Transistors, the building blocks of modern electronics, are typically made of silicon. Because it’s a semiconductor, this material can control the flow of electricity in a circuit. But silicon has fundamental physical limits that restrict how compact and energy-efficient a transistor can be.

MIT researchers have now replaced silicon with a magnetic semiconductor, creating a magnetic transistor that could enable smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient circuits. The material’s magnetism strongly influences its electronic behavior, leading to more efficient control of the flow of electricity. 

The team used a novel magnetic material and an optimization process that reduces the material’s defects, which boosts the transistor’s performance.

The material’s unique magnetic properties also allow for transistors with built-in memory, which would simplify circuit design and unlock new applications for high-performance electronics.

“People have known about magnets for thousands of years, but there are very limited ways to incorporate magnetism into electronics. We have shown a new way to efficiently utilize magnetism that opens up a lot of possibilities for future applications and research,” says Chung-Tao Chou, an MIT graduate student in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Physics, and co-lead author of a paper on this advance.

Chou is joined on the paper by co-lead author Eugene Park, a graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE); Julian Klein, a DMSE research scientist; Josep Ingla-Aynes, a postdoc in the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center; Jagadeesh S. Moodera, a senior research scientist in the Department of Physics; and senior authors Frances Ross, TDK Professor in DMSE; and Luqiao Liu, an associate professor in EECS, and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics; as well as others at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague. The paper appears today in Physical Review Letters.

Overcoming the limits

In an electronic device, silicon semiconductor transistors act like tiny light switches that turn a circuit on and off, or amplify weak signals in a communication system. They do this using a small input voltage.

But a fundamental physical limit of silicon semiconductors prevents a transistor from operating below a certain voltage, which hinders its energy efficiency.

To make more efficient electronics, researchers have spent decades working toward magnetic transistors that utilize electron spin to control the flow of electricity. Electron spin is a fundamental property that enables electrons to behave like tiny magnets.

So far, scientists have mostly been limited to using certain magnetic materials. These lack the favorable electronic properties of semiconductors, constraining device performance.

“In this work, we combine magnetism and semiconductor physics to realize useful spintronic devices,” Liu says.

The researchers replace the silicon in the surface layer of a transistor with chromium sulfur bromide, a two-dimensional material that acts as a magnetic semiconductor.

Due to the material’s structure, researchers can switch between two magnetic states very cleanly. This makes it ideal for use in a transistor that smoothly switches between “on” and “off.”

“One of the biggest challenges we faced was finding the right material. We tried many other materials that didn’t work,” Chou says.

They discovered that changing these magnetic states modifies the material’s electronic properties, enabling low-energy operation. And unlike many other 2D materials, chromium sulfur bromide remains stable in air.

To make a transistor, the researchers pattern electrodes onto a silicon substrate, then carefully align and transfer the 2D material on top. They use tape to pick up a tiny piece of material, only a few tens of nanometers thick, and place it onto the substrate.

“A lot of researchers will use solvents or glue to do the transfer, but transistors require a very clean surface. We eliminate all those risks by simplifying this step,” Chou says.

Leveraging magnetism

This lack of contamination enables their device to outperform existing magnetic transistors. Most others can only create a weak magnetic effect, changing the flow of current by a few percent or less. Their new transistor can switch or amplify the electric current by a factor of 10.

They use an external magnetic field to change the magnetic state of the material, switching the transistor using significantly less energy than would usually be required.

The material also allows them to control the magnetic states with electric current. This is important because engineers cannot apply magnetic fields to individual transistors in an electronic device. They need to control each one electrically.

The material’s magnetic properties could also enable transistors with built-in memory, simplifying the design of logic or memory circuits.

A typical memory device has a magnetic cell to store information and a transistor to read it out. Their method can combine both into one magnetic transistor.

“Now, not only are transistors turning on and off, they are also remembering information. And because we can switch the transistor with greater magnitude, the signal is much stronger so we can read out the information faster, and in a much more reliable way,” Liu says.

Building on this demonstration, the researchers plan to further study the use of electrical current to control the device. They are also working to make their method scalable so they can fabricate arrays of transistors.

This research was supported, in part, by the Semiconductor Research Corporation, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Army Research Office, and the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports. The work was partially carried out at the MIT.nano facilities.

Jay Wilcoxson, counsel in the MIT Office of General Counsel (OGC), does not shy away from a crisis. In fact, he enjoys navigating uncertainty to steer a conflict toward an outcome that is beneficial to the Institute. Drawing on his background in private law practice and his love for problem-solving, Wilcoxson ensures his work supports MIT's mission and principles. 

After attending Boston University School of Law, Wilcoxson joined the Boston law firm Goodwin Procter LLP, specializing in commercial business litigation. While the work was interesting and challenging, there were aspects of law firm life that he didn’t love, and he expected to eventually shift to a role as an in-house lawyer. He had always believed in the mission of higher education, and as universities are complex organizations with many moving parts, he was drawn to the range of issues they present. The challenge was that legal jobs in higher education are rare — people get them and don’t leave. 

For several years, Wilcoxson kept his eye on openings and met with general counsels at several universities, who reiterated how competitive these roles can be. One also mentioned something that stuck with him: Being a lawyer in higher education requires a high tolerance for ambiguity, which can be counterintuitive, as legal work is typically focused on applying the law to a set of facts to reach a clear outcome. In 2007, he opened Mass Lawyers Weekly and saw that MIT was looking for a lawyer with a background in litigation and other disputes at his level of seniority, so he applied. He was hired in August of that year as the first new lawyer to join the recently-created OGC. Before the office was established in January 2007, lawyers at MIT were not centralized in one office, but instead spread across several units on campus. 

Since joining MIT, Wilcoxson jokes that he is a “reformed litigator” because, unlike in private practice where he was often in court and managing the day-to-day of active lawsuits, much of his work now is focused on avoiding litigation. He works to identify potential friction points and reduce the risk of conflict or legal disputes before they escalate. His work is strategic and collaborative — working with clients across campus to identify and prevent potential areas of conflict and thinking broadly about how a case should be defended and whether there are opportunities to resolve it. 

Although Wilcoxson’s practice is very broad, his primary focus is on student life. He works regularly with the Division of Student Life, the Office of the Chancellor, the Office of Graduate Education, and the Institute Discrimination and Harassment Response Office, among other departments, laboratories, centers, and institutes. If an issue comes to the OGC and the client isn’t sure about whom to contact, Wilcoxson and his colleagues confer to ensure that it makes its way to the lawyer best suited to handle it. As he notes, it is not the community’s responsibility to find the right lawyer — the OGC team makes sure each matter lands with the right person. 

Wilcoxson credits the team in the OGC for building an office that people want to work with. He believes the community sees him and his colleagues as trusted thought partners and teammates. All members of the MIT community — faculty, staff, and sometimes even students — can reach out for guidance on Institute legal issues. As lawyers, Wilcoxson and his colleagues approach problems differently than engineers, scientists, or those in the humanities, offering a distinct perspective on how to navigate complex issues. 

The advice Wilcoxson received before starting his job at MIT, that he would need a high tolerance for ambiguity, turned out to be the best guidance he received, and, to his surprise after 19 years at the Institute, is one of his favorite things about his job. “I really like the uncertainty,” he says. “That’s what makes the job interesting.” 

Soundbytes 

Q: What about your job brings you the most joy? 

A: The relationships I’ve developed. Part of what brought me to MIT is also what keeps me here, the development of deep relationships. There are some people I have talked to every day for almost 20 years. There’s a mutual appreciation for how we help each other move MIT’s agenda forward. Those relationships are important because helping resolve conflicts and disputes affects people’s lives, so the pressure can be high. Having people you know and trust, who have your back, and you have theirs, is what really helps you get through when things are stressful. 

Q: How would you describe the community at MIT? 

A: There’s no one word to describe it; I get to work with so many different types of people, all bringing different life experiences and expertise. “Quirky” comes to mind. “Brilliant” comes to mind. Ultimately, what draws me most are problem-solvers. I work with many people, but I have one client: MIT. That's easy to say, hard to explain, and really hard to put into practice. On any given day my client is whoever is acting on behalf of MIT. It could be a faculty member, it could be a dean, department head, or vice president, or maybe even a graduate student. 

I love MIT and am immensely proud to be part of this amazing institution. I’m not inventing things, I’m not solving the climate crisis, I’m not creating cleaner energy, but I am helping people do that. I hope I can take things off their plates so they can focus on their work. 

Q: Are you involved in any other areas of the Institute that are not directly related to your job? 

A: What I really try to do is find ways to be part of the community. I go to faculty meetings and lectures, and I’ve brought my family to weekend events. I’m on a lot of committees with students, many of which focus on developing a policy or how to approach an issue that might be the subject of rules or policy. I also often serve on search committees for leadership roles on campus. 

My favorite side hustle is being a name reader at Commencement. I’ve been doing it for close to 10 years. We used to have one huge ceremony, where eight of us stood on stage in Killian Court and read the name of every graduate. What’s really cool is that when I read a graduate’s name, they’re handed their actual diploma with their actual name on it, thanks to an incredible effort by the registrar’s office and a large team of volunteers. We used to read all 3,500 names live and we spent a lot of time practicing.   

Although Commencement is now broken into smaller ceremonies, we still read names live at the Undergraduate Commencement in Killian Court. Each of us reads about 200 names. It's a fun group of about six of us who have been reading for years, and we all love coming back to do it year after year. 

I also was recently asked to serve on the Presidential Committee on Distinguished Fellowships. This is the Institute committee that works with students who are applying for various international scholarships, such as Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships. I’m very excited to work with and mentor these talented students as they pursue these amazing opportunities. 

Mohammad Imran Khan Mewati teaches grades 6-12 at a school in rural India. His students are largely from economically disadvantaged families, and the school itself has limited resources. But the biggest problem, he says, is absenteeism. 

“If a student is not coming into your class, how are you going to teach?” says Mewati, a teacher for 26 years. “That’s why I’m using technology in my classroom and outside the classroom, so that they can learn a little bit using their smartphones.” 

MIT Open Learning’s free educational resources have been a boon for Mewati as he develops Hindi-language digital resources for his students. 

“I am a self-taught app developer,” he explains. “MIT Open Learning has had a deep and practical impact on my professional life as a teacher. Many concepts I learned influenced how I design digital learning activities, simple educational games, and classroom strategies. My students may not know they are indirectly benefiting from MIT, but they are.”

Through MIT Open Learning, Mewati has used in his classroom OpenCourseWare’s free, online library of educational resources from more than 2,500 courses spanning the MIT undergraduate and graduate curriculum. Learners can browse content at their own pace, watch lectures, read course notes, and hear from faculty experts. All materials can be downloaded for offline use, and the website is fully responsive for smartphone use. These materials are also available on MIT Learn, an AI-enabled platform for all of MIT’s lifelong learning opportunities.

Mewati started using OpenCourseWare resources in the early 2010s and cites programming courses as the most useful. He dove deep into Introduction to CS and Programming Using Python, Introduction to C and C++, and Introduction to Programming Using Java. Introduction to Computational Thinking helped him bring together problem-solving approaches from mathematics and computer science as he built apps.  

Closing the gap with technology

Mewati’s school is located 15 miles from the city of Alwar in Rajasthan, a state in northwestern India. Most of the students do not have access to desktop or laptop computers, but the majority live in a home where at least one person has a smartphone. Taking advantage of this technology, Mewati creates classroom groups on WhatsApp so that he can share resources with his students, regardless of whether they can make it to class. 

Mewati began incorporating technology into his teaching in the early 2010s, when he had to engage 180 students in a lesson about the moon landing and Neil Armstrong. Mewati created a simple HTML page that included many iconic images — the American flag planted on the moon, the Apollo 11 spacecraft, the footprint on the moon’s surface — with Hindi explanations. Once he created it, he could use it again and again. When he tested students on what they’d learned, they got better results than when he’d taught the material using his previous approach. 

“This is the incident that confirmed to me that technology can play an important role in the lives of the students, and particularly for the rural students, for the students who do not have equal opportunities,” says Mewati. “Technology is the equalizer.”

That belief has driven Mewati’s efforts to build his school’s technological resources. Through crowdfunding, he secured 15 used computers to create a computer lab, and teachers now share the responsibility for creating mobile hotspots so students can connect to the internet. Mewati’s mobile apps provide additional opportunities for students to explore topics in greater depth or catch up on lessons they may have missed.

Referring to his apps as his favorite topic, Mewati explains that he has developed several types to meet a variety of goals. Some allow students to play games that develop their math skills, while others include syllabi, reading recommendations, and class notes. Other apps help students prepare for exams required for government jobs. He also builds apps for audiences beyond his school, such as an app that provides Hindi-language resources related to maternal health, a topic he says is not openly discussed in India. The app has been popular, he explains, because it provides honest information that people can view privately.

“If I see an issue, I think, ‘Yes, let’s create an app,’” he says. 

Collaboration, open sharing, and lifelong learning

Mewati shares the apps he has created, and the MIT Open Learning resources that support him, with a network of teachers across India. He has connected with other educators through India’s National Teacher Awards and earlier this year, he traveled to Dubai for the Global Teacher Prize.

“We share things with each other,” he says. “We have a huge group — more than 1,000 teachers connected across India. So, if we see resources, or useful things for a class, we’ll share. All the time, I talk about open-source materials, like MIT courses, for educational purposes.”

Through this culture of collaboration and open sharing, Mewati is able to bring new learning opportunities to his students. The apps he has built — made possible by what he has learned through MIT Open Learning — help extend access to educational resources beyond the classroom. As an educator, he says he’s happy about that. But he is also a learner, and it’s his journey as a learner that he wants people to know. 

“I am from a rural area. My parents are not educated at all. And I am a Fulbright Scholar. I can reach the Global Teacher Prize stage. The reason is simple,” he says. “It is because I continued my learning, whenever possible, with the use of technology and availability of free courses from MIT.”

To anyone who is curious, who wants to learn, to push themselves or build something new, he says that with MIT Open Learning, the resources are out there.

“We should use it, we should grab it, and we should share it as much as we can,” says Mewati. “Because that’s how humanity can flourish.”

MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI) is launching a pilot artist-in-residence program to facilitate cross-disciplinary dialogue between art, science, and the public. 

MKI is a world-leading institution for research in astrophysics, combining more than 60 years of expertise in space and ground-based instrumentation development with the intellectual energy of MIT’s faculty, research and technical staff, and students in the departments of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering; Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences; and Physics.

During the 2026-27 academic year, internationally acclaimed ultra-contemporary artist Amy Karle will work as the program’s inaugural artist-in-residence alongside MKI researchers to explore the research and processes behind cutting-edge astrophysical discoveries and instrumentation, and to translate this experience into an immersive, multimedia installation available for public display beginning in early 2028. Karle is known for her work as an artist, designer, and researcher whose projects explore how science and technology shape humanity, evolution, and the future across scales and systems, from cells to cosmos. 

“We are excited to work with Amy in this collaborative environment” says MKI Director Robert Simcoe, the Bruno B. Rossi Professor of Experimental Physics at MIT. “Her approach is unlike anything we have previously experienced at MKI and presents many opportunities to challenge the way we, as scientists and engineers, think about our study of the universe. At the same time, the resulting artwork will be shaped by the deep research we do, and the wide-ranging scientific and technical perspectives of the MKI community.” 

Karle’s proposal, which envisions astrophysical research and data as a co-creative experience toward embodied understanding of cosmic phenomena and touches on themes of scientific observation, signals, and inference, was selected by an interdisciplinary committee of astronomers, museum curators, and art-science practitioners. Reviewers praised Karle’s ambitious-yet-grounded approach to engagement, her attention to audience experience, her unique approach to science communication through art and technology, and the collaborative potential of her artistic vision. 

“I am thrilled to be partnering with MKI,” says Karle, whose practice over the years has included dedicated art-science collaborations with Copernicus Science Centre, the Interstellar Foundation, and Studio Quantum, as well as multiple installations for museums, festivals, and public spaces across the globe. “My first job was at a public observatory. I still remember showing strangers Saturn’s rings through a telescope and watching awe and understanding arrive as felt experience. That has shaped my work since. What MKI does at the frontier of astrophysics, translating faint signals into knowledge through instruments, computation, and human judgment, is a profound expression of that same process. I am excited to be in dialogue with that work and with MKI scientists to create art that makes this tangible and deeply felt, inviting people into the threshold where our ways of knowing the universe reshape how we understand ourselves.”

The residency begins with a one-month exploratory period in the fall semester, centered on meetings with MKI researchers, attendance at seminars and classes, and a public presentation to the MKI community. The project will then move from conceptualization to development, shaped through continued exchange with MKI researchers and complementary independent work in Karle’s California studio throughout 2027. 

In March, Karle and selected scientific collaborators will be in residence at the Studios at MASS MoCA, a national and international residency program embedded within one of the world’s largest and liveliest museums dedicated to contemporary art. During their time in residence, Karle and collaborators will test ideas, exchange knowledge, and engage with a multidisciplinary cohort of 16 other artists from across the globe.

“MASS MoCA [the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art] is pleased to be part of MKI’s artist-in-residence program and to contribute to the meaningful exchange between art and science,” says Susan Cross, MASS MoCA director of curatorial affairs. “We look forward to welcoming artist Amy Karle and collaborators from MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research to our campus, and to the Studios at MASS MoCA.”

The residency is supported by the Kavli Foundation’s Kavli Innovation Fund. The initiative seeks to develop new modes of public engagement with astrophysical research and discovery, and deepen emotional connections across the interplay of science and art.

“We are grateful for the Kavli Foundation’s support,” says Simcoe, “as it allows us to push boundaries and engage new audiences in the wonder of the universe and the process of science.” 

Karle’s work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including Centre Pompidou, Mori Art Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Modern Art, Ars Electronica, ArtScience Museum, Triennale Milano, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, with works on the moon and in space. She collaborates with and presents at scientific, technological, and cultural institutions including NASA, CERN, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Autodesk, HP Labs, and NVIDIA. 

She was honored as one of BBC’s 100 Most Inspiring and Influential Women, a Pioneer in Design, and one of the Most Influential Women in 3D Printing. Karle also served as an American Arts Incubator U.S. Department of State artist diplomat. Her first job was at a public observatory, where she began asking fundamental questions about space and witnessing the wonder it can awaken in people, an early experience that continues to inspire her to create works that allow people to feel how we come to know the universe and our place within it.

To learn more about Karle's work, visit amykarle.com. As the project develops, MKI will be seeking museum and festival partners to host the installation in 2028 and beyond. 

MIT researchers have created a new computing platform that could be used to develop intelligent and adaptive next-generation electronics that can simultaneously perform multiple functions, like computing and memory, all within one extremely compact, energy-efficient device.

Such a platform opens opportunities for low-power edge computing applications, interactive medical and environmental monitoring systems, and smart robots.

The researchers accomplished this by leveraging the unique mechanical response of soft polymers at the nanoscale. A mechanical response is how a structure changes when a force is applied to it. 

They harnessed this response to create tiny mechanical devices that use reconfigurable motion to remember and process information in a way that mimics how neurons behave in the brain.

Because key computing functions are built into the intrinsic properties of the soft polymer material, the number of components needed to perform the functions are minimized, enabling a compact and versatile platform for information processing. 

“Complex and coupled nanoscale phenomena can provide tremendous opportunities for new approaches to information processing and integrating multiple functionalities, such as computing, sensing, and actuation. This could enable levels of energy efficiency, autonomy, and reconfigurability in nanoscale devices and systems that are challenging to achieve with conventional computing platforms,” says Farnaz Niroui, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and senior author of a paper on this device. “Here, we harness the intrinsic mechanical properties of materials to engineer device-level dynamics, such that the material building blocks play a much more active role in defining device functionality than conventionally considered.”

She is joined on the paper by co-lead authors Peter Satterthwaite and Sarah Spector, EECS graduate students; as well as Jeremiah Johnson, the A. Thomas Guertin Professor of Chemistry at MIT; Maxwell Conte, a graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; Teddy Hsieh, an EECS graduate student; postdoc Eduard Bobylev; and Srinidhi Venkatesh ’25. The research appears today in Science Advances. 

Bioinspired computation

Biological systems can leverage physical changes, like motion or deformation, to process information efficiently and without needing access to a central controller. 

For instance, an octopus has a highly distributed nervous systems, with about two-thirds of its neurons spread throughout its arms. This allows the octopus to sense and process information about its environment locally and generate responses without requiring access to the central brain.

As an example, an octopus can mechanically change the color cells in its skin, enabling it to go through a rapid and context-specific camouflage process.

“You can think of an octopus as continuous computing matter, with computing, memory, sensing, and actuation distributed throughout its body,” Niroui adds.

Inspired by such performance, the researchers sought to develop a platform that can compute using mechanical transformations at the nanoscale. In mechanical computing, calculations are performed through physical transformations like movement and compression. 

While bioinspired mechanical computing platforms have been developed at the micro and macro scales, the MIT researchers shrunk their device to the nanoscale. At this scale, even minute mechanical transformations can lead to drastic changes in a material’s properties. This can enable complex computing in an energy-efficient platform.

But achieving the reversible nanomechanical transformations needed for such computing is a fundamental challenge. When two surfaces come very close, they experience strong adhesive forces that pull the surfaces together, making them impossible to unstick. 

To overcome this fundamental challenge, the researchers built a device with a super-thin film of the soft polymer polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) sandwiched between two metal electrodes. This soft spacer balances the adhesive forces between the two metal surfaces, keeping the electrodes from crashing together in an irreversible way.

“The soft material in serves as a ‘nano-spring,’ to help balance the forces to achieve nanoscale mechanical reconfiguration in a controlled and reversible manner,” Niroui explains.

When the researchers apply a voltage to the device, the two metal plates attract to one another, compressing the soft material and altering the electrical current flowing through the device. 

“PDMS is viscoelastic, which means that after being compressed, it takes time to return to its original state. This allows the devices to dynamically remember the history of forces and voltages applied to them, and convert that history into an electrical response,” says Satterthwaite.

They researchers used this performance to demonstrate an artificial neuron.

Brain-inspired information processing

In the brain, each neuron accumulates an electrical charge a little bit at a time until it reaches a threshold and fires, passing information to other neurons in the network. 

The researchers’ device mirrors this behavior. As voltage is applied over time, it accumulates stimulus as the electrodes gradually compress the PDMS. After crossing a threshold, it “fires” like a neuron before relaxing back to its original state.

“We have this complex functionality, which is the basis of biological computing, all contained in one nanoscale device,” Satterthwaite says.

Since computing and memory are incorporated within a single device with no need for external components, like capacitors or complex circuitry, this platform can achieve high energy efficiency with a small footprint. 

“The performance highly relies on the memory introduced using the soft polymer. We can intentionally engineer this over a large design space to meet the requirements of the desired applications,” Spector says.

The device can also be compatible with biological systems, Spector adds. For instance, it could be useful in applications like smart prosthetics that can rapidly process tactile data or low-power wearable patches that collect and analyze health indicators in real-time.

In the future, the researchers want to expand this work to further integrate sensing with computing and memory to realize nanomechanical computing matter with applications in intelligent and adaptive systems. 

This work was funded, in part, by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), an MIT EECS MathWorks Fellowship, and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. Device fabrication was carried out, in part, using MIT.nano facilities.

Courts have for two decades found that linking and embedding someone else’s web content, be it a photo, music, or an article, doesn’t violate copyright law–the entity that controls the server that hosts a copyrighted work, not the user or website that merely directs others to it, is directly liable if the content turns out to be infringing.

News publisher Emmerich Newspapers sought to convince the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to chart a new and dangerous course, arguing that an aggregator website that published links to its copyrighted articles was in effect “displaying” them and can be directly liable for infringement. EFF, along with several other public interest organizations and trade associations, filed a brief urging the court to follow multiple other circuits and reject that theory.

Fortunately, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals did just that. While it rejected the server test–the rule courts have used to determine copyright liability rests with whoever serves up the content–the court came to the same practical conclusion by focusing on who is responsible for transmitting content. 

Applying that test, the court found that pointing or directing a user’s browser to request and receive the copyright owner’s own copy residing on its computers does not involve transmitting or communicating the content. “Although we take different routes to get there, both the server test and the test we announce end up in a similar place: a website cannot transmit a work that it does not have,” the court said. 

We told the court that accepting Emmerich's theory would make the common act of embedding links a legally fraught activity, one that many websites might be unwilling to risk, which would seriously damage the internet as a tool for creating and disseminating ideas and knowledge,

We applaud the court’s decision–even though it applied a different test, it correctly concluded that a user linking pictures, video, or articles isn’t in charge of transmitting that content to the world. The user doesn’t control what’s located on the other end of the link—that’s up to the person who controls the server.

Emmerich also claimed linking violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), arguing its URLs were copyright management information (CMI) and when the aggregator displayed Emmerich’s articles under its own URL, it tampered with Emmerich’s CMI, which violates the DMCA. 

Under that logic, unsuspecting internet users could face ruinous legal risk for doing something as simple as using a link shortener, particularly given potential statutory penalties of up to $25,000 per violation.  

In our brief, we told the court that URLs don’t necessarily equate to a copyrighted work or provide sufficient information about the nature of the underlying content, making it highly unlikely that anyone would expect a URL to contain CMI. Quoting EFF’s brief, the court concluded that URLs are first and foremost a locational reference tool and while it may be possible for a URL to contain CMI, the bar to that conclusion is high.

Overall, this was a good and sensible decision that will protect ordinary online expression, communication, and access to knowledge. Hopefully this issue is laid to rest at last.

Related Cases: Emmerich Newspapers v. Particle Media

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is honored to announce today that Alexander "amac" Macgillivray — a former White House official who also served in top legal capacities at Twitter and Google — has joined EFF’s Board of Directors. 

Macgillivray served in the Biden Administration as Deputy Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and earlier had held a similar position in the Obama Administration. Macgillivray was one of the co-authors of the Biden Administration’s Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and oversaw many of the Administration’s AI initiatives, such as organizing its AI CEO convening, leading its working group on federal AI policy, and overseeing the creation of the National AI Research and Development Strategic Plan and National AI Research Resource. 

He was Twitter's General Counsel from 2009 to 2013, leading the Corporate Development, Public Policy, Communications, and Trust & Safety teams. Before that he was Deputy General Counsel at Google from 2003 to 2009, where he created the Product Counsel team.  

“One of the things I am currently focused on is positively impacting AI development," MacGillivray said. The EFF is uniquely situated for that purpose because it combines top-notch legal, technical and advocacy staff with a long history of fighting for people’s rights while encouraging the positive development of technology. I’m thrilled to be joining the board.”

Macgillivray joins a dynamic EFF Board led by Board Chair Gigi Sohn and Vice Chair Brian Behlendorf, and including fellow Board Members Erica Astrella, Anil Dash, Sarah Deutsch, Tadayoshi Kohno, Pamela Samuelson, Bruce Schneier, James Vasile, Tarah Wheeler, and Jonathan Zittrain.

“The EFF Board is thrilled to have Alex join our ranks," Sohn said. "I’ve worked with Alex for over two decades and have always been impressed not only with his intelligence and grace, but also his ability to think outside the box. His deep experience with non-profit boards will be invaluable as EFF enters a new and exciting chapter.”

Macgillivray currently also serves on the boards of The Trust & Safety Foundation, The Trust & Safety Professional Association and Public Resource. He is an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Macgillivray earned a law degree from Harvard, a bachelor’s degree in Reasoning & Decision Making from Princeton University, and a New Jersey Teaching Certificate. 

“The vanguard leadership of EFF Board members to ensure technology supports rights, justice, freedom, and innovation for all people has never been more critical," EFF Executive Director Nicole Ozer said. "Many of the threats that once seemed hypothetical are now reality and the work of our EFF community is fundamental to the future of our countries, our livelihoods, and literally our lives. I feel fortunate to have amac join as a Board member as I begin my tenure as Executive Director. His diverse expertise will be invaluable to make sure that EFF is stronger than ever to meet this moment.” 

Members of the Board of Directors ensure the managerial and financial health of the organization.  EFF is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Learn more about our cutting-edge work on AI issues, and please donate today to help keep us fighting for a brighter digital future.

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Mass surveillance isn't a joke. But police are treating it like one when using automated license plate reader (ALPR) networks. In our latest EFFector newsletter, we're covering a new EFF report on how officers across the country are routinely logging completely nonsensical "reasons" for their Flock searches, including "LOL," "LMAO," and even (yuck) "Sexy."

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For over 35 years, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberties, and the law. This issue covers a settlement enshrining Meta's harmful surveillance into law, states pushing back against ALPR, and how police are turning our privacy into a punchline.

Prefer to listen in? EFFector is now available on all major podcast platforms. This time we're asking EFF's Adam Schwartz what has united people against Flock cameras — and how we can make sure that today's backlash leads to lasting change. You can find the episode and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice:

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Since its integration into our digital world, social media has played a pivotal role in youth organizing and social mobilization. Yet, people’s access to these platforms is increasingly coming under threat from courts and legislatures under the guise of protecting young people online—presenting a significant hindrance to youth organizing.  

In a major recent example, Meta settled in a lawsuit with 52 states and territories regarding the use of Instagram and Facebook by young people. The settlement will require Meta, and pressure other non-Meta owned platforms like TikTok and YouTube, to embed age gating practices into every product while also requiring restrictions on the accounts of people under-18, such as a two-hour daily time limit and content restrictions.   

Youth Power on Social Media 

Young people have been using social media for political advocacy and community organizing for more than a decade. From organizing protests speaking out against police brutality, to organizing nationwide school walkouts demanding safety in schools from gun violence, and striking to demand lawmakers take action to protect the climate, social media has become an instrumental tool for youth to both speak out and connect with other young activists.  

Instagram has become especially useful for activism online by young people. The features on the app make it a helpful tool for being able to efficiently and quickly spread awareness, which is especially important when people need to share real-time information. For example, 17-year-old Darnella Frazier’s video on Facebook showed the world the murder of George Floyd. 

The impact of youth activism online is also evident on non-Meta owned platforms, with services like TikTok and YouTube being particularly prevalent spaces for young people to share their stories, build movements, and amplify collective engagement.

However, in a digital world operating under the settlement’s new guidelines, young people risk not being able to read crucial news due to the content being labeled as “age-inappropriate,” which has already happened for teenagers in Australia under its social media ban.  

A two-hour daily time limit and a block on Meta’s apps between midnight and 6am leaves little room for young activists to organize rapid response efforts. Being unable to see likes on a post will make it difficult to gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns.   

Add to this what we already know about Meta’s content policies which claim to “protect children” and keep sites “family-friendly” but instead label content like LGBTQ+ content as “adult” or “harmful,” youth will be left with no choice in what content they see once the ‘age-appropriate’ content filter is turned on by default. One recent report noted that Meta had hidden posts that reference LGBTQ+ hashtags like #lesbian, #bisexual, #gay, #trans, and #queer for users with the sensitive content filter on. This would specifically curtail the efforts of young activists doing work on comprehensive sex education.   

Global Trends 

Measures like this are being discussed across the globe, but not all courts have taken such a short-sighted approach. In August, the French Constitutional Council got a lot right in its decision to strike down the country’s legislation banning under-15s from social media for infringing free expression and communication for everyone online, not just young people.  

The French Court also called attention to its infringement on privacy as the legislation would have forced people of all ages to hand over government IDs, face scans, and other sensitive information to prove their age and access online content.  

Requiring this much data from users puts activists in danger of even more surveillance. Meta has already previously complied with demands from law enforcement to hand over the messages of users. The amount of personal information that will be logged and that could be demanded via a warrant from police to stifle or investigate activists’ actions or plans could cause a chilling effect, forcing advocates to pause or terminate their work.  

This is egregious because these systems misidentify or lock out people of color, people with disabilities, and trans or gender-nonconforming individuals whose IDs may not match their chosen name or align with what the system expects them to look like upon verification. And it’s often these communities that benefit from online organizing the most, especially for marginalized youth as social media can often be the only place to organize and build community. 

What Young People Deserve 

The settlement generates headlines, but it will not solve the core problem. Instead of tackling Meta’s surveillance capitalism business model that turns all online content into potential profit and centers lining the company’s pockets over protecting the speech and privacy of users, this settlement gives the tech giant an opportunity to carve out a new digital world that prioritizes its own needs, not those of young people.  

As we’ve been calling attention to in other contexts, this will force young people into digital isolation—curtailing vital access to news and resources for health and development. It also completely ignores the calls of youths themselves who favor digital literacy and education over surveillance and government control.   

Young people deserve a better internet than one regulated through panic. They deserve better than the government or Big Tech getting to decide how they use social media and what they can or cannot be exposed to or learn about. They deserve better than having their right to free expression minimized. This must not be lost in the pursuit of building a better and safer online ecosystem and environment.   

Researchers created a new technique that accurately and rapidly matches X-rays captured during surgery with a patient’s preoperative 3D medical scan. This method could make it easier for clinicians to precisely pilot minimally invasive surgical tools, leading to faster and safer procedures.

Clinicians perform many minimally invasive surgeries using real-time X-rays to help them steer devices like catheters and endoscopes through tiny incisions. But since X-rays are flat images, it can be challenging to determine exactly where surgical tools are located and oriented within the patient’s body, increasing the risk of complications.

To help localize surgical devices, clinicians may manually align X-rays with preoperative 3D medical images, such as CT scans or MRIs. Artificial intelligence tools designed to streamline this process struggle to align images robustly for all patients, making them infeasible in practice.

This new system, developed by scientists and clinicians at MIT and collaborating institutions, uses an AI model that adapts to each patient in only about five minutes. The model automatically matches one patient’s X-rays with 3D scans in a matter of seconds, and with sub-millimeter precision.

Named xvr (which stands for X-ray volume registration), it outperformed existing AI methods by an order of magnitude across a wide range of patients, body parts, and medical procedures.

“A majority of Americans live more than an hour away from a center that can perform noninvasive procedures, like emergency stroke interventions. An hour in stroke time is incredibly substantial. Making these procedures easier by combining 2D and 3D information enables these types of highly specialized life-saving procedures to be more accessible to much broader parts of the population,” says Vivek Gopalakrishnan, a postdoc in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); a recent graduate of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology; and lead author of a paper on xvr, which appears today in Nature.

He is joined on the paper by his advisor Polina Golland, the Sunlin and Priscilla Chou Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a principal investigator in CSAIL, the leader of the Medical Vision Group, and co-senior author of the paper; and Neel Dey, a former postdoc in the Medical Vision Group who is now an investigator at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital as well as co-senior author on the paper. Additional co-authors include David-Dimitris Chlorogiannis, a researcher and clinician at Harvard Medical School; Andrew Abumoussa, a neurosurgeon at St. Luke’s Marion Bloch Neuroscience Institute; Anna M. Larson, a pediatric clinician at Shriners Children’s Hospital; Nazim Haouchine, an assistant professor of radiology at Harvard and Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Darren B. Orbach, a physician and scientist at Boston Children’s Hospital; and Sarah Frisken, an associate professor of radiology at Harvard.

Making X-rays more informative

In many minimally invasive surgical procedures, like angioplasty to open blocked arteries, clinicians insert instruments through a tiny incision and use a high-speed mobile X-ray scanner to generate images that allow them to visualize the procedure from any angle. 

But to guide surgical tools without accidentally damaging other tissue, clinicians must align real-time X-rays with the patient’s preoperative MRI or CT scan. This process, called registration, helps them determine where the tool is in relation to anatomical structures. 

“It takes decades of training for a clinician to become skilled enough to see grainy, 2D images and understand how everything is oriented. We want to make these 2D X-rays more informative, so it becomes safer and easier to do these life-saving procedures,” Gopalakrishnan says.

Manual registration methods are slow and burdensome, requiring the clinician to guess the position of a surgical instrument by punching numbers into a computer or clicking anatomical landmarks on a screen. 

To streamline the process, researchers are developing AI models that can predict 2D/3D registration. But people have such diverse anatomy that a model which works well for some patients may fail for others. 

A lack of high-quality annotated medical image data makes it difficult to train a deep-learning model robust enough to adapt to many patients, Gopalakrishnan says.

Rather than trying to make a machine-learning model that can be applied to all patients, the researchers built a model designed to adapt extremely well for the specific patient.

“We tailor this one specific model for this one specific patient, and it doesn’t matter if it works on other people because there will be different models for those people,” Gopalakrishnan adds.

Patient-specific machine learning

Xvr takes one patient’s preoperative 3D scan, like an MRI or CT, and uses it to generate thousands of synthetic X-rays from many angles, producing about 1,000 images each second. It uses a physics-based simulation of the X-ray process to ensure these synthetic images are realistic.

“Instead of generating data from nothing, like some types of generative AI, this physics simulation is entirely based on the CT scan or MRI from this patient. Because xvr creates patient-specific data in a purely physics-based manner, there is no room for hallucinations,” Gopalakrishnan says.

The xvr framework uses these simulated data to train an AI model that can accurately align this patient’s 2D X-rays with their 3D image scan in a matter of seconds.

But while such a registration model is highly accurate, it would take about 12 hours to train from scratch for each patient, making it impossible to deploy in an emergency. To make the process faster, the researchers used xvr to pretrain a more versatile AI system, called a foundation model, that can quickly adjust to each new patient. 

They collected whole-body 3D medical scans from more than 2,000 patients covering a wide range of ages, image modalities, and regions. Xvr used these diverse data to generate synthetic X-rays and train a foundation model to perform 2D/3D registration.

This pretrained model can adapt to a new patient in about five minutes, and performs registration with the same accuracy as if it had been trained from scratch. 

“So now you can get patient-specific accuracy but also in a very rapid time frame,” Gopalakrishnan says.

The team tested the model on the largest available dataset of real 2D/3D registrations, incorporating data from five hospitals that covered dozens of bones and organ systems in adult and pediatric patients. 

Xvr significantly outperformed other AI-based methods in accuracy and robustness, while operating fast enough for emergency surgeries. The model could also be used to improve the performance of robotic surgery technologies. 

In the future, the researchers hope to focus on making xvr faster for real-time deployment, conducting further studies to verify its reliability in additional situations, and extending the system to handle more complex scenarios, like moving body parts. 

“For the past two years, we’ve been carefully developing this algorithm and validating it. Now, we are collaborating closely with surgical robotics companies and clinical groups to turn this research into useful tools for navigation or deployment,” Gopalakrishnan says.

This work was funded, in part, but the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the MIT CSAIL-Wistron Program, the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab, the MIT Jameel Clinic, the MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative, and the Chou Family Transformative Research Fund.

New variant of an old scam: Use the framing of a CAPTCHA to get an unsuspecting user to download and run a malicious program.

The annual “Demo Day” event at MIT, which marks the end of the delta v startup accelerator, fell on the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks this year, giving MIT entrepreneurs a chance to honor the memory of those lost that day while presenting their startup progress in the program.

Each year, the event celebrates all that students achieved while working full-time on their ventures over the summer with support and guidance from the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship.

But the usually boisterous night started with the program’s military veterans asking for a moment of silence.

“Today is a day of remembrance, but also a day of celebration,” founder and MIT graduate student Kevin Power MAP ’25 told the audience in opening remarks. “It’s about building to create a better world. Today, we honor those lost the way we believe they would want: by being humble, taking care of each other, and building something worthy of the people who never had this chance. In this room, people are taking on the hardest problems in health care, cybersecurity, defense, robotics, and manufacturing.”

Now in its 15th year, delta v Demo Day gives MIT entrepreneurs a chance to share their work and inspire classmates to adopt the entrepreneurial mindset. The companies that presented were whittled down from an initial list of over 200, twice the amount that applied in 2025.

Across a whirlwind 90 minutes inside a jam-packed Kresge Auditorium, 13 teams presented their startups to the audience in two-minute presentations. Many shared business milestones and progress in line with what a typical company would achieve over multiple years, including customer partnerships, prototype deployments, and even revenue.

Each team received mentorship and support along with $75,000 in equity-free funding, a dramatic increase from years past. This year’s cohort featured undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs, from across all of MIT’s schools.

“One of the things I love about delta v is it brings students from all across our community together to approach challenges with different perspectives,” Paula Hammond, dean of the MIT School of Engineering, told the audience. “Their companies are just as wide-ranging. They are working in AI, robotics, health care, aerospace, financial technology, biotech, cybersecurity, and more. At their core, they all share a desire to tackle difficult problems and improve people’s lives.”

This year the Trust Center also announced a new partner model for the delta v program, composed of over 125 leading founders from companies like HubSpot, Okta, and Kayak, along with industry experts and early-stage investors.

The event’s occurrence at the start of the semester is no coincidence: It is timed to attract the next generation of entrepreneurs on campus.

“This is my favorite day of the year,” said Bill Aulet, the managing director of the Trust Center and MIT’s Ethernet Inventors Professor of the Practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “Today is about building organizations that will solve the world’s most intractable problems. It’s about more than making money. These presentations will inspire you and make you proud to be a part of the MIT community.”

Artificial intelligence featured prominently in this year’s cohort of companies, which are applying the technology to solve major problems in cybersecurity and manufacturing, improve health care spending, design advanced metal parts, and more.

The company Neural Physics, for instance, is building AI models for manufacturing and other hardware applications. The company’s models are designed to accelerate product design and validation workflows for companies building things like cars, equipment, and machine parts.

“AI can build software overnight,” said co-founder and PhD candidate Mohamed Elrefaie. “AI for software has been solved. The next revolution is physical AI. Design takes too long, and it costs billions. In 1907, it took Henry Ford five years to develop the first Ford car model. Today, it still takes the Ford Motor Company five years to go from design to production. The U.S. advanced manufacturing sector loses roughly $245 billion annually due to engineer delays… [Most] of that time is spent running simulations or making engineering decisions. At Neural Physics, we are building foundation physics models to accelerate those processes.”

Another company, Cerebrus AI, has built a system for detecting when AI agents deviate from approved behavior. The solution builds a baseline of behavior for each deployed agent and monitors their activity to flag unusual behavior that could lead to problems.

“The rollout of revolutionary technology is being held up by three key questions that every executive is asking: Where are my agents? What are they doing? What do they have access to?” co-founder and MBA student Griffin Potrock said. “Security teams want to say yes, but they can’t trust what they can’t see. Cerebrus AI can help those teams.”

The company Talys uses AI agents to help health care organizations find opportunities to lower spending on things like pharmacies, operational processes, and third-party services. The company is already working with health systems and has processed $325 million in spending.

“Decades of attempts to reign in health care spending have fallen short — until now,” co-founder and MBA student Nicolas Berzin said “Why is it so hard? Analytics and dashboards give you pictures of the problem, but not the solution. Meanwhile, consultants are slow and expensive. There are thousands of spend categories, tens of thousands of procedures, and millions of items. Who knows how to save on all of these things? Imagine if you could classify every line, benchmark every item, find every substitution, triage every unprofitable case, and model every scenario across multiple contracts and thousands of procedures and categories like an expert. Talys is a margin-execution system that runs 24/7 to optimize procurement, reduce leakage, and improve case economics.”

Other delta v teams also presented impressive hardware solutions. RBT Resources presented a portable device that simplifies and speeds up blood transfusions, which could be used in hospitals and at the site of traumatic injuries like highways or battlefields.

“Transfusion at the point of injury is an extremely manual process with three key inefficiencies: They are time dependent, gravity dependent, and labor intensive,” explained CEO Anthony Capuano MBA ’26, a former U.S. Navy Seal. “Our goal at RBT Resources is to make transfusions faster and simpler for all medics.”

Gander Robotics developed a low-cost drone submarine that can be used when someone falls overboard on a ship. The hand-thrown, autonomous vessel can sense and travel to the person at sea and give them something to hold onto at the surface, all while providing rescue crews with its exact location.

So-called “man-overboard” situations are surprisingly common on military boats and cruise ships. The device was developed over two years at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. “Our autonomous rescue swimmer uses a proprietary technique to search with sonar from underneath the surface, where it’s nice and calm even if there’s a storm raging above,” CEO Michael Autery MBA ’26 explained.

The other teams presenting included:

Alpaca is building an integrated ecosystem of hardware and software to allow individuals to host their own frontier AI models without a subscription.

Banzai is building an AI-powered agent to help homeowners, property managers, and asset managers diagnose home repairs faster, improve repair accuracy, and reduce maintenance costs.

Bizon Labs is building a platform for engineering lipid nanoparticles to deliver advanced medicine anywhere in the body.

Cortheon uses AI design optimization to help foundries make complex metal parts at lower cost and with the design freedom of 3D printing.

Exo AI is helping financial institutions automate back-office processes using AI-native software capable of analyzing messy data and connecting fragmented workflows.

Pixology is using agentic AI to help sales teams create visual, engaging pitch materials faster for media rights deals.

Robox is using AI to develop a design engine for physical automation inside systems integrators, robotics firms, and manufacturers.

The Trade Lab is helping importers navigate shifting tariff regulations across the globe and optimize supply chains.

Let’s agree at the outset the world is a complicated place, and social scientists have exacting jobs when it comes to measuring civic phenomena with precision. 

After all, even careful studies raise follow-up questions: How much do their findings apply in other settings? Do conclusions about politics in one country apply to other countries? If you’re studying voters in a lopsided election, will your findings apply to voters in a close election? Those questions are all a natural part of the research process.

That’s where Naoki Egami comes in. Egami is an MIT political scientist whose specialty is the methodology of research. He carefully scrutinizes, for one thing, what social scientists call “external validity,” whether the results of particular studies apply more generally.

“I always say political methodology is the field where you ask questions as a political scientist, but then you solve them like an applied statistician or an applied computer scientist,” Egami says. “You find out the underlying mathematical problems behind the empirical challenges people face, and solve them optimally.”

As it happens, Egami’s interests range widely. Years ago, before the current artificial intelligence craze, he started studying what happens when AI tools are introduced into studies. How accurate are they? How can researchers account for AI tendencies? Focusing on these and other questions has helped Egami build a broad portfolio of research, win awards, and flourish in his career. All the while, he retains interest in basic questions about politics, as well as measuring things correctly. 

“You need both perspectives,” Egami says. “If you only think about technical statistical theories, you might not work on interesting empirical problems sometimes. But if you only think about problems, you won’t really solve them optimally; you’ll solve them in an ad-hoc way. So, you really want to have both lenses.”

Egami joined MIT’s Department of Political Science as an associate professor with tenure in 2025. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Statistics and Data Science Center at the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS).

Workshopping his career

Almost anyone who likes their job has experienced some good fortune in finding it. Egami’s case calls to mind those adages about luck being a mixture of preparation and opportunity. 

Egami grew up in Tokyo and attended the University of Tokyo. He was good at math and physics, but he also liked political philosophy and was unsure how to combine his interests. One day, Egami attended a workshop about U.S. graduate school, which he thought was about MBA programs. Actually, it was about PhD programs, and included a political scientist talking about using math in the field, so Egami asked her a question. 

“The miracle is: That workshop had 200 people in it, and after it was done, I was packing my stuff to go home, and the panelist, who was a PhD student, came down from the stage and found me,” Egami recalls. “She asked, ‘Are you the one who said you’re interested in political science in the U.S., and likes math?’” 

She invited Egami to what he thought would be another career workshop, the following week. Once again, he was mistaken.

“I showed up, and it was an academic seminar,” Egami continues. “There were only 20 people there. It was 19 professors, and me, a first-year undergrad.” Then a professor named Kosuke Imai, now at Harvard University, gave a talk about his own research on using statistics in the social sciences. 

“I was super-excited and felt if I could do even 20 percent of that, it would be a dream,” Egami says. “I talked to Kosuke and said, ‘I want to do what you’re doing.’ He probably thought I was just a random person.”

Egami, thus bolstered, started pursuing the goal of becoming a political scientist. He received his BA after spending a year as an exchange student at the University of Michigan, and applied to graduate schools in the U.S., landing at Princeton University — where Imai eventually became one of his advisors. Working with Imai, Rafaela Dancygier, Brandon Stewart, and others, Egami generated papers on methodological topics like external validity — and found substantial interest when he presented them. 

“That was a case where the audience or market told me what I should really work on,” Egami says. After earning his PhD from Princeton in 2020, he joined the faculty at Columbia University, moving to MIT five years later. 

Enjoying the spirit of MIT

One of the hallmarks of Egami’s work is very close scrutiny of the factors that can influence the results found in empirical studies. 

“In statistics, you talk about whether the people in the data are similar, meaning the population data,” Egami says. “But in political science, there are a lot of differences in context.” 

Consider the question of how much political campaigns sway the minds of voters. Political scientists have sometimes received permission to conduct field experiments in active political campaigns. That’s a significant step toward generating robust results. And yet, not all campaign settings are the same. Politicians may let researchers in when they expect to triumph, and the dynamics in those races might differ from close races. 

“It’s great to do field experiments, and that’s usually where people are allowed to do research,” Egami says. “It’s where politicians know they can win. But most of the time, we’re interested in the battlefield races, the politically competitive districts. And the logic and voter behaviors can be different in those cases.” 

Egami’s job, on one level, is to spot such differences and make other researchers aware of them.

Meanwhile, he has also developed a strong interest in scrutinizing the tools of machine learning, as applied to the social sciences. This predates the elevated interested in AI generated by ChatGPT, starting in late 2022. Some of Egami’s work explores how to systematically identify errors introduced by AI tools and then account for this issue when using AI in research.

“In the past, social science data is something we carefully collect and take a long time to really validate before we analyze it,” Egami says. “But if the generation of data is changing. If people use AI to generate data at scale, it can have errors. So I was already thinking: You want to have statistical methods that take into account these errors, otherwise many of the analyses will not be able to be replicated. That’s how I started to work on a lot of things about AI.” 

All of this has brought Egami recognition and honors in the field. Last year, he received the Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Political Methodology. He has also been the recipient of best paper awards from the American Political Science Association’s sections for political methodology (in 2019 and 2025), experimental research (in 2024), and political networks (in 2022). Earning awards in three subfields of the discipline speaks to Egami’s scholarly versatility.

In his view, though, the work he does in different areas is ultimately aligned. 

“All these things are in parallel,” Egami says. “I’m trying to start a new research agenda every three to four years. That helps me learn new topics and be motivated.”

Further motivation, he says, comes from being at MIT and liking the experience.

“I already knew MIT was an amazing place I would enjoy,” Egami says. Even so, in his time at MIT, he says, he has gained even more appreciation for the “spirit of engineering,” in the sense of working systematically on solutions to ongoing problems, among other things. In any case, Egami has found the Institute to be a stimulating and congenial place to do his work. 

“People are really nice at MIT,” says Egami, who has been teaching both undergraduate and graduate classes.

He adds: “The Department of Political Science is really high-functioning, people are intensive in terms of their work, but it’s just genuinely nice people.” 

And, yes, that’s one claim about the world Egami does not have to double-check. 

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 16 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02749-z

Heat stress reduces labour productivity, but economy-wide assessments are mostly missing. Using high-resolution projections and global economic modelling, the authors provide new cost estimates, and updated agricultural damages improve confidence in the social cost of carbon.

At the beginning of their first year, many MIT undergraduates choose to join one of the Institute’s 44 fraternities, sororities, or independent living groups (FSILGs), some of which are housed across Cambridge, Boston, and Brookline, Massachusetts.

There are 30 fraternities, nine sororities, and five independent living groups for students to choose from. Nearly 37 percent of undergrads join an FSILG, and these communities offer students more than a place to live, eat, and socialize; they are places where students create friendships, mentor younger students, work with both alumni and MIT administrators, raise funds for local charities, and learn valuable leadership skills.

While each organization has its own set of values, traditions, and membership process, they all share a common goal: creating communities where students can grow both personally and professionally inside and outside of the classroom, while navigating the rigors of an MIT education.

Anya Kattef ’98, director of FSILG Alumni Programs, says, “I can't imagine my MIT experience — or the decades that followed — without the extraordinary community I found in Alpha Phi. Surrounded by smart, compassionate, and driven women, I gained the confidence not only to survive MIT's demanding academic environment, but also to grow as a leader, progressing through the officer roles of athletic chair, house manager, and ultimately president. Beyond the leadership opportunities, the mentorship I received from upperclassmen helped me secure my first summer internship, navigate course selection, and pursue opportunities I might otherwise have overlooked. And perhaps most meaningfully, the friendships I formed through Alpha Phi while at MIT have grown into lifelong bonds that continue to shape and enrich my life.”

Service is a common bond

Liz Jason, associate dean and director of FSILGs at MIT, says “although every organization is unique and has its own personality, service remains a common thread throughout every fraternity and sorority. Many national organizations partner with causes ranging from heart health research and children's hospitals to literacy initiatives. Local chapters then build additional partnerships with organizations throughout Greater Boston, supporting causes such as Rosie's Place, the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, animal welfare organizations, and other community nonprofits.”

FSILGs often host signature fundraising events tied to philanthropy, while others organize volunteer opportunities throughout the year, such as cleaning up Back Bay alleys, so that it’s woven into the members' experience.

Jason also notes: “Our culturally based fraternities and sororities place a particularly strong emphasis on community service, with some requiring prospective members to demonstrate volunteer work before joining. In addition, some of our national organizations require students to complete at least one semester of college before joining to ensure they have established academic success first.”

Leadership and responsibility

Presidents and leaders of an FSILG take on a large amount of responsibility that goes beyond the scope of organizing social events or fundraisers. They’re managing organizations that function much like a small business.

“Leaders learn soft skills overseeing budgets, coordinating recruitment, mentoring new members, organizing educational programming, and often spend 10 or more hours each week fulfilling leadership responsibilities,” says Jason. “Leaders also learn conflict resolution while navigating disagreements among members or neighboring residents. They practice delegation, budgeting, prioritization, and time management. They gain experience running meetings, communicating with alumni volunteers, and working with senior Institute leaders. They have a seat at the decision-making table. As a leader, if you expect your peers to do something, you need to model and espouse that behavior, too.”

For students living in chapter houses, the responsibilities can extend even further. Leaders learn to manage multimillion-dollar properties. Student leaders coordinate building maintenance, communicate with vendors, oversee safety inspections, organize chores, and help maintain properties that, in some cases, have housed MIT students for more than a century. The student house manager manages the facility, attends training four times a year, where FSILG leadership goes over seasonal items they need to know, such as removing snow from sidewalks and steps, liability insurance, and safety inspections.

As the chapter president of Pi Beta Phi, senior Tea Picconatto says, “My role as president has strengthened my communication, leadership, and conflict-resolution skills. It has also connected me to the broader national organization and provided opportunities to build relationships with members and alumnae across the country. From a professional perspective, the experience has been valuable in demonstrating leadership and responsibility to future employers. I’m certain I was hired for two of my internship roles because of my sorority leadership experience.”

Picconatto adds, “Greek life offers a unique sense of identity, community, and connection to a nationwide network of members and alumnae that continues well after graduation in a way that is not replicated elsewhere on campus. My sorority sisters have always been there to offer emotional support, academic guidance, and encouragement whenever I have needed it.”

At MIT, Alpha Delta Phi Society is a gender-inclusive member of the Institute’s Interfraternity Council. As president, Gabriel Tian, who came to MIT from Toronto, Ontario, sought a community with which to experience MIT. During the first week of school, he was studying at the ADPhi house library late at night and said it felt very natural and productive. He says he thought “this is where I belong,” and pledged shortly after. Tian quickly became involved as academic chair and vice president, and even helped update the chapter's website.

“I have learned so much since Rush — how to be a leader, how to make difficult decisions, how to have hard and personal conversations, how to run a living community with an executive board, how to socialize more effectively to connect with each and every member. Being the president, or any other leadership position, is tough, but so incredibly valuable, and gives me confidence in myself and my ability to care of my community,” says Tian.

“In just two years since joining, I have made lifelong friends. In fact, some of the closest friendships in my life are right here in the siblinghood. The web of connections my chapter offers really enables connections between people who otherwise would not have the opportunity to have even met at MIT. To me, ADP makes MIT all the more brilliant and special.”

After graduating

Long after graduation, many alumni continue volunteering with their chapters, serving on house corporations, mentoring students, and helping preserve traditions for future generations. For many, the relationships formed during college continue throughout their professional and personal lives.

Some families even span multiple generations of FSILG life, with parents and children joining the same FSILG years apart. Others have found lifelong friendships — or even spouses — through their chapter experience.

Cecilia Warpinski Stuopis ’90, the chief health officer at MIT Health, found that when she joined the Alpha Chi Omega sorority while a student, she had an “instant group of peers.”

“I was trying out for the volleyball team, and my teammate invited me to Rush to see what it was about. We both were invited to join. There were about 20 of us in our pledge class, and perhaps 40 women total in the sorority at the time, and I’m still friends with many of my Alpha Chi sisters to this day. We’re a very tight-knit group. Sororities are a very supportive network of people who care about each other.”

Stuopis, whose husband also graduated from MIT, adds, “I became reengaged with the community at MIT as an alum, as a volunteer, and then an advisory board member for Alpha Chi Omega. My daughter came to MIT and pledged Alpha Chi, too, and this allowed me to attend her initiation. I’ve been on the Board of the Association of Independent Living Groups at MIT for the last nine years and recently signed up for another three. At MIT, fraternities or sororities are not like they are portrayed in the movies. They are guided by friendships, developing bonds, and are there to support all aspects of their member’s success — both during their time as students and well into the future.”

Students interested in joining an FSILG can find more information on the website.

In 2021, MIT set campus decarbonization goals as part of its Fast Forward climate action plan. Five years later, many of those goals have been met or are on track for completion, including efforts to make the Institute’s buildings more efficient, expand rooftop solar installations, and attain net-zero emissions. 

“Decarbonizing our campus goes hand-in-hand with MIT playing a leadership role in promoting carbon reduction and climate resilience through its research, innovation, and efforts to inform public policy in this area,” says Glen Shor, executive vice president and treasurer. “Our teams are leveraging that same innovative spirit to meet our campus climate goals.”

Creating an energy-efficient campus

Over the past decade, the Institute has decreased energy use per square foot by more than 10 percent, even as the campus has grown and research activity has intensified. Rooftop solar power generation has increased by more than five times in the same period, with installations added to the Stratton Student Center (Building W20), the Dewey Library (Building E53), the New Vassar undergraduate residence hall (Building W46), Graduate Junction (Buildings W87 and W88), and the theater arts building (Building W97). Thirty-three MIT building projects have earned Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. And in May, the Tina and Hamid Moghadam Building (Building 55) became MIT’s first Living Future Zero Carbon Certified building.

“We’ve completed more than 300 energy-efficiency projects across campus, focusing on our most energy-intensive research buildings, and ultimately touching nearly every corner of MIT,” notes Joe Higgins, vice president for campus services and stewardship.

Case in point: Building 46, home to the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex, and the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse (Building W41), newly home to the School of Architecture and Planning.

Building 46 was identified as one of MIT’s biggest energy users and the building with the greatest carbon-reduction potential. In 2024, the Institute completed a lab-by-lab renovation and improved Building 46’s mechanical systems infrastructure. The result: a 35 percent reduction in building energy use and carbon emissions — roughly a 2 percent reduction in overall campus emissions. 

The newly renovated Met Warehouse, which opened in August, features an innovative heat-recovery system, capturing heat rejected from the campus cooling system and using electric heat pumps to generate heat for the building. Higgins says the system will help inform the design of larger, campus-level heat-recovery systems.

Since 2014, 101 of the 168 buildings on MIT’s Main Campus have undergone energy-efficiency upgrades. The Institute’s 2030 Capital Plan will continue to invest in projects to reduce energy consumption and make efficiency upgrades a core element of all comprehensive building renewal projects. Examples of new projects include further optimizing heat-recovery systems; deploying more sophisticated controls to better manage ventilation, heating, and cooling; and using artificial intelligence to set classroom and office temperatures based on weather forecasts, occupancy patterns, and the forecasted carbon intensity of the regional power grid.

The renovation of Building 39, which is set to be home to a next-generation quantum research laboratory, will incorporate energy-saving features and technologies, including advanced insulation and windows, a smart ventilation system, LED lighting with automatic controls, and heat-recovery systems to maximize efficiency. These integrated systems are projected to dramatically reduce energy use and carbon emissions — cutting them by approximately 70–80 percent relative to the existing building baseline. 

Similarly, the McCormick Hall (Building W4) undergraduate residence hall renovation, which began this summer and is expected to be ready for students by the fall 2028 semester, will add high-performance windows, LED lighting, ventilation energy recovery, and low-flow plumbing fixtures. The project will replace gas cooktops with electric induction, use low-carbon flooring, improve stormwater management, and enhance the courtyard with native plantings, which require less water and maintenance while supporting local biodiversity.

On the path to net zero

MIT’s decarbonization efforts extend well beyond its campus. In recent years, the Institute has entered collaborations to create several large-scale renewable energy projects in regions of the United States where electric grids are still heavily reliant on fossil fuels. Together, these projects avoid over 200,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year, about equal to MIT’s annual direct campus emissions. 

“These projects, within a very short window of time, have had a significant impact on reducing emissions,” says Higgins. “They also put us on track to reach our net-zero target this year.” 

The first of these projects, the Summit Farms 60-megawatt solar farm in North Carolina, went online in 2016. Big Elm Solar in Texas, a 200 MW facility, followed in 2024, and Bowman Wind, a 208 MW wind farm in North Dakota, began operation in December 2025. Together, Big Elm and Bowman represent a landmark collaboration between MIT and 11 Massachusetts nonprofit and public sector organizations, including the City of Cambridge.  

“It’s a new market model that allows smaller organizations and government agencies to achieve greater reductions in carbon emissions that wouldn’t be possible on their own,” says Julie Newman, MIT director of sustainability. 

To capture the broader benefits of these projects, the Office of Sustainability worked with Institute researchers to develop a framework that assesses not only avoided emissions, but also economic and health outcomes. The team found that the projects generate economic benefits comparable to 7,000 one-year construction jobs and 189 maintenance jobs over 20 years. The projects’ annual health benefits are equivalent to 640 people quitting smoking for life, or nearly 200 premature deaths avoided each year for 20 years.

“Greener power sources are one of the building blocks we need to decarbonize our cities and campuses for the long run,” says Higgins. “That’s why we have made decarbonizing regional electricity grids a priority.”

The building blocks of campus decarbonization

To fully decarbonize MIT’s campus, the Institute will need to significantly change how it produces and distributes energy.

Currently, MIT’s Central Utilities Plant (CUP) burns natural gas to create electricity and steam-based heat, while also getting a small amount of electricity from the power grid. Electricity, heat, and air conditioning are distributed to campus buildings through a network of underground power lines and pipes. 

To move away from burning natural gas, and to take advantage of electricity from a greening grid for making heat, MIT is exploring creating a large-scale electric heat pump plant adjacent to the CUP on Vassar Street. The plant, a key building block for a long-term campus decarbonization strategy, will produce hot water and distribute it to campus buildings through a hot water-based heating system. 

“We’re starting the design process now, and in the coming year, we should know more about the scale and phasing of the heat pump plant we would construct, how it would interface with our existing district energy system, and the implementation timetable,” says Vasso Mathes, senior campus planner in the Office of Campus Planning, who is the campus decarbonization program manager. The heat pump plant will aim to recapture waste heat from existing cooling systems, supplying source energy to meet 30 to 40 percent of campus heating needs.

Another critical building block is transitioning MIT’s existing steam-based infrastructure to a hot-water system. That work — already underway — includes replacing steam distribution pipes to buildings with more efficient, easier-to-maintain hot-water pipes and converting buildings from steam to hot-water heat.

The third building block of a campus decarbonization strategy will be MIT’s ability to rely on the power grid for electricity instead of the CUP. “The electricity generated by the CUP is 15 to 20 percent lower in carbon emissions than the New England grid,” says Mathes. “We expect this to change over time as more and more renewables are added to the grid.” Even then, the CUP would be maintained as a backup system for use during peak heating and cooling days and grid stress events.

Finally, “the fourth building block is to go bigger, and look at shared infrastructure and coordinated planning with neighboring institutions and municipal partners,” says Higgins.

In that vein, earlier this year MIT became an anchor institution in the BosTEN Project, a year-long study to explore the feasibility of creating what could become the first city-scale thermal network in the United States. The network would help decrease the carbon footprints of major buildings across Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, by harnessing heat from the soil and rock under the Charles River and Boston Harbor, as well as waste heat from buildings and industrial facilities. It would also provide a renewable source of energy that can stabilize and even reduce the costs to heat and cool buildings.

“We’re thinking through how we can not only decarbonize our campus, but also how to use our work as a catalyst for broader strategies and technologies that others could readily employ,” Higgins says. “The unit of change needs to be at the city scale.”

For decades, one of the major complaints about nuclear power in the United States has been the argument that, after all this time, we still have not come up with a dependable strategy for sequestering high-level radioactive waste, including spent fuel from plant operation. This issue is of such importance that Haruko Wainwright has put it at the center of her research agenda as an Atlantic Richfield Career Development Professor in Energy Studies at MIT and an associate professor in the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering. 

In an essay called “The best-managed industrial waste in history,” which appeared in the Aug. 27 issue of the journal Nature, Wainwright made a bold statement, maintaining that an expansion of the nuclear power sector in the United States will benefit the environment, despite the fact that a solution to the permanent disposal of nuclear wastes has yet to be demonstrated in this country. 

In this interview, Wainwright describes risks associated with different forms of waste, ways to improve waste-handling procedures, and what lessons other countries can teach the U.S. in this realm.

Q: Why do you think chemical contaminants pose a greater public health risk than radioactive wastes?

A: I’ve always appreciated the fact that the dangers of radiation were recognized relatively early in the 20th century, prior to the widespread use of nuclear technologies. By the time an industry emerged, radiation protection standards were reasonably well established, including waste management. While nuclear power plants inevitably produce highly radioactive spent fuel, it is both solid and compact, making it relatively easy to contain and isolate from the environment. It took time to develop a disposal solution because people were pursuing a perfect one. Now, several countries are demonstrating that effective isolation over geological timescales is feasible. Finland, in fact, is about to open the world’s first deep geological repository for spent fuel.

Chemical contaminants present a different story. For many substances, like hexavalent chromium and PFAS (“forever chemicals”), the risks were identified long after they’d been released, having spread widely through the environment, food chains, and human bodies. PFAS, for example, has been used in industry and consumer products since the 1940s, yet the first federal drinking water standards were not adopted until 2024. Chemical hazardous wastes — including substances that degrade very slowly or not at all — are disposed of in the shallow subsurface without the requirement of long-term predictive assessments.

This is not to suggest that radioactive wastes are without risk. However, public perception is often disproportionately focused on — often hypothetical — nuclear hazards, while underestimating the dangers posed by chemical wastes. This misalignment actually has an adverse effect on the environment and public health. It leads to the misallocation of resources, diverting funding — including taxpayer dollars — away from worrisome contaminants whose environmental and public health consequences are already occurring. 

Q: How can we improve our procedures for storing spent fuel as more nuclear power plants come into operation around the world?

A: The nuclear industry is becoming increasingly proactive about waste management. Some companies, for example, now incorporate spent fuel storage capacity directly into their power plant designs, formulating plans that cover the entire operating period. Research on waste streams from advanced reactors — and even fusion reactors — is also growing. This approach of thinking about wastes before any are produced — what I call “design from the wastes up” — is critical for long-term sustainability.

Although further technical advances are surely needed, communication remains another area with significant room for improvement. Transparent monitoring programs and effective communications have been shown to build public confidence and provide assurance. Additionally, I believe we should place a greater focus on the inherent properties of radionuclides, including their risk pathways and mobility. Long-lived radionuclides are weakly radioactive and emit little or no penetrating radiation; their health risks are associated with ingestion or inhalation, analogous to chemical carcinogens. Most radionuclides, including plutonium, have low solubility and a high affinity for soil particles, limiting their mobility in the environment.

Current research on spent fuel storage has been devoted mainly to the integrity of the metal canisters used to contain spent fuel. Attention should also be directed toward developing predictive understanding of radionuclide transport and about geochemical barriers to the spread of radioactivity in the unlikely event of a containment breach. These approaches would exploit the natural immobility of radionuclides to afford additional layers of protection — in keeping with the nuclear industry’s recent embrace of passive safety features.

Q: How can the United States move toward the permanent disposal of nuclear wastes, and what can we learn from the European and Canadian examples? 

A: Many people tend to dwell on political and social issues, while the underlying science is frequently left out of the conversation. Fundamental questions — regarding the true dangers of radioactive materials and the feasibility of safe geological disposal — often go unanswered, leaving nuclear waste a vague, almost mythological threat, rather than a technical and engineering problem.

In fact, many people in geoscience believe that the failure of Yucca Mountain — the proposed geological repository for high-level radioactive wastes in the U.S. — stemmed from the fact that the site was chosen for political rather than scientific reasons. In 1987, Congress amended the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to confine site characterization to a single location, abandoning the original plan to screen multiple candidates. This top-down decision, widely dubbed the "Screw Nevada Bill," generated vehement local opposition. In addition, Yucca Mountain is the only proposed repository in the world situated above the groundwater table and within a zone of fractured igneous rock, where radionuclides are relatively mobile. Demonstrating its long-term safety is, consequently, much more difficult than for other proposed repositories.

Europe's approach to waste disposal offers a stark contrast. Switzerland, for example, identified a preferred site after a transparent, scientific evaluation of multiple candidates based on technical criteria, earning community acceptance as a result. Sweden and Finland built trust through decades of patient consultations with the public. And in Canada, more than 10 communities voluntarily expressed interest in hosting a repository before one favored site was ultimately selected.

Another underappreciated difference relates to how public concerns are handled. In the U.S., worries about radiation and radioactive waste have often been brushed aside by experts. In Europe, communication professionals and experts are trained to address every concern sincerely, offering understandable, science-based explanations. Discussing those concerns, moreover, can provide valuable opportunities to identify knowledge gaps and improve safety.

I believe that selecting a geologically sound site and communicating the science clearly — in terms that anyone can grasp — are the essential first steps toward achieving the permanent and safe disposal of nuclear waste.

The federal government has inserted a provision into a funding deal with the state of California that would make the state abandon its gold standard net neutrality law, broadband affordability laws, and public safety protections. Doing so would be a huge step back for California, and would actually end up being more expensive for Californians in the long run. Tell the governor to reject this provision before accepting these funds from the federal government.

Take Action

Tell the Governor to Stand Up for Net Neutrality, Affordability, and Public Safety

On August 31, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced it would be awarding California $1.4 billion to expand broadband connectivity in the state. In that deal is a provision that says that California agrees to not enforce any law, order, or policy that imposes any sort of restriction on internet service providers (ISPs). These ISPs will get awarded the funding in order to connect Californians they have neglected for years. The ban on enforcing our laws would last 14 years. This is disastrous for a lot of reasons. 

First, California is one of the only states with a strong state net neutrality law. Recreating much of the FCC’s Open Internet Order, the law prevents ISPs from blocking, throttling, zero rating, and instituting paid prioritization on internet service. Put another way, the law ensures that users, not companies, decide how they can see on the internet. If California is not allowed to enforce our gold standard law, there will be little stopping ISPs from controlling how everyone experiences the internet. 

Second, California has a number of affordability protections that would also fall under this agreement. For example, when the state approved the merger of Verizon and Frontier earlier this year, it required the new merged company to offer a $20 internet plan to low-income Californians—saving Californians billions of dollars over the next decade. Just this year the California Public Utilities Commission found that the average cost of broadband across four major urban markets (San Mateo, Oakland, Los Angeles, and San Diego) was $51 per month. In 2023, Consumer Reports found that 84% of American consumers pay at least $50 per month, with many paying more. That $30 difference per month—which is likely to actually be more—makes all the difference for low-income Californians. It is how Californians will save billions from this merger requirement. In contrast, $1.4 billion in new connectivity and infrastructure doesn't matter if the most vulnerable Californians cannot afford it. Eviscerations of this and the net neutrality protections will, ultimately, cost Californians more than they will get. 

Third, this deal will impact public safety. The same California net neutrality law which protects consumers also ensures reliable service for first responders during emergencies by banning throttling. In 2018, Verizon throttled, or slowed down, the service of firefighters as they were battling what was, at the time, the largest wildfire in California history. In reaction, fire departments came out in support of what would become California’s net neutrality law. If California cannot enforce its net neutrality law it will leave its first responders in a weaker position as natural disasters only become more intense. 

Most people do not have a choice in ISP as it is. California’s net neutrality law is one of the few things protecting Californians from the whims of these monopolistic giants. Californians should not give up our few hard-won protections in return for a hand out to these behemoths. Tell Governor Newsom to reject this provision before he accepts these funds from the federal government. 

Take Action

Tell the Governor to Stand Up for Net Neutrality, Affordability, and Public Safety

This essay was written with Cindy Cohn, and originally appeared in Lawfare.

One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance—such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders—to mass surveillance techniques—such as tapping into the internet backbone or mass collection of telephone or internet metadata. The legal and technical architecture of modern mass surveillance, initially framed as a necessary defense against terrorist threats, has grown far beyond that justification and national security in general. Mass surveillance is now a routine tool used by law enforcement. ICE uses it in...

Really interesting story about Harvest, a specialized code breaking computer built in the 1960s by IBM for the NSA.