Our Journey

Short Version

In 2015, we started advancing TCCB & Seevik Net via a series of research initiatives and publications, and the holding of the 1st Edition of the Free and Safe in Cyberspace conference series in Brussels.

In 2019, a startup spin-in called TRUSTLESS.AI which attracted private investments to build initial architecture, ecosystems, proof-of-concepts and systems compliant the TCCB (closed in September 2023).

In 2021, the Trustless Computing Certification Body and Seevik Net Initiative was launched and established in Geneva during the 8th Edition of the Free and Safe in Cyberspace, in its preliminary form, at the presence top partners and personalities.

By Spring 2023, we held eleven editions of the Free and Safe in Cyberspace (in Geneva, Zurich, Brussels, New York and Berlin) with over 120 outstanding public and private participants. We aggregated world-class advisors and research partners, evolved the Trustless Computing Paradigms. Over 15 nation states and 3 IGOs have engaged in our events and constituent processes, or stated their interest for the Initiative.

On June 28th 2023, after months of reckoning with the emergence immense risks and opportunities of AI and their intersection with unregulated digital communications, we launched a Harnessing AI Risk Initiative for the creation of three new global intergovernmental organizations and participatory constituent processes leading up to them, to wholly govern AI and digital communications for the global public good. Such Initiative includes the Trustless Computing Certification Body as one of such organizations, and was presented to a UN public event organized by the Community of Democracies, with its 32 member states.

On October 18th 2023, we published call for the convening of an Open Transnational Constituent Assembly for AI and Digital Communications, a call for a critical mass of globally-diverse nations to democratically and inclusively build such new organizations.

Next November 2024, we’ll be aggregating a critical mass of pioneering nations, IGOs and vision-align entities to jump-start the constituent process of such organizations during for the 1st Harnessing AI Risk Summit, in Geneva.

Long Version

The Trustless Computing Association is the fruit of 20 years of the near single-minded quest by Rufo Guerreschi to extend the principles of democracy and civil liberties to the global level, and to our sphere of communication and information. He has sought to realize the potential of IT to radically increase both civil freedoms and democratic participation, while radically mitigating their abuse to commit grave crimes.

He has been an activist for global democracy since the year 2000 when I met Troy Davis, the son of Garry Davis, "World citizen n.1", and worked in New York for 6 months as his deputy director at its small World Citizen Foundation pursuing ways and funds to promote global democratic constituent processes via the newly emerging internet technologies.

Ever since nearly all my work has being aimed at find way to foster or catalyze proper global constituent assembly processes, such as those that Garry Davis called for in 19 November 1948, interrupting the UN General ASsembly in Paris supported by Camus, Sartre, Einstein and hundreds of thousands.

To this end, Rufo founded and lead multiple NGOs and startups in the areas of e-participation, free software, and bleeding-edge privacy-enhancing technologies and standards.

In 2001, when Rufo participated in the fields of Porto Alegre, Brazil, to the 1st World Social Forum, a historical event for progressive transnational political social movements, as deputy director of the World Citizen Foundation, an organization promoting the radical democratization and empowerment of global institutions and delegate of the Seattle-based Public Sphere Project of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.

Together with many bright altruistic minds from all over the World, he envisioned how the Internet, booming at the time, could uniquely empower activists to democratically control and fuel transnational democratic movements, to promote the democratization of global and media governance.

After spending one year in Seattle and around the World to acquire skills at 4thpass.com (then Motorola) – makers of the World 1st mobile app store and provisioning system – he proceeded to enshrine such goals in 2003 in the mission and vision of a new non-profit Sammondano, (“those who share the some World” in Esperanto), which became the ultimate goal of every startup and non-profit Rufo founded and lead since.

In 2004, Rufo went on to found a startup to develop open-source e-participation platforms for political organization, Participatory Technologies, that worked with an organization in 3 continents and EU parties, considering EU-wide membership at the time. In 2007, he moved on to pursue similar goals founding the Telematics Freedom Foundation, whose statute (doc in Italian) prescribed that the entire governance of the organization would mandatorily be transferred to the users of its open-source e-participation platform once they reached the number of 10.000.

Aimed to create the World's 1st open and democratic self-determined cyber-social system. The concepts and web tools of “user-verifiable social telematics” and “transparent telematics”, digital “continuous democracy” were developed and promoted, laying the foundation for Trustless Computing.

In 2008, the CivicRoom (now “Seevik Room”), a central element of Trustless Computing, was first conceived, whereby a citizens-jury-like body of 5 citizens, accountable to a non-profit, guarantees extreme levels of accountability of a given hosting room. Such levels of assurance enabled end-users of security-critical open source web services, such web-based e-participation platforms of political parties, to radically be assured that the free software they downloaded according to the new GPLv3 Affero license – and the hardware stated by the provider – was the same as that running effectively inside the server room.

The CivicRoom idea was first introduced by us in this 2007 blog post, constituted the core project of the Telematics Freedom Foundation, and recently validated for example by the “2-man rule” for access to NSA server rooms proposed by the NSA Director in the wake of Snowden revelations. In this video minute 33.21 till 36.00, Bruce Schneier, the most renowned IT security expert of the world, makes direct reference to the need to deploy in-person “secret sharing” schemes inspired to ballot box voting procedures. The CivicRoom was demonstrated with a physical installation in 2007 next to the Ara Pacis in the center of Rome (short video), at major ICT event organized by the newly elected “Italian IT Czar”, Alessandra Poggiani.

The revelations of Edward Snowden in 2013 raised hugely the bar of the challenges to be tackled to turn IT from a means of societal control to one of citizen empowerment. It became clear that all IT was broken by design at birth, down to the CPU, random number generators, chip fabrication processes, and even standards-setting.

Such quest took him to cross path in 2014 with Roberto Gallo (CEO of Kryptus) in Campina, Brazil, the deepest IT security expert in South America, leading unique open-source HW security projects on a similar quest, and with highly complementary skills, creating a bond that still lasts to this day.

The realization of the potential of ICT to enhance freedom had been promised by Richard Stallman with the Free Software Movement, on one side, and by Steve Jobs’ Apple, with the famous “1984” Apple video ad, on the other. Thirty years later, with Snowden in, it became clear that such promises had not only utterly failed, but the freedom and security of citizens and businesses had dramatically worsened. We learned that ensuring the integrity of free software and a good server-side process was not nearly enough to provide meaningful freedom. We also learned that genius innovators could be quite deceptive and disingenuous when claiming to be primarily concerned about freedom and civil rights, rather than power and profit.

Since 2015, the Trustless Computing Association was established to take on such a challenge. Since, we’ve built an expanding global community and consensus around our standards and ecosystems, through a tight-knit, resilient emerging consortium for Trustless Computing, made of globally-rare and unique technical R&D partners, which we lead to submit EU funding initiative to build the tech and the certification body, spanning the entire supply chain – including CPU, operating system, server room access management, fabrication processes, and standard-setting governance. Such R&D partners include EU’s largest cybersecurity industry association, Italy, and Austria state secret standardization agencies, and in particular technical partners along with the entire life-cycle stack, including the world’s only maker of a fully inspectable microprocessor, KRYPTUS, the world’s largest AI R&D organization DFKI, and a leading open-source microkernel maker, KernKonzept, and more.

Since 2015, we’ve been fast expanding a consensus of top experts and EU institutions around our proposed Trustless Computing Paradigms and the Trustless Computing Certification Body as a world leader in IT security through our Free and Safe in Cyberspace Conference series – held already in 11 editions, twice in Brussels, Iguazu, New York, again Brussels, then Berlin, Geneva and Zurich . We partnered with Tecnalia and CapGemini to write new policy options for EU Parliament on cybersecurity standards.

In July 2016, as we expanded our technical designs, consortium and event series, we were selected and participated to the leading German hardware accelerator, the Berlin-based Hardware.co. And we held another edition of the Free and Safe in Cyberspace conference.

In April 2017, we signed a Letter of Intent for a Partnership for Trustless Computing with the fastest growing IT security R&D center in Europe, the Univ. Luxembourg SnT. In May 2018, we moved our offices to Berlin. In June and July 2018, substantial interest has arisen from public and private partners to pursue a larger 15-25M€+ dual-use innovation/R&D funding initiative, with new EDICP funds from EDA, called Trustless Dual-Use. And we held another edition of the Free and Safe in Cyberspace conference.

In September 2018, our startup spin-off TRUSTLESS.AI was accepted in the prestigious Fintech Fusion accelerator in Geneva, and soon decided to move both startup and association in Switzerland. The startup has grown. The association hosted the 6th edition of Free and Safe in Cyberspace. We established the startup spin-off TRUSTLESS.AI to build the initial TCCB-complaints open computing base and open target architecture and realized an initial proof-of-concept device (video) with target clients.