We're not live yet. No, we are back Senate Judiciary Committee April 9th 2021 We're dealing with H128 Bill dealing with the defense based on victim identity Criminal defense is based on This morning we're going to hear from representative small but before we do that Senator white would like to make a statement and And then we'll begin to mark up we're here for mother No senator white the floor is yours Thank You senator Sears Over the past few days. I've received Numerous emails and phone messages some of them pretty vitriolic Accusing me of being racist homophobic and in general not a good person First let me apologize to anyone I offended for anything I said my comments and questions were not meant to be hurtful nor offensive as Legislators we need to examine all aspects of proposed laws for consequences. We may not anticipate That might mean asking questions that when taken out of context seem inappropriate As an example is this one single sentence that was pulled out of a question that I asked that has been used in form letters sent to me It's proving that I am racist With that going into the weeds. I believe what I was trying to wrap my head around was Whether we should whether we should why Should prohibition on the panic defense should it be broadened to include more than just gender. That's what I was trying to wrap my head around by that example. As we grapple with important and complex issues, we must be able to ask questions that might seem inappropriate or hurtful when taken out of context. If we can't We will not continue to learn and grow and our legislation will not be the best it can be So again, my sincere apologies to those who were hurt by anything I said they were not in any way meant to be To convey any racial or gender slurs. Thank you, Senator Sears for giving me time to make this statement. And as we proceed through this bill, I have a couple of specific questions For Bryn about how this prohibited use of this defense relates to our enhanced penalties for hate crimes. Again, I apologize to anyone I might have heard Thank you, Senator White and just having worked with you for many years. Your heart is always in the right place. And I don't think there's any one of us who haven't said things that can be misconstrued. And it's unfortunate in this kind of setting where we're on YouTube where something can be taken and really questions and motivation, etc. So I speak for the entire committee and part support for you and Your efforts at making this a better state Thank you very much. We're going to hear from Representative Small who was Either the lead sponsor or a co-sponsor of the bill in the house. And I don't think we've ever met because she got elected this year and we're meeting remotely. So Representative Small welcomed the Senate Judiciary on the six years on Bennington County way down south. Leave your from Manuski, which is I don't know that you can get here or get there from here. We do try once in a while. I think we have to go to New York to get Welcome to Senate Judiciary. I think you probably know Senator Baruth or Vice Chair And go ahead. If you didn't produce yourselves MIDI Senator Nick Senator Nick you're muted. I wasn't asking. I'm sorry. I wasn't asking question. No, I was asking you to introduce yourself. I don't think representative Small has met us because she's new to the legislature and we've been meeting remotely. So I'm sorry. Someone just can being a little off here at five years. Okay, no problem. I'm Alice Nidka from Windsor County and a few other surrounding towns. Nice to meet you, Taylor. Senator White. I'm Jeanette White from Wyndham County. And I am Joe Benning from the real Vermont, otherwise known as the Northeast Kingdom. Welcome to Judiciary. Taylor, thank you for joining us this morning to help us with this bill. And we're anxious to hear from you. Absolutely. And thank you so much for having me and talking about this bill. It is truly been a privilege and watching the deliberations and honestly I want to offer gratitude and the work that has already been done in the edits to the bill. And what I would say is making it stronger and more clear as to how it would be used within our judicial system. I want to start today just by giving a little context as to why the bill was introduced initially and then get into where I think a lot of the discussion left off last week around sentencing and my views on that piece of the bill. And so first really understanding that this defense is focused on on the bias that already exists within our communities towards LGBTQ. And so I a couple pieces that I highlighted in House Judiciary was recognizing the level of violence that we are experiencing on a national level as well as within the state of Vermont. And so a couple pieces that I hold is that for the past two years the Human Rights Campaign has actually declared it the deadliest year for transgender people in the United States as we continue to see an increase in and transgender deaths and murders. And reflecting on previous testimony from the Pride Center of Vermont I think something that's challenging for our state and being able to grasp and fully understand these issues is that a lot of this data and information is kept within our nonprofit sector. And the reason for that are two. One is that we don't have the systems in place to fully collect this data and be able to review it. In an initial version of this bill we had a report attached to it and encouraging that data collection. In discussion with the committee and really focusing on the lack of data present. We moved it over to that hate crime bill in a way to elongate that conversation and see how we can improve that data collection overall. And the second piece is really understanding trust within the systems which I think has come up from various folks who were testifying and understanding that with a history of LGBTQ identities being policed. And a current understanding that if an assault or murder is happening to an LGBTQ individual that there is a defense in play that has been used nationwide that would justify the death or assault of folks within our community. The opportunity or the desire to come forward is not there because you are re traumatizing and going through a proceeding that is saying you deserved what happened to because of your identity. And I think that is the hope with this bill is to remove that piece of validity and saying that one person's identity is the reason for these crimes to be committed. And with the full understanding that when we are talking about the victim or survivor in these stories that there is no crime being committed on their end. Our judicial system has many defenses available. And so if there is a question of intent or actions on the victim or survivors and those would come up in other defenses used by the defense. And not necessarily understanding or saying simply that identity is the issue. And I think I also appreciate the hypotheticals that have come up in this committee. And if I may add a few more into the mix. When we have seen this defense used it can go various ways and again is really dependent on public opinion and bias within those sectors. So there are times where that defense would be seen as an admission of guilt and simply identifying that if you are committing the act because of someone's identity that it would be construed as a hate crime. But other times because of this this lingering bias and I even focus on what the past administration has done for the past four years is put forward executive orders and actions calling for the lack of rights or the removal of rights for transgender folks, whether that is serving our country in the army, or whether that is just trying to access comprehensive health care and not having that opportunity available. And so one a few examples that come up are really thinking about the reality and the cases that don't come forward. So again when we're hearing about these these deaths and assaults that are happening. We are seeing transgender women who were, you know, at a bar and a man came up and was hitting on them and things progressed they go back to one of their places.  That when the person outs himself when a trans woman says I am transgender, that there's a sense of panic that comes over the defendant. A piece of that is recognizing their own identity and having questions about that. But the reality is is that we are seeing trans women stabbed multiple times I think something in the research that released it out to me is that 46% of homicide cases or sorry, yes, 46% of homicide cases nationwide include a firearm. But when we're talking about specific hate crimes in relation to LGBTQ folks firearms are used about 26% of the time, and the vast majority is using a knife or other objects and what could be considered overkill. And, and that's hard because those are not the cases that are coming forward because of the inherent bias that is there. For folks who are able to come forward, we sometimes see in the sentencing area and an understanding the severity of the crime that folks will be moved from what would be considered a murder charge to manslaughter. So reducing the sentencing overall in this understanding of, I understand that you panicked, I understand what you were grappling with in this situation. And I think that gets to a piece that that Senator Benning you were bringing up around bias and understanding the ways that bias shows up. And so my dream and my hope is that we would be in a world without bias but I also recognize that all of us based on life experience and learning that we gained cannot exist in this world without bias or prejudice whether that is food or whether that is identities and how we connect with one another. So when it comes to the sentencing piece. I really just want to recognize that it's not separate from the case and deliberations, but can be another contributing factor in saying, not that you were justified, but that the crime was not as bad because of who it was committed against. And also reflecting on the defender generals testimony and thinking about that this defense is not often used in Vermont or may never have been used in Vermont. And that defendants actually choose not to use this defense because of fear of worse punishment or harsher criticism. So my question is, when would this defense come up in Vermont. It would come up when the defense sees this as a viable strategy to reduce sentencing or to a quit the defendant in question. And so that would be a recognition of potential bias or prejudice within that specific courtroom that would help in moving that forward. And I think the benefit of passing this bill is really recognizing that if someone is committing this act because of one's identity that we are updating our hate crime statute and that that would be used, not as a defense, but again an admission of guilt. And I think that the other piece that comes up is thinking about the Vermont State Police and their testimony that they brought in front of this committee, which was on principle alone, if we are able to pass this bill, that we will start and moving this direction of building trust within the LGBTQ community and truly getting a clearer picture of what this violence looks like on a larger scale. And it's difficult to come forward when you feel like your identity might be used against you. But knowing that this is showing Vermont's values. It's showing that we care and that we recognize the dignity and humanity of all Vermonters in the state. And that folks may come forward more often so that we can understand the reality of these situations. But I think that hope is that, again, not blaming the victim in these situations, especially recognizing that there is no crime committed on their end. And I will, I will pause at that point and see what questions the committee has for me and happy to answer them. I'll start out and take my chances with this question. Your last comment about building trust within a community, I think is an important one. Given the national trend where many states are passing laws that restrict the rights, for example, participation in sports. I'll get the state wrong. So I'm not going to mention which state, but the governor just vetoed a bill there because it went where I think was Arkansas. Because he felt that he felt the bill that the legislature passed there, but it's a strange state in that vetoes are overridden by a majority vote. How does this stack up, if we are to pass this bill Governor Scott to sign it, how would that stack up in us as compared to those other states that are passing laws that limit rights. Thank you for that question. And what stands out most for me in this is, again, what a privilege it is to be here in the state of Vermont where we are not considering these discriminatory bills that again we recognize humanity enough that that would not be coming forward in this legislature and honoring the work that this legislature is doing and helping to protect folks instead of discriminating against. Two pieces one as we see this sweeping across the nation it reminds us of the very clear discrimination that folks within the LGBTQ community are facing, especially on a legislative level. So, by only focusing on a trans or LGBTQ protection bill. Again, we are signaling our values around that support, and we would be joining a cohort of states that are already working to pass this bill. Just last week Virginia became the 12th state and our nation to pass a gay trans panic defense bill. And there are 13 total, hoping that DC gets a statehood at some point, but they don't get counted in the state that and as it currently stands. And so we also know that there are about a dozen more states that are considering this bill this year. And Vermont has always been a leader in this realm and we can continue to be a leader by moving forward with this belt. The question, Senator white. Thank you. Thank you representative small and I, I specifically took note of your comment about why limiting this to a transgender or gender issue. Because that was a question that I had and so I appreciate you expounding on that a little bit even though it wasn't in response to a question from me so that helped me understand that a little bit better thank you. Absolutely, and if I know that wasn't a question but if I may respond. And another piece that has come up in committee as you mentioned in your introduction today is around that that intersectionality, recognizing that for people of color. We are seeing even higher rates of these assaults and murders and in particular black trans women are among the highest risk. That came out from the human rights campaign saying that the predicted life expectancy for a black trans woman in the United States is 35 years old, and not because of health disparities but because of the risk of assault and death. And so, with this bill we're recognizing that LGBTQ identities are not specific to one race are not specific to ability or socioeconomic status, but recognizing this identity, specifically LGBTQ identities in the context of the larger slew of identities that would be covered. The other questions, representative betting. Thank you. Well, I don't believe we've ever met before. Not yet. I want to back up the train a little bit because I want to start where Senator white left off when she first came on to talk about hate mail and whatnot that we receive. This is a wonderful conversation, and I think we need to have it. I want to make very clear, since you raised my name that you obviously flag something that I said, and make sure that we both have a common understanding what it is that I'm taking for position on the bill. I've been a criminal defense attorney for 37 years. And I honestly had never heard of the gay defense before. It was brought to my attention this past summer by one of my constituents who asked that I introduce a bill that would enable a jury instruction in the right circumstances for a judge to instruct the jury that a gay panic defense was not to be considered by the jury and their deliberations. And I began working on that bill, because after learning about it and frankly I spent several hours going through some of the other states legislation and briefings and news reports and legal opinions about the subject to educate myself as to what was going on. I am certainly sympathetic to the cause. And when I began to work on that bill for a jury instruction, I learned that this bill was actually in the works. And so I backed off that believing that this was going to take care of what I was going to do anyway. And where I am very troubled by what I have in front of me is the attempt to add the sentencing phase into this bill. Let me explain why. It is one thing to be acquitted or found guilty of an offense, based on a defendant's reaction. But when it comes to sentencing for me at least that's a completely different phase. I'm going to ask you to just consider what I brought up the last time that I think you might have heard. I use the example of somebody who was in the Westboro Baptist Church. Would they be prevented from bringing up in front of a judge at sentencing, not during the consideration of guilt or innocence, but at sentencing the makeup of who they were in order to try to give the judge a complete picture on who was being sentenced. I'm going to reverse that for today's discussion. And I would ask you to picture yourself.  They make you extremely uncomfortable. And for whatever reason, if it falls into one of the categories that is. You react and strike out on someone. I will agree that you should not be put in the position of having determined your guilt or innocent you shouldn't be able to avoid the charge. And if you are convicted. This is where I run into trouble with this bill, and you're sitting next to me. You're my defendant. I would try to use everything I possibly could about you to tell the judge why the sentence should be mitigated to some degree while the prosecution is doing just the opposite. In my eyes, this bill would prevent you and I from presenting that defense. By bringing your mindset how you found yourself in that situation. All of that would be eliminated from the judge being able to consider something. And I use the quickly reacted to one of Phillips statements by saying we don't elect bias judges. That was a mistake on my part. Of course, everybody has biases. The trick with the judge though is that the judge is committed to setting aside their bias when imposing a sentence. I'm really troubled at this stage with the way the bill is being presented if sentencing is incorporated into that. I think my history and criminal defense tells me I should not be voting for that because a criminal defendant has been deprived of the right to make an argument at sentencing. Even if society completely disagrees with the rationale behind that argument, depriving them of the ability to do that in front of a judge, to me is just completely repugnant. This is what my struggle is right now. And I, for the benefit of those folks who are watching on YouTube, who are introduced to this conversation for the first time.  I may be but that's not what's going on here I'm really struggling with how far the bill has come, because I think it takes one step too far. I'm comfortable in that situation where you and I would be prevented from presenting a defense, not at the trial stage, because I agree you should not be able to avoid conviction. But at the sentencing stage where the judge has to decide what kind of programming is appropriate for you after you've already been convicted. So if we have a difference of opinion on the ultimate bill. That's where that ultimate differences. And I'm happy to hear what your response to that is and reconsider if my position is not correct. Absolutely and appreciate that the opportunity to respond. First and foremost, I want to underscore that I don't believe any of you or the legislature deserves hate mail in this situation, especially as we interrogate these bills. My apologies if my reference earlier was indicating a difference of opinion or your position on the bill that was not my intent by any means. When I think about the sentencing phase, I think there is again with your legal expertise is is far more than my own. I think when we look at this defense what what we are saying is that it is because of the person's identity not because of the actions that are happening outside of that, that the act is being committed that this this sense of panic is overwhelming the person because of who you are, or this. Again, not recognizing someone's humanity in that moment, and then committing an assault or murder on that situation. And so when it comes to sentencing. In your example with the Westboro Baptist Church. I think we would absolutely be able to talk to my upbringing we would be able to talk about my own identity in the mix since and that would not be removed from the situation. I wouldn't be able to be used as me saying that I, I attacked I assaulted this person because they were a part of the Westboro Baptist Church, had they said derogatory things that would be something that would come up in the conversation around evidence. Because there were precipitating factors or other defenses in the mix, whether I perceive that it was self defense because of their actions or or moving forward, that would be a defense that would be used and could be considered. In this situation, my, my hope and the intent of the bill was really to remove this idea that we can justify or reduce a sentence because of the victims or survivors identity, if, if I clarified that. No, I appreciate that description and I see the last phrase that you used. I see a clear line of demarcation between the trial phase where someone is considered guilty or not. And the sentencing stage where it's no longer a situation determining guilt, because guilt has been found, but what do you do with the individual who is now guilty. There are some element that we are depriving you and I of if you and I are sitting at defense counsel table. Are we being inhibited in some way by denying us the ability to tell a judge, all about who you are, what your psychological makeup may be. I use this with every single criminal defendant that wouldn't just be you. But the mindset of an individual who was being sentenced is something that a judge may have to literally work on trying to change. So, bringing this into the conversation about how do you sentence this person should Taylor small be thrown into jail versus is there a probationary situation that can be fashioned. And that's why I'm really nervous, because to me this language says, it's not even to be considered at all. And I struggle with that so I guess that's that but I appreciate your conversation. I want to make clear. I have a hard time with this everything is taken into consideration and sentence. The famous case of those two brothers that in Los Angeles that killed their parents and then they wanted mercy because they were organs.  I don't think somebody should get a lesser sentence because they had a gen I just don't understand that Joe, I'm sorry. You know, yes, it could come in that they had grown up in the West Ward, whatever the name of that Baptist church was that can come in as something that is there but I don't know why they would get a lesser sentence than somebody else. Tell me, Dick, if I could change the subject of the crime. Let's take two people who have been charged with retail theft. One has stolen food. And another has stolen a shirt. But with two people who are charged with the same offense. But there could be radically different reasons why the one who stole the food is actually entitled to a different sentence from the one who stole the shirt. And that's where I'm seeing the discussion about sentencing interfering with the ability to make that argument when it comes to this topic. I have faith in the judges who are placed in their positions to say, Benning. I don't care what your argument is. It doesn't work for me. I'm sentencing you as I would anybody else despite what you're telling me. That's what we put judges in place for Senator White, Senator Bruce. Oh, I just had a clarification question and it's both for representative small and for Joe, Senator Benning around. What I heard you say representative small. I think was that when when in the sentencing phase that in the example that Senator Benning used where you were the defendant here. I would be able to talk about your, your background your upbringing, your, the culture in which you grew up, whatever it was, bring anything forward. The pertains to you as the defendant. And that. And so, in Joe's example about the Westboro Baptist Church, they would, the defense would be able to bring up the fact that this kid was this was the culture that he was in this is who he was this is his, his sense of morality and whatever, but not necessarily bring up the panic issue the panic defense is that did I understand both of you right there that that you could, you'd still have the right to bring up the person's background, everything about the person, but not then say, and because this was the, this person's background, they panicked. And you would, am I understanding that right because that this is where, where I get a little confused. Yes, is the short answer on that one and really thinking about the defense that is being used is that I, I did this crime I committed this crime because of your identity, and therefore it should be justified. A slight reminder for the committee that in the reality of these situations and what we're talking about. I would absolutely be the victim in these trials, and not necessarily the defendant so I do appreciate the hypothetical and flipping the switch. I'm understanding that if this bill were passed the what the Westboro Baptist Church would not be covered under this bill but really focusing on on LGBTQ folks who are experiencing this harm. Right and so you're, can I just follow up on there so your, you committed this offense. Because of your background, what you're bringing up about yourself, but not putting it on to the victim itself that that it was because of the victim's identity. Correct. Okay that that is very helpful to me. I just wanted to. Can I answer the rest of your question because you didn't both. I'm having a hard time getting in here. Yeah, Senator Bruce has a question here trying to get in for the last. Thank you. And then, and then happy to turn it over to center. Thank you representative small. I know you've, you've done a lot of research in bringing the bill forward. And I, I took a look at some of that via link. And there was one piece that I found very illuminating which was an academic researcher who had quantified the percentage of reductions in sentencing using this defense. And I'm, that was to me the most illuminating of all the evidence can you just share a little of that. Absolutely. So the research that came out that looked at hate crime data that is available from the FBI, as well as a 2012 study report that examined 120 anti LGBTQ murders that occurred in the United States. What was found is that in a third of those cases when the defense was used, when it came to sentencing they received a reduced sentence again the typical move being from a murder charge down to manslaughter, less time, and in some cases only serving probation. So I think that the percentage but significant in my opinion is also the 5% acquittal rate with folks who are using this defense as well. Okay, thanks so much so this goes back to what I was saying the other day. If we were to prohibit this defense at trial, but allow it in sense and sentencing, according to those statistics, we would, we would still have a really alarming percentage of effective uses of the defense. 42% was the number I remember, in terms of reductions from what would otherwise be the case. So, I put it a little more strongly than that but I, but I think it's fair to say it undercuts the bill almost completely to allow the defense to be made at trial and sentencing. And so that's my reason for opposing that change in what the house did. So, if I can come back. Taylor one of the things you were talking about was the reduction of murder charge down to a manslaughter charge. A judge cannot do that, once a conviction has been rendered. I understand the need for this bill at the trial stage, because we're trying to prevent it from being used to avoid conviction. That's society's interest in my head. When we're talking about the sentencing stage since the judge does not have the power to drop the charge down after the conviction has been made. The concern still remains that we have judges, we expect to sentence appropriately. And if there is a judge who is somehow off the rails, using their own personal biases, we try to take care of that and judicial retention. I don't want to see you or I in a situation where you've been convicted, being prevented from arguing whatever we possibly can at sentencing, even if it's in violation of what society would normally consider appropriate. We have to trust that the judges understand there may be a different reason to give you a sentence of X than the other person who's charged with a simple assault, being sentenced with why. I'm sorry, Joe. But does that mean that because I was panicked, I should get a lesser sentence than you if we committed the same crime? That's the excuse. And I'm sorry, but I can't accept that excuse. I mean, that's why I use the Melendez twins. I don't know if they were twins, they were brothers. So their excuse after they wanted a lesser sentence because now they were orphans after they killed their parents. Well, they didn't get it, but that's right. But I'm just saying that. So, I mean, I appreciate represent small being here. I'm not sure I just have a disagreement with you over this particular point in terms of what, you know, obviously the fact that I that the person grew up in the West wards bro. And now I'm in in Wyndham County in that church. It's part of the sentencing and understanding, but I think the fact that because they're going to use as an excuse that they discovered that the person was transgender and they panicked over that's where we're saying can't use that excuse.  But I do know where I think we've gone as far with represent as small as we can on this issue and I appreciate her coming to the committee and talking with us. I just disagree Joe. That's that's what America is all about dick I appreciate that Taylor I do appreciate meeting you and having the conversation. Thanks. Senator white wants to have a final. So representative small. This conversation has been very enlightening for me. I, I, when we originally talked about it, and Joe used his example of the kid who grew up in the Westboro Congress or Baptist church and and when when I was thinking about the sentencing phase. I was assuming that he would not be able to bring up as his defense, the fact that he grew up there and this is his culture and this is. But what I'm hearing now and what I think I understand is that he can bring up all of that information about himself in the sentencing face to the judge, but can't then say, and because of that, I'm have I get to blame the victim. So that is very that that is very helpful for me because I, it was the sentencing phase where I was, where I was having a problem not the trial phase so I, and I know that Joe and I probably still disagree, but I, I found this very helpful thank you. If I may add one more comment chair Sears. Okay. I'm going back to one of my initial statements and testimony is really recognizing again that this defense is not used often or again at all in the state of Vermont as it currently stands as the office or the defender general's office has shared. And here in having this be able to come up and sentencing again is really focusing on legal strategy, and that strategy being playing into the potential bias or prejudice of a judge and that situation. And so, with that consideration coming forward, we hear that if someone were to say, I did this because of someone's identity, I would hope that our judicial system would see that as it is which is a hate crime, and not a defense or justification for one's actions so my worry about this defense come up in the sentencing arena is again really focused on that piece of justifying these, these crimes that are happening and playing to potential prejudice or biases that we know exist within our communities. Thank you very much for joining us. There's a whole lot of other folks here who may want to comment on parts of this, but got about five minutes left of committee time because we have to go to the floor to 1130 and it takes time to walk down the hallway and do whatever we need to do to get ready for the floor so I realized we need to come back to this but I, is there anyone who would like to comment about five minutes on this you may not be able to come back. More, you may not be able to come back. Not that everybody else isn't busy. Maybe you can comment. Yeah, so thank you for inviting me back to testify and I thank you for these last five minutes because I think I really didn't have very much to add, except to that this has been a very enlightening conversation and I just have my two cents. So I, you may remember the last time we talked about implicit bias as an entire body that there have been some studies that have shown that are implicit and our explicit biases are more closely aligned. When it comes to two specific groups, immigrants and lgbtq. And that is because researchers have found that there's just more social acceptability around disliking and hating immigrants and hating people who are who identify as lgbtq. It's not surprising to me that we're having a lot of these conversations because often what happens is, if I told you today that I don't think that people of different races should be able to get married. I think we would all be equally appalled. But if I said that people of different genders should not be able to get married, or that someone who is transgender should not be able to marry someone who is cisgender. We're now having conversations about religious beliefs, and we're having conversations about principles and the way that people were brought up and grown up. And so there, there's just more social acceptability around that and I think what we're trying to do here is shift that and change that change that culture and change that climate. And so sometimes it can be helpful to have to look at this in the context of a different protected category, because in 2021, I think we would all agree that there's no room left for racism. There is no space left for racism. And so, if I imagine at sentencing, we're sentencing an older gentleman who is white, and who grew up in a town that is predominantly white, and was taught at a very early age to hate people who are black and brown.  He is now sentenced, and he wants to bring up the fact that he was brought up at a different time at a different age, learned racism early on, and that's why he committed the crime that he did. I think we would all be really comfortable in saying, no way. You don't get to use the fact that you were brought up a certain way to justify your violent actions against your victim because of the color of their skin. That's just not okay. There's no excuse, by the way, even if you're 90 versus if you're 20 and you're, you've committed the violent offense. And so what we're saying is there should be zero tolerance. When, yes, our judges have made a promise to be impartial and to be neutral and to be bias free. But yes, of course they are, they do have bias, like all of us do. But this bill, this statue is guiding judges and not accepting those arguments, instead of leaving it to judges to do that themselves. This is the legislature construct like instructing the jury instructing judges instructing judges that we're changing the way that we think about LGBTQ communities, and we're not going to accept excuses for both the guilt phase and the sentencing phase that you are not like Senator Sears says, entitled to a lesser sentence, because you grew up in a different time, or that you were taught to be a racist or a sexist or you were taught to be homophobic. And we're not going to tolerate that. So, I think the, I looked at the new draft, certainly the Human Rights Commission would support it, and I would encourage you to move forward and to sort of think about this in the context of, as if it was a race, and whether that would be whether there would be a difference and how you would feel differently about if you would feel differently about it. Whether it's guilt, the guilt phase or the sentencing phase. And I would say that I don't think we would. So, thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. I think you left, and maybe it's covered in immigrant but the recent violence towards person who's an Asian. Thank you for telling me that means a lot. Okay. Anybody else we've got. Peggy why don't we try to schedule this. We do have it on the schedule for 1115 on Wednesday. Yeah, hopefully we can, we can do it. Thank you. I look forward to seeing our schedule for the next week. The next two weeks you're going to be really busy trying to get bills out and hopeful. And I think that the news is would be done in about a month. Bad news is a lot of bills won't make it this year. And out of this committee and that's not because we're trying to be a whole. They're not important. And I think it's more important to get it right.


In regards to us reaching the scaling issue, which out of the two primary solutions to be on Segwit Do you think is the best and also could you just explain the advantages and disadvantages in each one? So I Won't take a position on scaling options for a simple reason. I think we will do all of them We will do Segwit segregated witness is an architectural change the structure of a transaction that removes the Signatures from inside a transaction places them in an extension of a transaction it solves a number of problems including transaction malleability Quadratic hashing which is a problem that occurs that can lead to develop service It allows for second-layer implementations such as lightning network and other things like that And extends the capacity of Bitcoin By at least a factor of two possibly two point seven Based on some estimates depending on how many people use it We're going to do Segwit. It's a good test of solution. It's available today I think it's going to happen before the end of the year I was more optimistic at the beginning of the year when it was first proposed, and then it received a lot of pushback I am still optimistic that it will happen and then We will also increase the base block size and with Segwit Multiply that base block size increase by two at least and get four to eight megabytes of Capacity in Bitcoin and then we're going to implement shore signatures and Maybe a bunch of other technologies Spoon net which is a refactoring of the block header to introduce a new capabilities and flexibilities into the system Maybe flexible transactions maybe different types of Digital signature algorithms all of the above scaling is not something that is solved once Scaling is a moving target as You achieve each level of scale That opens the door for new applications those applications immediately consume all of the available capacity that you just made available And the problem starts again.  What are we going to do now? Oh, let's scale up. You use CP. Oh email is impossible to route It takes days to get it across the internet and the fees are so ridiculous. Oh, we solved that. Oh wait now Everybody's using email what image attachments.    We don't have the capacity for that And that got upgraded and then it was video and then it was high-def video And then it was Netflix and YouTube and everybody watching video on the internet And as soon as we solve these problems We create the opportunity for new problems Because if you gave me ten times the capacity on the internet right now all across the world as an internet Engineer, what would I do? Use it instantly all of it VR 364k streaming video to everyone Of the muffin I'm eating in the cafe Done Gone all of the capacity gone Instantly right and you give me 10x again and it all great fantastic Holographic 3d VR Simulations of entire worlds virtual worlds being transmitted. Oh, by the way download my AI It's only six petabytes Don't you have good 25g service on your mobile Scaling is something that is a moving target Because scaling is an aspirational goal that engineers look at and say what more could we do if we had scale You have a system that allows you to do global transactions without borders that delivers a level of Planetary scale in utility for every one of those transactions Instantaneously open to anyone in the world outside of the control of governments and banks It costs a dollar Maybe two boo-hoo And we're gonna make it cheaper and faster and then as soon as we do people will want to put more data on the blockchain And then more data on the blockchain and the rate of transactions will increase and we will reach visa scale And six months later We will reach two times visa scale because we're on an exponential curve and they're on a linear one And and one here later with ten times visa scaled and then we're talking about Micropayments between internet of things devices that are buying priority access to Traffic lane for an emergency vehicle by bribing the other cars to move the hell out of the way Why not? I can invent ten other applications that would chew up all of the capacity of the Bitcoin network today And that's what everybody's going to do scaling gets fixed By trying new problem new solutions to each problem as they come along and we will never fix scaling All we can hope to do is fail gracefully For 25 years just like the internet has and if we do that The world's our oyster right we get systems that are massive scalable and impact everybody's life But we don't solve scaling so we're going to do all of the above And I'm a fan of anything that works is technically sensible is not disruptive. It's maintainable And it doesn't violate some of the core principles of decentralization. It doesn't give power to anyone We can change the rules as often as we like we should not to point rulers in order to do that


On the other side of the world, 3,000, 5,000, 10,000 miles away, it might begin like this. Tension at a trouble spot, a call for help from a friendly nation, a brush fire incident about to begin, a small war that could become full scale to answer this ever-present danger. What's up, Colonel? General Adam is coming right back. There should be a decision soon. We don't know if you're on this one. The Army presents The Big Picture, an official report produced for the armed forces. Tamper, Florida, McDill Air Force Base, headquarters, strike command. In a night meeting of its battle, staff has been keeping abreast of the situation since midnight. Strike comm was designed for just such an emergency as appears to be developing now. We have a low extending through the area, sir, but it shouldn't affect the deployment. This message is for Major Gray. Yes, sir. Standing by under this unified command are forces of the Army and Air Force. Combat ready units tailored to strike hard and fast anywhere in the world. We have Hal Jamison at Strike Comm, keeping us posted on late developments. We're going to call him in. Come in, Hal. We're here in the war room. The Strike Comm staff is keeping abreast of late developments and waiting, waiting for a decision from the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington. All right, sir. General Adams, the Joint War Room has just indicated that the military buildup is proceeding rapidly north of the border. Since the last summary, a note was delivered to our ambassador. That's General Adams at the end of the table, Chief of Strike Comm. His major concern is fast action in carrying out one of several strike plans if the JCS says go. And has suggested that a US strike command air ground force deployment would be most effective. On his staff are Army and Air Force, with two Navy and one Marine officer. It's more than cooperation in this recently formed organization. The Army and Air Force units are well integrated into a single, self-sufficient force that can travel swiftly anywhere and be fully prepared to fight when they arrive. An alert barracks at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, or Fort Campbell, Kentucky. With one of the ready units is Stu Fries. This alert is 72 hours long, three days, during which the men can't leave the barracks except for brief training exercises. They're ready to go at a moment's notice. It's the well-known waiting situation, and most of these troops seem to be taking it pretty well. Trooper, what do you think? Expect your outfit is going to be moving out? I don't know. But if we do go, I'll tell you one thing. The situation over there quiet down pretty quick. Are you the first sergeant of this company? That's right. How many hours have these men been on alert status? We've been standing by for 65 hours. If we don't get the word in about seven hours, we don't go. Yes, the troopers will be pretty glad when the alert is over. No, sir, when we go off alert, another outfit takes over, and that means we go second, and we don't like that. Right about this time, I get kind of busy, sir. I have a lot of paperwork to do. A, if we stay, and B, if we get called on this mission. Well, where do you think you'll be wearing this weekend? Those are your boots. I don't know. But I'm set for either one. Overseas, or my sister's wedding. The thing that bothers me, I can't let the folks know if I can't make the wedding. Well, it's too late for that now. Security says no telephone calls, telegrams, or letters. You're born looking, but I'll get you this time. Not hardly. All right, give me your attention. I've just received word that this alert's been extended five hours. Never mind you, you'll remain in a barracks and keep your gear in a ready status. Now, this didn't want to travel. We've just had word that things are happening over at Strike Calm headquarters. Sir, the JCS War Room on the phone? Adams, sank strike. That long-awaited call has just come through from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Give me the weather over the departure field, please. Yes? Yes, OK. The weather at Shaw's better than on the last report, I saw. I know what you mean. Fighters can be airborne in one hour. First troop carriers can be airborne within two hours. After that, a steady stream. Thank you. All run out. The weather searcher unload basis for the troop carrier The departure airfields. Many aircraft and several points of departure are involved in a strike operation. All details have been carefully tied down in several alternative plans. We have a favoring win of 100 knots through this area. Right through here, running about 40 knots in through here. Is there any questions there? Thank you. Gentlemen, we're going to execute head-hard effective immediately. The weather is good at the departure field. The weather over the sea will be moved out before the aircraft arrive at the refueling areas. Will you get me a conference call with Sink Air Strike and Sink Air Strike, please? Priority one, Operator. This is Sink Strike Duty Officer with a red express call. Give me your commander. Aft Strike is the name given to the Air Force Combat Units, Aft Strike to the Army Combat Units. Stand by, please. Yes, sir, we have Aft Strike and Aft Strike on the line. Aft Strike, Aft Strike, Sink Strike speaking. We're executing head-hard effective immediately. I'm taking the force. I'll be airborne shortly. Holloway will be here. Join up later. Anything at your end. OK, see you later. Over, out. Well, gentlemen, let's get this show on a roll. Colonel, earlier you indicated that there might be a possibility of having a word with General Adams. Is he too busy to talk to me at this time? I think so for now. It might be possible later on when we're airborne. Is it because the forces involved in the strike are fairly large? Is that the reason why General Adams is personally taking them? This could be the reason. Just how large a force is going out on this strike? This I am not at liberty to say, but it's big enough to do the job. If you'll excuse me, I've got to get going. For all the past 72 hours, Air Force units too have been in an advanced state of readiness.  There go the tankers. They're first off the ground to get a good head start on the fast fighters they're going to refuel. They've all been preselected to fit into various package plans to meet specific situations. Each package, a balanced integrated air and ground strike force tailored to meet a particular crisis. The fighter pilots are being briefed up to the last moment before takeoff. Their government at the moment appears to be in no immediate danger internally. However, if border fighting should break out, our friends tell us that the communist infiltrators may do irreparable harm. Gentlemen, this wraps up the intelligence briefing. Are there any questions? If not, Major Johnson. Takeoff time for the lead flight is $0,600. After join up, we will climb to 40,000 feet. The route will take us to the continent by way of these island bases. Refueling points are here, here, here, and here. Radio silence will be maintained throughout the flight, except as necessary during refueling. The rescued duck butts will be here, here. From now on, according to prearranged flight plans, aircraft will be flowing out of several bases in a steady stream. Getting them all airborne quickly, having planes of varying speeds mesh properly, bringing them in without having to stack them up when they're low in fuel. These are a few of the problems of a fast strike-arm operation, and strike-arm relies on the tactical air command to conduct this phase of the operation. Throughout this strike, they're watching the weather. Every change is vital information. Here's where some of the weather information is being picked up and relayed to the ground station. Captain, how's the weather shaping up? The weather will be good most of the way. The lake from the coast of the first refueling area will have high-scattered clouds, favorable winds, and good visibility at flight level. And over the continent, there will be a few scattered areas of thick clouds. Supersonic jet fighters, destination Arandivu at Alpha, somewhere over the ocean for those in flight refueling. Hal Jamison is staying with strike-arm headquarters. Let's go over and catch them. They're just about to take off. TD, RE, 48408. Well, it looks like we're all set. Get the manifest ready as soon as you can. All set to go, Colonel? Yes, we are. What about equipment? What goes with the headquarters like this? Any guns or tanks? No. Our problem is communications. We've got to have equipment for worldwide communications and enough to control an operation this size. The equipment is in trucks, which will be airlifted and air-dropped. There's a unit right over there, the talking bird. That goes with us. What's a talking bird? This is a very special girl. One complete communications installation, which can bring an aircraft to the airfields overseas and can provide worldwide communication. What about personal equipment? You carry only a toothbrush? No, a little more than that. Each one of us in the headquarters staff has three bags always packed, one for the tropics, one for the cold climates, and a third with articles and clothing, basic for wherever we may go. My equipment is already aboard the aircraft, but if you're interested, I can give you an idea of what these bags contain. For the arty, everything from face masks to snowshoes, for the tropics, mosquito bar, insect repellent, first aid for snake bites, all the latest and personal gear for every climate's possibility. General Adams is now entering the command aircraft. While en route to the trouble area, he will have full communications facilities available and will be in direct contact with Washington, as well as all elements of strike-on, whether in the air or on the ground. Immediate communication is, of course, vital in an operation of this type, where the situation could change without warning, necessitating a change of plans to meet the new situation. He's starting out from his sister's wedding. This weekend traveling. This way, I need the driving to them. Doing as in the old days, but a long string of them, screaming their way overseas. For an overall view of the situation at this time, let's get the word from Harold Jamison. Colonel, you on schedule? Very much so. General Adams has just notified the Joint War Room in Washington that the strike force of Hithard is off the ground and on its way, which means we are meeting our schedule. Have you received reports of what's ahead? Well, we expect the weather to be pretty good for the rest of the flight. No, sir, I didn't mean that. What's the situation on the ground? Has actual fighting broken out? No, and we hope to get there fast enough so that it won't. That's the whole idea behind strike command, to be on the scene, in force, so that an aggressor will change his mind. What about the possibility of talking with General Adams sometime during this flight? Well, he's going to be pretty busy until after the force actually arrives. Jack Turner went out early on one of the tankers. Some of the fighters have already reached the rendezvous for refueling. Tell us about it, Jack. This is one of the most delicate moments in the entire operation. Each fighter that comes along must slow down and jockey into position to receive a fuel line from its assigned tanker. Roger, going to come first flight tanker passball two, ready for receivers. Behind you, what's coming up on your left row? Roger, speed run five, ready and waiting. It takes plenty of practice to make this connection at 29,000 feet, traveling at about 300 miles an hour. That's about as slow as one of these fighters can fly at this altitude. That's the probe in the fighter looking for its target from the tanker, a funnel-like affair called a drogue. Looks like that fighter has come in for a perfect hookup. You can imagine what trouble you can run into if weather isn't on your side at a refueling station. Everything's got to be working for you out there. Weather, timing at the rendezvous, and coordination of the pilots. Jack tankers, as they become available, will make this operation much simpler. The reform below and to the left of the tankers. Left scanner to pilot. On schedule, the navigator picks up the overseas coast line. There's land down there. We should be there pretty soon. Right about now, be driving down Main Street. Hey, the time it takes me to drive home, our whole battle group load up with its equipment, made it overseas. Instead of seeing Main Street, they get a look at the other side of the world. The thing that bothers me, I don't know where I am. Look, when they read about your sister's wedding on page 10, they read about where you are on page 1. We're approaching our staging base. We'll be landing in about 30 minutes. OK, men, put on your steel helmets and fasten your safety belts. The land will get off the aircraft and adjust the parachutes and equipment and load on the jump aircraft. Well, at least this isn't going to be a hurry up and wait operation. We're not going to be sitting on the ground. Here's the first touchdown of the C-130 transports. This is a critical time, bringing in this large force and proper sequence. All kinds of aircraft will come in, in that steady stream that began back in the States. In spite of differences in aircraft speeds, range, and refueling techniques, they're meshing smoothly, avoiding stack-ups and bottlenecks that could be really dangerous at a time like this. Sergeant, what about the experience of these troops? Are they ready for the type of terrain and warfare they may be up against? Look, these men have trained all the way from Alaska to Panama. They're all volunteers. Many of the officers and non-cons are combat veterans. Some Korea, some World War II. The CO got his degree in Normandy in 1944. We've been on Willow Frees, Banyan Tree, and Swiss Strike, some pretty rugged exercises. When they're talking about a combat-ready outfit, that's an outfit like this. This is the best trained battle group in the United States Army. You're pretty emphatic about their training, Sergeant. You know, they have paper requirements for what it takes to qualify to be combat-ready. Well, this outfit has that and a lot more. Thanks, Sergeant, and good luck. OK, we'll start loading this aircraft. We'll left-door load up first. Move all the way to your front and lead the first two seats vacant for the jump masters. OK, start moving in. Now, keep it closed up as you go in there. Once you get in the aircraft, take your seat and also pack your safety belt. Keep your chain strap down until we're at our airport. Pack your safety belt. This particular operation called for an overseas movement by many types of air transports. And in this operation, an overseas staging area is available for parachute and weapons issue on the ground. These troopers are reloading into assault aircraft from which they can jump. Can you tell us whether at this time just reported to Washington that Hithard has arrived and is ready to do its job? Well, Colonel, do you think I could talk to General Adams now?  General, this deployment looks like a success. What are some of the things that might have happened that might have gone wrong? When you have hundreds of aircraft in the air flying great distances, there's always the risk of mechanical failure somewhere on the way that could result in a bad accident. Fortunately, we've had none. Also, weather is variable over a distance as great as this operation spans. And sometimes it could frustrate arriving in the destination area on time. Our weather has been reasonably good and has not delayed our aircraft to any extent. Then, of course, as you approach the objective area, there's always the risk of hostile action. Our CASAF has been on the ground and in business for several hours. And we've had no hostile action so far. But we believe that they can take care of it if there should be any. The CASAF, the general mentioned, means Composite Air Strike Force. These are the fighters, primarily, which arrived well ahead of the troop transports. General Adams, hasn't the Army and the Air Force worked together at good many times in the past? Why is Strike Command different from what existed before? Yes, the Army and the Air Force have worked together, done many great things together for many years. However, except for a few specialized tasks, such as the SAC operation, modern warfare transcends the capabilities of the Army, Navy, and the Air Force, none of whom can win a war alone, but combined, they can. In the case of the Strike Command, we have organized tactical air power and Army forces together into a hard-hitting, fast-moving team which can go any place in the world and carry out animation joint chiefs might give us. Thank you, sir. To meet the threat, the emergency, the aggressive act, Strike Command is ready now. A balanced, flexible air-ground striking force, practiced in getting away swiftly and reaching far corners of the Earth in hours. Through the means of a unified command and a joint headquarters, the United States is better prepared than ever before to summon up its military strength for the critical moments that may come. The big picture is an official report for the armed forces and the American people, produced by the Army Pictorial Center, presented by the Department of the Army in cooperation with the state.


Hello. I'm excited to speak about containers and isolation levels at KubeCon today. Hi, my name is Jachi Liu. Today I'll be talking about making sense of the various isolation layers in the Kubernetes landscape. I came across this topic while working on an open source project at the University of Chicago in how, you know, working on multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters, allowing different users to access different layers of the control plane. And I found a lot of these topics to be really, really interesting. I'm excited to share them with you today. Cool. On the agenda is multi-tenancy and isolation, a little bit of introduction to that. And then diving deeper into the components and isolation layers within Kubernetes that's supported by Kubernetes. And then I'll talk a little bit about the particular project that I worked on that focused more on container level and pod level isolation. Going straight into talking about multi-tenancy and isolation. So what is multi-tenancy? In a single tenant architecture, each tenant or user have their own instance of their own cluster. So in this diagram, you'll see that user one has their own cluster, which has a control plane and worker nodes. User two is completely unaware of user one's cluster and has their own cluster to work in as well. In a multi-tenant architecture, some or all of the resources of a given cluster can be shared across multiple tenants or users. So in the diagram on the right, in a multi-tenant architecture, user one and user two are sort of both using the same cluster. They might be sharing a control plane, there might be multiple control planes, and they're sharing the worker and their own resources and pulling together those resources. So why do we care about multi-tenancy? What do we want it? In modern day systems where there are more and more complex clusters and more and more complex platforms, it can be really challenging for platform teams to have to operate multiple Kubernetes clusters. For example, some of the challenges are, you know, running dedicated control planes for each cluster, making sure that from an operational perspective, deployments, patches, and upgrades across a fleet of clusters are up to date and standardized and managed properly. Those things can be really challenging. Additionally, there's overhead with running a lot of foundational resources, such as policy controllers, observability platforms that really should be consistent for a given organization and might actually be better off as shared resources. So as a result to sort of reduce the operational complexity, it might be worth it to run multi-tenant systems. And the general analogy of multi-tenancy is think about this in terms of an apartment where you have multiple tenants, each of them will have their own, their kitchen, their own bedrooms, their own bathrooms.  But for the most part, they're operating on their own without having access to other people's resources. Cool. So when it comes to multi-tenancy, you then have to think about isolation, because if everyone's on the same cluster, what does that mean in terms of who has access to what resources and how much of the given resource a tenant can consume? So in that case, single-tenant clusters are very valuable if you have a small amount of tenants and is definitely the best way to ensure isolation, because everyone is sort of in their own domain without access to anybody else's resources. And ideally, constraints and restrictions on other resources don't apply to single-tenant clusters. On the other hand of the spectrum, there's also a completely one shared cluster where everyone has full access to everything, which is very, very much open. Regardless of where on the spectrum you fall on, there needs to be some level of trust in a multi-tenancy. Ultimately, something underlying is shared. And multi-tenant clusters are able to address some of the downsides of managing a single cluster for each customer or each tenant, but can come in different flavors and different restrictions. The goal with multi-tenant clusters is to enable tenants to coexist without impacting each other, which doesn't just mean isolation, but it might mean restricting quotas or restricting API access to or resource access to a particular tenant so that one single tenant cannot bring down the entire cluster. So ultimately, the trade-off is between cluster management complexity and isolation in the far right example where you have one shared cluster where access is very or everyone has the same level of access. That's the least amount of cluster management complexity, but on the other hand, there's also no isolation. In the single-tenant use case where everyone has their own cluster, it's the most amount of isolation, but it's a lot of overhead complexity to maintain. And along the lines, you might decide that some things are worth sharing, some resources are worth sharing, but some other constraints need to be in place. So there's a constant trade-off between complexity and isolation, and then there's no perfect isolation scenario. Okay, so this talk primarily focuses on the tooling that Kubernetes provides you for isolation, but I also want to take a high-level view on what's sort of available in securing your system overall, because those things definitely come into play. So things like hardware, the hypervisor level, networking, the virtual private cloud, they all come into play and ultimately how secure your ecosystem is. And for instance, if you have a really strict firewall, you might be able to have a more generous RBAC policy on your cluster. So things like having web application firewalls for your external APIs, restricting access for internal APIs to a given network, they all sort of provide different layers of protection. So being realistic and practical about what your security policies are and making sure that you're creating a sustainable development environment, also sustainable environment for your team to understand and manage the layers is really important. It's not always about, you know, everything has to be locked down, but understanding the big picture as well. So that's something that I really wanted to highlight, but the majority of this talk is going to focus on the Kubernetes level and what you can do with your Kubernetes cluster. Okay, so let's jump into just that. I'm going to introduce these topics by going over the basic atomic primitives within Kubernetes, because I think that these are really important to build upon to talk about isolation. So starting off the containers are the atomic unit of work containers run on pods and pods are a logical unit of the application. Pods are then deployed to nodes, which are at the virtual machine serving as the workers and a cluster will contain multiple nodes. The important thing to know here is that you can run multiple containers per pod if your application logically, you know, is separated into different multiple containers. Cool. So what isolation layers does Kubernetes provide you? At the top layer, you sort of have the workload.  But given, you know, example of isolation might be that different tenants might have priority on resources or the number of nodes allocated to them or how scaling out works. But from a architecture perspective, it's really abstracted away. There's this shared pool of nodes that anyone can theoretically access. The next layer is the control plane, which is a core part of the Kubernetes cluster and is able to segregate the tenants and allow for authorization based on our back. API priority and resource allocation and actually sort of starts to define the protas, the restrictions, the controls. So the control plane includes the Kubernetes API, the scheduler, the controller manager, and also includes at CD for storage and state. But the important thing is here is where the cluster is managing and correcting the desired state and will make decisions in such a way that actually enforces some of the isolation that you might want to add to your cluster. And we'll talk a little bit more about what tooling and mechanism that means. At the bottom layer is the platform services, which include things like central logging, monitoring, ingress, egress, and internal DNS. A lot of this is going to be shared across the tenants. And one of the benefits of having a multi-tenant system is you can have the same logging, say monitoring. You can share these platform services. You can upgrade them consistently and you have the same use cases across the different users on your platform. However, you might not want to allow sharing across all the actual metadata or underlying information in the platform services. For example, you might want to provide the same DNS tooling to everyone on your cluster, but that doesn't mean that you want all tenants to be able to discover each other's services. So there might be additional constraints you built into the platform services to make sure that everyone has the tools that they need to run their applications, but that users don't actually have access to other users' data or other users' information, such as their metrics or logs coming from an application owned by someone else. So again, foundational services, which are definitely one of the benefits of having a multi-tenant system to begin with, but doesn't mean necessarily that all information provided in this platform level is going to be shared with all tenants. Okay, so the namespace permittive is the key way for enforcing and implementing isolation at each layer. Kubernetes doesn't define what a tenant is in a multi-tenant architecture. So it's really up to you to come up with a model that makes sense. For example, you could have namespaces divided by user. Each user on your platform has their own namespace, or maybe your tenant is 18 within your organization, or maybe your tenant is actually different organizations altogether. Those are user-based ways of dividing up a cluster into different namespaces and defining what a tenant means to you. Other examples are you could also have different namespaces for different environments, such as a QA staging or production environment. You could have different namespaces for different applications. So if you have a different microservices, may choose to live in their own namespace. So a lot of different ways to divide up what a tenant means, and Kubernetes is not prescriptive about it, but namespaces in general is a foundational abstraction that allows you to define what a tenant is within your own system. Okay. So the namespace allows you to organize your cluster and define what a tenant means, and then who gets to share what policies. But a namespace by itself doesn't create those policies. So there's no restrictions when you create a namespace on whether or not a user in that namespace can traverse to another namespace. So in order to actually implement different isolation levels, you actually have to add on the policies that are supported by the Kubernetes tooling on to the namespaces so that you can have them. So examples of controls that are relevant and potentially interesting is one, using row-based access control to grant access to namespaces and authorize resources and authorize API access. So at a basic layer, maybe in namespace A, these are the users that can access namespace A, but cannot access namespace B in creating that foundational policy. Using things like resource quotas at the namespace level to constrain CPU memory and storage. So you might want to restrict and limit quotas on a given namespace, because as we sort of talked about before, the worker nodes are all shared. And when, because the worker nodes are all shared, you could theoretically have a situation where one namespace consumes all of the resources and namespace B is unable to launch pods. You don't really want that. So you want to be able to constrain CPU memory storage at the namespace layer and implement those kind of quotas. One really interesting and frequent use cases, you might need to tie certain nodes to a particular namespace like I have done in this diagram. That doesn't come by default, but you can definitely use the pod node selector to implement a way such that certain pods are only launched on certain nodes for a given namespace. So those are examples of controls that could be potentially useful in creating isolation at the namespace level. And there's plenty of different things that you can do and configure, which are really interesting within Kubernetes. Okay. So a note on namespaces in most Kubernetes deployments, tenants are authorized to list all namespaces on the cluster. So this is something that if your use case requires tenants to not be aware of who else is on the cluster, namespaces might not be the isolation level that works for you. And there are other tools, there are other open source tools available that you might need to look into. The other key thing that I want to talk about is I sort of mentioned resource quotas, but oftentimes when we talk about isolation, we think about just security and role-based access control and who has access to what APIs, but it's really important to isolate and restrain resource consumption because you could have a scenario where one tenant, whether maliciously or unintentionally, abuses the resources on the cluster, overloads it, and that will impact all the other tenants on the cluster if it causes the cluster to go down. And one of the goals in multi-tenancy is that you want the different tenants to be able to function without being impacted by other tenants. So Kubernetes is a great API priority and fairness documentation on this topic, but these are really important things to implement in your deployment so that no one resource can sort of take everything down. Okay, I'm going to talk a little bit more at the container level. So containers overall create separation between workloads, even if they're hosted on the same node. Within Kubernetes, containers run on pods and each pod is a logical unit of an application and can actually contain one or more containers and the pod is sort of deployed onto a node. Okay, containers by nature, we think of them as developers, we sort of think of them as VMs that are isolated but you can very easily break container isolation. I'm going to talk very specifically about containers running as root. By default, containers run as root and there's sort of a reason for this, which is you might need to run as root in order to install software and certain applications like Nginx sort of run as root by default on the server, but it's genuinely best practice to run as a root user and if you do need to install software on the container, you can install the software first and then actually run the application as a non-root user. So that's something to take note of. The other way that you can actually break container isolation is with any kind of vulnerabilities built into dependencies or code that you're installing onto your container. So the way to sort of avoid that is to scan your container for vulnerabilities but it can be really cumbersome if you have to scan every single container on every single cluster or every single node constantly. So you actually want to be able to have an accurate scan at runtime. So the idea behind this is you want to treat your containers as immutable objects and don't download code on runtime. That also means that you wouldn't have to run your containers as root on runtime and be able to store, build your container and load it into a container registry where you can just scan the containers in the container registry and scan for vulnerabilities there instead of every container on the cluster before the container itself is deployed to Kubernetes or to your cluster. You can even use a tool like Open Policy Agent which can actually enforce emission control based on the scan results coming out of your vulnerability scan so that you're not deploying compromised containers to your cluster. Okay, so those are sort of my two really important things to highlight about containers and container security. There's quite a lot more and I've left some resources at the end in case you want to read up more on container isolation and container security. But I'm going to deep dive into a use case from the team that I worked with at the University of Chicago on the pod level isolation that we needed. So our use case was that we were enabling users to launch their own Jupyter notebooks in a browser setting so that they can run analysis on biomedical data. And the flow on the back end kind of looked like this. The user would go to a web application where they would request a Jupyter notebook and they would be told what the CPU and memory constraint is. Behind the scenes we had an application called Hatchery that would call the Kubernetes API and launch a distinct pod for that user and this pod is assigned to that user. It actually has a persistent volume backing it up for storing the Jupyter notebook as well. This pod launches our own image of the Jupyter notebook and is isolated from the other pods. The user is able to execute code in terms of what they're executing on the Jupyter notebook but cannot access things like the Kubernetes API or internal APIs. So at a high level this is sort of what I just described. Hatchery is the open source tool that will deploy a pod to Kubernetes so that the user can execute their own code. Hatchery in that process denies the user or that pod access to the Kubernetes API and internal APIs through network policies and it also imposes a constraint on CPU and memory usage per pod so that in case there is a really heavy workload on a particular Jupyter notebook that maybe a user is running a heavy computation on data, a single pod cannot overuse resources and take down the entire node or even the entire cluster. So that's sort of it for my talk. Like I mentioned before there's a lot of really great resources in case you do want to learn more. I'm going to call out Running with Scissors which is a talk by Liz Rice at GopherCon where she did talk a lot about containers and root access and I also want to call Hatchery the open source project which is on GitHub. Okay I think the thing that I want to leave you with is that Kubernetes gives you a lot of tools to come up with different ways to add constraints, different ways to add isolation at the pod level, at the namespace level, at the cluster level. But it's really up to you to come up with a model for multi-tenancy and isolation that makes sense to you and your team and makes sense for the broader architecture for which your deployment, your Kubernetes deployment is in. And it's really important to decide what those tradeoffs are and understand them because you don't want to over-engineer your deployment, you don't want to over-engineer your application. But I'm hoping that at least in this talk I gave you a sense of what basic Kubernetes tools and container level tools you can leverage to implement what you need. Thanks everyone, bye.


What's up you guys welcome back to my channel. My name is Coach Coco and I love volleyball so much to my Tannels filled with chips, tricks, hacks, chips, chips, tricks, hacks and everything you can ever need to know about volleyball. So today I wanted to talk to you and introduce myself to a lot of new volleyball interests those who are interested in volleyball because I've noticed that a lot of the volleyball community has been expanding since a very popular volleyball anime Haikyuu has come out a lot of new players are becoming interested a lot of different players are becoming interested and there's just a general buzz under current in the volleyball community. So I wanted to introduce myself and give you a peek into my channel especially since I've been here on YouTube for a long time I started my channel in 2017 and I'm going on year four now here on the platform and I really wanted to introduce myself because my channel is filled with chips, hacks and everything you could ever need to know about volleyball. I have curated this channel in order to have volleyball awareness bring diversity to volleyball show different highlights of volleyball and give volleyball advice that is generally warranted and give you things that you need to know especially if you're venturing on to the volleyball world and I pride myself in making sure that volleyball is a place where you are comfortable you are wanted you are needed you feel that you can be who you are and be yourself because that's important to me and that's one thing that I can say is one of my largest goals on my channel is making sure that you feel like it's a place where you belong and I can say that over the years I've really made this channel into that and I'm so proud of that so that's why I want to introduce myself to the Haikyuu fans I hope I'm saying that right especially since you guys are now a part of the volleyball community we're seeing a different type of volleyball evolve and it's evolving right in front of our eyes so it's not only important for me to say hey hey what's up to you guys but also show you some of the great things that volleyball has to offer especially if you want to transition from watching the anime to playing on the court and I know that you guys are getting a lot of general information from the anime but if you're ever interested in transitioning to volleyball the sport on the court I would love to be able to be your coach virtually in person but my channel is filled with a lot of different videos that way you can start working on your own skills and we can get you where you need to go so check my playlist out especially if you're working on new skills or make sure to leave a comment below of videos that you would like to see and if you want me to do vlogmas I would love for your video ideas because this will be my first year ever committing to a full vlogmas so I really want to see how many of you guys are interested in a vlogmas because I think that vlogmas is so fun it's a way to connect with you guys to feel the holiday spirit to do all of those things and that's something I want to be involved in so I look forward to reading your comments if you're not already following me on tiktok I am on tiktok at Coco Valley and you can look at all my other social media information below but I just want to say generally hey uh I'm here volleyball is here volleyball love is here and you're welcome so please like comment subscribe share this with another haiku fan or share this with somebody who needs it and I will see you guys next time