Thank you, Damon. Thank you, Audrey. Thank you, Ahmad. And welcome to the Berlin Freedom Week. Enjoy, and let’s do everything we can to make the world free. Thank you very much.

So this Wednesday, at the old Stasi headquarters, there is going to be the coming together of victims of the Stasi of the 20th century with the victims of Pegasus of the 21st century. And they will talk about how things have changed and some things remain the same. At ...

Thank you, Damon. Thank you. Before we end, I would like to also invite you to another event that is going to happen next Wednesday. We just heard from Hanna a great presentation on transnational repression. It’s a big issue. Many of us have been victims.

Two years have passed, and not much has happened in our countries in terms of access to internet. Do you see in the U.S. government, in the conversation happening now in the U.S., engagement, interest in opening access to internet beyond borders? And people that come from countries like Venezuela, ...

Thank you. So Damon, two years ago, we were together in front of the U.S. Senate testifying about democracy. And I don’t know if you remember, the last question they asked us was, “If you had to propose one policy to promote freedom movements, what would that be?” And my ...

Ahmad, I want to go back to you on this idea of access to the internet, because I know that this is something that you have been working on. When I go to Silicon Valley and talk to the people that are really into technology, they are developing incredible apps, ...

And actually, this Wednesday, we are having a full-day workshop with technologists and activists in order to see how we can improve this, because as we said before, it’s open source. Being open source means that nobody owns it and everybody can contribute to it.

So this is something that is solving the problems that we are facing to communicate and to send and receive resources. So we are creating something called the Freedom SATs Fund. And the idea is that we know the people that are being onboarded, and those people that are doing ...

So what we are doing now, not just in Venezuela, we are doing it in five pilot countries—Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America—we are onboarding activists on Nostr in order to have a completely autonomous, anonymous account. No KYC, meaning you don’t need a phone number, you don’t need ...

So we then turned into Nostr. Nostr is basically X on a protocol, but it has something very unique: that you can send and receive Bitcoin with a touch. It has the like button, it has the resend button, and it has a lightning bolt that you can just push ...

But after the election in 2024 that Maduro stole and there was a new wave of repression, X was banned in Venezuela. WhatsApp was weaponized, meaning that people could go to prison just for having WhatsApp. And X being banned, you needed a VPN. And to have a VPN, it’s ...

And the answer is yes, we are looking for different ways to use technology. And I’ll use the example of my home country, Venezuela. I had a conversation with Jack Dorsey two years ago, and he introduced us to Nostr. Nostr, as Audrey says, is a protocol. And I thought ...

Yes, we are. So as you say, Damon, we had over the weekend, we had 180 delegates talking at the Berlin City Parliament, and one of the issues that got more engagement was the use of technology. There was so much participation from the delegates from all over. And there ...

And that the users are the owners of… they are the owners of their followers, they are the owners of the account, and they can switch it from one account.

One of the challenges that you express in your book, <em> Plurality </em> , is the fact that there are big companies that have a monopoly over communication. What are your thoughts on open source?

Of all of the countries that you visited, what has been the country that is doing the most interesting work at the grassroots level, what Damon is talking about? What have you seen that is a technology that is really helping people at the grassroots level to either communicate or ...

I know, I know, I know. You live on a plane. I asked where you’re living now.

So Audrey, you were just telling us that you’ve traveled to twenty-seven countries in the past two days.

What are some of your thoughts on this? And maybe Damon, if you have some ideas. I know that you’ve been following this. What are your ideas on these new technologies to support these movements?

A couple of months ago, we saw that there was an uprising by Gen Z in Nepal, and it was a tech-driven uprising. And something really interesting happened that there was a shutdown of internet, and then there was an alternative using tools like BitChat that doesn’t require access to ...

Thank you very much. Ahmad, you are an Iranian-born technologist and human rights activist, and you have been focused on the freedom of the internet. A lot of these technologies require the basic aspect, which is access to the internet. So what are your ideas, your proposals to make internet ...

So I would like to start with your thoughts on this issue. Audrey?

So beyond a book, it’s a movement that you’re proposing, Audrey. We have a great panel now, and we just heard about things that can be done within democracy. I mean, you were leading all of these efforts in the strongest democracy in Asia. But we come from the other ...

I call our next panelists, Damon Wilson, Ahmad, welcome.

Audrey, the floor is yours.

We will hear from Audrey and then we will have a panel discussion with three other people that will go into this area of technology for freedom and democracy. It is truly an honor to have someone that is breaking ground in this idea of technology for democracy.

Audrey Tang has become a well-known global figure after her incredible work in Taiwan by protecting the digital space in Taiwan. She wrote a book with a friend, Glen, about Plurality that has to do with the ways in which technology can actually be good for democracy, good for collaboration, ...

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/-DjvtvI4k9o?si=XQ_UUNtKTHCVgtnQ&start=184" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>

So as our next speaker, we have Audrey Tang.