I am publicly setting the intention to post every LOI that I've submitted to fellowship programs where I've been rejected. This is not out of shame or blame, but rather to simply and honestly still get to share the beliefs and intents of my work. This also is to create a bridge for public feedback, clarity, and collaboration asks.

1. Sloane Joie Trugman
February 28, 2017
Mr. Christopher Stone
Open Society Foundation
Dear Mr. Stone:
No matter where you are in the world, modern or not, security and insecurity, oddly are taboo concepts.
This makes something as critical as data security, individual-digital identity, national-digital identity, and
planetary-digital identity really hard conversations to have because it seems so distant and rather
farfetched. And it keeps getting pushed from under one rug to the next. Although the internet has been
declared as a “basic human right” by the UN, I still am finding, globally, that there has yet to be a
conversation around individual security and accountability of the digital identity.
It was late October 2015 and I was in Florida attending one of our nation’s top military and intelligence
communication conferences. I gripped my business cards confidently that read: Secretary of the
Information State while sitting front row before a panel that held the: Section Head at J6 NATO Allied
Command Transformation (ACT)-Norfolk, NEC Project Officer European Defense Agency; Deputy
Director for Command and Control Integration (DD C2I); Directorate for Command, Control,
Communications, and Computers-Joint Staff J6; Principal Scientist-Scientific Lead Deployable CIS
Networking and IT Infrastructure Service Line- Operational CIS Service Area NATO Communications and
Information Agency (NCI Agency); the Vice President-Product Management SafeNet Assured
Technologies; and the Solution Architect DeepSecure Ltd. Literally, some of the top national and
international data and systems people.
Out of the six very distinguished and dignified men before me - that shape not only doctrine, policies,
culture, and the protocol for the advancement and (war) exercises of communication technologies for and
across their constituencies (and allies) and to set national and international precedent of all things cyber-
not one could clearly answer my questions on data security, national-digital identity and public access to
complex information questions that I machine gunned at them following their discussion.
To be fair, these gentlemen were locked within their particular legacy silos, and at the same time, were
responsible for developing national resiliencies and alert systems for major cyber attacks, hacks, and to
field the national identity and even war implications of those…for an entire nation and a global alliance!
But, the OPM breach had already happened earlier that summer and they had nothing to say about a
cyber attack of that scale that not only jeopardized national systems, but that took a federal system that
held sensitive federal and civilian information and liberated it to the internet for the public. So, if
innovations followed history, that meant that the rate of access to high technologies would eventually
parallel the rate of bad habit of enabling a culture that been permitting hacking and identity theft. And that
would become the national identity, which it has become. I believe the way that too much accountable
and real information that was leaked out there is being dealt with is flooding it with just as much false
information. And it just doesn't have to be.
The international media has been all over the relationships of civilian and US government ties to apps
and data: “Why the CIA wanting encryption backdoors is a failure of leadership, not intelligence, Analysis:
The question shouldn't be if encryption should have backdoors, but why intelligence agencies have begun
shifting the blame onto those who push for privacy”;“Big Data: A Tool for Inclusion or Exclusion? …While
the report shows the important role the federal government must play in enforcing civil rights laws online,
the need for robust auditing by companies and external groups remains as critical as ever”; “Big Data Can
Be Used To Violate Civil Rights Laws, and the FTC Agrees”; “Cyber isn’t all that special, says NSA chief”;
“Cyberwar for Sale - After a maker of surveillance software was hacked, its leaked documents shed light

2. on a shadowy global industry that has turned email theft into a terrifying — and lucrative — political
weapon”; not to mention what has been going on since the recent US Presidential election, and your very
own article in the Guardian, “We Won’t Let Political Led Motivated Hacks Stop Us.”
I suddenly realized that the most sophisticated and knowledgeable people perhaps, in the “recognized”
world (recognized meaning distinguished, internationally respected, and heads of national and
geopolitical nation-states), could not only incompletely answer basic security questions or field civilian
digital-national identity and security related concerns, but they were dealing with hacks, breaches, and
shifts in national and global strategy so far bigger than themselves. So who could answer those human
oriented questions? I mother knows best, my mom sure couldn’t either.
So I turned to the proverbial mother’s of my nation and friend groups. As a January 2016 article points
out, the “FTC is falling short in protecting consumers' data used by businesses,” and it seems that
national-digital identity is something to get on paper and get a laugh out of, as demonstrated with the H.R.
DATA (Data Accountability and Trust Act) Bill.
Could the Electronic Frontier Foundations (EFF), The World Economic Forum, the ACLU, or the Human
Rights Foundation help out? Perhaps, Megan Smith, the CTO of the United States? Maybe even her
colleagues at the OSTP or within the Digital Service? I knew something was up culturally when our
Nation’s highest science and technology office and digital service were not creating campaigns, portals,
communication, or ease to know citizens rights online and what a very decentralized digital self meant on
top of having a national identity.
All of this seemed to me to be a bigger identity unknown that is affecting a global citizenry. A global
citizenry that also hold over 65 million refugees that are beginning to be issued a Blockchain or biometric
data enabled technology to hold their “identity”. This flags me with with fears because at the moment
there is no known accountability for users especially because they trust the companies that build the
products and provide the services and then they trust their governments laws and international treaties
that are supposedly designed with them in mind. Yet, at the same time, there is no formal, easy, or
widespread knowledge base (like brushing your teeth) to discuss pressing digital hygiene of the what,
where, when, why etc. topics of data, digital culture, or identity.
Then the U.N. declared internet access a human right. But if targeted content and trackers were behind
the information that was being produced and consumed, why wasn’t basic digital-identity standards a
thing? New standards need to replace ones that are no longer up to standard, especially in communities
that are getting the newest first versus those that have been living with something for instance to watch
it’s development and progression. There has not been a hygiene or practice standard set for the global
and extraterrestrial proliferation of data and information. And that was a starting point for me. Because
whilst countries were trying to be agile with they image of trust and security to those in their boarders,
techniques, capabilities, and ingenuity was becoming much more colorful, in demand, and quite frankly
fun outside of government service jobs that made innovation, information, and technical capabilities about
national identity and warfare.
Then it dawned on me. I wouldn’t know what values or lessons to impart on my children, when I had
them, as to how to be safe and to survive in this time and age. Machines would be collecting information
and as soon as new industries caught up, they’d be making accountability judgments on those humans.
In January of this year, I visited Thailand and Myanmar and yet again came face-to-face with this
disconnect from digital identity and data management that I had in the United States even though all over,
and even in the countryside, locals protecting 11th century ruins and living a life managed by hard work
for the family and by religious ethics, were data messaging, creating Facebooks accounts, using mobile
banking, and communicating across the web and using apps that they were advertised to use.

3. Historically speaking, humans have created management systems to live or to go through the greatest
unknown that is our actual present: living. But less often then not, do those that benefit, fall, or rise
through the systems exchange their experience. In product development or law, there are places of audit
or discovery to get an assessment or overall feelings so that something can be created, altered, or
updated. However management has gotten so good that styles are now beginning to be challenged
simply for the fact that there are so many ways to contribute under large organizations or institutional
structure that accountability starts getting lost when there is too much shuffle. This is where I found that
no matter how many programs, innovators, rules, laws, and systems of rights and expression that had
been created, that those that benefitted from these programs were so far from knowing them as
immediate and ready hand knowledge. A time for new standards.
I’ve been witnessing that, unlike with national-religious-village-language-etc identities, We, as a society,
across boarders, across the planet and even as far as in outer space, have no real cultural identity to
what we consume or produce, making what comes from insights off that information hard to understand,
weigh in value, teach our children what is hygienic (choices based), or even invest into x y orz toward
what the future will hold for us with all the info out there.
We’ve already created the many many many ways to be human, but we haven't stepped back for a
second to see what that means when decentralized identities enter our individual, familial, educational,
professional, religious, stately, planetary identity on top.
My intention is to be an Open Society Fellow and develop and local-to-global campaign on digital
identities, a how-to guide for the internet to further it’s justification as a human right, highlight the UN’s 17
sustainability goals and how learning what a basic human right such as the internet can provide as a
learning and access point to contributing actually creating your identity as being part of a much larger
voice on this planet.
My highest regards and I look forward to your contact later this March.
Sloane Joie Trugman