Welcome to Tech Talk. Bye.

Well, thank you so much. I'm delighted to to join the podcast today. As your listeners can probably tell from the lilt in my accent, I come from, Ireland, and I've joined, CDT as the Europe director. I've spent the last fifteen years working on international human rights law at European level and international level as well. And and for the last ten or so years of that, I've actually been leading organizations, and people mainly focusing on how we bring about change and ensure that human rights and individual rights are at the center of EU law and policy. I have, worked, I guess, across I worked in the private sent sector fifteen years ago. Most recently was working at UN human rights, and I spent many years at Amnesty International, the the biggest human rights organization in the world. So I'm really delighted at this crucial moment for tech, law, and policy to be joining CDT joining and leading CDT's Europe office.

on one hand, the Digital Markets Act, which is looking at some of the questions related to EU competition policy. So we can see the competition policy will be high on lawmakers' agendas on both side of the Atlantic. And then as you said, the Digital Services Act, which is a very broad reaching draft proposal, looking at some of those items that you mentioned. So at the Center for Democracy and Technology and me personally as a an advocate for having international human rights policies at the center of content moderation, even before the publication of this proposal, we've been calling for things such as more transparency over algorithm algorithms and decision making, about giving more power to users to challenge decisions that have been made about their content, but also, you know, really stressing about the importance of having these complex questions of the legality of speech being kept in the purview of the courts. So from that perspective, when I look at and it's still a draft proposal. I should stress it'll take many years before, there's a final agreement on on the law. There's definitely a number of things at CDT that we can welcome. They are looking at bringing mandatory transparency to some issues such as giving researchers more access to understand, how algorithms are working. There's talk about giving more procedural safeguards for users when they want to challenge decisions that are made about their rights. At the same time, we do see some contradictions in the draft regulation, which raised some concern. So one point, is surrounding this whole question of intermediate liability. So the European Commission has listened to international human rights experts, CDT, and other, not for profits in the tech space in saying that it does recognize the general principle of maintaining, a clear liability framework. Because what we don't want, of course, is a situation whereby private companies are incentivized to censor and overtake down content. So there's a provision in there that guards that principle. At the same time, in other parts of the regulation, there are provisions which we worry could undermine that and actually create a situation where it's still platforms that are making, you know, decisions about legality of speech or will be incentivized to over censor. So I think the really again, going back to that core point about the rule of law that from CDT's perspective to protect individual users' rights, we do not want a situation where neither platforms nor governments are, either censoring people's speech or inhibiting people's right to equally participate online. So we'll really be hoping to bring be be a player that brings the different stakeholders to the table and have expert discussions on how to make sure that the DSA is ultimately a very positive thing for the development of EU law and tech policy.

Absolutely. So, you know, as we've seen over the last months and even year, there's an increasing realization about the importance of, you know, the digital space and technology on human rights and democracy. And that has not been lost on those who are leading EU foreign policy. Indeed, there was a new action plan on human rights and EU foreign policy adopted last year that already started talking and thinking about what does what would the EU's tech foreign policy look like? And that does bring up a lot of opportunities. One opportunity is really to pay more attention to a role that the EU already plays, which is election monitoring around the world, to pay more attention to the digital elements of that. And there again, you know, CDT stands in a very good position based on many years of experience in this area to bring concrete proposals, and suggestions to diplomats and those working in cyber diplomacy about how we really ensure that human rights policy is upheld and practiced in the EU's foreign policy. Another point in that regard, the EU has a strong track record and a number of guidelines about how to protect human rights defenders, working abroad. And, of course, with the COVID nineteen pandemic, all of our work is online. We know that human rights defenders in particular come under risk of government surveillance and attack as they work online. So, again, encouraging I think there's a great opportunity for the European Union to match its commitment to its human rights defenders with a policy in the digital space, things like championing encryption globally, ensuring safeguards and recourse checks against the surveillance, there's a real opportunity there to modernize some of the EU foreign policy human rights instruments.

Well, you know, one of the things that attracted me to join CDT, and that's working internationally, It's just the manner in which CDT brings together that deep technical expertise with the understanding of democracy in a broad sense, whether it's about election integrity, whether it's about human rights and content moderation. And I really believe that given that we now have so many proposals, we mentioned the digital markets act, the digital services act, this new push for more of a tech tech focus in the foreign policy, there's just such an opportunity for, a Europe office that's rooted in EU law and policy debates to help shape those developments and to hopefully play a positive role as we look to shaping global norms on these issues. I believe that CDT also brings such added value with the fact that we have colleagues who are, you know, human rights lawyers, but also technologists, engineers, and you really need to have that, you know, cross sectoral, multi stakeholder approach to have meaningful impact on law and policy debates. And I'm just really excited to have been tasked this mandate to grow the CDT Europe office.

First and foremost, of course, like any organization, we are navigating working together in the time of pandemic. So for me, it's very important that, the Center for Democracy and Technology in Europe is very mindful of some of the implications of online, working and in particular how that can impact marginalized or at risk groups. I'm really excited about a new project of work that we're looking at, in the terms in terms of working against algorithms and discrimination. And my own background is in EU equality law. I worked for many years, for example, on ensuring equal access to education for Roma children in different EU member states. And I really believe that there's a fantastic opportunity to, again, use an existing body of law from the EU, the very strong equality law, but really then actually look at algorithms, whether that's in recruitment, whether that's in content moderation, and make sure that victims of discrimination have access to justice, have remedy in practice, rather than in an abstract sense. I think that's a really exciting opportunity and project that CDT Europe is looking at developing, and one I very much hope that will be, central to our concerns in 2021. More generally, I'm very excited to grow the team, to to welcome new colleagues, and to ensure that we have a central seat at the table.

We're also calling for more transparency about content moderation rules to allow public involvement and accountability and for more rights for individual users. Sorry. My cat was just playing the piano. I did not. Leah. Sorry about that. Shall I just start that give you ten seconds and start the answer to that again?