DETAILED AIMS: Aim of the event series, in synergy with Trustless Computing Certification Campaign, is to catalyse and coordinate a wide multi-disciplinary, technically-proficient and citizen-accountable multi-stakeholder process to arrive at wide informed consensus of a critical mass of relevant actors to define and jump start a set of new socio-technical standards, certification and certification governance bodies for critical end-2-end ICT communications, infrastructure, Artificial Intelligence, targeted lawful access systems and cyber-physical services, that are uniquely-comprehensive and achieve unprecedented, ultra-high and constitutionally-meaningful levels of assurance, and assurance measurability; while preserving or increasing targeted cyber-investigation capabilities, preventing malevolent use, and overall increasing public safety. They will enable low costs and efficient certification processes by facilitating radically open innovation models and target architectures.

THE NEEDS: Necessarily, after Snowden and recent hacks, any new standardization and certification paradigms will need to assume that highly-skilled state and non-state attackers, with very limited actual liability risk, are willing to devote tens of million of euros to sustainably compromise at least a few arts of the life-cycle or supply chain of a given end-2-end IT services, in order to gain and maintain remote access, preferably and mostly highly-scalable. Such standards will therefore need to renounce to the need or assumption of trust in anything and anyone that is critically involved in any critical IT service life-cycle component, from certifications governance to hardware fabrication oversight; except on the assurance quality of the overall organizational governance of all intrinsic socio-technical constrains and (dis)incentives bearing on all entities critically involved in the entire life-cycle.

DESIRABLE NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL POLICY IMPACTS: Although such bodies are meant to be highly effective within current legislative and constitutional frameworks – i.e. without governmental recognition or legislative changes – they will hopefully provide the socio-technical oversight, standardization and certification basis for the enforceability in future scenarios of recognition or adoption as voluntary or mandatory for certain classes of services by (a) the EU or single national governments – in order to solidly comply to their Constitutions and human rights charters – of (b) by intergovernmental agreements and treaties. Examples of such treaties could the Geneva-Convention like treaty proposed by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right of Privacy, the proposed Snowden Treaty, or standard bodies for the “so-called” World-Sized Web called for by Bruce Schneier. They may constitute an example (OMC post) of the “sector-specific” solutions to Safe Harbour issue, and other EU/US privacy issues, as suggested by Max Schrems.
Constituent processes for the creation of the mentioned intergovernmental treaties could get inspiration from those of the Coalition for International Criminal Court, lead by the World Federalist Movement, that created the International Criminal Court, or a proposed constituent process based on UN Caucuses, which was approved by the World Federalist Movement 2008 Congress (post).

VISION: On the medium term, it is hoped that a wide informed consensus and adoption of the envisioned certifications can spur substantial R&D projects and open ecosystems in a solid actionable path to participating actors and nations with: a renewed digital sovereignty of the communications of citizens and public institutions; a global business leadership in the most strategic security-sensitive IT sectors (such as autonomous vehicles, advanced narrow-AI, critical infrastructure, intelligence and lawful access systems); a reference for a “trustworthy computing base” for the defense of critical assets and infrastructures and strategic defense communication; a sound low-level technological basis and governance model for narrow but ever wider AI systems, in critical societal scenarios, including autonomous and semi-autonomous moveable systems.

GOVERNANCE: By far the most crucial factor affecting the achievement and sustainable maintenance of the targeted assurance certification levels will rest on the ability to set in place constituent process of future organizational bodies or frameworks aimed at high to ultra-high levels of transparency, oversight, technical-proficiency, citizen-accountability and presumable altruistic intentions.
In synergy with such Campaign, the event series aims to jump-start adequate constituent organizational processes for the future governance of such bodies, well aware that by far the most crucial factor affecting the success in achieving and sustaining such assurance levels, is the ability to sustain extremely high-levels of technical-proficiency, citizen-accountability and presumable altruistic intentions of the key resulting decision-making bodies. Such bodies would be international non-profits, self-financed by the costs of certifications to ICT services offered by private and public entities. They could constitute for the digital world, for example, what the International Democratic and Electoral Assistance represents for global elections (OMC post).