Hi, so my name is Sandy Barrett and we're here for a monthly show called what's going on and there's a lot going on in the world including happy International Women's Day to whomever chooses to watch us and also to Eric Añero a colleague of mine who just got back from Africa So we'll be talking about what's going on in the other part of the world the non NATO part of the world and see what's going on in that part of the world during this disastrous war in Ukraine Anyway, happy International Women's Day before we begin. I want to mention something about that holiday that holiday was a holiday that was first celebrated and created in the former Soviet Union in 1917 the Soviet Union of course is Russia that was the result Soviet Union of the Bolshevik Revolution which occurred there in 1917 as Russia emerged Defeated essentially in World War one at that time in 1917 then the Russians gave up and it gave up huge amounts of territory to the Germans and they essentially surrendered after in 1917 the war ended in 1918 and at that time the women of the Soviet Union Got together to celebrate peace to celebrate women all throughout the world women and girls But also to celebrate peace. We all should remember this in Russia in 1917 and see whether or not we can consider peace between Russia again and the NATO countries Right now. So Eric you were recently in Africa. So what's going on there? What did you find there? I was astonished actually I should say by what we found there And by the way, I just want to point out for our audience that this little country Right here at least compared to the rest of the world. That's what Ukraine is Surrounded while this is the Russian Federation Ukraine and this is what where you were in Africa, right in every close, okay And then I was also in Ghana But before I go there I would like to piggyback on what you said about the women and think about all the women in Africa that are still fighting to get more rights and that need, you know The the help from the women in the West they need the help from all people in the world Men even like you, which I'm sure you do support those women, right? Yes, of course and then back to the situation of the war in Ukraine and then how it's being viewed from Africa I was also surprised to see that most of the people on the streets of Africa but even within the political realm are You know have some sympathy for For Putin and Russia and Russia. I was surprised So I tried to understand what was going on and I realized when I asked people that they're not Condoning what is going on in Ukraine As far as the war or the invasion, you know, you name it, but it's more like they are They have sympathy for someone that stands against the West By what what do you mean by the West also the West? I mean by you know all the former European colonial powers. Okay, that's key though, isn't it? Okay, go ahead example France in Ivory Coast You know and that's where you were Ivory Coast Ivory Coast has been independent from France since the 1960 but it wasn't a real independence up to now France has it needs on the throat More than 15 countries over there The new generation is no no longer the generation of my father of my grandfather who were Colonial being do you mean colonial beings meaning that they were subject subjects of the French Empire They were they were you know, my mother went to school, you know Singing the French Yeah, Marseillez Learning about more of the geography and the history of France rather than that of her country I grew up, you know learning more about my country I went to school with you know friends in Europe that today maybe are you know leading their own countries But my generation doesn't want to be seen as a colonial being anymore. They want at least to be respected and the research as Africans but also a citizen of the world human being that's it. So The West unfortunately the European powers and they are like the western European powers Western European powers, correct and they are like from you know, Canada Canada and the US Unfortunately have kept that, you know a statue school of you know, you know a colonial relationship of Westerns West supremacy like meaning like For the past 20 years nothing has been done to change that you have new generation that wants Change that doesn't want to be a Citizen of countries where the West just come to get resources But just want to to do their business, you know and and I think that The West hasn't changed the way they do business with Africa now Africa has also Historical right relationship with the Russians for example. Wait a minute. Let's go back to something. So it I When I studied European history it turned out to my surprise that between like 1878 and 1917 the capitalist powers France England then Germany And Italy to and the United States basically conquered Africa and split it up between them and there was a big conference the Congress of Berlin in 1878 where this section was considered French and this section was considered British and what you're saying is that they use their Imperial power to Kind of rob the African nations of its resources. Is that true? Yes And then of course, you know that these are things of the past we thought But unfortunately, it doesn't change, right? It doesn't change. So you have you have You know in the name of this Agreement in Berlin and Yalta. You have Yalta. Yeah, you have your US condoning, right? France You know, you know continuing to to you know brutally Exploiting the resource of Africans, right? You know, that's why today Even though I grew up with you know a portrait of JFK JFK in my house We have like that sympathy towards towards the US More and more Africans are linking the US to that brutal, you know Exploitation of France and other colonial powers in France in your section of Africa Yeah, France in my section of Africa. This is why you know You see today the streets in Africa being in favor of putting as a man or Russia as a nation that stands against, you know, those who were supposed to be their friends but you know that are doing According to them worse than the Russian I take for example what happened in Libya. All right, right, which was Deeply influenced by Italians, correct? Yeah, Libya and then, you know, Libya, of course Gaddafi wasn't an angel No, of course Gaddafi was I guess we all have to say that before we discuss anything An angel right but and Libya by the way is up here. Yeah, but Gaddafi was kind of, you know You know maintaining some kind of peace over there and then, you know, the resources were pretty much, you know shared like I'm not saying equally but Could we put it this way that Libby that Gaddafi was looking out for the interests of Libya? Yes, okay now whether or not he was corrupt and all that stuff is a different question Yes, and then he was like a Libyan mother exactly European convinced Obama to go bomb I mean bombard, you know, Libya. Yeah, Libya is a total mess today Including including a reintroduction of slavery. Yeah, right. Libya is a total mess today You know comparing to what Libya was all Africans wanted to go to Libya really why tell me Europe because in Libya Libya was kind of, you know, well, I mean Develop more than the rest of the the continent so Libya is also Arab. Yeah, Libya is Arab Okay, he has money right and then yeah Gaddafi was, you know, of course buying a scoundrel. Yeah So what happened in Libya?  Bokina Faso, Mali Mauritania, all these countries are under the menace of, you know, Terrorists, you know, the threat of terrorists and fundamentalists that wants to occupy the place So for most of Africans, both the intelligentsia and the people of the street This is something that they will never forget. Okay, so but they blamed their mess, whatever messes exists in Africa right now On the old colonial powers in which it's France, England Italy, I mean, and the United States now, correct? Yeah, the United States, not because the United States was a colonial power, but because the United States has some Like as an alliance with these colonial, I mean colonial powers and then they will expect The US which is seen as the, you know, the the stronghold of democracy To at least make sure that these countries, these European countries are not treating, you know The Africans anymore like colonial beings, like today The US is doing something very great, like, you know, revisiting the racist past Today we're hearing about black lives matter But how can black lives matter only in the US and not matter in Africa? This makes me question the sincerity of Disassertion that black life matter because the black lives in Africa also want democracy They also want to have hospitals. They also want to have education when the IMF the International Monetary Fund He's crippling the economies by Adopting like measures like the structural adjustment That makes, you know, I remember I went to school 60% of the budget when I was going to university in our in Africa was devoted to education After the IMF came with the structural adjustment It went down to I don't know maybe like 10% or what but in all the schools were Dismantled the hospitals were like dismantled just because this country had to pay back their debts Okay, so why do you connect the IMF with the US? Uh, you know, it's Bretton Woods, right? Yeah, and yeah, it's like the institutions of Bretton Woods and Bretton Woods was in the 30s. Correct. Yes France has control of the IMF Mm-hmm, uh-huh. The US have like more more of your control of the word bank. So but it's all the same You know, so, you know, uh It's about time You know the the US and the West change the way of looking at Africa Okay Let's let's turn to the other Places in the world that have not been reported on as certainly It doesn't appear that there's been any reportage about who favors whom from Latin America No protests that I know of pro Zelensky pro Ukraine nothing and I said and but today there was an interesting Headline from Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela and also we know something about Cuba So it occurred to me that if you think about it, what's happening in Latin America? Do they favor Uh, Zelensky and Ukraine Or the West or what are their feelings? I suspect they're pro-russia. Yeah, but you know in this in this situation Like the western media tend to always look at who's the bad guy who the good guy look for, you know, who follows who The real problem here is like about, you know Does the West have any credit any credibility any credibility? That's the real question because I'm pretty sure no one wants his country to be invaded by another superpower, but you know We have to put everything in a context of geopolitical, you know struggles and fights So it's like how can countries like France that are still Oppressing oppressing, you know countries in Africa have the right to say, you know something This is the real question and then the people like Maduro Like the west is giving them, you know enough water to put them To put in the mirror because like okay, so let's look at Venezuela also You could also Extend that to nicaragua also and cuba all of whom cuba's been cautious But all of whom nicaragua and venezuela start there have come out and said either very little or have been pro Putin okay, so why is that it's because this is what I think and then I want your comment The united states has its sphere of influence and it's had that since the Monroe doctrine in 1823 Which said that this republic of the united states america controlled all of the rest of the americas And that it would not allow any other foreign powers ever to mess up that control Okay, this is our united states. I don't want to say our because I don't know what its government is all about It's my country though, and I love this country. Okay, so this republic then now that's its backyard. Yeah, okay What is the backyard for instance of this of russia? It's this area of eastern europe and also I Asia much of asia so when Putin perceived I would guess Just like in the united states when president kennedy perceived a weapons threat in cuba That were put there by the russians When nato began to extend his power this way I think putin said no, we're not going to allow that Does that justify his invasion? No, but I want you to think about that What would the united states have done in a similar circumstance? What did they do when the russians put missiles in cuba? That's that's a big question.  I mean, it's the same agreements that allow Former colonial colonial powers from europe who have the backyard they extend even the backyard on another continent like France has like a large sphere of influence here in africa. That's it's a backyard. Yeah, yeah That's the ego. Why does it, you know, uh, is it uh pertaining not only for The americas and not for russia. So I guess russia also, you know is trying to defend the turf So, uh And and then they don't see nato as a good idea in the neighborhood Well, if you let's go back a little bit to what russia really Is and what it isn't all right russia is this huge federation at this point that extends all the way to asia Since the 19th century if you think about it russia has been invaded by the west beginning with napoleon correct in 1812 That in those invasions Temporarily where it went into a bayance on the first and the second world war I don't know how many americans know that russia was our ally in both wars. So it was the us France britain and russia Which fought against the germans Correct in world war one and in world war two, but in both of those wars The russians paid the highest price. Yes Okay, especially in europe against the germans the russians had the most casualties And they were perceived as at least a very important victor in defeating the nazis. Okay So with that history 1945 comes second world war over When there should have been peace between the us and russia immediately begins the cold war against russia Right. Yeah, and from 1945 until present the nato alliance Has been an alliance directed against russia and the russians have said repeatedly not in our backyard, right? Yeah But you know we should also you know Look at the fact that you know also russia tried to also have their own Sure, sure always always always a lot of countries across the you know, mostly the the countries that were in eastern europe You know of you know, eastern europe in africa a lot of countries even south africa, for example Doesn't want to take like a very, you know, uh, a strong position Like with regard to the invasion of of ukraine ukraine because Russia helped south africa fight the oppressive regime In you know, you know, yeah, like in the apartheid regime. They did. Yeah, russia. So did cuba. Yeah, so did cuba Mali for example that is kicking out france from the day country now. Yeah now has been like a good, you know historical pattern of Russia so You know, it was fair A camp wanted to push for liberalism another one was like for socialism, but today the world has changed it's like Other other powers and mid-sized power are emerging It's a fair competition now between I mean the the whole world like you have like you have turkey that is doing business in africa China is there and russia russia is there russia is today In africa. I know china too. Yeah china very much But what does it mean for the u.s? The u.s risk To lose their sympathy. I mean lose africa. I know if they continue To follow the european powers that are looking at africa just as a place of subhumans Who are not, you know capable capable of doing, you know anything But what how do the russians or the chinese look at africans? You know, uh, someone was telling me do you think that you know, uh, the the russians are less White supremacists that I said, you know what they don't bring that when they come to the business Rather than the u.s or the the european that have been only given condoms to africa for the past 20 years And the the assumption that the whole continent will die from AIDS Rather than looking for ways to create I mean a dynamic, you know market over there where africans can do business Nothing is comparable to what the u.s.  You will have the same sympathy, you know about the u.s I mean no matter what politically, you know, the governments are doing so Even if china today was to To to to surpass or even to get closer to what the u.s. Is It would have just been because the u.s. Has been the pioneer And then china has been able to copy or to look at it So, you know, uh, if the u.s. Doesn't change that perspective of looking at african countries only as like, you know Second-class citizens and exploitable. Yeah, and then we can help Just help AIDS it's time for business We want in ivory coast People in ivory coast want to buy cheese from the month that is even getting sometimes better than cheese from france You know, yeah, they want to like do business with they would rather do business with the u.s. And i mean they want to be able to do business with any country You know with respect to, you know, human rights, you know, like We're not they don't want to be forced to do business with a country like France There's so much that people want to buy from the u.s Rather than being, you know locked into a Sphere of influence from france or great britain It's a new world The new generation wants to do business with china With russia with the u.s. And they don't want to be forced to do that. This is the new world any power any country any superpower or empire that doesn't understand that Will have china and russia, you know, uh, take the You know get the the cake Well, that's but there's also another policy that the united states has pursued particularly in latin america They sanction everybody. I mean the the government of the united states puts heavy-duty sanctions on cuba What are they supposed to do sit there not be able to buy anything from anyone?   There will be small conflicts here and there But this is not a small conflict It's time for the world to look at How we're going to do this today anything that happened in the u.s A guy in the bush in africa knows about it really back in the day How come americans don't know about all this stuff? Because you know, we have a condescending attitude towards the rest of the world, you know If if you are humble enough even if you are the mightiest if you are humble enough You learn about yeah, what's going on and then today the the you know the press is horrible I mean today like with your cell phone, you know what is going on in america like as as soon as it happens So we have to be in a world of cooperation because nobody can win any war, you know because like Shouldn't this be obvious to the u.s. After iraq It takes time it takes time for a mighty i mean a mighty power like the u.s To change it's like a huge change It will take time it will take like americans themselves and it would take the people that are called calling them some progressive I know to do that because they are also i'm very i'm very Surprised that you know, you'll find among those who are progressive Uh, some people that you know, uh camping on On their grounds like you know the rest of you know, if you're not among them use a devil Today there are nuances now There's it's no longer one side and the other one even china is probably an ally of russia Yeah, but china also has its card concealed. Yeah. Yeah, whatever will happen to uh russia Maybe could be in in their favor. So it's like this, you know, it's like moving Well, but the there was a really interesting article and I think I don't know how Much longer we have maybe a little bit, but there was a very interesting article Okay, let me go back a little bit. It seemed to me that this war in ukraine started almost immediately under the biden administration and I would say that russia This is a pre-emptive war on the part of russia They are pre-emptively entering ukraine and that to me as a moral kind of person Is really a capital sin that they have done this that they have invaded Unilaterally another country. Okay, so let's let's put that aside for a moment But that there are underlying causes of why they did it which is not to justify it But to say that they had their reasons and it doesn't seem that the press is covering any of that All the press is doing is stoking up further war by labeling putin a madman evil blah blah He has a strategy. This is what I think happened. He has a strategy. He has to yeah I think there has been a tacit agreement with china That allows putin to do this because he knows china has their back that to me. Okay, and remember That that was a foreign policy that should have always been avoided by the united states The united states never should have adopted any policy. It appears to me that would drive russia and china together That's a what what on earth is going on with that if russia and china are together I don't think that the united states I don't know. I mean, I can't imagine now what's going to happen to the united states Yeah, and the europeans are dependent on russia. It's a new world. So it's the united states So I mean a lot more importantly. We're dependent on china Yeah So so it's like even like Like shooting a gun on your own. Yeah, so uh, I got an email from a russian friend of mine who said We not only shot ourselves in the foot that we have shot ourselves everywhere By doing this by driving those two superpowers together I'll say one thing about the former president trope. Most people don't even like to hear anything he said But he clearly had a different foreign policy toward russia He wanted as you said to do business in russia. It's time for business. You know, there's no more like this and then Russia russia was clever. I mean russia is pulling The the u.s. Back to the, you know cold war. I know which is which will trigger, you know Militarism and all these I know and gun sales. Yeah, I mean the the gun sales people of the world must be Thrilled, yeah, we don't need that There is a need for a profound discussion about what is going on and people have to understand that it's not like A villain against the right, but that's the way the press perceives it because the press they like it Why they always find a good guy and a bad guy because this is how that is not true of the foreign press It is true of our press and I don't understand the idiocy of them. I don't get it. Why aren't the american people being Better informed about this because the the the traditional press is dying. So they're looking for anything What do you mean by that newspapers? Newspapers because today, you know People get the news from from I mean, which is not a good thing, but the traditional media Has lost their credibility They have lost their credibility with the the the newspapers the newspapers Newspapers for long because they get advertisement. I have I have I have been a reporter for cnn, right? I've been a stringer for cnn. I've worked for the voice of america and other newspapers And I know that you know how much advertisement or Which government finances your operation have an influence on your you know on your Editorial, so I there aren't any more editorials and half of the press Like the free press I used to be big and fat Nothing now we need people we need citizens to sit down and discuss even here in the mark We need to sit down. I haven't seen any debates where people can exchange their ideas It's either One side of you know one spectrum of the press Another spectrum. I mean side of the spectrum of and then people are fighting, you know Like a proxy war through the the media that they support we need to sit down and discuss like this Yeah, like this go into the issues And then understand what is going on that it's not only a villain that is being you know persecuted in russia it's it's uh the consequence of Action that have been taken by decades decades ago. It's like and and then there's a huge risk Right now africa is paying already for that war.  That's why I like I came and you came here, right? Yeah, that's why I want the us to do better to do better. We can do better in africa. It won't be A militarism that will make us win the war over there. We have to win the hearts of the people We have to be genuine. We have to bring development. We have to bring business because products that are made in america So far are better than most of the you know the goods that are made around the globe We have we have argument to sell we can sell things to africa without a gun on you know You know the head of the people over there We have like we have good industries. I've seen what is going on in here in the month. I've seen How cheese cheese? I mean even wine. I brought a californian wine to my dad Who's an aficionado of you know white? I mean, you know french wine And he lives where in abidjan abidjan he couldn't believe that that wine was coming from california. No He thought it was a wine from from france or from you know, this uh, so he's a franco file He's a franco file, but he's changing. He's changing because you know, he wants, you know, his grandkids To be able to talk to an american kid as equal The pass is a pass Now we want like a new So also you you said and you said a lot of people have said that there's china is all over africa too What do they want in return? Are they going to exact the A price for the is it imperialism on behalf of china and russia when they are in there china China is definitely looking for i mean it's some the new imperialism is that of economy Okay, okay china is not there to Not with the military, you know, I mean they have some military to protect, you know, the the ships Going through the place like east. I mean The horn of africa and like around Somalia and jibouti or all this because china is doing more and more business to the continent The ships are you know going through, you know the the routes here So they need the military to be able to protect the right, okay China is there for business china is not an angel. No, no, no Yes, I get it. I get it. Yeah an angel But you know today and mugabe said mugabe from from from uh, from uh, so here, right? And bob way, you know, who was like a good boy by western standard for a long time until he was deceived by tony Blair And and and and and and and and and uh, president clinton So he went to become their enemy, but mugabe said one day The european raped us Now we have the choice to go to bed with china without being raped. It's a big difference So we're choosing who's our partner You know, so That's really powerful if The europeans and the americans the canadian come no longer as you know Yeah, they will do better than china But they're not doing that right now. They're not doing that. Is there anything that is comparable to uh, you know, the legacy of Elvis Presley Hollywood, you know, nothing the fight. We know that right fight for the women rights the fight for for, you know workers until you know Labor day become a day for shopping. Yeah, it was a day of, you know, uh, you know, the fight of the workers and then it came from here So we have to go back to them. You have to go back to that I think we should stop right now, but the conversation is not going to be over. I would guess So last thing, what are you predicting? What's going to happen in this war? Well, today the world is like that's like what it's Unpredictable anything can happen. I mean, but you know, I'm pretty sure, you know Ukraine would be Destroyed. I know which is terrible interest of, you know, superpowers. So this is what I said to my sister who lives in canada This is a proxy war between russia and the us People don't want to hear that though. They want to hear about it's only about ukraine ukraine is the battlefield.  But thank you. Maybe we'll be back in a month, right? Yeah, thanks a lot and all my sympathy to the people of ukraine me to and to the people Really everywhere right now. Right. Right. Okay. Thank you, eric and we'll see you soon


Yes, Roma wines taste better because only Roma selects from the world's greatest wine reserves for your pleasure. That's R-O-M-A, Roma wines, those better tasting California wines enjoyed by more Americans than any other one, for friendly entertaining, for delightful dining. Yes, right now a glass full would be very pleasant as Roma wines bring you Agnes Moorhead in a remarkable tale of suspense. We were driving too fast, but I knew that if I slowed down at all I would begin to tremble. And so although the road was torturous, climbing steeply up the mountain I kept my foot pressed hard on the gas pedal. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that my husband was looking quietly into the green valley far below. He looked peaceful now. He had made his speech about driving too fast. I'd asked him to be quiet, and now he was quiet. I wondered what he would do if I stopped the car and told him right then that we were driving up to the Johnson House so that I might kill him. I parked the car on the highway at the foot of the dirt road leading up to the house. We walked quickly behind the heavy trees. My husband stopped once to wipe the dust off his shoes. I hurried him on and we soon arrived at the front door. As planned I'd forgotten the key. I did open my purse and look however, and that gave me the opportunity to release the safety catch on the gun I had borrowed from my husband's belongings. I suggested that we try one of the windows. He agreed, and we slowly made our way through the underbrush that was growing wild at the side of the stucco building until we reached the first floor window. The window was set high above the ground and my husband had to stretch his body to reach it. I waited until he had his back to me. His hands raised high in the air, reaching for the window frame. Then I opened my purse, took out the gun, aimed very carefully at a spot just in the center of his left shoulder blade, and pulled the trigger four times. We didn't fall right away. He had had his fingers over the window ledge ready to unfasten the catch when the bullets hit him. There was some terrible effort to dug his nails into the stucco and tried to keep him dying. I couldn't move. I wanted to scream but my throat felt paralyzed. He tried to turn his face and look at me. But he hadn't that much life left. At last. I wiped off the gun, his gun, and threw it behind an acacia bush. Then I walked back to the car, slowly and carefully removing any of my footprints which showed in the loose dirt of the road.  Put the car in the garage, went in and had my shower, and laid down in the library to wait. A few minutes after the grandfather clock struck 11, the telephone rang. Hello? Miss Skinner? This is she. This is Jonathan Brown, Sheriff's office. I have some... My husband? Yes, ma'am. I waited quietly for a moment, then I let the phone fall to the floor. I listened until I heard Jonathan Brown hang up. Then I replaced my telephone on its stand, went into the kitchen for some ice which I put in a large Turkish towel. I then arranged myself carefully and attractively on the living room to then, and waited again. Come here, please.  I'm all right.  Well, I felt faint suddenly. Well, ain't no wonder. Tell me what happened, Mr. Uh, Brown, Jonathan Brown, Sheriff's office. Mr. Brown, please sit down. Thank you. Well, your husband was up at the Johnson House this afternoon, as well as we can figure. Up there on the side of the mountain, you know, and he must have been trying to get into the window, and somehow, somebody, well, shot him. Are you sure you want me to tell you? I'm sorry. Go on, please. Well, we, uh, looked around the place, couldn't see anything. Though we found the, uh, you know, a weapon, it was a gun, found in the brush near where he was, and, uh, no footprints or anything, except tire marks. Down the main highway, and a bunch of cigarette butts where someone must have been sitting in the car, uh, waiting, you know. Those were my tire marks. You, you was up there? Well, I had an appointment to meet my husband this afternoon at the foot of the road leading up to the Johnson House. He had said that he'd had some business to attend to and would get a ride with this other person. He was very mysterious about it. And I waited for an hour or more at the foot of the road. You were so clever to recognize the meaning of those cigarette stuff. Well, he is. And when he didn't come, I thought perhaps I was mistaken about the appointment, and so I drove home. I would think about perhaps I'd gone up to the house I might have saved my poor dear husband's life. Hey then, I know. I'm all right. I'm all right. I'll be all right. Now don't you worry about a thing, Mrs. Skinner. The Sheriff's Office will round up the guilty party or parties and have them brought to trial, you know. Yes, I'm sure. I slept well that night for the first time in ten years. My husband during his lifetime had snored loudly and steadily, and during his later years, he had acquired the nervous and distressing habit of grinding his teeth in his sleep. This night all was quiet and peaceful in the house. In my house. And as I say, I stepped beautifully. The next few days were also beautifully quiet. A few photographers and newspaper men, but they were kind and gentle and didn't make too much bother. Finally, Mr. Jonathan Brown called to say that he would send a car for me on Friday morning. The next day, as it turned out, to take me to the car and his inquest. Small courtroom was crowded, and almost everyone there eyed me with great sympathy. The inquest proceeded evenly. There was as yet no evidence as to the identity of my husband's murder. I again stated that I had left the tire marks and cigarette stubs at the foot of the road that led to the Johnson House. No, I hadn't heard a shot. No, my dear husband had no enemies. Then... I've had this blackboard brought to court so that I might show the position of the body when found. I think it might be of interest. Very well, proceed. The body was found just below the first-story window on the left side of the house. The dead man was obviously trying to gain admittance, you know. He didn't die immediately, as I will show you, but stayed alive long enough to try to keep himself from falling. Since marks from each of his fingernails were found running down the side of the building. Here, then, is the window sill. And here are the marks of his fingernails. And here is the spot where the body lay when it was discovered. And here is the house. As he talked, he watched. I didn't know why until I heard the first scrape of the chalk against the blackboard. For one awful moment it was the sound that had been made by my husband as he tried so desperately to hold himself alive. I found myself tightly holding the wooden table in front of me. My arms and body tears. Trying not to faint. Since the large deposit of the dried stucco from the building was found under each of the victim's fingernails, I believe I can best illustrate the manner of the victim's last moments with a physical illustration.  We hear the gunshots, and then the victim slowly sinks to the ground. Oh, please. Please, I can't, sir. Please, don't make that. For suspense, Roma Wines are bringing you Agnes Moorhead in the 13th sound. Roma Wines' presentation tonight in radio's outstanding theatre of thrills, Suspense. Between the acts of suspense, this is Ken Niles for Roma Wines. Tomorrow on Valentine's Day, delight your Valentine with a gift that's smart, lavish, and in perfect taste. Say it with Roma Champagne, traditional wine of romance. Brilliant bubbling Roma Champagne is an unforgettable token of your thoughtfulness. For pale gold, sprightly dry Roma California Champagne, by the world-famous charmant bulk process, is sparkling wine at its finest. Yes, to make any golden moment live forever, say it with Roma Champagne. And remember, you enjoy an exclusive difference, a better taste in Roma Champagne. For Roma crushes only the choicest grapes, especially selected for fine Champagne. Then Roma Vipner's unmatched skill, the magic of necessary time, and America's finest wine making resources, guide this great treasure to rare taste luxury. Finally, from the famed Roma Champagne sellers to you, comes better tasting Roma Champagne. So this Valentine's Day, say it with Roma, Roma Champagne. Golden masterpiece of Roma, the greatest name in wine. And now Roma wines bring back to our Hollywood Sound stage, Agnes Moorhead as Mrs. Sally Skinner, and William Johnstone as Jonathan Brown in the 13th Sound. A tale well calculated to keep you in suspense. I must have been taken home from the inquest. For the next consciousness I had, I was lying on the guest bed. In the corner set, Mr. Jonathan Brown, he must have seen my eyes open. Feeling better? Yes, thank you. I'm terribly sorry. Oh, yes, all right. Quite a strain, you know. Yes, it was quite a strain. I'm going to ask whether it'd be all right to go on without you.  What happened? Oh, he said you'd be all right. Shock. I meant about my husband. And his death, the hand of persons unknown, you know. Is there anything further I must do? Not a thing, Miss Skinner. He's been very kind. Well, it's a terrible thing happened to you. Well, I don't know if there's nothing more you need from me. No, no, nothing. Thank you. Well, goodbye then, and don't you worry. We'll find who did it, you know. After it left, I had the time to be angry at myself for my behavior at the inquest. What was the people of thought? To say it only from the noise of a piece of chalk on a blackboard? I wondered if Mr. Brown had suspected anything, because as I remembered back to earlier afternoon, he had been watching me as he drew those silly little diagrams on the board. He hadn't been looking anywhere else, not at the coroner or at any other reporters, not even at what he was doing. He'd been looking at me. Well, of course he was looking at me. He was showing a civic. I slowly allowed myself to return to my former position in the community. I was able now to do the things I'd always wanted to do, but had been restrained from doing by a certain attitude of my husband. He had never liked entertaining. He didn't believe that we should belong to the country club and take a civic pride in the fact that our home was the largest and most beautiful in the community. In fact, it was his desire to sell our lovely home that caused me to finally take that complete and drastic step. The first evening that I accepted an outside invitation was for one of the Wednesday night evenings of bridge at our club. At my table with a present with a bank and his wife. As I sat down, I noticed that a windowpane on my left was shattered. Good evening, Miss Gray, Miss Gray. Good evening, Miss Gray. Well, I'm afraid I'm the culprit here. I'm playing ball with the kids this afternoon, and I threw one right through your lovely window. Oh, really? All right, but I got old Sam here. I brought him along with no painted glass and he'll fix his up ship shape no time at all. Go ahead, Sam, right over there. Yes, Mr. Brownshaw, don't mind me, folks. I'll be through here in just a minute. Oh, incidentally, Miss Skinner, I always meant to ask you whether or not you minded noises, especially.  I don't understand. Chalk on a blackboard? At the end, yes, Sam. I always wondered about it that you faded just when the chalk was scratching across the blackboard. Oh, remember hearing? I'm afraid I faded before you drew any diagrams. I think that's what you were planning to do, draw a diagram. That's what I was planning to do, yes, ma'am. Yes. Does he have to do that? Is something wrong, Mr. Skinner? Does he? Mr. Skinner? I can't. I'll be at home in the next few days. I canceled all appointments. He really was unbearable. In October, I resumed my activities. I began to see people again. I grew especially interested in chamber music. Through my activity, I arranged a musical evening to be given by a group of which I was the second vice president. They planned the formation of the Philharmonic Society eventually. I went to the musical alone, and I was studying my program when... Is this seat taken? Good evening, Mr. Brown. Well, Mr. Skinner, good evening. Getting recognized, ma'am. Well, I was to be joined later. Well, I'll just sit here a moment then. You know, I'm terribly sorry about the other night. It's really nothing at all for you to be sorry about. Very kindly to say that, you know, but I do feel guilty as all sin being the cause of you getting sick like that.  Did what? Very close to the club that night, if you'll remember. Yes, yes, well, it was. Well, just so I don't feel it was my fault, you know. No, I don't want you to feel that it was your fault. That's very kind of you, you know. If you don't mind, I'll stay here until wherever it holds as he gets you, all right? We crave your indulgence and a certain open-mindedness for giving a fair chance to the first piece with which we're going to open our program this evening. The title of this piece is The Thirteen Sound, and the composer is Julian Carillo. This piece, because of the unorthodox nature of it, created a veritable furor in New York City, some weeks ago on the occasion of its premiere. It's what you'd call, I guess, modern music. And the really unusual thing about it is that the instruments, instead of playing as they usually do in Mozart, Haydn and such classical veins, play in quarter tones. Now, a quarter tone is somewhere in between the other tones, such as the, we are accustomed to hearing. So on this following piece, the instruments are not playing as you would think, out of tune. This is the way it is supposed to sound. Thank you. So now, the various members of the quartet will tune their various instruments into these quarter tones. And this is quite a short piece, but I know you're going to like it. Tune up, gentlemen. This should be very interesting. Thanks so much, Skinner. Thirteen sound. Have you heard it? No, no, I haven't. Too hard again, Miss Skinner. It does get stuck in here. Oh, I'm not, um, it's hot in here. You're terribly piqued. Show me your arm. I'm cold. Excuse me. Will you let me out? Will you please excuse me? I left Mr. Brown sitting there.  I never liked modern music. I locked all the doors and I turned on all the lights. And then I did a foolish thing. I found a hammer and a piece of board. And I beat and beat and beat and beat on the board with a hammer as hard as I could.  Then I turned out all the lights and opened the windows and went to sleep. I didn't sleep well, but I didn't stay awake either. I hadn't set the alarm next to my bed and when I first awoke the next morning, for a minute I couldn't remember what had happened. I fell drunk. I got out of bed and put on a lovely shot to his brocade house coat and started downstairs. The sun was shining outside. It was a beautiful day. Not the sort of day when you could be disturbed by unrelated noises. I felt grand when I got downstairs. Then I heard, I didn't care. I knew only that I had to stop it before it happened to me again. I stood shivering there in a beam of sunlight. I waited for him to come bursting into the room after me. I waited. What, did I disturb you? Oh, no, no. Then I will come in, but I can only say a minute. Would you like some coffee? Oh, no, thank you. When I was so sick, you remember, the doctor absolutely forbid me having any more coffee. Oh, I, I didn't know that. Oh, sit down, please. Do you drink much coffee? No, why do you ask? Well, I thought perhaps your recent attacks might have been caused by that. Mr. Gregg is a great one for aspirin and salt tablets. I think it's much simpler than that. Cut out coffee. Well, I, I, I think my attacks were just caused by this heat. I, I plan to see voyage. Oh, house splendor. That will certainly fix you. You know, I don't need to be disrespectful, heaven knows. But perhaps on the boat, you might meet a fine young man who will. Perhaps. Oh, when do you plan to leave? This afternoon. I'm leaving from New York. Oh, well, you can't. Pardon? For the clubhouse, the unveiling ceremonies of this afternoon. Oh, I forgot. Well, you simply can't leave. Well, no one who can replace you on the speaker's platform. Oh, well, I, well. Well, I'll right then, Mrs. Gregg. I'll say for the ceremony. I drove to the new clubhouse of Mr. and Mrs. Gregg. The building was really very lovely. It was almost ready for occupancy. We were unveiling a heroic figure which graced the entranceway. Our speaker's platform was built alongside the figure. And quite a few of the members and their families were sitting on the wooden benches in the front patio waiting for the ceremonies to begin. Oh, hello. Isn't this exciting? Oh, yes, yes, very. The ladies have done a marvelous job. Oh, thank you. Thank you. What's that fellow going up there? Where? See up on the roof there. Oh, yes. Makes me nervous to see people at such heights. Off a toast to Ed. I guess he knows his business, I imagine. Yes, I suppose he... Yeah, I'm very anxious to hear your little talk, Mrs. Gennett. Thank you. I think you've managed admirably since you're an unfortunate... Well, you understand. Yes, yes, thank you. Well, I think we should get on with it, eh? Well, I believe it'll be only a few more minutes. Ah! What? What is it? Look, that's Workman. He's going to fall. Can't someone catch him? They'll catch him. Oh, they will, they will do. Take out a catch him. Very clever. Sure is. I really thought he was falling off of that building. It used to be an acrobat. Oh. So how did he make that noise? Holding tenpony nails in his hands. Scraped them along the face of the building as he slid down. Did you think of that, too? Mm-hmm. Made an awful racket. Mm-hmm. Pretty. Nice lady, you know. Yeah. What's that devil are you doing? Hmm? Oh, fixing my nails, I guess. Well, cut it out, will you? Sure. What's the matter with you? All right. That noise makes me nervous, I guess. You know? America's favorite wine. This is Ken Niles returning for a curtain call with a brilliant star of tonight's suspense play, Agnes Moorhead. Apparently, Agnes, you're not superstitious, accepting the lead in a play called the Thirteenth Sound on February 13th. Ha-ha. Superstitions are no phobia with me, Ken, but I do have one. What is it? I refuse to give a party for 13 people. Yes, but even a thirteenth guest is in luck, Agnes, when you serve Roma Port. Realty-red, fragrant, nectar-sweet Roma California Port adds warmth to the welcome for everyone. And Roma Port is so easy to serve. You simply pour and hospitality rain. Yes, Ken, Roma Port does make entertaining a pleasure. Not only that, Agnes, there's a difference you can taste in all Roma wines. And this better taste begins with the choicest grapes in all California. Then Roma's unmatched skill and winemaking resources guide these luscious grapes unhurriedly to tempting taste perfection. Later, Roma places this rich taste treasure with Roma wines of years before. And finally, Roma selects from the world's greatest wine reserves for your pleasure. Well, it's easy to see why Roma wines taste better, Ken. Yes, Agnes, and here's the most conclusive proof of all, a gift basket of Roma wines for you and your guests to enjoy with a compliment of Roma, the greatest name in wine. I'm delighted, Ken. Thank you very much. And good night. Tonight's Suspense Play was written by Kathy and Elliot Neuiss. Next Thursday, same time, you will hear Anne Baxter as star of Suspense. Produced and directed by William Spear for the Roma Wine Company of Fresno, California. Tune for the thrilling adventures of the FBI in peace and war following immediately over most of these stations. In the coming weeks, Suspense will present such stars as James Stewart, William Bendix, Eddie Bracken, and others. Make it a point to listen each Thursday to Suspense Radio's Outstanding Theater of Frills. This is DBS, the Columbia Broadcasting System.


So, Michael, for the session, it's open state description with variable stretch. Yes, so there are... Thank you. Thank you for the introduction. This is a joint work with Serge and Reza, more both present, so if you want to ask me questions later, you can do it. And what we looked at was authenticated encryption with variable stretch, as the title says. We already saw some introduction about authenticated encryption in the previous slide, sorry, in the previous talks, so I'll just quickly skip through the introduction. We saw that authenticated encryption gives us confidentiality and integrity at the same time, using a symmetric key. And in this work, we focused on nonce-based authenticated encryption with associated data. And schemes like this have both encryption and decryption algorithms, which are deterministic, and use a non-repeating initialization vector to achieve semantic security. And they also allow us to process what we call associated data, which is just a string that needs to be authenticated but not encrypted. And schemes like this, so this is a quite old notion, but it's very popular because it allows us to construct schemes which are efficient, simple, but secure at the same time. And we have schemes of this type, both deployed and competing in the CSAR competition, still in the third round. A small caveat of these schemes is, however, that they are what people these days would call brittle, because if they are not used exactly as they are supposed to be used, we can have the security collapse on us maybe unexpectedly for a regular user. A most notorious example of such a brittle behavior is the nonce misuse. We have studied this problem a lot, and it's been treated extensively in literature. Another example is the decryption misuse, where a user might release a putative plaintext before it is verified, and this has disastrous consequences as well. Another approach we have seen in literature is to define a very strong notion which would treat any misuse that we can imagine, but a consequence of this approach is that it's not easy to achieve this security. So maybe we can't have robust schemes for all applications. And another type of misuse that we studied in this work, in context of nonce-based authenticated encryption, is the stretch misuse. The term stretch simply refers to the number of bits by which we expand the ciphertext compared to the messages. This quantity has to be non-zero, to have meaningful guarantees for authenticity. And related to this, a very basic intuition about security of A schemes is that whenever we expand by tau bits, we expect the adversary to have to do about two to tau forgery attempts before it succeeds. And for all nonce-based authenticated encryption schemes, this ciphertext expansion is considered to be a constant parameter, and this is assumed both in the design and in the security analysis. And so stretch misuse would be simply the case where a user would use several different values of stretch with the same secret key. Now, a very necessary question before we started this work, we asked ourselves, is it worth investigating this? Like, is this really a valid misuse scenario that can occur? Or is it just yet another A notion to add to the collection? And it is interesting for several reasons. The users might have incentives to do this, so there are several usage scenarios where it would be very useful and nice to have this, so to speak, sliding scale authenticity, you don't have to re-key your algorithm, but you can maybe decrease the stretch save on the bandwidth and then increase it again when you need bigger authenticity guarantees. When the users decide to do it, there is almost no implementation barrier which would stop them from changing the algorithm because the tag is usually just truncated. And most importantly, there are some attacks. So if there is an attacker who has access to several instances of the same algorithm with different values of stretch, the security might not behave intuitively for the users. And in fact, we were not the first ones to have noticed these things. The first mention of such counter-intuitive behavior comes from 2013 from what turned out to be a long discussion on CFRG Forum where Manger noticed that if we take OCD algorithm with 128-bit tags and 64-bit tags, what happens if we use it with the same key is that whenever we get an encryption query with 128-bit of tags, truncate this tag and submit it to decryption with the shorter tag version, this will always be a correct forgery. If we look at how OCD works, this is not surprising at all because the tags are simply truncated when they are computed. This breaks the intuition for the users and this opinion was also voiced in the forum where people have said, well, maybe it would be better if we could avoid such interaction. Consequently, several algorithms in the CSER competition received heuristic tweaks where the tag length has been mixed into the encryption algorithm by dropping it either into the nonce or associated data. But no real analysis was done. And unfortunately, even with these countermeasures in place, most of the schemes will still be vulnerable because most of these schemes that have been mentioned on the previous slide follow the paradigm of ciphertext translation. It might look a bit scary, but what it is really is just a way to take an authenticated encryption scheme which can only process nonce and the message. We have an encryption algorithm which gives us a stretched ciphertext and we want to authenticate associated data. So what we do, we just compute a keyed hash of this associated data of constant length and bits truncated to tau bits XOR to the end of the ciphertext. This works if the stretch is constant. If not, we can use this nice property where encrypting the same query which differs only in associated data gives, well, so we have these two ciphertexts and when we XOR them, this gives us the truncated difference of the hashes of these two associated data which depends only on the key and associated data. And then if we have an attacker who has access to several instances of this algorithm using gradually increasing value of stretch and wants to forge for the longest value of stretch, the adversary can gradually build up this forgery. This is the attack, it's ugly, I won't go into the details, but the bottom line is that the attacker has to first exhaustively search for the first tau bits of this difference and tau one is the shortest value of stretch the attacker can work with. Once we have this, we switch to queries stretched by tau two bits and we can shorten the ciphertext expansion value that we have access to and we just iteratively exhaustively search for the next bits that we don't know using the bits that we have already learned and this repeats and repeats until we have to find the last remaining bits that we don't know, tau L minus tau L minus one which are two longest values of stretch and we have our forgery and what can be counterintuitive for the users is that we only do two to this many queries with the longest value of stretch and now this is pretty worrying because if this is 128 and this previous one is 96 the forgery cost is 2232 and as I promised this works even with the countermeasures in place so if the tau is encoded in NOS this works for any hash it works in associated data it works for a very frequent type of the hash and this clearly indicates that we'll probably need systematic treatment of the problem so when we start and we want to formalize security of authenticated encryption with variable stretch there are some pretty intuitive properties that we would like to see from our new notion clearly there will be some space of possible stretches that our adversary can work with what we want is that the previous attacks will be captured in the new notion of value of tax we want to show we want to appear like if there are any interactions between different values of stretch we want these to appear in the advantage and at the same time we would like that the security level that will be captured by the new notion can still be achieved by efficient schemes nice and efficient like we know from the basic non-space AAD what is less intuitive is how should we formalize this it's not so easy to find an ideal system for the notion because the starting point so what we started from was the security definition for non-space AAD from 2002 actually it's a slightly different version but this is what most of the schemes follow so we defined a security of such a scheme with a security experiment where an adversary who tries to break the A security of our study scheme is left to interact with two black box oracles in the real world these would be the encryption and decryption algorithm initialized with a secret random key and in the ideal world these would be replaced with a random bits oracle for the encryption and an oracle which rejects all the forgery attempts and the adversary is restricted not to repeat nonsense in its encryption queries and not to attempt the trivial forgery in the decryption queries and then we defined the advantage of the adversary in breaking the security of the A scheme like this importantly also in this game the ciphertext expansion is assumed to be constant and thanks to this the game is nice and intuitive it makes a lot of sense to see why things are defined the way they are but when we try to extend this to the case where there are several values of stretch at the same time it becomes a bit more complicated to see why try to consider what would be maybe the first intuitive attempt to formalize security with variable stretch so apparently the adversary has to interact with several instances of the algorithm that are available in parallel they are using all the possible values of ciphertext expansion from the stretch space and we restrict the adversary to not repeat nonsense with every expansion but what we do in the ideal world is not so clear what we could try is to say in the ideal world we just replace all the encryption oracles with random bits oracles and all the decryption oracles with always reject oracles but unfortunately this notion will not capture what we wanted so if there are some interactions which are maybe useful with the biggest values of stretch if you want to do forgeries there we won't see this because there is always a trivial attack on the shortest value of ciphertext expansion so this notion doesn't work for instance the gradual forgery would not appear as a valid attack in this case because we can't use the decryption oracles and even if you overcome this problem there are some other problems which appear on the way and I will just fast forward to the notion that we have end up with and this is what we define so our notion is called NVAE N comes from non-space and B comes from variable tag you get the idea but it differs from most of the conventional notions for authenticated encryption in that it is parametrized so now our notion takes a parameter tau c this tau c is one of the possible values of ciphertext expansion that the adversary can use and we just say that when we take tau c it is fixed throughout the security experiment at the same time we say that tau c is arbitrary so we only say take one of the ciphertext expansion values that you have set it as the challenge for the adversary so the adversary is trying to attack this particular ciphertext expansion value but it still has access to all the other expansion values and how we define the security experiment is in the real world we have all the instances with all the values of ciphertext expansion which are at the disposal of the adversary the adversary can ask encryption queries decryption queries it mustn't repeat the nonce for the same ciphertext expansion value but maybe it can be repeated for different values and we only ask it not to do trivial forgeries for queries expanded by tau c bits but not for the others in the ideal world we leave all the oracles the same so the instances that are stretched by not tau c bits will be exactly the same as in the real world only the tau c bits stretched queries will be treated with idealized oracles with a random bit oracle reject oracle and then we define the advantage in nvae tau c of the adversary like this so what does this model capture? does it capture anything meaningful at all? the answer is it does and what we see when we have a proven bound for nvae tau c is the exact level of security that we guarantee for the queries that are stretched by tau c bits to see why think about the restrictions and the two worlds the adversary has to work with we didn't restrict the adversary too much for all the other expansion values it can even do forgeries it can take the shortest ciphertext expansion that is in the stretch space it can forge, it will probably be easy but this doesn't help the adversary to distinguish the two worlds because this is the same in both worlds but maybe this will help the adversary to collect some information that will be useful in attacking the target stretch value and this the queries to the stretch tau c bits will be the only thing that can help the adversary to really distinguish the two worlds at the same time if we can prove a bound that is independent of a particular value of tau c so we only assume it's fixed throughout the experiment but we say oh well it will work like this for any value of tau c what we will see is that the scheme behaves as expected for every value of stretch and this is what we wanted to capture in the first place so how would a good advantage look like if we managed to prove something in the model so what we would like to see is an advantage which has these two main components one component will be this term which grows linearly or maybe quadratically with the number of decryption queries made with tau c bits of stretch and this is something that cannot be avoided because if there are just tau c bits of redundancy after two to tau c queries you just guess it but we want that it doesn't decrease much faster than this and then there will be some other term which probably comes from the construction but this should not depend on tau c directly or the resources related to tau c for instance for a typical block-cypher based construction we would see a birth data bound like this where sigma is the total amount of data processed with all the values of stretch because the adversary just learns about the used block-cypher what our model doesn't say is that using short values of cypher text expansion is okay well if you use short tags you don't get much security and this will also show in the advantage when you substitute tau c by a small quantity when we then look back at the two attacks that I have presented we see that these are captured as valid attacks for the truncation forgery on OCB we see that we have constant small resources and advantage equal to one we focus on tau c so we set tau c to 64 bits we have access to 128 bit encryption oracle in the ideal world we will never forge in the real world we will always forge so we have advantage of one compared to what we would expect here or in the gradual forgery this is a bit more involved but what we see is that most of the queries or most of the resources are spent values of stretch different from tau c so a user might not suspect that if a lot of activity is spent on the other values of stretch the chance to attack the target stretch will be too good but in fact we see the advantage is one again compared to what we would expect which is this and maybe to see what it is exactly I have this small example imagine that we are using an A scheme for which we have 32, 64, 96 and 128 bit tags and for the value of stretch so for the 128 bit tags we only do 2 to 32 decryption queries so the advantage we would expect from a good scheme in this model would be 2 to minus 96 not one and except for defining security with variable stretch we also show that it is possible to achieve the security in this model and to help in doing this we also define an auxiliary notion we call KESS and what this notion captures is a property where an adversary cannot distinguish if it is interacting with many instances of the same scheme with different values of stretch by the same key or if all these instances are using independent now this property alone will not give you A security but if it is combined with the conventional A security of the scheme this automatically gives you NVA security so this is a theorem we proved and this is pretty useful if you already have a scheme that is working well as an A scheme for instance OCB you already have a well established proof of security and the only one to tweak it to make it secure against variable tag so maybe you just tweak it you prove the KESS property and your analysis is done and this is what we do to show that this type of security can not only be achieved but when we achieve it the scheme will still be efficient and fast as we like it we take OCB and we modify it by putting the tag length in all the tweaks to do this it is actually very easy to prove the KESS property because the OCB is based on tweakable block ciphers so encoding the tag length in the tweaks will just separate all the instances and the NVA security just follows very easily also the modification that we proposed should not harm the efficiency too much so the overhead will be very low we have not tested this but we are pretty confident that this is the advantage that we see and we see that it has exactly the expected form we have the term which grows linearly with number of decryption queries made with stretch tau c and we have this ugly term which comes from the construction but we see that it only depends on global resources so total number of queries everywhere the size of the stretch space but not queries made to the challenge expansion and what is nice on what we proposed is that it can be applied not only to OCB but to a bigger class of schemes so all the schemes which are based on tweakable primitives which is quite a big class of schemes some of them are already present in CISA competition and it's time to wrap up so what we did in this work is that we have formalized the security of authenticated and non-based authenticated encryption with variable stretch we have established the relations of our notions with the existing notions so that we have a nice picture of what belongs where and what are the relations we have shown that this type of security can be achieved and that in fact it can be achieved very efficiently what we have not shown is how to take any existing non-based AE scheme and transform it into an NVAE secure scheme in a black box efficient way so maybe this is possible maybe not we have not investigated this problem and before I conclude I just want to very quickly say that our lab is looking for postdocs right now so if you are interested or if you know someone who is interested just drop us an e-mail thank you for your attention question Hi everyone I have a short announcement for the excursion this afternoon if you want to go with us then we are going to gather


It's an honor to follow Ambassador Moose and Dr. Natali. And I also had the honor, as Leah mentioned, of serving on the Task Force on Extremism in Fragile States, which met here at the U.S. Institute of Peace. And on behalf of that Task Force, I really want to thank all the members of the Resolve Network and all of you who are engaged in research on extremism because the Task Force really benefited from the work of researchers. So many of us had worked on this issue before. Anyone who's worked on this issue is frustrated by this issue. And we really sort of put it to the researchers that were supporting us to show us what works, show us what we have learned. And people were able to do that. And that really, I think, benefited the Task Force in the report. So here we are to do a fireside chat. There's no fire. I understand the other talks are TED-style talks. I've never seen a TED talk, but I understand they're short and to the point. And so that's what we're going to aim for here is to be to the point. It's a real pleasure to be here with JM as well, who's one of the most respected scholars on this particular issue, as everyone knows. And we're just going to try to sort of skim the top of the waves a bit as a way of teeing up the rest of the discussions today. And this is an issue where I feel as though we always have to start with our first principles, unlike some of the other issues I deal with. The definitional issues are quite important. So I thought we would start there, JM. And I thought we would start with the very basic question of, how should we define extremism? What is extremism? And how important is it that we have a common definition for that? Yeah, so the definitional issue has been my big cause for the last couple of years. I think that we have struggled with this, and it's a very consequential issue because if we don't understand extremism as a field and as a unified kind of phenomenon, we can't really study it in a systematic way. And we can't create policies that are fair and objective. So we need to understand the things that make jihadism like white nationalism, like anarchism, ecoterrorism. There needs to be some way we understand these things in a coherent kind of framework that lets us talk about all those things as being related to each other. Beyond our just instinctive understanding that they're related. So what I've been arguing for is a definition that is sort of grounded in social identity theory that comes out of work that I've done and also the work of Hororo Ingram, who's written some really great material on this and proposed a sort of extremist system of meaning that can guide a definition. Which is that extremism is the belief that your group, the in-group cannot be secure or survive without taking hostile action against an out-group. And that hostile action is always necessary because of the inherent nature of the out-group. So it's a commitment to always always being engaged in hostile action against some group that is not your own. And hostile, I think, is an important word in this because a lot of our conversations about extremism have naturally revolved around violence. That's obviously a high priority. Terrorism, for a long time, a lot of the field was very concerned with terrorism and didn't use the word extremism that much at first, in the immediate years after 9-11. And slowly we've come to understand that extremism is more than just terrorism. So it can be a state-like apparatus, like ISIS. It can be political. It can be harassment, such as all right online. There are a lot of different dimensions. It's the hostility. It's the fact that you're taking action against that out-group that makes you an extremist. So you mentioned the sort of distinction between extremism and violent extremism. As we think about this from the perspective sort of both of the researcher and the policymaker, should we only be concerned with violent extremism or do we need to sort of start with extremism and why? Why would you sort of give the answer you do? I think we need to be concerned beyond violent extremism. Violent extremism is a natural priority for policymakers. It is a government role to ensure the safety of its citizens. So that is a natural focus and an appropriate focus for government efforts. But as an academic community, as the people out here who are working to study this, as people who are working as activists, and to an extent as people who are shaping policy, we need to understand it more broadly because movements can go back and forth between violent and nonviolent modes. Pre-violent activity can lead to violent activity sometimes. Sometimes it will lead to people sort of scaling back what they're doing. It's important for us to understand that either way. We need to know if a movement is tipping toward violence or if it's going to step away from violence. We need to know why. What are the factors that cause a movement to step back from violence? Something in that respect that I think we don't talk about much because it's a difficult thing for policymakers is what kinds of intermediate steps are we going to accept below the level of complete theoreticalization. So if you're dealing, this comes up in Syria, obviously, with Toriyar al-Sham, I think is kind of the preeminent example of this. If a group steps back from the most extreme interpretation, but it's still pretty extreme, how do we deal with that? Do we want to incentivize groups to do that? Do we want to praise a group that does that, even though it's still very extreme, but has taken a step back and disassociated itself from global al-Qaeda, particular kinds of attacks? So I think there's a lot of really complicated stuff in this space that we've only just begun to discuss and explore. I also want to ask you another distinction, which is this question of, we're talking about extremism, well, what about the extremists themselves? Can we study sort of all groups or all those who practice extremism sort of on the same footing? So if you have extremism that is espoused by a state, either for ideological or political purposes, can you study it in the same way that you'd study extremism as espoused by, say, a non-state actor or a movement? Is there a distinction to be drawn there? There's a distinction in terms of the kinds of practices, but they're definitely of a kind, and we need to be able to integrate that. So my litmus test for a definition of extremism is that it has to include the Nazis at all stages in their development. If you have a definition of extremism that excludes the Nazis at any point in the Nazi regime, then it's missing something really important. So I think that- It sounds like a fair litmus test. Yeah, well, and I think that we've been very focused on non-state actors, which is appropriate to some extent, certainly. September 11th has shaped a lot of our response to this, and so that was carried out from a non-state actor. But if we look at ISIS, ISIS is pushing that borderline, or was, pushing that borderline between being a state and being a non-state actor. It's a proto-state, so do we stop considering them extremism if they become a state? I don't think we do. So all of these factors, I think that what we're lacking, there's a lot of people who are working on comparative studies of extremism, and a lot of people in this room. And what we're lacking is a systematic way to do that, to sort of view the field as a coherent whole and what goes into the study and what stays out. We spent a lot of time initially on this question, and the task force on extremism, the scoping question in a sense of what actually is the problem that we're as a group trying to tackle. And there was both the kind of theoretical question, but also the practical question of when we're recommending solutions, who are we recommended they be directed towards. Another sort of category question maybe is, or maybe a question of priority, is should we focus more on extremisms that have broad appeal, sort of global ideologies, or ideologies of global appeal or that feature global networks. More than we focus on, say, extremism that might be particular to a place or to a smaller group that doesn't have that kind of global appeal. Is it, can we learn from those as much as we can learn from the global ideologies? I think we can learn as much from each of them. Who deals with it and at what scope are valid questions, depending on how popular movement is and how widespread it is. We also run into a lot of problems, the most popular kinds of extremism become related to power structures, political power structures, social power structures. And it becomes much more difficult to deal with them as extremism. So just the sort of easy, low hanging fruit on this is that there are millions of white nationalists, people with white nationalist beliefs in the United States compared to at most a couple thousand people who are ISIS supporters, but look at our resource distribution on that. Right, I want to talk about something else you've written about. And for those of you who haven't seen it, you should see it. JM had a chapter that he wrote, I think back in June, is that right? A research report for the Resolve Network where he goes through a lot of these issues. It's a fascinating paper and I would definitely recommend it to everyone here. But one of the things you write about in this research report is the shift that has taken place, which again, the task force that I served on, sort of focused on quite a bit, from just talking about countering terrorism or fighting terrorism to talking about the preventing and countering violent extremism framework. Now that that shift has sort of been at least a few years now sort of in place. I'm wondering what you think about, what have the implications of it been? What are the successes of the shift? What are the failures of making that shift? I think that the big problem in the space has been the same problem that was associated with counterterrorism, which is that having become a national priority, we put massive amounts of money into it without really demanding accountability. So anybody who had a great idea got some money to work on it and didn't necessarily have to report measurable results. Didn't have to come back with metrics that show how you were preventing violent extremism. You could come back with metrics. People would come back, we were talking, Leigh Ann mentioned, some of us, and Assistant Secretary Natali mentioned some of this. We come back with metrics that say we created jobs, but we can't come back with metrics that say that creating jobs reduced violent extremism. So I think at this point, I think this is a widely recognized problem. And hopefully the next generation of programs that we put onto this will have more accountability, will have more measurable outputs that are related to violent extremism and not to our assumptions about what's causing it. And what about successes? Do you think there have been any real sort of gains that you can point to of shifting this from the counterterrorism to the P-CVE network? I think that, no. I think that there are certainly some programs that are good. There are people who are doing good work. Moonshot CVE, I think, is one that's particularly strong. Mofluen doing kind of individual intervention work. A number of groups have popped up on the far right side over the last couple of years doing this. And that's all private sector, basically. Some of it is government supported or funded. And some of these programs are good. But surrounding these successes are just a gigantic industry of people churning out social media metrics and monitoring lists and a lot of kind of aimless, aimless programming. So it's a kitchen sink. But you don't find anywhere else in government. No, never. It's not a common problem at all. So it's kind of the kitchen sink approach in that some things, you throw everything at the wall and a few things do stick. But I think that we're probably due for a reckoning on this whole industry. Well, and since we're one of the things I think we're looking at here today, and which I think is great about the Resolve Network, is this kind of nexus between research and policy. Do you think that policymakers and researchers are sort of in the same place on this shift, on whether it should be made, on the value of it, and so forth, or are there differences? I think people are coming around. I think there's sort of a broad recognition at this point that we need to do more. The research, there's been a lot of great research done on this topic and related topics over the last several years. There's been a lot of noise, but there's been a lot of really kind of good, insightful, focused stuff. And the trick is sifting through this very large body of literature. I mean, just since September 11th, the body of literature on terrorism and extremism has exploded. So there's just so much of it. So sifting through it, finding what you can do in a sort of actionable way and then doing it, I mean, it sounds simple. It's not, it's actually very complicated to do each step in that process. And I don't want to be, you know, I mean, my kind of response a few minutes ago is probably more negative than I intended it to be. I think that we have a lot of, it's sort of like an ocean of people working on this and there's a lot of people making individual progress or small group progresses. And the problem is I don't think that's kind of cohered into an industry-wide systematic approach to the problem. And to what extent is that sort of blocked by or affected by sort of the political ups and downs in Washington? I mean, maybe it's a delicate question, but because this is a research area that depends so much on government engagement and government funding, you know, how much is it subject to the vagaries of kind of political climate here in Washington? Well, the good news is that because of an abundance of funding starting from 2001 and running up until fairly recently, the field is pretty established. So there's a lot of people working on this. They're committed to this. They have departments. They have programs. So it's more self-sustaining than it was before. But the presence of government funding, I think, also shaped the kind of research that we did. So we have disproportionate research on jihadism versus white nationalism. Other and then other kinds of extremism or distant, distant third, if even that. And so the funding, whatever funding levels exist, I think they sort of shaped us. And I think the abundance of funding also contributed to a lot of vaporware-type projects, a lot of pie-in-the-sky kind of research that is actually worth conducting, but it's a lot of money that goes to things that didn't work out. So I think the environment is somewhat tighter now from the government side. I think that the social media companies are now stepping up and they bring their own perverse incentives to the research program. You know, I think overall our funding sources, and I mean, I'm not exempting myself from this in any way. I take money from all these people that I just mentioned. And they're all watching, so be careful. Yeah, well, everybody knows that I'm a bit of a loose cannon on this. So it's what you put up with when you deal with me. I think, you know, it shapes the research. So sometimes it can shape it in innocuous ways, which is here's a bunch of money to research something that's kind of interesting, but maybe isn't a top priority, but, you know, it's interesting. So hey, I'm going to do it.  And then finally, it's really driven by the incentives that each of those sponsors have. So I think, ultimately, you know, making extremism studies and terrorism studies into more of a regular academic pursuit will be better for the research that's produced. I want to shift a bit into this question of how we're doing when it comes to countering violent extremism or preventing it. And as I said, you know, for all the members of the task force, there was a great deal of frustration. And we were surprised nevertheless actually to see the numbers on just how much extremism has spread around the world since 9-11 and how little success, frankly, all these efforts at countering it or rolling it back have had. And again, we were surprised to find that there was, even at this stage, you know, 17, 18 years after 9-11, a pretty poor understanding on the part of policymakers about what drives extremism. How do you account for that? I mean, do you think that there is a disconnect between policymakers and researchers on this question of drivers of extremism? And what can we do to get people to better understand what the drivers are? Yeah, so I think, you know, that's a pretty fair assessment. I mean, it's kind of difficult to know. I mean, we put all this effort into these programs. One reason we can't say that they're super successful is because we haven't figured out what our metrics are. And we don't have a way to control, you know, what would extremism look like if we hadn't been doing all these things, you know, with all the other factors. So extremism is growing in part because of new technologies like social media. And so it may, we may be doing things that are successful, but extremism will continue to increase because the structural factors are encouraging it more. And then there's also a question of drivers. So a lot of the bad assumptions about drivers that I've heard certainly have originated in policy community. You know, I go to a meeting in government and, you know, people just have very intuitive ideas about what causes extremism. And it's very difficult to move them off of that. So poverty being one of the most persistent ones. One of the areas that I'm interested in, in my research, is actually looking at the question of the role of uncertainty. So there's something called uncertainty identity theory, which is by a social psychologist named Michael Hogg, which has found pretty good empirical evidence to suggest that when people are experiencing uncertainty, they look for things to reduce that uncertainty. And that extremist ideas are a way to reduce uncertainty. And it kind of offers a way to square the circle on some of these driver questions, like poverty doesn't correlate to extremism, but sudden poverty, a sudden economic upturn, the loss of an industry that had supported people or even sudden wealth, in some cases. Anything that really upsets the status quo, upsets people's understanding of where they fit in the world may be related to that. And that may be a way to redeem some of these driver questions, that certain places a jobs program might be a good thing. Certain places education might be a good thing, but not as a universal policy. I think the point you're making there is the importance of tailored understanding and tailored approaches to these problems in different places around the world, which again is something that came out pretty clearly, I think, for us as we spoke to researchers. I want to talk about one driver in particular, and it's something that Dr. Natale actually mentioned in her comments, and that's ideology, because this is a driver that policymakers do tend to focus on a lot. They like to devise policies to try to combat ideology. And so I want to ask you, do you think we have over or under-emphasized or rightly emphasized the importance of ideology? And have we been successful, have we figured out how to combat it successfully sitting here in Washington, DC? So the latter question is a pretty easy no. The former question is I think that it is appropriate to recognize the importance of ideology. If you don't have an ideology attached to violence, then it's just random violence, or it's criminal violence is profit, violence for profit. The thing that defines extremist violence is that it's driven by an ideology that is not profit, that is not random. And so you can't, you don't have extremism if you don't have ideology on there. Understanding it as a driver is a more complicated question. To adopt, to become part of ISIS, you have to get the ideology somewhere. You have to, it has to be transmitted to you somehow.  We know that that happens, right? Ideology structures violence. We don't know if ideology causes violence or if that violence would come out in other ways if the ideology wasn't there. And there's a question from the audience which I think is an interesting question, which is somewhat related because you've talked about the sort of role of ideology in sustaining violence. Someone's asking about the role of violence in sort of sustaining the success of the extremism. So it's almost kind of the opposite. Would you say that for an extremist group, do they at some point need to advocate or adopt violence to survive? Do we have lots of examples of extremist groups that have been peaceful and have nevertheless thrived as movements or as groups? So peaceful and nonviolent are not necessarily the same thing. Which is why I went with the word hostile in my definition of extremism. So you can understand hostile behavior as violence. You can understand harassment as psychic violence. You can understand discrimination as structural violence. So you don't have extremism without that piece, that form of attack that comes in maybe physical violence as we understand it, maybe something else. I think that physical violence is, and this is, I'm looking at this more in depth in my dissertation research, which I'm currently ongoing so I'm not, I don't have complete answers to this yet. I know never to ask anybody about their dissertation, so I... You could, I love talking about it, but my point being, I don't think I personally don't feel like I'm at a place where I can fully answer that, but I think that there are structural incentives for extremist groups to continue to radicalize, to escalate the kinds of hostile action they wanna take. And some groups, I don't think that you, I think what's probably most unlikely, and somebody here may be very able to correct me, so I'll say this with some humility attached to it. I think what's most unlikely is for a group to sort of stay in that middle zone where they're engaged in systematic kind of hostile behavior but don't escalate the violence. But that doesn't mean they're always gonna escalate the violence. Some groups will get up to that point and then ease back. And that's a process that we really need to understand better. One thing we haven't done is study extremist movements of the fizzle, and it's very difficult to do that because when they fizzle, we don't find out about them. Extremist movement gets to a certain point and then goes back, draws back. Why does that happen? And can we encourage that to happen? So there aren't, I'm sure people in this audience probably can suggest some case studies on that and I would love to see some off the top of my head. I think of something like the John Birch Society which sort of went up to a certain point, had a certain amount of success, and then tapered off and never went away. It's still out there, actually. But it never achieved critical mass and it's not a significant player in that scene as we understand it today. How much of a problem is this? You write about this a little bit in the paper I referenced. How much of a problem is it in the research community to sort of agree on who you're studying in a sense? To agree that, well, that's an extremist group, a new extremist group especially, with others saying, oh no, it's not. It's not quite up to that line. Yeah, so I mean, I can't get people to agree that Nazis are extremists, so I'll tweet about this and I invariably get from very smart people who I respect will come back and say, well, Nazis were popular, they represented the mainstream of German society, so they're not extremists. So if I can't get people to agree on that, then you can imagine that getting people to agree on up-and-coming groups is even more difficult. I think the definition, we come back to the definitional problem because we need to define the field in some useful way so that most of us are studying mostly the same stuff. You'll never get perfect agreement. Everybody will always have their own definition at the beginning of a paper or a book or a dissertation and they will include the groups they want to include, but what we need is really a coherent understanding of the kinds of groups we're gonna study so that we can do comparative and longitudinal study of groups. We need to be able to compare how white nationalists and jihadists function. We need to be able to compare how Nazis function compared to al-Qaeda, why one has a certain kind of success and one has a different kind of success, and we need to be able to look at them longitudinally. The other element of the definition that I'm using and particularly its focus on nonviolent behavior is that in a practical terms, this isn't gonna stop somebody from studying it, but if you're studying ex-group and it has a history of being a kind of a popular movement that engages in nonviolent activity, then it tips over into violence, then it tips back away from violence. It's still the same kind of group throughout that history. Similarly, a lot of the definitions of extremism that are currently out there are based on extremism, defining extremism, the people who don't want Nazis included, defined extremism as being outside the mainstream. It's a fringe movement, so the Nazis can't be extremists because they're not a fringe movement, but the Nazis didn't start off being the mainstream. They started off as a fringe movement. They became the mainstream and then they reverted to being an extreme to a fringe movement. They didn't stop being Nazis during that period. So I just think where we need to go, I think, so that we need more systematic and kind of high level comparative and longitudinal study of these groups and I think a good definition empowers that. So we have only a couple of minutes left for our fireless fireside chat. And so I wanna come back to this question since we do have policymakers who will be watching of metrics and what success looks like. You know, as a director of a research institute, I have very uncomfortable relationship with metrics, but I know it's important for policymakers. And so I think the question which arises is what does success look like against extremism and what are the sort of key things that you would recommend to make it more successful? We talked a little bit about some of the diffuse nature of the researcher, of the funding and so forth. We talked about some of the lack of success that you feel as though it's had. What does success look like and what do we need to get there? Is it more resources? Is it a different focus? Is it a definition? I think success looks like management of the problem. But not defeating extremism. We've had extremism always throughout human history, recorded human history. You can find movements that fit my definition of extremism and that will fit other peoples. There is some argument that it is inherent to the nature of society and psychology of individuals and groups. It's a problem to be managed. You can't wipe it out. You can't eliminate it. We're not gonna have that perfect society someday where nobody has any kind of bigotry or hatred or violence. But it's like crying. We manage it. So when you see crime increasing in an area, you put more resources on that area. A part of the definitional issue here is knowing where to put resources. By most kind of metrics, you would look at white nationalism as the most serious problem than jihadism in this country. There are reasons why we've focused on jihadism, some good and some bad. But ultimately, what we see is that there's a very strong and resurgent white nationalist movement in this country. And so that is somewhere where we should put attention. So the fact that we're always running around putting out fires is not necessarily bad. It's part of, it's inherent to the problem.  So what you wanna look for is, if there's a team of arsonists working in your neighborhood, how do you disrupt that? Functionally, from a policy standpoint, I think you do that, you can use more kinetic kinds of approaches to that by arresting or exposing people who are recruiters, exposing networks, cutting off money, cutting off resources. An ideology can't spread unless it's disseminated. So the deep platforming that we're seeing now is a useful tool for managing the problem. It doesn't get rid of them, but it's a management tool. Deciding where you're gonna draw the lines on deep platforming is a whole different fireside chat. I think, mostly I think that the more we have a toolkit of understanding of which groups we're including in here, how those groups evolve over time, why do they tip toward violence, why do they tip away from violence, why do they tip toward being more extreme, whether having more hostile views of the outgroup or embracing more hostile actions. And so if we can identify those factors at the group level, that's a useful way to approach this problem. And that sounds like a nice way to tee up a lot of the conversations that we're gonna have later on today at this forum. So I think one thing that came out very clearly and all the people we talked to on the task force was that this is a problem, and certainly not all policy problems that we look at are this way, where researchers, policymakers, and the public all agree that it's important, that it's urgent, that we need to tackle it. And so thank you very much, JM, for the work you've done on it. Thank you to everybody else here who's engaged in research on it. And thank you to USIP.