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From YouTube: From Storage to Justice

Description

Learn how Filecoin's unique cryptographic proofs are being put to the task of establishing trust in our most sensitive digital records, such as the documentation of human rights violations, war crimes and testimony of genocide.

In this talk, we introduce the Starling Framework for Data Integrity and its ambitious goal to take on the technical and ethical challenges of restoring trust in digital imagery. Starling represents a ground-breaking methodology in the fight against the spread of misinformation and the looming threat of deep fakes by providing open-source tools, best practices, and case studies.

We believe that through new web protocols we can help reduce information uncertainty in digital media and build a more vibrant and equitable knowledge graph to drive the Web 3.0.

While there is a lot of interest in evidence-based decentralized attribution, surprisingly there are few working examples. That changed this summer. Over the last 90 days we worked with a team of engineers to deploy Starling prototypes in Syria to document attacks against civilian infrastructure. We’ll reflect on the path ahead for authenticated imagery, its evolving technical and ethical dimensions, and the various applications Starling could be applied to across humanitarian relief and accountability efforts in the future.

Join us for Filecoin Liftoff Week, an action-packed series of talks, workshops, and panels curated by the web3 community to celebrate the Filecoin mainnet launch and chart the network’s future. https://liftoff.filecoin.io/

Events take place all week, October 19-23, 2020. #FilecoinLiftoff

For more information on Filecoin
- visit the project website: https://filecoin.io/
- or follow Filecoin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Filecoin

Get Filecoin community news and announcements in your inbox, monthly: http://eepurl.com/gbfn1n

Chapters
00:00 Starling - A Framework for Data Integrity
01:10 A Story on Accountability
04:05 Centralization of Power - The Nazi Regime
06:00 Fake News
08:05 Challenges of Documentation
09:58 Starling Framework: Capture - Store - Verify
11:05 How does it secure data?
13:04 The secret sauce - Filecoin's proofs
17:20 Dilemmas
18:06 This is Important Now
20:06 Why Trust Matters

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Well,, thank you so much colin and thanks to the team over at protocol labs.

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I've had such an incredible journey with you all over the last two years and this presentation today.

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Is just a short summary of the many things.

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That we have done together and it comes at a really important time.

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And so I think a lot of things have aligned.

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To bring us to this point.

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so want to talk to you today about the journey.

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That we have taken together looking at how storage.

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Can be critical part of the pursuit of justice.

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And this presentation today here is going to cover.

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Three parts of what we did. well,. As we looked at accountability,, we developed a framework to deal with accountability and then, as we've, moved towards the pursuit of justice,.

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We've looked at really the significance about what we think accountability means and, specifically the architecture for accountability.

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In the 21st century., so I want to begin here by bringing us back to 1945.

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75 years ago, the nuremberg trials began.

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And they were a watershed moment for what we think of.

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As the bedrock foundation of accountability.

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For international human rights law., the nuremberg trials were held at the end of world war ii and the allied powers flush with victory decided that they wanted to. Instead of using their conquest.

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Of the access powers as a moment for retribution.

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Instead wanted to pursue accountability.

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With an eye of creating a precedent for human rights,.

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And creating a deterrent from anyone who would ever do something like what the nazis attempted to do to deter them from ever doing that, again.

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And what's fascinating about this trial on many things,.

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Is the method in which they proceeded to make their case.

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And going to robert jackson,, the prosecutor's opening argument,.

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He explained to the judges of nuremberg, that,.

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"We will not ask you to convict any of the men on trial here.

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On the testimony of their foes., there is no count in this indictment that cannot be proved by books and records.

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The germans were always meticulous record keepers,, he said, and these defendants had their share.

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Of a teutonic passion for thoroughness to put things on paper, and nor were they without vanity.

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They arranged frequently to be photographed in action.

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And we will show you their own films..

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You will see their own conduct and hear their own voices.

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As these defendants re-enact for you from the screen,.

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Some of the events in the course of the conspiracy.".

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So jackson made a profound choice to not call witnesses.

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To the stand as the key part of his argument,, but instead he brought forward documents.

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In fact, 3000 tons of documents, photographs and records.

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Were entered into evidence and examined for how they proved unequivocally what the horrors.

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Were of the nazi regime.

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and interestingly, in those documents,, there were some of the first digital records from really mainframe computers that were used by the nazis.

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To organize a systemic campaign of violence.

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And ultimately, genocide.

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so nuremberg created this relationship.

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Between documentation and accountability,.

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Documentation and the prevention of human rights.

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And what was so powerful about these documents was that they were clearly proven to be authentic,.

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Because they were created through a central.

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And a certified national authority, which was, of course, the german government.

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and when we think about it,, the german government represented architecturally.

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A centralized form of government. you could argue that fascism is the most extreme form.

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At centralization of a government form.

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And that was why we believed these documents.

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As if we understood them to come from the nazi regime, than we understood that they were in fact evidence of the horrors that they committed.

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well, fast forward to today,. Look at the war crimes.

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That are being perpetrated every day in syria.

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Well,, the documentation is ever-present.

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And yet becomes from completely different sources.

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It's a curious inversion of methods of evidence that it's actually the people,, not the state,.

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That are the meticulous record-keepers here.

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They are the holders of truths and also mistruths.

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And the possibilities for this have emerged large part.

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Because of technology that comes from smartphones.

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Where, at the beginning of the conflict in syria, in 2011,.

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You heard about 472 million smartphones that were shipped in the world and that obviously 10 years later has gone up exponentially.

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To around 1.6 billion smartphones., and so really, when we look at the architecture of this system,, we moved away from a centralized form of documentation to a decentralized.

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Or ultimately, a distributed form of documentation, which in theory is robust,, which in theory provides.

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The most amount of documentation, possible.

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And in theory, we should be in good shape.

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Well, a case that comes to mind of some of the opportunities.

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As well as challenging with these types of documentation,.

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Comes from a good case study that you can look at in 2017.

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In the syrian town of khan shaykhun.

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there in the morning, syrian fighter, jets dropped chemical munitions of sarin gas.

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And it was a horrific violation of international law.

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And there was multiple forms of documentation, many on the ground,, many coming from smartphones,.

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There was also satellite imagery as well..

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It came rapidly,. It came quickly and it proved unequivocally.

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That, indeed, the syrians had violated international law.

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In using chemical weapons against their own citizens.

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And yet the same tools of documentation.

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Which, in theory should have helped us, in this circumstance, here,?

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They were amplified in different ways. Online.

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And the most virulent form of distribution.

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Actually came from a hashtag, which pushed all these images out, there, calling the events in khan shaykhun a hoax.

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Syria hoax was a hashtag that trended number two.

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In the united states and ultimately, what was found later.

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Through forensic analysis was that there was a systemic plan.

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Of misinformation that was advanced.

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By the russian government and the syrian government,, which pushed forward this idea of the hoax and then with the terrible irony, was amplified.

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By right-wing alt-media figures in the united states.

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And so this represents, in theory, a crisis of truth,.

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And everyone here, I'm sure, has their own experience with this and I think we're dealing for the last couple of years with the tremendous fallout from all this..

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And if you look just a bit to the future.

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The prospect of synthetic media that can come.

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From deep fakes or other forms of manipulated, media,.

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Well, they can advance ideas around a hoax.

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Like never before., and so there is deep concern for what all of this pretends in the future.

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And moreover,, when you look at the ways.

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In which this documentation is put forward,, namely on places like social media sites or in places like youtube,, you can see that these are not necessarily resilient forms of documentation.

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If members decide to drop off of youtube,.

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Those videos are no longer available. if they get taken down by youtube,, they're, no longer available..

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So although there are many human rights groups that are doing important work in syria,, they have these incredible challenges of the architecture of documentation.

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The distributed form of documentation here provides amazing, benefits,, but also incredible challenges.

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And so some the human rights groups have taken it.

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On themselves, to bring down off of social media sites,.

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And off major internet platforms into private archives.

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The extensive forms of documentation that exists for human rights violation in places like syria and their work is now being fed into accountability. Mechanisms like the iiim.

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Which is a un body? That's been set up to begin the process.

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Of figuring out what war crimes have transpired in syria.

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And hopefully be able to bring people to account.

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So we looked at this context of the possibilities.

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Of information, the possibilities of misinformation,.

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And we asked a very simple question.

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We asked, "what if we could establish.

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A single,, clear chain of evidence.

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That could allow any photograph or any form of documentation on the ground to prove its integrity at each step, as you would capture that image,.

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You would then store that image, and then, finally, as you would verify that image?".

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Capture, store, verify.: these are the three parts of the life cycle of an image.

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And any form of verification of an image,, and we felt as though there was an incredible opportunity to bring forward a framework that would allow us to accomplish all of these three tasks.

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And ultimately create an end-to-end signal flow that was open source that could use a deep root of trust.

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In a hardware with next generation, processors,.

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Use the latest web3 protocols and, of course, keep that entire system decentralized.

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And that's ultimately, what emerged as the starling framework for data integrity..

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It's a joint project between the usc shoah, foundation and stanford department of electrical engineering..

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We are bringing together a variety of industry players.

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And experts and members from the human rights community.

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All to advance the cause of human rights and to bring forward prototypes as well as ethics.

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That can allow us to understand how we are going to preserve.

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Human history going forward., so I want to take you very quickly through how we do what we do with the starling framework..

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So we begin with the mobile phone and we use all of the rich sensors that are on that device.

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Such as gps and gyroscope and time and date.

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Coming from external sources., and we take those, that metadata,.

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And we bring it in and we form a metadata file.

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Which then gets married with every single image and video.

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Which has taken on the phone., so we have a combination now of an image and metadata.

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That's come together to create a package which can be used to prove that an image was taken.

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At a certain time and place., that package is then hashed on the secure enclave.

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Of a processor in the new exodus 1 mobile phone,.

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And then we take that encrypted hash and the package.

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And we push it out to the decentralized web.

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And here's where protocol labs come into play.

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in order to do this effectively and efficiently,, we mark every file with the cid,, which then allows us to push it out to a decentralized networks through ipfs.

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There we're able to distribute the files on a variety of different types of storage media., so we can put it with ngos or with academia or enterprises.

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We could also put it on individual devices like servers.

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That are on-prem, laptops, even raspberry files, apis.

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But, most importantly, of course our big dream was: could we use a mobile phone so that anybody.

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Who wanted to store the records.

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That have the testimony of genocide or the testimony of human rights violations that any person.

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With just their mobile phone could contribute?

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and then we said, well,. If we know that we can distribute.

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These files effectively,: how could we then prove.

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That as the files were distributed, they also retained their integrity?

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and that's where we were able to work with the team over at filecoin with incredible success.

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And what we were able to do is use the two proofs that come from filecoin,, proof-of-replication and proof-of-space-time to be able to create fixity checks.

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That have really never been done before in any form of secure storage., because, what's so fascinating about the way that filecoin works is that we're able to use proof-of-space-time to ensure that, on the random basis,.

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And on an ongoing basis that we can check if there has been no degradation of the file and that continuously, it has been stored in a way.

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That has not been tampered in any way..

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That level of certainty around storage is what is ultimately the secret ingredient.

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You might think of as the filecoin protocol., because what they're able to do is that, through creating consensus and creating security through that process,, that entire effort, cryptographically, is actually productive.

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So, unlike bitcoin or ethereum,, which you have with every form of sealing of a file.

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On the filecoin network, is, you have then also a productive result, which is a proof, secure proof of the integrity of the file.

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And that holds tremendous promise for the storage.

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And the preservation of media,, especially vulnerable forms of media,.

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Of the kind that we deal with. well,, so we've established a cryptographic chain of custody from capture and storage,. But then you still need humans to be in the loop.

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and that's where we built a verify module to allow humans to create an expert certification,.

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To analyze the files and then put their own attestations.

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Of the validity of files on the ibm, hyperledger.

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And then working with the team at protocol labs, we're able to architect a system where we took the results from hyperledger.

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And then put them not only receive the commds.

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And commdos from filecoin,, but then we also push them out again to a decentralized ledger on the hedera hashgraph.

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So you have a form of interoperability between filecoin and the hcs, which then allows you to be able to push out the information to anyone. Who's authorized to see it, the proofs, as well as the images onto a decentralized cache that was all browser. Based.

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And so using a gun database,, we were able to allow for this form of decentralized cache, to allow anyone who sees an image on the web.

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Or on social media to be able to access the image as well.

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As also a cached record of their cryptographic, proof.

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In the extensive cryptographic proof that we have., so that is a tremendous accomplishment.

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And I'm happy to say that today,, that system is operational.

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So we have the applications on the mobile phones.

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Which were built on a library called proofmode that was put together by the folks over at the guardian project and witness,.

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We elaborated on that to then build out a storage module.

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As well on the same mobile phones,, we then created a verification module on a desktop application, which allows you to be able to let experts certify all of their analysis.

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And then under the hood, we were able to create apis.

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And and clis working together with folks over at sdi.

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And spotlight studios to really leverage the full power.

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Of the filecoin protocol.

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and then last but not least,, we've worked with the teams over at canon, over at reuters to start to take professional imagery, not just from mobile phones,, but also from canon cameras to then push those out.

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And be able to then display these in,, as you see, here,.

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A next generation gallery that would allow you to see for every photograph, an advanced form of metadata.

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So you could see exactly where and when the photo was taken.

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And then finally,, if you download that photo, you'd actually have embedded within that, all of the metadata,, which is following the spec that we helped contribute to. That was created by adobe.

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The new york times and twitter called the content, authenticity initiative..

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So those are the incredible innovations that we were able to make just a little bit under a year.

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And that was not enough..

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What we realized was along the way that all these technical innovations yet still needed to be examined for their possibility.

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But also their danger. and that's where we worked with the team over a witness and really follow the guidance from an incredible workforce.

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They wrote to understand all the various dilemmas.

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That you can have with this form of cryptographic, capture, storage and verification.

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So we've thought holistically, not just about the technology,, but also about the ethics and the implications of how this technology could be adopted.

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So that brings me to my last point of today.

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So, let's think about the journey that we have here.

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From storage to justice,, because it is not inevitable.

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And specifically in this time,.

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We are facing a crisis of trust of the kind that we've really never seen before, because the tool that we have come to rely on.

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For information dissemination,, the internet,.

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Has been overwhelmed with mistrust.

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And we're now in this intensive process of figuring out. How do we get here and there are concrete steps that are being taken to try to address all these problems?

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and if you read the news, every day,, fast and furious,, there are new proposals that are coming forward.

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so for instance,. Just this week there have been efforts.

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To think about changing the state of the web.

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By potentially changing the state of the big players.

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Who are dominating the web, such as this antitrust suit.

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That was filed against google.

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on both sides of the aisle,. People are considering ways of taking down and modifying section 230,, which is one of the key fundamental principles around how the internet looks at issues.

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Around liability and immunity., so any of these changes, changes to the incumbents, changes to the policies of the web,.

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They hold a lot of power and we need to be careful.

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That in this moment, in which we're trying so urgently to deal with the problems that we can see right in front of us,, the terrible problems around mistrust.

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And distrust on the internet,. We yet need to be careful that we don't make mistakes to over-correct.

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Or make changes that could have potentially far reaching implications.?

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Because when you look at really the most incredible moments,.

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Around accountability from this year in 2020, which reverberated from minneapolis all the way over to idlib in syria,, what we've come to understand is that there are many things with the internet which actually, I think we oftentimes take for granted.

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And that when we look at accountability,, we look at the horrors of accountability,, we need to understand that there is actually beneath this architecture. That needs to be thought of.

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To be able to bring forward imagery to change people's hearts and minds.

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and those images can be aided with cryptography.

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Cryptography could be used to help protect witnesses,.

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It can be used to clarify imagery and from accountability,.

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You could see even something that could be with certain federal rules of evidence..

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It could be even being self-authenticating.

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think about that for a minute.. The seals on filecoin,, the cryptographic proofs that come from filecoin could be powerful enough on their own that they could allow files that are stored on filecoin to be admitted.

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If only an affidavit into evidence., no humans would need to be involved..

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That is an amazing possibility, but it is also an important responsibility.

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For all of us to consider, because ultimately, what that means is that we need to think about trust,.

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We need to think about the different components of trust.

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And how we as a society, are coming to consider.

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What actually is trustworthy.- and I want to leave everyone here with a message.

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Which is that, when we think about trust,, what we ultimately need to remember is that trust is formed through a process of consensus.

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So much in the way in which filecoin creates its own forms of technical consensus,.

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The consensus of knowledge requires similar forms.

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Of decentralization and distributed systems.

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We need to break silos to maximize diversity,.

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We need to eliminate misinformation by sharing information.

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And we need to broaden our evidence base by being able to create webs of knowledge.

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So that there isn't one single ledger of truth.

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But instead of multiple experts who are able to come together and we would come to understand their attestations,.

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Their expert advice, and what that process would involve.

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Is that we would repeat it again and again and again.

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Because I'd argued to you that the worst possible outcome.

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That we'd have in all of this is that we would have somehow one single ledger of truth.

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Instead,, what we really need to remember is that a distributed system needs to remain distributed at all times,. We need to create interoperability.

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And we need to create integration between systems so that distributed forms of knowledge can remain diverse.

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And remain robust because the much.

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That leads us to a distributed system could easily be robust., and so, when we think about the web3,, we really need to consider its core interoperability.

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And allow multiple ledgers to exist.

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To provide diverse cryptographic, features,, diverse performance characteristics and diverse methods of preservation., hence that I think has been one of the more inspiring things about working with the team at filecoin.

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Is that they've come to understand exactly what that vision.

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Of a decentralized system truly looks like.

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and, as I was working on this,, it struck me that really this form of resilience.

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Is something that should be really intuitive and easily for everyone to understand.?

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The way that I think about it is that it's really like biodiversity,.

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That the more variants in the system,, the more diversity within the system,, the more resilient a system can become and the faster it can evolve.

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And certainly back to where we began and thinking about nuremberg,, I find it so profound that this is exactly what the nazis never got, which was that,.

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Diversity was the complete antithesis of the nazi project.

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And when you look at their policies of eugenics,.

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And their strategy of eugenics,, what's so disturbing about them, but ultimately, where they were truly held to account,.

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Was that nature would never ever let that project succeed.

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So when you think about our move from storage to justice,,.

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Remember that we need to think about the architectures.

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Of justice and keep them distributed and ultimately.

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Allow each of us to be a part of this process,, because what we do on a cryptographic level is important,.

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But ultimately it's up to every single one of us.

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To keep these systems powerful, it's up to all of us.

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To keep these systems filled with integrity.

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All right, with that,, hopefully we have a little bit of time, left for questions,, happy to answer.

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And so one asks,: how can we help more?.

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Lots to do, and so we have exciting projects this year.

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That we are working on at stanford and funneling through some really great professors.

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Over at the stanford law, school., so we'll definitely have some pretty big announcements.

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In the next couple of weeks and we're really excited.

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To continue partnering with the folks over at filecoin.

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What I'd offer to the broader audience is that there are many things that we are yet doing.

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With forms of documentation, and so if you have projects.

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Or you have things that you think can benefit from this technology and the framework,.

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Please do get in touch and I'll leave. My email address.

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In the chat window and be happy to collaborate with anybody who has inspiring project that we can help.