The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> MODERATOR: Hello. Just checking if online people can hear me. Great. Good. Anni and Louise, are you there online?
>> REMOTE MODERATOR: Yes.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Anni. Louise, are you there?
>> RAPPORTEUR: Yes, I'm here.
>> MODERATOR: Good thing. We can see you.
>> RAPPORTEUR: Hopefully you can see me.
>> MODERATOR: Okay. Thank you, everyone, for joining. We are about to kick off. So we will wait for a few people to filter in, in person, and then we will get started. We have 11 online. So online people, thank you so much for being prompt. And we will get started shortly. Okay. Just checking. Yeah.
For those of you online you can see a very exciting room in front of you. But you can't see us. So what I will do is I will just share my video. Now you can also see me at the front. And we will move that around to our colleagues as well, who will be working -- who will be talking shortly.
So welcome, everyone, to this session. And this is focused on cyberpolicy dialogues. The idea here is we will be connecting different communities between research and practice, between technical and policy communities, and trying to do a little bit of interactive networking. So although you see four people up here on the stage, this is not going to be us talking to you not very much. It's going to be you talking to us. And talking to each over. And ideally everyone online also talking to each other as well. So welcome and thank you for joining this session. I will talk a little bit about -- just the overall outline. And then we can get started.
So this is being organized by virtual routes. My name is James Shires. I'm co-director of virtual routes. We are an NGO that focuses on research, education and public engagement in cybersecurity and Internet Governance. I will land it over to introduce my co-worker, Louise Marie Hurel.
>> RAPPORTEUR: Hello, everyone. Can you hear me okay? Good. I am Louise Marie Hurel. I'm a researcher here at the Royal United Services Institute, which is a fancy name for a think tank in London working on a range of issues and defense, and one of them is cybersecurity. And we conduct research and also convene different sectors to discuss some of the domestic but also international policy challenges on cybersecurity. So it's lovely to be here, even if online this time, but it's great to see some familiar faces as well.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Louise. And what we will do is the following. Louise will say a little bit about RUSI's main programme in this space, which is a global partnership on responsible cyber behaviour.
We will then turn to our key speaker. We are very pleased to have Corrine Casha to give her perspective on crossing different communities. You can use a code or link to the quiz. And we will seven it to the room to unpack the questions in more detail. So those online will go into smaller group and those in the room will do so as well.
You will be assisted very ably in this task by two of our co-hosts, Yasmine and Erik here, who will be going around and answering any questions, stimulating discussion based on their own extensive knowledge of this area. So Yasmine and Erik thank you so much for helping out here. I will now stall here and hand the floor to Corrine for some opening rashes. I will also move my video so the online people can see her in person.
>> CORRINE CASHA: Thanks, James. My name is Corrine. I'm multi-director for Global Affairs at the Ministry of Global and Foreign Affairs.
The reason I'm here at the IGF forum is precisely because of the fact that our government is currently sponsoring fellows to participate here in this IGF forum. And the reason why we are sponsoring the IGF forum, is because we are firm believers in the fact that cyberpolicy should not be restricted solely to governments but that cyberpolicy should also incorporate different facets, should incorporate industry, should incorporate Academia, and incorporate Civil Society and also should incorporate researchers.
So one of the main -- let's say, sacks, that we are currently conducting is to bridge the divides and also have the cyber researchers, cyber government officials interaction more with each other. From my personal experience, this is very important task, because when it comes to -- for example drafting national cyber strategies it's important to have different ideas. Not only restricted to what cyberpolicy is by government, but it's important to also factor in the research, the Academia. The government -- let's say perspectives, coupled with other partners.
So I'm very pleased to be here today. Because this is exactly the combination of what we want it to be, a networking event, where we discuss ideas. We discuss knowledge. Where we impart information together, and hopefully build up better cyber resilient as well among ourselves.
I also wanted to outline that being a European member, Malta is advised the European government and council to actually incorporate these different factors together. So we are actually obliged to also include -- so just as this policy of inclusiveness as well. And to include different communities. So it's also a part of our -- let's say, EU membership or of our EU obligations to have these different perspectives come together.
So that's what I wanted to say from my perspective. And I now hand it over to you, James, again. Thanks.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much, Corrine. And I will go straight to Louise to talk about the Global Partnership.
>> RAPPORTEUR: Wonderful.
Thank you very much. Just a year ago some of us were together in Kyoto for the regional launch of the Global Partnership for responsible cyber behaviour which is an initiative that we have established since 2022, it actually here at RUSI with the purpose of bringing to the research community, studying and engaging in topics related to responsible cyber behaviour.
And I think to be back at the IGF just really shows the importance of this space, for us to be able to connect not only with other researchers but most importantly to make the most out of this multistakeholder community that the IGF has been nesting for decades now.
And I just would like to echo a lot of what Corrine just said. The objective of the partnership is really to bridge part of that conversation. But most importantly, is to identify who is researching topics reeled to responsible cyber behaviour. And I say responsible cyber behaviour, because it's not just about states responsibility in cyberspace. But it's really recognizing that we will only be able to have a proper conversation. And we will only be able to develop a critical mass and critical thinking if we are able to identify those researchers that are based in different regions, right.
And that has been our arduous task to identify researchers working on these topics from the different parts of the world. So we launched that.
But I think the background for the conversation that we are having today -- and I think it's a perfect, you know, match between what we are doing over here at RUSI with a global partnership and what routes is doing as well is connecting different communities. Because at this moment, as I think many of you are very familiar, it's been decades that the UN processes have been discussing the rules of the road for responsible state behaviour, right. And while it is an important space that has developed norms and -- you know the recognition of how international law supplies to cyberspace, even though only 33 government entities -- I want to say 31 because only two of them have applied International Law into cyberspace. And that's good and important when it comes to peace and stability in cyberspace.
But these UN processes they revolve very much around a particular modus operandi. And that includes it's government centric, even though there is some separation of stakeholders. And even though we see three in the room it's still in the room challenging two different polls. So U.S. western democracy is on one side and obviously Russia, China and a couple others, right.
And I think the debate here is to bring those different bits of pieces and in these different countries and especially developing countries to have a little bit more voice in those processes, and sometimes that is by the broader competition.
I think another thing is it's on international peace and security and much less so on other areas of thinking about responsible cyber behaviour such as development and how it enables a lot of the conversation of states being able to be accountable as well as other stakeholders. Of course there is some conversation around due diligence. But then it's still very limited to the language of this particular space.
And I think -- you know it also means limiting who can be in those rooms, right. Even though there is some accredited organizations that can attend the -- let's say opened working group on cybersecurity we still see that there's a certain privilege to be in this room. You need to be accredited. You need to have the resources.
So the whole point of this conversation, and it has emerged as part of this dialogue between us and virtual routes really, to think about how can we actually look at other spaces within the UN system that actually already has that structure for us to facilitate a dialogue where we can bring these communities together. And where we can leverage the knowledge and that others are conducting in this field. How can we identify researchers let's say now in other region. How can we understand other views of responsibility cyber behavior beyond just the very state centric or just related to these poles or just to government.
And how can we think about something that is encoded at the international level and into these response but at the regional level and domestic and how states and countries can justify developing cyber capabilities. So I really wanted to give a little bit of a glimpse at the background of where we are coming from as RUSI and our commitment to foster networking significants such as these. But also our collaboration with virtual routes which is also a member and a partner of the GPRCB.
So I just wanted to welcome you all to the session and to thank you for the opportunity and really gutted to not be able to be there. But very excited to what we are going to be able to learn from each other and also from the conversation that we will have here online. So thank you very much and sorry if I spoke a little bit too much. But looking forward to connecting with you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Louise. And that context was super important. So we are really glad that you could share that with us.
What we are going to do now is we are going to move from the bit where we talk at you. To the bit where you engage in ail will bit of a Q&A to start with. So as you will be able to see in person, there is now a Slido with three shore questions.
So please do fill out these three short questions to get a sense of who we have in the room and what you think the main challenges are. Anni, I believe, will share the link to this same Slido online for those participating in hybrid form. And I can see people are already filling it out. So maybe the online people are super quick, they have their laptops already open.
We broke this down into communities. Can you slice a pie any way you want. This was how we decided to do it.
Government, Intergovernmental organizes and Academia and Civil Society. So very appeasingly it looks like we have a similar mix of different attendees so that's good. If there is anyone from one community, that might be a lesson in itself.
So we are now changing results and we can see that actually IGOs are representing the majority of the people in the room. And Erik and Yasmine haven't filled out the poll themselves. So the telecommunities come from government and they come -- so telecommunity is my identity but they also have affiliations in these different area as well. If you identify as technical then also please list your organizational affiliation as well.
So I will now go to the second question we asked you. Which was how often do you engage with people outside your main community? So we know there's a lot of IGO people in the room. There's some Civil Society, some industry. And how often do you talk to people from other communities?
I like that this is going often is the main response. We are seeing no one's first time in engaging in communities. Which is good but we would be welcoming that as well. Okay. So occasionally, some responses. Some people doing this all the time. But it looks like most people are doing this often, regularly but not sort of day-to-day in their normal jobs. Maybe what we would expect in a multistakeholder Internet Governance environment. So that's question two. That gives us a sense of who is in the room and their community interaction.
Now we will go to the most important question. This is the one that is going to frame your breakout sessions. So it's not a ranking. This is more of a word cloud. So what do you think are the main obstacles to greater cross community interaction? Louise mentioned a few already. Things like accreditation to key events. Thing like resources and participation. Others coming out as well. So please fill in as many words as you would like to hear as well.
Don't forget you have to come up with additional words. You can also -- you know double click or double down on the ones that are already there as well. I will give you a few more minutes to think about this. It's a little bit more of a challenging question than the first two.
Some really thought provoking answers coming out already. Wow. I can still see a couple people typing. So I want to give people the space to make sure we capture as many views as possible in terms of these obstacles.
Just take a quick poll of everyone in the room. Does everyone in the room feel that you filled out to your comfort. You put as much as you want into the word cloud. I will take that as a yes. And same for people online as well. Thank you very much for putting this through.
Just a few -- I already have a lot of responses thinking already. But I'm going to hold them back. Because I don't want to talk any more to you. I want you all to discuss this word cloud between yourselves, right. This is a networking session, not a presentation session. So what we will do is break into different groups here, small groups in the room. We will go into breakout rooms online.
For people online Anni will be assigning you to breakout rooms. We are looking about three or four people per group. And then what we will do is spend 15 minutes just talking about these key points. Can you pick one of them. And really drill into that. Say what is the issue here. Why is this such an issue. So what are the reasons for that issue. And most importantly how can we overcome the obstacle. I really want everyone to get towards that solution part of the conversation in your groups as well.
So I can already see three clear groups here. One on the left for me. One on the right and one in the middle. If you -- feel free to move around. Feel free to make sure you have different communities involved in that group. And online I hope you also are also be assigned roughly equally as well. So that's it for me. I will break now. And we will come back in 15 minutes to hear your thoughts on these obstacles and how to overcome them. And in a way we will reflect with our participants as well. So thank you very much. And we will see you in 15 minutes.
(breakout sessions)
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much, everyone, online. We will now reconvene in the main room. We will also bring our in-person participants together in the main room as well. I hope the conversations were fruitful.
And I would like to invite our participants to reflect very briefly on the outcome of their discussions, which words they focused on, and most importantly what solutions they found. How might we overcome these obstacles?
And in order to give our in-person participants a chance to get their headphones on, I will start with our breakout room. We will have only a few minutes each. So please can one person from each group say a few words about the session, and then I will turn to Corrine and maybe Louise as well for some concluding thoughts. So would anyone like to intervene from our online breakout room?
>> RAPPORTEUR: I don't watch to keep talking, but I just have to say Akuti and Nurraini, we had a great discussion. I don't know if they want to jump in and discuss what we talked about in our group. We talked a lot about silos and lack of disciplinarity momentum. Akuti and Nurraini, do you want to share?
>> Hello, my name is Nurraini. We talked about silo earlier because I was from the policy side -- I'm still from the policy side of ministry of health but now I'm in Academia as a student. So one of the issues I personally face is to propose the research topic on that governance and related to policing and regulated methods as well.
Because the academic side they just don't really see how this topic would benefit their circle, their fraternity. By the way I belong to the school of infomatics. So them in general the students research topics are usually about data and the analysis of data but not really on the policy and regulatory matters.
So that is one issue that I personally faced. And from my conversation, with different stakeholders, I was from the government. The government side they say they though they need to did a regulation. They need have a policy direction. But they are not really sure on how to do it.
Because they don't understand the technical matters. When I talked to the industry, meaning technical people. They are saying they can design the services according to the regulatory requirements and according to the policies. We just have to tell them what to do and they can design accordingly.
And when I talk to the academic side they are more focused on the ethics and the curiosity and the reliability of both services. Because to them the responsibility lies on the government.
So there is a gap between all of these three communities in terms of understanding each other basically.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. And fascinating to hear not only as a gap between the research in other communities but even these research subjects, you know the choice of topics where the focus can enhance something as well. Hopefully that is something that definitely has a solution. Because we can redirect research in these ways.
I would like now to turn to -- I'm going to badly turn the group with Erik's group. So I will come and give you the mic and give someone from that group the mic, and everyone will be able to hear their reflections from their discussions.
>> My name is Dubi from South Africa. What we have been experiencing and what we have been discussing is how different groups, what is government, Civil Society, IGOs, the silos we can come together because some of us have problems in our country at the face of doing awareness, we don't have a clear-cut policy.
So there's a learning curve for. So us, so how people can come together to come up with a clear policy or a clear regulation on how to have a cybersecurity policy. These are things that are hampering our -- some of us in our country. So there is a learning curve. So we want to see what -- some brought them to resources. Some countries have a national problem and how they can come together and what assistance can be rendered to them. So that they can develop a cybersecurity policy.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much.
And that calls for coming together both within a country and internationally to provide assistance is very well heard and I appreciate your intervention.
The last group we had in person was over here. I would like to invite someone to give some reflections. Please. First of all we point the out how difficult it is to get a Visa. Here in IGF it's been slightly different than other for runs about you still a chance of getting a Visa in EU countries can be 30% and engaging with conversations with similar people and even online but also a person and notifications I work in Berlin.
And what we see is sometimes the process can be rather or it can depend on other countries and sometimes it's kind of arbitrary need. Germany doesn't have a chance. And that's sad, because I think for example it's great to see the involvement of different stakeholders because sometimes we are the ones doing the research I would research on the conversations so if you want other members of the group. Please feel free to do so.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. I want to highlight one issue that was discussed in this group that was fortunate to be a part of which was language barriers. We had one attendee here from chat who speaks French and Arabic and no English and was nonetheless seeking to participate in what is here unfortunately an English language only forum. So I would like to invite letter to say a few things.
>> (speaking non-English language)
(speaking Arabic)
(speaking Arabic).
>> MODERATOR:
(Speaking Arabic)
So of course just to say a little bit about the challenges where not only is language a barrier to an application. Have you Visa applications, you have awareness of thing like cybersecurity measures and also ultimately government resources and money to contribute.
And the there unfortunately the language barriers themselves have been demonstrated in this session. So in the last 5 minutes of the session I would like to turn to Corrine and Louise to give a few concluding remarks on their thoughts. Thank you all for your participation.
>> CORRINE CASHA: Just a few remarks. I don't have a lot to add. I was pleased to hear what they said. They are food for thought, also for me, coming from a perspective of government. I think for me I see two things. One is the fact that coming from government, I see that very often decision making at the highest level, for example at DUN is really sort of the privilege of governments, and I don't only say that in the realm of cyber.
I've seen it in the negotiations, for example, on oceans, and therefore this is not just something that is restricted to cyberpolicy. So in other policy areas. And also at the -- let's say national level. So going from the multilateral to national level, what I see is that the government sort of -- there's this culture where government thinks that it owns policy. And so whenever we are coming one a strategy, for example, not enough research, not enough evidence by Academia or by industry is fed into the sort of strategy document, for example.
So what I see is when we are coming up with a policy position, very often it's taken by government, but it's not -- it does not include the different perspectives of the other players. And I think -- it's really important to bring everybody on board. And this is what we are trying to do. And just knot to take up a lot of time because I know Louise is wanting to say some rashes but on issue of funding we are very well aware of.
That and one of the things any government has been doing is we are fund -- for example when it comes to negotiations at the UN level we fund countries. We fund also governments to -- we sponsor, let's say, least developed countries, delegates who cannot travel and cannot participate. So we fund them. So they are also a part of the process.
And we fund fellows and Academia and researchers. Because we believe it's very important that we continue to fund these different, let's say, stakeholders so their ideas and their knowledge is fed into the process. I think it's very important. So that's all I can say from my end. But I think Louise has a little bit more to say as well from her end.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, and Louise we have already had a sign saying please wrap up. So if you could summarize in 1 minute that would be much appreciated.
>> RAPPORTEUR: Absolutely. I'm not going to take up time, and Corrine, definitely said a lot of what I was going to say. I just wanted to thank you all for the contributions and the thought provoking discussions. The one thing I would stress, though, is point on -- usually in these conversations, be it at the IGF and even at the UN, we are talking about how to ensure that cross-stakeholder representation is more effective, right.
But I think the lesson that I'm taking from this dialogue today is within our respective stakeholder groups how can we make it more representative? How can we build those bridges within our respective sectors, right? And that is something that Akuti in our group mentioned within a Civil Society you can use pressure and add pressure to make other space more representative.
But are you as an organization walking the talk of making your staff more diverse of ensuring you have equity and that you are sensitive to the different -- let's say regional reputation within your team.
So I think that is the key takeaway from me from our conversation with you today. And thank you, again, and thanks, James, for, you know, holding the fort and for the wonderful contribution.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Louise, and thank you, Corrine, and for facilitating for us. And thank you online and in person. (speaking in Arabic)
And have a great rest of your day.