Buidl for Peoples not Machinez - Arturo Filastò | Web3Privacy Now - Rome Meetup 2024

[Music] I guess I will tell you a bit of the experience that I have gone through in uh developing some uh technology but always with a focus on um I guess how it can help people bring about social change have some kind of impact uh and um ideally improve people's life and the world that we live in um and uh it was already introduced so I already got an excellent introduction I don't think I need to repeat any of these things but I have been working on uh developing software for the last 15 years uh I founded several projects that deal with whistleblowing uh I worked for the tour project for uh several years working on anti-censorship technology uh and uh at the moment uh the main project I work on which uh I guess will be what I will telling you a bit more about and some of the lessons that I learned in in building it is the open Observatory of network interference uh that's a foundation based in Italy that uh measures internet censorship um just to establish a little bit my street creds I guess In This Crowd I can say also that uh back in 2010 is when I first started to paying attention to uh cryptocurrency space um I will not talk too much about that although I have have been thinking about it in coming about about this presentation and I think some of the Lessons Learned can also be applied to this space as well um so what is uni what's the open Observatory of network interference so as I mentioned it's this Foundation that's based in Italy and what we do is we measure the internet to be able to understand how things are blocked so uh sometimes they will block uh around elections or during uh certain social or political uh instabilities uh access to social media platforms they might block access to Independent news media sites and uh what we have developed is a methodology to be able to collect uh empirical data on um that serves as evidence to uh demonstrate that in fact there was some restriction in place limiting people's access to information limiting people's access to certain content or certain sites in that country uh and this problem I guess as jaril was hinting before is actually harder to do than you would think because um as was being said before um computers tend to not be um as deterministic as we would like them to be uh being able to establish especially internet networks uh it's very hard to establish the causal link of what um has determined a particular effect that you observe so for example in the case of the work that we do we want to understand basically if somebody in the government ordered a particular ISP you know let's say Vodaphone uh to restrict access to uh I don't know a a News website uh but what we have available is you know we can't show up at the office of the ISP and say give me evidence that you got a document I mean we can try but uh most of the times they will not answer us so what we are left with is looking at these metrics that we collect from the network uh from the measurements that we carry out with the software that we build uh and then based on that coming up with some hypothesis of whether or not what we are observing is explainable through some kind of thing that is not the government intentionally ordering uh the ISP to implement that restriction uh and so this is sort of you know it's it's a big topic I think uh a whole like there is not enough time here to talk just about that but you can read more about what we do on on our on our website uh suffice to know is that we've been building this um mobile and desktop application and and building a whole ecosystem around understanding this kind of phenomenon on the internet um and I guess one thing that is also important to State uh which we will get back to this uh a bit more throughout the present ation uh is sort of what what is what is the mission what is what is that drives the work that we do at Uni and I think this is in general something that is important for um I guess projects that have some interest in doing something let's say in the public good or um reaching some kind of societal or political uh change or impact is like to try and be um explicit and intentional about what your mission is and and also understanding how that uh applies to the work that you do and in the case of uni how how we sort of articulate have reached to articulate our mission over the years uh I mean it took some time to reach this point is like what we do is we we want to make a free and open Internet by increasing the transparency of Internet censorship around the world that's basically what we do so we want to shed light on how internet censorship is implemented around the world and we believe that in doing so we will determine an Internet that is more free and open that allows people to be able to uh access uh information um without less with less restrictions uh and with less uh control um and and so what I'm going to tell you about is basically some of the Lessons Learned in this in this journey over the past decade uh from you know 2012 when the project when I started the project to date and and I think some of the Lessons Learned can maybe apply to other contexts as well um and the thing I would like to start off with is is really the Genesis of uni in a way uh so uni started with this this sort of idea that that that I had about um what what is it I at the time I was working for the tour project I was doing uh a lot of uh work around understanding uh how tour was being blocked uh around the world and it was basically very ad hoc and impromptu where we would uh reach out to people that uh where tour wasn't working we would share some scripts some tools that they would run on their computer they would send us back the data we'd analyze the data figure out what was going on then reach out to them again and be like hey can you run this other thing uh and then you know there was a lot of uh like trial and error and iteration and throughout this this period we we basically assembled what what I call a a bag of scripts you know like basically a a set of different tools that we would have to to pull out and throw at people when when situations emerged emerged such that we could really understand what was happening on a particular Network and from there the idea came of like well really what we are doing is that we're we're kind of building a unit test for the internet right so like what we're doing is we're we're making some hypothesis on how the internet should work in the form of T Test cases so if you're familiar with the concept of unit tests in in software development it's it's the method through which you assert that a particular piece of software is functioning properly so you will say I expect the software to behave in a certain way and you write a test that ensures that it is behaving in that way and similarly we wanted to do something like that for the internet so it was kind of built around this modular framework where you could write these things things that were called net tests that would basically make assertions on certain Network properties and based on that generate a report that was then the thing that we would analyze and we would say ah this property does not hold true therefore it is likely an indication of some kind of restriction or some kind of censorship and it was nice like I think even looking back at it I think it was a very nice idea like at least conceptually it uh it it I mean I still find it quite cool I think it was nice um that said we we tried it like uh uh and and we're rolling with this uh this sort of idea for a while uh but I guess it also had some issues like for starters we know like we had this Vision that people would be contributing a bunch of tasks we'd start having a giant community of people that would write tests that would get upstreamed and people would uh uh I don't know write their own little module plug it in maybe some of the modules would come back to us uh and we could run it on other networks but what we saw is was that in reality not really that many we had some like a lot of even important tests that were contributed but it wasn't really as much as we were expecting the other thing was that we realized I think that the modularity and extensibility wasn't really that critical like in the end there's only so many things that you can test on a network like it's not as necessary as in the case of software to have all this amount of modularity and extensibility and by virtue I think of also focusing on these very I would say nerdy and geeky ways of writing test uh we ended up mostly attracting a predominantly Technical Community uh and as a result um you know we weren't really seeing the kind of um of impact that we really wanted to to see right uh and additionally to all of this the whole system was was pretty complex to maintain because you know we we basically had created a a testing framework around this with like a plug-in system and and all of this this uh this extra complexity around that so just for reference this is in the first what is it like um yeah four years let's say of uni you know like we were getting measurements we were covering some networks but as you'll see in the charts later on I mean we're still talking about like uh millions of measurements per month which um you know was not really the kind of coverage or Insight that we were we were looking for and and basically what what we understood is that we needed to somehow change our strategy we somehow needed to um maybe make a different type of compromise and so really we it wasn't so important uh we realized it wasn't so important to have that kind of modularity um um at the expense of getting bigger coverage uh and so we decided to basically refocus everything on having fewer tests having a system that was a little bit more s simple it wasn't um as technically novel maybe from that perspective uh but it it made it actually easier for for and for people like real people to actually install it and run it um and you know this this I just picked a this was a research paper that was published around 2014 that compare to several platforms that do internet measurement and at the time like uni was listed as flexibility High because it had this this kind of uh very modular framework for writing tasks but our coverage was like very low at the time and we'll see in a second that you know we compromised basically flexibility to some extent so we made one step back in a way in one dimension but uh as a result we made a step forward in in the other uh and you know so like going back we basically started building a mobile app we started making uh our measurement Library we basically rewrote it in C++ we simplified it to a point where we could actually write it in C++ without uh going insane and um and yeah like basically from when we launched the mobile app you can see you know these numbers that were in the range here we're now starting to see coverage of thousands of different networks and uh you know in the order of tens of of uh uh of million measurements coming in every day and so I guess and and another thing is that ultimately it's not really just about the numbers you know because as I was mentioning before our goal is not really you know we don't care to measure the internet for the sake of measuring the internet or like publishing nice papers like really what we want is people to use the data to bring about some kind of change and so thanks to this we were also able to start engaging more with uh different communities and different uh digital rights organizations around the world to publish research that was able to document cases of censorship uh in places where otherwise it would have been very hard to tap in to the local Technical Community uh and and so you know following that we started collaborating for example with um whoa what happened here how do I go back uh let me go back yeah there we go um with a with a great organization from uh um uh from Malaysia that uh Works in all the southeast Asia region that we still collaborate with today and we we started doing a series of reports looking at the state of Internet censorship in um you know this was 2017 I think we did Thailand Myanmar and Indonesia uh then we started working with uh some uh uh journalistic group in uh in Egypt uh where we we published a report uh in looking in depth at the the restrictions uh um in that country and in general what we realized here is that you know we were basically able to have more impact with less complexity and so through doing this of of somehow in a way making a step back to um go rather in a different dimension and having the confirmation that this change in strategy was in fact working we understood that um yeah we were basically on the right track um and and on this note uh I don't actually remember where this phrase comes from like who who who articulated in such a nice way but this is something that uh uh you know I guess as uh uh as you know like the d The Ed of a of a foundation I try to remind myself of this uh as often as I can of like how you know you're always going to have to make uh these kinds of decisions right like uh that it is very important to think about uh how you uh strategically align your objectives in such a way where um you know you are putting to good use the limited resources you have uh and and align them to what ultimately are everyone's limited aspir Limitless aspirations right because we all would like to do all the things but unfortunately we don't really have all the things now and so if um you know you you spread yourself too wide you you end up really not being able to to maximize the the impact that you you would otherwise maybe be able to uh to achieve uh and another important um I guess aspect to all of this is that we really started to realize how essential it was to have um greater con connection and and greater uh and and a and a much tighter feedback loop with the communities that we were serving uh and and and really understanding how it's not really about the technology like in the end the technology is not that which drives change like what drives change is the needs that people have the communities that you are serving what what what problems they are facing and and if you are able to to serve that with something that is significantly less complex um then great like that's what you should do and and and really you know it's about asking the communities you serve what what they want to achieve and and how you can place yourself as some organization that builds technology or builds software so that you can you can facilitate the work that they are doing because um for example with uni we really see ourselves as a technical partner like we are not um you know there to do advocacy to do policymaking to do in the end like if nobody is using our tool to uh do legal intervention journalistic interventions like the important work that brings about social change like the tool is just uh is just collecting this data that sits there in our in our databases and uh it's just going to rot at some point um and so you know really Community participation is is essential like uh um not only because it's what what drives impact obviously but also because it it provides essential context of like what are the real challenges that people are are are facing all around the world and and and really allows you to be able to address what are the actual needs uh it's also essential in the case of uh well uni but I guess perhaps many of the of the projects you're also developing where there is a this sort of privacy and security Dimension to it as well where where it is essential that people have trust you know they need to trust uh the the the people that are that are developing the tool like it's nice I think sometimes to think that um you know just because you have something open source or you have something that is cryptographically proved then uh you know trust comes naturally with that but at the end of the day what really builds trust is meeting people is like seeing people showing your face like getting to know them getting to understand what they need getting to to see if like what you are doing is in fact going in the direction of what they would want to to to see and and most importantly listening to them uh and and lastly obviously by building communities um you you end up having a situation where um you know communities will be the best champion of your tool you know like it's especially in our case where we need people all over the world to be collecting evidence of Internet censorship we cannot possibly be everywhere in the world as like a small nonprofit organization you know and so that's that's why it's it's so important uh and you know we we ended up around 20 yeah 2016 I think is when we started and then you know it got ramped up over the years uh building uh what we call the the partnership program which now counts more than 50 noos all over the world um which basically function as this like they are they are organizations that do various kinds of interventions whether it is on the advocacy side policymaking side journalistic interventions uh in some cases also legal uh legal work um to make use of the data and also to make us uh improve the tools that we develop and this is for example a picture from the last partner Gathering we did in Malaysia with our uh southeast Asia Middle East and Central Asia Partners um and and really like once we have started ramping this up we have started to see you know the outputs that we really wanted to see so you know research reports that um come from the use of the data some of them also in collaboration with the uh important International Partners uh we've seen our data getting used uh as part of uh supporting uh more academic research um s that is carried out completely independently from us so it's just people that take our data make use of it and and publish some uh investigation based on it um it's supporting uh advocacy intervention so for example we uh work a lot with access now which has this uh uh keepon um campaign to advocate for internet shutdowns uh which been cited for example in the uh United Nations Human Rights Council um and um and also legal cases so there have been some uh some instances in which uh some lawyers took the data that we generated uh and used it in a court case where they were able to uh challenge the legality of Internet censorship uh and and in some cases even um be able to to win it so um this I think was the one in uh um in Pakistan where where as a matter of as a result of this this kind of uh uh legal intervention from the Islamabad Supreme Court they were able to rule in favor of abolishing a particular type of legislation that made it possible to implement this kind of uh uncontrolled uh restriction um it also has led to integration inside of thirdparty projects uh that make use of of our data and uh um and uh and have it as part of their platforms so and obviously there's also the numbers you know so like uh you may remember I think we were we we had the other slide it was somewhere around here but like since we have started to ramp up all of our uh Outreach and um sort of community involvement efforts we're now at a point where we're collecting uh you know many tens of millions of of network measurements every day from basically every country in the world uh and it's basically the largest data set that exists now on internet censorship world worldwide uh and so I guess what I will leave you with is uh is I guess maybe some questions you know so I I figured um for this kind of of of community like maybe um one thing to to ask yourself is like um you know what is what is really like the um the mission and like the the impact that you're trying to achieve and and does that align with the technology that you are building like are the properties that you're Building inside of your technology uh sort of leading to empowering people to do what they wish to do um and um and and like really like are you are you solving the right technical problem like is is the specific property that you are um implementing the right um the right property to achieve the impact that you wish uh and and most importantly really just involving communities and uh and and and the people that you would like to serve um and um yeah that's basically it so I'm I'm happy to take any questions uh that you may have so thank you very much [Applause] um does it work yeah uh thanks for your presentation just a very quick question um did any report that uses your data get published about censorship in Western countries like European countries or the us. or the UK yeah yeah so we we published actually um well the last that we published was academic paper at fukai you'll find it on fukai 2024 which looked at the restriction in in Europe targeting Uh Russian media sites so maybe you know that Russia Today and spotnik news there was a uh sort of an order from the European uh uh what was it the European commission I think they they put out a decree where they said uh uh in Europe access to um sort of broadcasting of content from these uh um Russia owned uh broadcasting Services should be restricted um it was very vague like it didn't really prescribe exactly what should happen on the internet layer and so we were interested in trying to understand how and to what extent this had been received uh by European uh uh countries and yeah we saw a lot of uh difference um at a national level where you know you would have both in terms of techniques through which the block was being implemented some were more effective some were less effective some were not even trying to block uh access to them um one of the takeaways that I I found quite interesting is that it seemed like there was better coordination um at sort of the uh internet service provider layer than inside of the national layer which I think in some way shows how uh um I guess like corporations are more coordinated across boundaries than countries are coordinated inside of their own uh National boundaries um but yeah that's that's like one of the latest uh um research that was published on Western countries uh we we have done um some other reports in the past looking at uh blocking of uh gambling sites and uh piracy related sites um in general those are the main categories of ah we published one um during the Catalonia referendum when they blocked access to all those uh referendum um related sites but in terms of news media it's quite unprecedented what happened recently like it is uh it's definitely yeah see first time we saw it in in Europe I have a question like how you would Define community for yourself because in this industry let's say many people thr Community when in reality it's just a Discord chat and people are not that b Bond knowing each other or they share a certain cultural aspect and also maybe communities were diverted or washed out a bit by social media because they keep dropping the community aspect like or like a gaming culture like you play a specific game that's a community but I think the communities you're specifically talking about are much more genuine or like uh organic so how you would describe the Community you were referring for and what sort of qualities they have to be defined as a community yeah I mean in general I guess it's uh it's people that um share the same goals and the same um ideals that we have and that are uh sort of brought together by um in our case the software that we develop in that they they use it as part of the um you know the work that they do or as part of the the topics they are interested in uh in terms of how like I guess our community is made up of different uh I mean I don't want to say tiers but like let's say there's different levels of Engagement so you know uh I would say the ones that are the most engaged are for sure our partners so with our partners as an example we when we establish a Partnerships we sign a anou with them which basically defines uh uh what are the what are the things that we support them in and and how uh what what they are interested in doing uh thanks to our support so that we can Define some uh areas in which we can work on things together uh but the this is obviously something that's only possible if you are let's say a digital rights organ or a human rights organization like you you you need to be some kind of of entity that is already doing this kind of work um then we also have uh like people that that are part of our community in the sense that they are contributors to our open source software so we have people that uh will come to our code bases they're interested in contributing um you know their knowledge their time um maybe they're interested in having an experiment as part of our experiments that we build and so they pitch it as an idea and then it's discussed and then if it's something that we want to we want to ship we will we will work with them to be able to integrate it uh and then I guess there's also just people that are that are interested interested in because they care about uh internet Freedom they care about uh free and open internet and so they they come to us just because it's it's an aggregation of people that that have a a similar shared vision of of how the internet that we would want looks like and and as part of this we organize um what is I think now bi-weekly Community uh meetings so that happen uh on uh on our channels so people come we discuss we have an agenda uh we''ve started to organize also some uh we also organize a lot of trainings so we'll go to several conferences and uh um organize workshops where people can come learn about our tools um and yeah like a lot of these these kinds of things then I will do one just for like no no no I was more interested said like for example since I'm from Ukraine uh I I see different internet shutdowns from all the sides related to the war I was interested like how a person who is not a journalist and not a from nonprofit uh could benefit from this information like so sort of like you're providing information for organizations and then they they they they sort of promote the fairness of the internet stuff like that but what's the where in the pipeline or food chain is the average internet user or a person well I mean yeah that's that's a great question so I mean the thing is that the the thing about our tools is that people can install it on their phone right or on their computer and so really immediately what they can do is they can run our tests and they can check what things are blocked on their Network in that moment in time and this is something that they may not even necessarily be aware of in some cases it's also the case that people in a country suspect they are being affected by some form of restriction and they don't know because sometimes it is especially in places where um you know you mention Ukraine so um let's say the network the the the internet weather there at the moment is not exactly great like you don't necessarily know if your inability to access a particular site or service is due to it being intentionally restricted or if it is just because in general the network is performing poorly and so in these kinds of circumstances uh and and we might not have us or any journalists or anybody for that matter might have even covered that topic like no nobody might somebody might not have even published on it and so what you can what these kind like what people that have these kinds of questions in mind can do is they can just go to our data set and see if data has already been collected on it if it hasn't they can collect it themselves and inspect it on their own directly and they can answer this question and it's I don't know I think it's quite empowering in the sense that it makes you understand really what is happening on your on your network and it makes you understand um you know that because it is also a common thing that governments used to do in that they would blame it on uh you know what I call internet weather the the fact that something is unavailable they'll say ah you know it's because there was a cable cut or it's because the Internet is just performing poorly but the moment that you start having the kind of data that we collect available it means that this kind of plausible deniability is no longer possible and it is something that because our data set is is made available as an open data set because our tools are made available as free and open source tools it means that we're not really even The Gatekeepers of this information you know not us not our partners not the journalists that use it like all the data is entirely made available openly uh we we build these platforms that make it uh as easy as we can to inspect the data I mean I didn't show it here but we have a platform called uni Explorer where you can go you can build charts you can uh pull up pages of particular countries and you can see what's happening um with respect to information controls in a in a specific region and a specific country without really you know we we are not really the vision that we see at some point is that if we have done our job well maybe we won't even be necessary to be the ones that publish reports about this stuff because pulling up your phone and opening our app will be as simple as pulling up a weather application you know it's like how's the internet weather today it's like Cloudy with a Chance of censorship you know so that's that's the sort of thing that I think we would want to achieve I mean we are not there yet I think a lot because there are some technical challenges that need to be overcome uh in the sense that as I was explaining before like there is this issue of um determining the causal link because you know we are indirectly measuring through observations something that is an opaque um sort of process that we have no insight into like we we don't know if ISP got an order or like what the government uh you know ordered isps to do we just see what's happening on the network but like with enough data collected and with you know some of the improvements that we are applying to our heuristics we are going to soon get to a point where we will have some kind of um yeah system I mean we're working on a beian network based uh uh modeling of um you know B basically producing what effectively is a probability distribution of How likely something is to be unavailable due to sensorship versus it being unavailable due to let's say natural reasons um and so through this it will be yeah kind of like a weather report you know like you you see the percentage you read it and you're like ah okay I now know that uh it's uh 80% likely that this thing is blocked just one comment I understood that you're the opposite to misinformation in the sense that there's so many false information that is not censored like on another spectrum and it's kind of like uh uh there are many cases when there should be sort of censorship and it would be interesting to see if there will be a discussion on what's the positive censorship for society and what's the negative in terms of the future of the internet or just the healthy relationship within the people communities yeah I totally age I mean I think I think the the necessary condition to be able to have this discussion though is having empirical um scientifically collected uh data on it because as long as we are only having a debate and a discussion that is based on um you know hearsay and and rumor and anecdotal evidence which was the previous let's say state-of-the-art within quotes like people would maybe publish some reports here and there maybe there would be some some articles that would come out saying this happened or that happened but uh you know I think in order to have this kind of discussion you really need to have a comprehensive longitudinal data set that covers as M much different uh places as possible uh and that is backed by some methodology that can be uh also fact check and verified uh so that you know we can have a discussion of the sort of like what is the right threshold like what is you know you know maybe even open up the question of like is it is it right for Europe to block access to Russia today or Sputnik news or you know where where is it right for governments to intervene and restrict access to social media personally I don't think it's ever right but I think it's important to have this discussion and the only way to have a discussion about this I think is really having uh the data to to inform it thank you thank you question oh I come from Chinese Hong Kong so I'm interested in learn more about how o i Pro operate in China could you please uh provide some insight into its current Stu and better there are any contributors from China in M the project yeah so I mean China is uh is a very very big can of worms uh in the sense that it is uh I mean it's definitely one of the uh most advanced internet censorship apparatuses in the world like I think there are a few other places that uh have uh something at the level of sophistication of China um I mean if you have some I mean I can I can say just broadly speaking like broadly speaking they use a variety of different techniques one thing that that I that I say about how internet censorship is implemented in China is that in some way they follow what I would call a defense in depth approach like they are not satisfied with just implementing one line of defense to restrict access to content but they will Implement multiple overlapping methods uh which make it significantly harder to to circumvent any kind of restriction so you see blocking happening at the DNS level blocking looking at protocol level things and uh doing also active measurements themselves to enumerate and identify sources and destinations of illicit traffic um they are also known to uh make use of some I would say pretty aggressive techniqu in terms of uh restricting people's ability to access particular platforms like just as an example at some point I mean this at this point was some years ago there was this case of the great Cannon where they basically uh kind of made a lot of users become a botn net to attack a GitHub and uh and and do a distributed denial of service attack using their censorship apparatus um and it is also a place where uh there are a lot lot of uh members of the technical community like a lot of researchers whose job is is basically just that to research on how to make the great firewall of China as as it is known uh better and more effective at at restricting access to um to content uh so and and I guess another more like um economical Dimension is that I think China to some extent uses internet censorship also as an economic tool to um provide advantage to their local companies at the expense of foreign companies so for example in China you have basically an alternative to most other Western Services you know like with uh you know you have we weo you have WeChat you have uh you know Alibaba and and all all these other platforms that are direct competitors of of things in the west and the ones in the west are mostly restricted and and blocked um but yeah I don't know if you have like something more specific you would want to know about China because it's um there's definitely a lot to say okay thank you okay well thank you all very much [Music]