. So in this directory, I have the HAL source, which is the same. We can check it again, but it's really the same that I showed you. And then we've got a make file to actually build the backdoor. All this code will be available at the end of the presentation. There is a link at the end to actually build, as we saw, the different steps to get our Thompson make backdoor. And I've got engine.c, which is a modified part of make, actual source code of make. And in engine.c somewhere, oh, yeah, I think it's here. Yeah, it's here with better. OK, I prepared that, but I forgot. I have my two features encoded into engine.c, and the make file will make a patch of it and then do some specific stuff and create a new version of make for me. So the first part is the self-replication one occurring when make compiles make. And the second part is the simple backdoor that just does a set on the HAL 9000 source during just before compilation and replace the modified source code again back to its original form. So it's very simple. And the whole restricts here are pretty straightforward and simple. I'm just looking for engine.o, which is a target for make. At some point, when you make, you may compile engine.c in engine.o. And same for HAL 9000, so same for the demo, which is, of course, in a make file. So I've compiled make.legit to be able later to compare it with other stuff. Make.legit comes from the original OpenBSD source, HAL 9000 as well. And then I make the source backdoor. So the first generation, the orange one. And with this make source backdoor, I compile make from the legit source and we can see the self-replicating job occurring. And so now we have make binary backdoor and we compile HAL 9000 again with this binary backdoor. And then we just execute two occurrences of HAL, the first being the legit one with a random password. And as I showed you earlier, HAL does behave correctly. He says, that's not a good password. Sorry, but I'm not going to open the door for you. And using the exact same password, I'm actually able to enter the door. So I can do like this and it will always misbehave. I can add some characters as well. It will always open the door for me and even if I audited the source code, there is no clue of this backdoor in the actual source. It's in the make that even the compiler that has been used to build it. So the implementation details, I showed you the actual source. We are in the do run command function of the engine.c in make source. And we just need a few variables which are available to us, which is the name of the object that will be compiled with engine.o. And the command that needs to be emitted by make to actually build this object, which is cmd. And so in the source, yeah, it's readable. OK, nice. I do something odd to obtain like self-replication. My source code looks like that in engine.c, the backdoor one. So there is a code diff. And then I decode it with base64. But that. Fact is, I need to encode my backdoor to be able to survive multiple generation of recompilation. And in the make file I showed you that I used to make this demonstration, there is this input of code. So I just diff my version of engine.c, which is evill, against the legit source engine. And then I obtain a patch, $at. And then I do multiple rounds of encoding for this patch. And then with this patch.free, which is the third generation of my patch, I'm actually patching the real engine, the target engine of the make.src binary. So I have different levels. And the first one is the template backdoor. Because I have in my code, I just have diff, which is not an actual misbehaving behavior. It's not even decodable by base64. So I have my template of the backdoor. Then I encode it one time. Then a second time to be self-replicating. And then a third time to be able to actually never hit the actual templated backdoor. Because I don't want in a few generation of my code to be actually able to stumble upon diff, which is not interesting to me. For the targeting of all 9,000, I use the same semantics. I look up the job name. And then I will mess with the actual command that make will do to compile all 9,000. And what I do is simply left and right of my command, I will add some other shell commands. The first one is set, which will actually modify the source code. There could be many different ways to actually backdoor all 9,000. I chose this one because it's pretty straightforward. And this talk is more about the idea behind it more than the actual way you can do it. And I think it's quite simple. Like the whole backdoor, the two features are 29 of C. I think the docker backdoor I made a few months ago is six lines of go. So it's quite cheap to develop. I think the backdoor for docker took me about one or two days. And this one took me a couple of hours of employment. Because once you grasp your head about the principle of self-replicating code and self-hosted components, it's really simple to implement this in any component that has these properties. And so what I do is I just change the code, then execute the command, then change back the original state of the code using MV. And the dash i oric of said enables me to actually save a backup copy of the file before modifying it. And then it's an uninteresting string concatenation stuff. But then maybe we can actually detect this kind of behaviors. Maybe, I don't know, we could actually do some static analysis of what the compiler of HAL 9000. That's a difficult answer, because we don't really know well this kind of backdoor could be. So we could do differential analysis, let's say using a legit make that we trust. Oh, I don't know, but we trust it. And then compare it using the Levenstein distance even just doing a binary diffing between our programs. There are a few tools for that. Bindiff, which is a commercial proprietary one. There is Radiff, which is part of the Radar toolkit, which is open source. Maybe we can go further. Maybe we can do some decompilation. Maybe we can use a few other tools, like Ghidra or Radar 2, as well, which are tools that we can use. Maybe I can show you. I have time to actually see what's happening. So let's have my binaries there. I'm going to load into Radar the binary backdoor of make. OK, there are fortunes. I was lucky for this one. Radar emits weird fortunes. I'm just going to do a static analysis of functions so I can have the symbol tables. So let's list the function tables. OK, there are plenty of them. Some of them have symbols because I'm lucky. I've compiled make with the debug symbols, which are quite useful. And I'm going to grab for this object. This symbol contains our backdoor. Let's inspect it. Let's assemble it. OK, that's a lot of code. OK, you didn't see anything. OK, there is the function and the symbol entry. Plenty of things happening. Plenty of things, plenty of things. And then at some point, we stumble about a large string, which is the patch.free. And this large string should appear as true. Oh, here it is. So actually, we can do binary decompilation, or at least scan the symbols in this binary to find such backdoors. But maybe I could use a way still there, a way to, I could store it. I could hide it in, I don't know, I could build a return-oriented part using preceding symbols already found in the binary, or another one. So we can do that. But that's quite manually. We need to inspect, as I said, maybe make, maybe the compiler, maybe hal 9,000. Maybe we can do some runtime analysis as well. We could use on OpenVsd, retrace, retrace, maybe run it on a debugger and inspect what's happening. Same radar supports a debugger mode where you can run interactively your programming too. But these tasks are quite tedious. There is a guy, David A. Wheeler, 20 years ago. He was reading the Thompson paper. He made some interesting contribution about trusting trust. And his contribution is the diverse, double-compiling method, which is a way to detect some of the backdoors emitted by the Thompson hack. And the idea is, OK, we spoke about the compiler of source CS before. You took a compiler that you don't really trust, X maybe. And you compile it. And you obtain the compiler, the binary compiler, X1. Then you take the second compiler, Y, that you don't really trust more than X, but which is slightly different. Maybe you can take, I don't know, GCC for X and C long, and LLVM for Y. So you have two compilers, X1 and Y1, which are binary different. They come from different compilers. So they are not the same. But they share a feature. These compilers are compilers. And functionally, they should emit the same binary code. So let's do another round of compilation. And with X1 compile again CS and obtain X2. And with Y1 compile Y2. And then X2 and Y2 should be binary equivalent, because they are the same implementation of different compilers, or same compilers in functionality, but different in implementation or compilation source. And if you are able to do that, then you are able to actually detect if X or Y was backdoor. You cannot tell which one, because you don't trust any of them. Maybe there is a slight chance they share the same backdoor. Could be possible. But that's one way to do that. There are a few related works, appearing in a POC or GTFO, which is a very nice read. The first one is the unable backdoor using compiler bugs. This paper shows a way to actually backdoor sudo by patching GCC with a little patch, which is about maybe some typos in the code. And the guy actually submitted the GCC commit before it was removed. And for this specific version of GCC and using a specific version of sudo, you will obtain a backdoor sudo. And the interesting part of this paper is the fact that it's deniable, because it's just a bug. Oh, sorry, I wanted to fix a typo. And then I've got a backdoor. Oh, I'm so sorry about that. That's an interesting feature. And from one of the authors of this paper, there's a nice blog post as well, which simply enumerates a few ways that us as distributions or maybe compiler developers, we should behave in front of this problem, which is honestly quite old and not new. So the actual conclusion of this talk is, yeah, computer science is quite a recent thing in human history. But we have this problem for quite half a century now. And it's still unresolved. And maybe we should actually think about new ways. I don't know. I have no answer to this actual real problem. I just wanted to share it with you. And some people could think about maybe reproducible builds that we have seen a few years ago, notably in Debian, I think. But it doesn't actually fix the self-replicating problem on the compiler that you first. So maybe next time when you choose a self-hosted component of your system, you should really think about the origins of x. Could be make, could be Docker, could be GCC. There are like plenty of components which are self-hosted. And the next time you stumble upon a command that looks like that, think about it. And tell yourself, OK, this could be an issue. Maybe it's not. I'm not over paranoid. And I'm not saying that every compiler or every component of every compiler or every Docker runtime you use is actually backdoor. I'm just saying it's doable, and it's quite cheap. Maybe this could be a game for you to do that. Anyway, let's discuss about that if you fancy such discussion. And you can find the whole code and slides at this git repository. I don't mind browsing it with a web browser because it just will kick you out. But it's plonible using git. And I think that's it. We have like 10 minutes to discuss about that. I'm super eager to hear from your feedbacks. Thank you, everyone. So do you have any questions or comments or things you didn't really understand in the presentation? Throw it. Just wanted to add two quite important observations. The first is when people talk about trusting trust, they mostly consider it an academic problem. We had this issue that was covered a while ago that the Delphi compiler, the object-oriented Pascal thingy that was very popular in the 90s on Windows, was actually chipping malware in the compiled binaries for a long time. So everyone who was using Delphi was creating malware and distributing it. So we've also seen a couple of other attacks on the supply chain that pretty much look just like this. And the second observation, if you look at reflections on trusting trust, the PhD thesis from Wheeler, you'll notice that the approach he's taken doesn't work for some of our supposedly very secure, modern programming languages, because, for example, Rust doesn't have independent second implementation. Everyone nowadays using Rust typically is getting some Rust compiler binary from someone and trusting that to work. It's insanely complicated and slow to actually bootstrap Rust. The very same situation with Java, with Go, the list continues. Haskell is one of the traditional examples. And if you can't provide a short bootstrap cycle for your programming language, maybe it's not as secure as you think it is. Yeah, good point. Thank you. Does anyone else want to talk about the comment? Those are good points, just one correction. Go does have a reasonably good bootstrap story, because you can build Go 1.4, which only requires a C compiler. And you can build any modern Go version with Go 1.4. So in Hackersource, we actually build sort of Go from scratch without the need for a bootstrap binary. So you're able to actually self-host Go from a scratch on your machine? Nice. From C. Nice. So you just need to trust C.C. No, I'm joking. No, that's the best we can do. No, I'm really joking. And I think we shouldn't be paranoid about this issue. It's a real one. But at the same point, we are humans. We trust each other. I would also like to mention that there is an implicit context there being the operating system. And you trust it to provide the right file to the compiler. And you can make the OS itself your unscored file. And when it's compiling itself, it can also create a hostile operating system. Of course, operating systems are health-hosted components as well. It's quite difficult, at least for the BSD. Maybe in that BSD, there are some cross-compiling options. I'm not really aware of that. But on OpenBSD, you definitely need OpenBSD to build OpenBSD. We could talk days about, like, I have a friend which is doing CPU synthesis. And the funny thing is he is able to emulate a non-existing CPU on a platform. It's called software synthesis. And you take an hardware definition and you synthesize it on an FPGA. And then you obtain a synthetic processor to test it, maybe. And the funny thing is he was running our hardware definition of an FPGA on an FPGA. And maybe the actual hardware FPGA was lying about something. So it's a non-endable problem. But yeah, thank you. Yeah, operating systems, for sure, are vulnerable as well. As the manager of OpenBSD make, I will deny everything. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Now, the real point is, as human, we are creating bonds and we are trusting each other. And there is no need to be overly paranoid about such things, especially in the open-source community. But too much confidence as well is not good. But we are trusting ourselves together. And that's a human thing. And I think that's OK to trust someone is being able to be confident about ourselves as well. And that's important. I think I'm done. Do you have any more interventions, suggestions? OK, thank you very much.


Hello, welcome to the session on estimation of project matrix. After gathering the entire requirement specific to the software project, usually we need to think about different solution strategy for the project. So in this session, we will learn how to estimate the cost, effort and duration for a software project. And then we will select one solution approach, which will find suitable to fulfill the organizational goal. So at the end of this session, students they categorize the projects using Kokomo model and estimate the effort and development time required for the project. A software project is not just about writing a few hundred lines of source code to achieve a particular objective. The scope of the software project is comparatively quite large and such a project could take several years to complete project size. What would be the size of the code that is written say in number of lines, files or modules cost, how much would it cost to develop a software, a software may be just a piece of code, but one has to pay to the managers, developers and other project personnel. And how long would it be before the software is delivered to the client, the effort that is how much effort from the team members would be required to create the software. So Kokomo model that is constructive cost model was proposed by the bow. According to him, there could be three categories of the software projects that is organic, semi-detached and embedded. So the classification is done by considering the characteristics of the software, the development team and the environment. The concept of organic, semi-detached and embedded systems are described below. So the organic development project is said to be organic type if the project deals with the developing as well as understood the application, the development team is small, the team members have prior experience in working with similar types of projects. So semi-detached means a development projects can be categorized as a semi-detached type if the team consists of some experience as well as the inexperienced staff. So team members may have some experience on the type of system to be developed. Embedded type of development projects are those which aims to develop a software strongly related to machine hardware and the team size is usually large. So Bohm suggested that estimation of the project parameter should be done through three stages that is the basic Kokomo model, intermediate Kokomo and complete Kokomo. So the basic Kokomo model that helps to obtain a rough estimate of the project parameters it estimates the effort and time required for the development in the following way. So effort is A into the size rise to B that is person month and development time we can calculate is 2.5 into effort rise to C months. So KDSI is the estimated size of the software expressed in kilo delivered source instructions and ABC are the constant that is determined by the category of the software project. But that denotes the total effort required for the software development expressed in person per month and the development time that denotes the estimated time required to develop the software that is expressed in the month. So the value of the constant ABC are given so these are the fixed values that we need to consider for the organic type, semi-detached type and embedded type of the software project. The values are constant. Let us pause the video for a while and try to solve the question for a project type organic and if the A value is 2.4, 1.05 and C is 0.38 so that is taken from the previous year organic type values. So let us find out the effort and time for development and number of developers for the project size with 30 that is it is in the 1000 lines of code for a project size of 30 you need to find the effort and time for development and number of developers. So let us resume the video and the answer for this question is the effort in person per month is 85.35 and the development time in months is 13.55 so the number of developers is 7. So let us pause the video and answer the question according to the Kokomo model a project can be categorized into how many types the answer is three types that is as we discussed in the organic semi-detached and embedded okay three types. Next question consider you are developing a web application which would make use of a lot of web services provided by the Facebook, Google, Flickr would it be wise to make estimate for this project using Kokomo answer the question the answer is not at all not at all it is required. Let us discuss the intermediate Kokomo model in real life there are many other project parameter that influence the development of process the intermediate Kokomo takes those other factors into the consideration by define a set of 15 drivers that is product attributes hardware attributes personal attributes and project attributes project attributes that consist of required software reliability extent size of the application database complexity of the product and in hardware attributes that is a runtime performance constraint memory constraint volatility of the virtual machine environment then required turn about the time the personal attributes the analyst capability software engineering capability application experience virtual machine experience and programming language experience and in the project attributes we use use of software tools application of software engineering methods require the development schedule and all so we need to consider all these attributes that is product attributes hardware personal and project attributes complete Kokomo model both the basic and intermediate Kokomo models consider a software to be a single homogeneous entity an assumption which is really true in fact many real life applications are made up of several small subsystems one might not even develop all the subsystems so just use the available services the complete Kokomo model takes these factors into the account to provide as for more accurate estimate of the project matrix to illustrate this consider a very popular distributed application the ticket booking system of Indian Railway there are computerized ticket counters in most of the railway station of our country so the tickets can be booked or the cancelled from any such counters the reservation for future tickets cancellation of reserved tickets that could be performed on high level the ticket booking system has three main components that is a database and graphical user interface and network facilities so among these the development of the GUI is considered as an organic project type the database module that could be considered as semi-detached software so the networking module that can be considered as embedded software so to obtain a realistic cost one should estimate the cost for each component separately and then add it up so advantages of Kokomo model it is a simple model and it should help one to understand the concept of project matrix estimation the drawbacks are so Kokomo uses the size which is not a proper major of the program size indeed estimating the size of the software is difficult task and any slight miscalculation that could cause a large deviation in the subsequent project estimates so more over Kokomo was proposed in 1981 keeping the waterfall model of project life cycle in mind but it fails to address the other popular approaches like a prototype increments spiral agile models and moreover in present day a software project may not necessary like consistent of coding of every bit of the functionality rather existing software components are often used and glued together towards the development of new software so Kokomo is not suitable in such cases so Kokomo 2 was proposed in the later 2000 to many to address these issues so these are the references I referred thank you


Man, I can't wait to come to Nashville. Dude, I'm excited, buddy. My whole following is Jack, to see you speak. I just got to see you speak a couple of minutes ago. I got to see you speak in Vegas. Unreal. This man will change your life. You've got to get through this event in Nashville. Well, let me just say that you will change your life by being there because I'm just a little spark, right? So I'm just like you. I know what it's like to struggle. I know what it's like to keep hitting the ceiling over and over.  So if you're interested in putting all that together and dreaming bigger and 10X in your life, this guy is spending a lot of money and a lot of time and a lot of energy to make it easy for you to be at this event in Nashville. So where are we doing it? Nissan Stadium. Tennessee Titans. GC is going to be on the field, man. Dude, did we negotiate this deal already? We did, man. Oh, we did. I got to go back and read the contract. I didn't know we were doing Nissan Stadium. Can you believe GC at Nissan Stadium? I'm a Toyota guy myself. Oh! No, no, but look, I'm really a people guy. So like if you're going to be there, I'm going to be there. And I can't wait. Nashville has been very, very good to me. Yeah, yeah. Recently, Nashville, a lot of people were just there. I was all over your Nashville paper, dude. They picked up the article. So I can't wait to be there with you. Yeah, you're going to put together a great event. Dude, thank you, buddy. We're super excited to have you. Hope to, I mean, honestly, to be glad. Thank you.


Hello and welcome back to my channel. If you're new here my name's Jackie and I'm an aspiring fiction author who does videos about things like plotting and outlining and drafting and having mental breakdowns in the middle of drafting so if that sounds like something that would be interesting to you please subscribe and like and hit the notification bell. Basically do everything that will keep the gods of YouTube happy. So I recently completed a first draft which is now in a drawer to be forgotten about for the next two to three months which means it is time to look for my next book idea. So I thought I'd do a video today about my process for finding new book ideas. Step one is simply write everything down. Now before I drafted my last book I thought I was a sort of person who didn't have a lot of ideas because I had only had one idea for a book for over 10 years in my head and I never really explored any others and it wasn't until I decided last year that I was going to do NaNoWriMo and I had to find some ideas that I went through. All of the old notes on my phone and all of the old scribbles in the back of my journal that I discovered I actually had a whole list of things I could potentially write about. So the way I do it is I often have these really weird vivid dreams and I have a notebook next to my bed where if I have a weird vivid dream I will get up and write about it as soon as it's done. Now these notes are generally not the most legible notes which can be interesting when I'm later trying to decipher them but what it means is that anytime I have an inkling of an idea it is written down so that when I am ready to then work on a new project I have a list that's ready to go rather than trying to think of a brand new idea on the spot. Now if you're hearing this and thinking well I do never have ideas though like it's all very well and good for you to say write them down but what if I've got nothing to write down? I would try to be a little bit more open with what you classify as an idea because as you'll see later in this video some of my ideas are quite in depth. I might have an entire world or inciting incident or family that the book's going to be about and that gives me a really solid starting point for writing a book. However an idea could be as simple as I work with a lot of Russians and wouldn't be fun if I put them all into the same fictional universe and saw what happened or I feel really strongly about this issue in the world or in the media at the moment and I'd love to write a book that explores that or I'm so mad at my sister right now and I really need to just argue with someone and maybe I can argue on paper so it can be anything from a complete world or plot or event or character through to something that you want to explore. The main point for step one is just to write everything down. Step two is to make sure that everything is written down in the same place. So one of the things you might notice as you start observing things and making notes of things you'd like to explore in your writing is that these notes are going to be in a range of different places so I have them in the back of my journal which I keep on my bedside table and I generally write in there if I have a dream. I have notes in my phone from when I've been traveling. I have notes on little bits of hotel stationary from when I've been traveling. I've got them in old documents and who knows where else and one of the reasons why I felt like I had no ideas for so long was because I didn't know where they were like I actually had tens, dozens, scores maybe of ideas written down but I couldn't find them. So one of the things I did at the beginning of October when I was preparing for NaNoWriMo was I created a spreadsheet. Now this spreadsheet has one tab for every idea so it helps keep things straight. It means there is a single place you can refer to so that when you are ready to start working on a new project rather than trying to remember those ideas off the top of your head you have this single source where you can find them. The other benefit of putting them all into one place is that through the act of transcribing your ideas you'll be able to evaluate whether they have any promise or not. So as someone who gets a lot of her ideas from random dreams I can wake up thinking oh my god that was epic it was it's going to be a smash hit motion picture I absolutely have to write it and then I'll do the notes and go back to sleep. When I transfer it to this spreadsheet that's what tells me if maybe there is potential to turn it into something or whether I'm just insane. So if you look at the ideas video I did back in early October last year you'll see that one of them involved basically three arms getting severed which um I know maybe in some sort of horror it can work but that's not really my genre and honestly I think even in horror it's probably taking it a step too far so that one I typed out and then went let's just delete that tab straight away. The other thing that the spreadsheet's helpful for is seeing how much of an idea you have in that initial spurt of inspiration so for the project I recently finished this is what I had umbrella academy style family of children with powers with one girl who can't use hers dad is going to send her out into the world to try using them and everyone leaves the house she stalls knowing that someone will come to drive her out before long she is in the bathroom and here's someone into the house uh is a bit confused thanks already that was fast she ducks behind the bath into the windowbox to hide and thinks maybe if I stay my powers will come out by instinct her sister enters the room she gasps sister says run she fumbles with the window behind her and falls through as the sister fills the room with fire and as she is falling out she hears the words don't bother coming back until you have powers so that scene there was the inciting incident or the turning point that set the plot into motion and having a complete scene actually meant that when I started to write even though I wasn't as prepared as I'd like to be at least I had one scene I could start with whereas there are other ideas where I don't have a specific scene so another tab says 12 year old girl is friends with some sort of fairy slash god you start creating mischief around the town and everyone thinks it's her so there is a premise there but there's not as much to work with that doesn't mean it's a bad idea it just means it's incomplete and there's some more exploration to do and that brings us to the next step step three for finding your book idea is to then go through your spreadsheet or your file where you've collected all of those ideas and take a look at them and think which one of these sparks interest for me right now and I'd recommend not just picking one straight away but picking between three and five that you'd like to explore so I'm going to take a quick look at my own spreadsheet and see which ones sound interesting to me right now one of the things you might notice as you're going through everything is that similar themes come up in different ideas so I have a number that feature people with superhuman abilities however I do want to avoid that for my next project because that was a big part of my last project I also have a few with parents who are dead or have amnesia and I have a few I've got a couple about like 11 12 year old main characters so what that means to me is clearly these are areas that I want to explore in more depth and maybe if I've got like a cup a fragment here and a fragment here that have some crossover is it possible for me to put them together and create a more substantial idea five minutes later okay so I've been through my spreadsheet and there are four ideas that I'd like to explore in a little bit more detail now so one is so we've all had those running dreams I'm sure where you run and run and you're going so fast and then you start to fly and I remember I had this idea years ago actually and it was about basically a girl who could run and fly in dreams but the twist is that in her dreams she was like the secret agent and working on behalf of some agency and the people who were chasing after her were like the enemy agency or whoever and so in her dream life she's like a spy and in her real life she's just a regular you know 11 12 year old student she happens to be quite good at running and track and she starts to see things from her dream in real life and they eventually start to merge and she isn't sure what's real and what's not anymore so I thought that could be fun the next one is actually one that came up when I was last writing down my ideas so not too distant future the main character is an engineered superhuman and part of a program that was quickly destroyed so these people are very rare she is capable of functioning like a normal human but she needs a lot of meat to maintain who she is so herself her skills her sanity her humanity if she goes too long without eating meat she starts wanting to eat the people around her and the concept behind that is like what if the key to remaining human is to eat others and can you still be human if the cost of your humanity is cannibalism basically again these are all very rough it's very early stages but we are only partway through the process the next one is the god of mischief one I mentioned earlier so girl becomes a friend friends with a fairy or god who starts creating mischief and everyone thinks it's her and the final one is about a special mineral so a woman works at a museum where they're showcasing a newly discovered mineral slash substance believed to help with regeneration eternal life it does something special someone steals it she eventually catches up to them but suddenly all these other people are after her because everyone wants this super mineral and she needs to eat it to keep it safe and it starts affecting her very quickly so all of these obviously very rough I haven't done any work on them beyond the initial jotting them down but that's okay because this is still early in the process this brings us to step four which is to do some brainstorming now you can brainstorm however you want to if you like to use a mind map and just see which ideas spark if you have certain questions you want to do to explore something I'm just going to do some string of consciousness writing to see what ideas I have when I'm thinking about these different concepts and whichever ones have the most they're the ones I'm going to continue exploring so it's been not that long maybe between five and ten minutes and I have about three quarters of a page for the dream spy story and what I've written down is basically what I already know about the idea or what what could be true so sort of if I'm asking myself what could this book be what could it be about I've just been jotting down ideas around that I've also been raising questions in my notes so there are some things that I already described so 11 year old girl is a regular student blah blah blah when she sleeps she is really a courier for a secret agency and takes documents between bases then questions why is an agency using kids well could it be that they're less suspicious are they faster than adults in the stream world or could they actually have been bred for this are they little clones or creatures that have been created for the agency's purposes next question what does the agency actually want what do they do I have no idea and then another one why are they sending physical documents why aren't they emailing or doing some sort of online encryption so these are the things that I don't expect to have answers to off the top of my head the first time that I start looking at this idea but having questions for me is a good sign because it shows me that there are things to explore so from here is part of step four I would do that for each of my ideas until I ran out of steam so it might be five to ten minutes I might have one idea where I just get going and it's 30 minutes and I'm still writing which is a really good sign but at this stage I just want to see if thinking about this sparks more thoughts if you're stuck and you're sitting down and you have a blank page or a blank word document and you aren't sure where to start with your brainstorming an exercise that I found really helpful is Susan Dennard's looking for magical cookies in your book now I already have a video on this so I will put a link in a card so you can see it as well as in the description below but a summary is the exercise is supposed to help you rediscover your passion and interest in a story and the example she gives is when you're in the middle of it and you've gotten to a stage we're just slugging through but it's not working and it's really it's boring you as the author which means it's going to bore everyone else but I think it can also be helpful at this stage when you're right at the beginning and trying to decide what you want to work on next so the areas you need to look at are what made you want to write about this idea so in my case I have these four ideas that I shortlisted why did I shortlist them what was interesting to me about them what do I want to explore with this what makes me excited then once you've done your list of reasons why you want to work on this the next piece is I imagine dot dot dot and here you imagine all of the things that link to everything you've just said so I haven't actually done this I'm looking through my papers because I haven't actually done this today as part of these projects but I want to see if I can find when I did it for powerless um yes there we go okay so powerless is the project I just finished and I have what made me want to write powerless I identify with the odd one out dynamic of the main character versus her sisters I love how the father will stop at nothing he sent her siblings after her when he was kicking her out I like the full circle of the narrative that there's a clear inner journey as well as an outer one because the inner journey was supposed to be that self-acceptance I don't think that quite happened in the first draft because I was trying to get it done but this is at the brainstorming stage and I knew that that was an element I wanted to be in there and I hadn't really thought about any of my ideas from an inner journey perspective as well as the outer journey before so those were the three things that I came up with when I asked myself why I wanted to write that book when I asked myself what I imagined I have epic fight scenes where she has to survive without powers hmm this is interesting revisiting this now that I've done the draft I'm like did I include that probably not to the extent that I could have anyway epic fight scenes where she has to survive without powers secret conversations between her and her sister underworld slash mafia involvement which did end up happening time limit is there a ticking clock where she needs where she needs to succeed by a certain time or else they'll kill her or get rid of her and then what would make me want to write each scene in this book so here I've just got tension intrigue possibility slash hope and if you look at Susan Dennard's example she's got things like she loves the romantic tension between her characters and one of the things she really wants to write is almost kisses lots of almost kisses so if I'm thinking about these ideas what would make me want to write this dream spy story and I'm like I want to describe that moment when she lifts off of the ground I want to have this really clear expectation that if she's ever in danger she can wake up and then I want everything to fall apart because one time she can't wake up and she can't go back to the real world or I want her to get back to the real world but it's not safe anymore because they've somehow followed her there now although this video has covered four steps this is not the complete process for me as what I will be doing next is actually trying a couple of different plotting methods in my short list of ideas so I'm expecting I'll have two or three left once I go through the brainstorming and then I'm going to try the snowflake method story grid and either the story circle or story clock depending on what how long it takes my story clock workbook to arrive because I live in Estonia and postage is slow here what I did last year before nano rimo was I had three short listed ideas and for each of them I used the take off your pants method save for cat method and story engineering so I will include a link so you can check that out if it's interesting to you in your case maybe you'll do this initial brainstorming and that'll be enough and you'll have brainstormed around your three or four ideas and you'll see that one of them clearly has much more and that one's the one you're more excited about and you're ready to start writing straight away maybe you're a pancer and you don't like the idea of plotting and outlining in my case I found one of the really valuable things about going through the plotting exercise was that it was just a more structured approach to brainstorming so rather than just doing an off the top of my head what do I think would be cool stream of consciousness ramble like I've just done I had to address certain things I had to think about theme and I had to think about the characters and I had to think about key events that would happen in the book and that forced me to develop the ideas a lot more before I started writing and honestly the plan I had for powerless wasn't perfect the book did change and develop a lot as I started writing reading those notes just now I realised I left a whole lot out but the exercise was still helpful in getting the creative juices flowing so as an optional step five I recommend picking one or two outlining methods and try to outline your book before you start writing just to give your brain more to chew over in terms of brainstorming and creativity the other unrelated thing I wanted to mention today is if you haven't been able to tell from my accent I am Australian and Australia is currently experiencing its worst bushfires in history from the news I believe New South Wales has lost a third of its koalas over 20 people have lost their lives and between 20 and 30 people are missing in Victoria at the moment the air quality is so bad that people are having to wear masks in order to breathe and it's even reached New Zealand which is 2,000 kilometers away the fires have been going on for about two months already and usually peak bushfire season isn't until February or March so there could potentially be another two months of this ahead when it comes to the size of the fires it's spread to over five million hectares which is if I check my stats over five times the size of the Amazon fires in 2019 and over two and a half times the size of the 2018 California fires now I know I have 50 subscribers so this video probably isn't going to do much but if this happens to be the one that goes viral I'd like to ask anyone who sees this to please do what you can I've put links in the description to different organizations you can donate to which include the local firefighters, Salvation Army, Red Cross and a whole lot of organizations that are both trying to stop the fires and provide relief to the victims it doesn't need to be much like even if you can just spare a couple of dollars if hundreds of thousands of people around the world did that it would make a huge difference that is all from me to today back on the subject of writing if you have a method for finding and choosing book ideas I would love to hear it so please leave a comment below and I will see you next time bye


Several reactions trail the Lagos State Ansar's report as the United States demands sanctions while the Chief of Defence Staff, General Lockheed Rabo says the report was released through the rogue channels. And women take the four in the force-covering elections in equity as eight join the governorship race. This is Plus Politics. I am Mary Anacorn. Different reactions have trail the report of the Lagos State Judicial Panel of Inquiry on Restitution for Victims of the Sars-related Issues of Abuses and Other Matters with the United States stating that they look forward to Lagos State and the federal government taking suitable measures to address those alleged abuses as well as the grievances of victims and their families. Also, the Chief of Defence Staff, General Lockheed Rabo, claims that the report was released through the rogue channel and that the Lagos State Governor, Babaji Desong Oulu says it will help to start the process of proper reconciliation of affected victims. Now joining us to this costus is Legal Practitioner, Inibaghe Ifyong, and former Special Advisor to the River State Governor, Oppenabot Inko Taria. Thank you very much, Mr Taria, for joining us. And thank you very much, Inibaghe. Thank you, and good evening. All right. Thank you. My pleasure to join you this evening. All right.  Just as we started by saying that several reactions have trailed this, the presentation of the report, there are some sensitive parts of this report, just like Mr Rabo has said that it was released. Some of the pages of this report were released through the wrong means. I don't know what he meant by that, but I remember the last time we spoke on the issue of the bullets that were matched with the army, you didn't sound very positive as to if the government was able to do anything or if people were going to get justice. But here we are now. A report has been presented. Some of the, some bits of that report have been leaked, even though people are saying they are unable to authenticate the veracity of the contents of those leaked pages. But what are your thoughts now? Do you have a change of heart somewhat to if the government is going to get justice for the people and all of the victims involved, whether those who were dead or those who were alive? Well, regarding the leakage in quotes of the report, I don't think we should dissipate energy on how the manner in which this report came to public light. I can confirm to you that the substance of that report in circulation, the one you are referencing, inaccurate, I can confirm that to you authoritatively. What is it being, what is in circulation? It's a true representation of the position of the panel. But what is being circulated, however, is the draft. That is why it does not have the signature of the chairman and members of the panel. But when the clean copy comes out, you will see that this is exactly the same thing. The difference is that in the one that is being circulated, there are a few typographical errors. But as to substance, as to their findings, there is nothing in that report that is different from what the panel found or what they have recommended to the best of my knowledge. Now, I want us to be very realistic about this. We have a regime, a government, if you prefer that, in this country to be, that has no regard for human rights. And the government is not pretending about this. Answers, protests happen because of failure of governance. I like to stress these points at every opportunity that I have. They wouldn't have been answers if we had a responsible government. If we had a government that lives up to its responsibilities. People came out to protest because of the vacuum in leadership. The issue of police brutality, the issue of the strategic killing of Nigerians has not been addressed till date.  Nigerians are still being killed almost on a daily basis by the police. People are still being arrested illegally. I receive these complaints and reports almost on a daily basis. So what that shows you is clear lack of political will, clear its sincerity. Now, will there be justice in terms of implementation? Yes and no. There are aspects of that report that I believe that the legal state government is going to implement. The greater challenge. And I hope so. I hope so. I want to give the government some benefit of doubt. But as it pertains to the conduct, the criminal conduct of the Nigerian army, led by people like Bello and others, we may never see light at the end of the tunnel. As far as this current regime is concerned. Possibly what we have there. But the government is not in charge of the judiciary. I mean, if this is a report that has been presented, it's supposed to take due process. There has to be prosecution one way or the other because they've been indicted. When you say the regime, you make it sound like the government controls everything. No, this is not a matter for the courts. It is an entirely, at this point, it is an executive matter. It is not judiciary. Okay, it's not a judicial matter. It is not a legislative matter. Of course, parliament can intervene, but it is not a matter for the courts. The panel has made recommendations. They have reached a conclusion on fundamental issues. One, whether they were the massacre, they have confirmed that they were the massacre. They have given faces to some of the victims of the massacre. They have confirmed indeed that the governor of Ligosta invited the army to attack innocent protesters. They have confirmed that the army sabotaged the protest. They are defining that clear. What I am telling you is that under the law, we look at session 218 of the constitution. The operational use of the armed forces is vested in the president. So this report is also an index meant on the president because it is either Bwari gave the order as commander-in-chief for those soldiers to invade the Toge and kill innocent endurance, or is not in control of the armed forces. In which case, it is as bad as defects because it's sure that really there is no commander-in-chief because we have to listen. This is commander-in-chief. You cannot be commanding as a chief if you do not have control of those who are your subordinates. Now having become aware, let us assume for a second that the president was oblivious of the massacre, of the atrocity they had the army committed at the Doge. Having become aware, having been established through a judicial inquiry, what action is the president going to take? That is the question. I am not optimistic. I do not have any confidence that this president is going to implement the recommendations of the panel. Interesting. I just want to ask you one more question. If I go to in Kotara, there were very many other panels that were set up at the behest of the NSAS protest, of course, to address the issues in different states. But Laker State seems to be the only panel that followed through and has now presented a report. I do not know if you are the right person to ask the question, but I will ask it nevertheless. What happened to the other panels? Why have they not followed through? We have not even heard of any sitting. The one in Cross River is almost nonexistent. There should have been one also in Rivers. We have not heard anything. Really, what are we to make up all that? The governors are irresponsible. It is as simple as that. Most governors in Nigeria are irresponsible. I cannot apologize for saying so. They are clearly irresponsible. They do not care. In some of the states, the inquiry was not even in panel. The governors did not even set up the inquiry. In other states, they grudgingly, reluctantly constituted the panels, but refused to provide logistics for the panels to work. One of those states is acquirable. After the panel was set up, I got to know that the funds that were meant for the taking off of the panel was diverted by somebody in government. When the funds were able to sit subsequently, the governor even frustrated the release of the report. I do not know whether they have finally sent it to Abuja or not. This is the story in most of the states. Legals are taking the center stage. One, because of the incident of the 20th of October, the two kids, which drew the attention of the international community. Two, because legals, whether we agree or not, you agree or not. Legals is the faith of Nigeria. Every part of the government is represented in legals. The media is in legals. The civil society is in legals. The leaders of a legal profession is in legals. It is natural for greater attention to be paid to legals. But other states, very little attention has been paid. Why? The governors are irresponsible. Interesting. Mr. Tariah, on the report, 11 people were killed. Four are still being declared missing. 20 of them have been injured. All of them at the leaky toll. But in November of 2020, I'd just like to bring the minds of everyone watching to what the minister for information, Mr. Lai Mohamed, had to say that year. I'd like to quote him. He said, leaky shootings, it's the world's first massacre without blood or corpses. How bad does this report rub off on the federal government and state government? Well, let me start by commanding the panel in legals. For the ramrod, the integrity with which is subject, I must commend that panel, because I was one of those who actually dismissed the various panels as a part of duty, which we have set up as a premium policy. The target position gave the world impression that they were actually doing something when in the natural fact, it was saying that the subject used to ensure whatever pluralism must have thrown up will just taste a lot. I haven't said that. On the issue of Lai Mohamed, everybody in Nigeria and even the world at large is now seized of Lai Mohamed, will I call it? I don't, I don't even want to call it ratudies. I'll dismiss it as a Mendocino point. Unfortunately, he's one man that I really admired before the assumption of office administrator for information. But sadly, this is a man that had dragged his name in the moor. Lai Mohamed is known for lies and most times unnerving lies, internal lies, lies that suffer from at least a bit of poverty. What's his name? Winston Churchill once said, he said truth is incontrovertible. Marlins made the right, sorry, Marlins made the start, it did not have to be the right, and that is exactly what has just played out. As a student of an as-student, all as-student, talking of my brother, the lawyer talking of you, Maria, we all also read, I strongly believe, the gods are not to blame, which is a rendition of Odupo's rights, where it is said that the most slowly, but by daybreak it has crossed the sky. And this is exactly what has happened. The truth can never be hidden. And what I cannot also comprehend is the implication of the military. This was purely civil butter, and the people conducted themselves in canonical order way. So there was no need, they had flags singing the national anthem, and so there was no need whatsoever to invite the military. The police at no point in time said they had been overwhelmed. So you find a callous, conscious-less government trying as much as it can in a rustic manner, trying to oppress those that are clamoring for justice, equity, and certainly for good governance in the country. Because we have a government that has embedded us to criticize a government that is there, not in the interest of Nigeria, but is there in its own interest. And that is why we have that macabre dance at the theater of Thailand with the crazy string of lunas. So I will not want to dwell much on what Lai Mohamed, who has no credibility, to say this because it's a national thing, who has no credibility to what's there anymore, to draw a model of that will be confidence of level of prominence and importance to a man that ordinarily should be dismissed or imprisoned from his lead in Nigeria. How can a man without a drink of conscience go to the world to tell the world they are no deaths when it is obvious, your evidentiary proof that people were callously murder of that will. And you go out in so sad that a man without conscience gone ahead, not minding the triple-letting families of the men they beat him so that they are massacred of that will. Rather than that swaggering, rather than telling Nigeria that the government will see to it, the government will address the issues who go on air and is still insisting that there are no deaths on that day. There can not be a devil's representative than that of the person of Lai Mohamed. Let's move on to something else. Yes, let's not dwell on that. Let's move on to something else. On the panel, I'm urging the government to enter the implementation of the panel. On the issue of the CVS, I listened to what my brother said, on the issue of the CVS, he was a equivoker. All he did not question, he did not question the report, the signature of the report, the only question procedural obligation, the situation where, oh, if you have gone through this process, but that is minimizing the maximum and minimizing the minimum. We are not bothered about how it was submitted. They are regretting, they are angry because unlike in those days where we had the bullet theory, the epidemic middle theory, you only hear what the government wants to give to you, today you have different sources of having your information. And that is what is reminding them. And I'm happy because without this leak, without this disclosure, I can tell you that the government that is based by the sincerity of that panel and this report would have somehow embellished it. And so we're happy, we are working for what the Lagos State government will do. And it is a shame that other state governments have swept this issue under the carpet. That is a problem we have in this country. And I pray, I sincerely pray that the Lagos State government will implement the recommendations of that panel or else Nigeria's are going to make a grocery of their conscience. Talking about the Lagos State government, the governor, Babaji Desong, who made some statements at the receipt of that report by members of the panel, let's take a quick listen to what he said and then of course I'm going to take your thoughts on it. Proper, reconciliation, restitution, bringing together of everyone that must have in one form or the other been affected by either the police or any of our citizens that must have been wronged by one form or the other. This process. So he's talking about restitution, he's talking about bringing together everyone that had been hurt one way or the other as a fallout of that incident. He's talked about reconciliation. And let's not also forget that there's also going to be some monies paid to the families of those who lost their loved ones, the injured ones and of course we don't even know about the families of those who are missing. So the Lagos State government has started doing something, but Mr. Inkotiria quickly, how easy is it going to be for the Lagos State government in terms of this issue of restitution that he's talking about again? What's the hope that the Lagos State government can really bring all of this to play? Let's not forget also the government does not have the powers to bring the army to the table. Remember how tough it was for the panel in itself to get the army representatives to come to give their statement at some point, you know, there was some in Broglie. So here we are, the reports has been made clear, we've seen some pieces and bits of it. What's the certainty? Do you think that there is any form of hope out there that maybe this implementation will take place, especially in the angle where the army and the police comes in? Because this is of course, the police was the basis of this whole protest in the first instance. But let's also not forget that governors and the federal government are being indicted one way or the other. What the recommendations of the panel will make Nigerians to make it push, to make it push you of their conscience and you know that, and if they rehash, it will be worse than what we're experiencing. It is very simple. We must go beyond the issue of rhetoric. We're not interested about it. It's not in mouth to mouth-pious relevances and sanctimonious regalities. The panels are as recommended. The recommendations include what should be done to the nature authorities and the role the federal government and the state government are going to play. So it is as simple as ABC. Just take the panel, the report of the panel and implement them. Set up an implementation committee. I hope that the review is all about the implementation and not all about trying to review what the panel has done. Sorry, not trying to observe what the panel has done but has to do with the implementation of what the panel has done. So I don't see anything difficult in implementations. If there is sincerity of purpose, if the government is sincere to assuage the feelings of the family members, of those who love their life, it is very simple. The talking of the security operators, especially the army that have no business, because the constitutional role of the army is to protect the integrity of the nation. Yes, there's also a provisional that says you can invite the army when the police are aware, but we all know that the police are not aware at all. If just as an example of the seriousness of the governor, who just wanted to ingratiate himself with Mr. President, wants to give Mr. President the impression that he is on top of the situation. And Mr. President cannot even absorb himself because of the commander-in-chief. And so whether we like it or not, whether we need it, whether he was aware of the what was going to happen or not, if he is immaterial, the boss must have his table. If the commander-in-chief, the governor, is not even the commander-in-chief, so the President himself cannot be restricted from the plane. So in synopsis, what am I saying? Let the government implement the recommendations of the report and ensure that those soldiers, because you cannot send a military man out without knowing his identity. For the commander, if it's a brigade commander, for example, and he's ordering his boys to go out, then maybe he's going to know how many the names of those that are going to come. Now that's all the important issue that I have to make. You see there, if a soldier dies in work form, is identified, and his family members are compensated. But when a soldier goes out to commit havoc, does something that is illegal, it's because I don't know soldier. We cannot be living in that world of delusion. So his soldiers know those they have sent out. And unfortunately, I will not be blamed though who went out to shoot. Because the soldier is trained to carry orders. I want the man who gave the order to be penalized. Soldiers are meant to carry orders. There is no way a soldier, otherwise, if you are a kid of destiny, a soldier would not have been going to tell his boss, no. You don't say no to your boss in the military. We all know what happened to the bigger soldiers around the country and their lives, when there were vast certain issues. So the commander that sends them out is a man that should be penalized. And that will go a long way in placating and asserting the feelings of the agreed, a very large extent. The commander must be sacked. He has to be sacked. We ask the government to implement the recommendations of the panel.  The federal government seems to be pretty quiet on this issue. Many are hoping to hear from Mr. President or his office. I mean, since this report surfaced, lots of people have posted on social media saying, well, let's hear what the federal government has to say about this issue. But they seem to be tight lipped about it. But let me take you back to 2020 to something that the special presidential spokesperson, Femi Adesino, said. I'd like to quote him directly. We'll put up that picture right now on our screen. He said, and I quote, if President Buhari hadn't exercised the restraint and the tolerance of a father, he would have been taking or would have been talking of something else in this country. He continues by saying, the rivers of Nigeria could have turned crimson and mourning and lamentations would have surfaced at the lead. He also said, but we are thankful for the father in Mr. President, that's Buhari, his patience enduring almost to a fault. End of quote. Now that post, I think he put it on Twitter at the time in 2020. He was praising the president for his restraint. And I'm wondering what that restraint was about. And he also made a statement about blood flowing and crimson. This is even after the fact that people had been killed at the toll gate where they called a hoax. And remember, we had that issue with the CNN, international media houses who had reported on this issue. So I'm more curious. This is a lot, if you ask me, but do you think that the federal government in Ibarca is ever going to speak on this issue again, knowing that they may somewhat be tied to this and indicted one way or the other? And also bearing in mind that the United Nations, the U.S., are also calling for sanctions. We don't have to wait and see, frankly, but I have caution against excessive optimism. I think we should approach this with caution. We are dealing with a regime that has no regard for the rule of law. And you see one rule of law is undermined. The very fabric of state is destroyed. Now, I don't expect them to depart from the scandalous position that they have been, they have taken over time. For example, I don't expect them one man to have the decency to recant the very provocative positions that he took in the past on this matter. It's not likely going to do that because the people who are doing this are shameless. There is no shame in the government. But then we have a report that we have a report that clearly states the opposites, which is very obvious. So why would they not recant? Well, because you cannot shame the shameless. It's as simple as that. You cannot shame the shameless. This is not the first time that a massacre has happened on that point. Meanwhile, the Islamic women of Nigeria were slaughtered in 2016. 348 are found by the Mohamed Gawah, Judge Mohamed Gawah led judicial panel of inquiry. Have they been implemented? Was anybody sanctioned? Was any soldier commercial? Was Brett not awarded as the non-career ambassador for that atrocity in order that he committed well in office? What are we talking about? We have a brutal dictatorship on our hands and we just have to link with that reality. But I want to assume that one day we will have a responsible government in this country that will take action on those issues, that will review this matter and put the criminal who killed Nigeria and Dontraya. But if we are waiting for Bwari to do that, then we can as well wait forever. I don't have any hope at all that this report as it relates to sanctioning the persons who were directly involved in that atrocity. I don't have any hope that that is going to be done. I don't. Quickly, the People's Democratic Party has joined in the group of people who are making demands to government at all levels as a result of this report. But how do we, especially people like you civil society activists and advocates, make sure that this issue is handled devoid of any political bias because it's one way or the other. It will become an APC versus a PDP thing in no time. How do we make sure that that doesn't even become the order of the day? PDP doesn't have credibility to speak on issues of this nature because our state leave Lagos, leave the two gates massacre for a second. They are 36 states in Nigeria. Over 10 of those states are controlled by the PDP, including our people and others and rivers. Have they submitted their reports? What have their governors done? Which PDP state has made compensation to victims of police brutality or victims of incest? Which, so the party must also look at itself in the mirror. What have they done to call their governors to order? That's why I'm saying I'm not bothered about what PDP says. I am bothered about what affects the common man and what the common man says. That's my position. In Kotara, you wanted to say something. No, I asked if I did that question with the director. Well, if you think… As an amendment to what my brother actually said, PDP, the political hostages have started, so PDP will consciously exploit the situation. And otherwise, like he rightly said, if there to be a back issue or to be one task issue of the other, you see all the governors making all sorts of unnecessary noise left, right and center. But now this has to do with compensation. This has to do with massacre. You see the way they stand themselves for me. So what is the PDP talking about? It's just trying to score a cheap political goal. And that's what justice PDP is trying to do. So nobody should take what the PDP is saying seriously. After all, we had your demassacre. And the massacre was under PDP. We had all kinds of massacres that you present under PDP. We had conversations so this has just got beyond partisan politics. It has to do with humanity. And so let us not talk about what the PDP is saying or what the WDT is saying or what the YYC is saying. And that brings me to my last question. My last question before we go because we're out of time. What does it say about how the average Nigerian state treats, rather what does it say about the Nigerian state and how it treats humans? Is there any value whatsoever placed on the life of the average Nigerian? And I'm trying to tie this to what happened to the young girl who died in custody outside the country. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. The life of any Nigerian is valueless in the eyes of the government. That's the truth about it. You can imagine if an American is in difficulty in this country, what the state of the American government would think. Relentlessly, they say the situation, they say that America. But in 21 million Nigerians can die. I listened to what Advocate Davorek, who was stressing the issue of for our from where to where, how annoying, how shameful it is. But Nigerian lives are not valued by our leaders. Unfortunately, they're not valued. I asked myself because if you were dying for this country, we call Nigeria. Because at the end of the day, we'll just send messages to you, condolences messages to you, and make all kinds of promises that will never be fulfilled. That is the truth about it. So that is why we have the problems we have with this country. How many Nigerians believe in Nigeria? Most Nigerians don't even believe in the country we call Nigeria. And that is as a result of the exclusive leadership we have. That is because we have leaders who are not there in the image of Nigeria, but who are there for allocentric criticism, for allocentric criticism. So it is not what I must consider. It's a shame. But I must tell you, it is not worth dying for the present Nigeria we live in. Yesterday, in the days of our fathers yet, I don't know what to know. But for today, it is not worth dying for the present. Now you will die, I will be forgotten. You will be died.  I will be concerned. Because of the power of leaders. Well, on that very sad and gloomy note, I want to say thank you for being part of the conversation. Inibara Fiong is, of course, a legal practitioner, and Oponabou Inko Taria is a former aide to the governor of Riverstay. Thank you very much, gentlemen, for being here. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Well, here are the seven key recommendations of the Lagos Judicial Panel. When we come back, I'll be giving you our next topic for conversation. Stay with us.