Blockchain for Human Rights and Historical Remembrance

07/20/2018

She fights for political prisoners, arranges free lectures on human rights, and stands for commemorating those repressed during the Communist era. She has also worked in one of the first Russian crypto media and held several industry meetups. How does one person manage all that? Call it a mystery. We talked to Elisaveta Vereshchagina about the past, present, and future of blockchain and the possible ways to involve the technology into the human rights agenda. 

— Do you believe blockchain, decentralised economy, and cool independent IT projects in general have any chance to survive in today’s authoritarian Russia?

— I’m trying to look at it from a different, non-state perspective. The “information war“ might be ongoing. What has been important to me, though, is that, unlike politicians or even human rights activists, the crypto community has never been splitted that much over national issues. You know, blockchain enthusiasts have been working together even with their countries being at war or at the edge of war. Either the community is too pragmatic, or too idealistic…

— The pragmatic seem to be prevailing over crypto community today. Idealists are leaving.

— The whole concept was originally created by cyberpunks who advocated for a non-state structure. They stood for privacy meaning against wiretapping and lurking and tried to create a “parallel universe“ without violence and state arbitrariness. Cooperating with the like-minded (regardless of their nationality) was a true honour for the gang.

I actually subscribe to the idea of blockchain going in this “state-regardless” direction. However, it is not much likely nowadays, as the technology is increasingly being used by states and corporations in their commercial and political interests. In a 2015 interview, the head of SWIFT claimed that as soon as the technology skyrocketed, they would search for the ways to deal with it. The head of the Russian Investigative Committee put it differently: if bitcoin had not been banned, he said, the competitiveness of rouble would have decreased (sic!). I believe he did not understand quite clearly what he was saying, neither did his fellow officials, otherwise he would have been fired for questioning the compatibility of the national currency. Well, just kidding.

Speaking of the “authoritarian Russia” of today's... By 2018, the government has indeed taken a few tough measures, including the infamous ban of the Telegram messenger after its owners’ refusal to provide the security services with access to the users’ accounts. The very fact that special services officially demand access to every citizen’s correspondence is a direct violation of the human rights law. That’s complete nonsense!

A few years ago, one ministry could advocate for crypto ban, while some other would praise the technology, suggesting to switch to blockchain literally each and every thing. A lot of people in our country have been fighting for crypto legalization because they believe it is about freedom, dignity, and progress. But now the space of freedom is narrowing, it is.

— You have been a part of one of the first Russian cryptomedia legendary team. Tell us a little more about the development of the industry.

— Well, we launched our first meetups in early 2016. At the beginning, there were just a few people from the Moscow blockchain community, mostly, you know, “geeks” who did not know well how to communicate and were afraid of public speaking. They didn’t have it in them: the basic evangelist function. A few months earlier, in autumn 2015, we presented a wallet app at the Moscow Exhibition of Economic Achievements, and I met an American blockchain-evangelist whose values were close to mine. She came to crypto from charity and now was traveling the world speaking to people about blockchain. There is no such profession as “evangelist”, at least in Russia, so it usually sounds like we do nothing: just randomly chatting here and there. Still, it is an important job, a job of the future, they call it, — to unify people online and help them meet offline, creating a space of shared goals and values, guiding the conversation.

— Can you point out any problems you witnessed as the community developed?

— A huge number of amateurs, especially when it came to ICOs. Everyone and their mother were launching startups, most of them aimed at just 'making money'. I was attending a pitch session in a prominent accelerator when I first realized that not a single project was indeed innovative enough or socially oriented. Everyone just wanted to get more money. But who needs so much money in a world which might soon collapse?

— Was there any ICO you’d thought of investing into?

— I fell in love with a project called SolarDao. A solar panels market pioneer’s ICO allowed to invest in their longterm solar energy system. They did an amazing 50-page industry analysis — an interesting read, a truly professional work. Moreover, they really stuck out on ecological / futuristic terms because they offered real solutions.

— Solar energy sounds great. And what about the artificial intelligence? In one of your articles, you mentioned that the AI was likely to solve police brutality problems by analyzing video records from police stations in automatic mode and detecting violations. Can you elaborate?

— There is such a chance that the technology will help us prevent the police from behaving unlawfully just by keeping them under control 24/7. What we shall always be aware of, though, is that the technology is a tool which can be used both to safeguard people and to spread total control over them. If the technology in question, for example, gets replicated, we’ll get an ideal tracking system — and the AI will be able to watch over you 24/7, just as at previous stage it would have controlled the police.

— Recently, on your social media you shared an unusual topic of transferring records of people repressed during Stalin’s reign to blockchain (including the information on their burial places). Can blockchain be used for historical remembrance?

— My friend and I have just discussed “the right to be forgotten” which Google made come true by allowing its users to delete their personal data from the web. The friend of mine said it reminded him of George Orwell’s “1984” where one (specifically, the state) could edit any information post factum in their favor. That is exactly what blockchain prevents – once you put something on blockchain, you can not change or erase it. From this point of view, blockchain can do a great job for the truth advocates who do not want their past to be changed by others.

Some time ago registering births on blockchain seemed strange to me, but now I get the point. Once a regime or any other force tries to erase all the information on a person from all the available sources (just like they did under the totalitarian rule, marking out the faces and what we would now call “photoshopping” the “undesirable” people away from articles and photographs), they simply can’t. Thanks to blockchain, it would be impossible to “delete” a person from the historical records as if they had never been born.

And the information concerning repressions… This data often lacks proper verification. For instance, the 1950s KGB issued fake documents stating “your grandmother died of pneumonia in a camp in 1943”, while in reality she had been sentenced to death in the late 1930s.

— Which part of this data has not been disclosed by the security services?

— Since it is not disclosed, we can only guess. But I believe, the part is huge. Interestingly, the facts on repressions are not kept in such great secrecy as the victims’ burial places. The KGB never said: “Here are the mass graves, come and commemorate the people we’ve killed back in the XX century.” The burial places are searched for by enthusiasts following locals stories, with babushkas saying “there is a strange forest surrounded by a fence, which was guarded by the military until the USSR collapsed, and no one knows exactly what the forest hides but everyone believes it’s a frightful place to go...”

But let’s return to blockchain: on the one hand, transferring data on burial places to a huge base where no information can be edited might lead to stuffing the database with fakes (as I have mentioned earlier, not all the KGB documents available are true); on the other hand, we would be able to track back the issue date of any chosen document, so it might be useful.