Over the last decade or so, the tech industry has tried, and mostly failed, to make “smart glasses”—tech-infused glasses with cameras, AI, maps, displays, and more—a thing. But over the past year, products like Meta’s Ray-Ban Display Glasses and Oakley’s Meta Glasses have gone from a curious niche to the mainstream. 

Before you strap a dashcam to your face and sprint out into the world filming everything and everyone in your life, there are some civil liberties and privacy concerns to consider before buying or using a pair.

Meta is the biggest company that makes these sorts of glasses and their partnerships with Ray-Ban and Oakely are the most popular options, so we’ll be mostly focusing on them here. Others, like models from Snapchat are similar in form but far less ubiquitous. But Meta won’t hold this space for long. Google’s already announced a partnership with Warby Parker for their “AI-powered smart glasses,” and there are rumors around a competing product from Apple. 

With that, let’s dive into some of the considerations you should make before purchasing a pair.

If You’re Thinking About Buying Smart Glasses You’re likely not the only one who can see (and hear) your footage

The photos and videos you record with most smartglasses will likely be stored online at some point in the process. On Meta’s offerings, unless you are livestreaming, media you capture when you press the camera button is kept on the glasses until you import them onto your phone, but media is imported automatically by default into the Meta AI mobile app, which is required to set up the glasses. 

You can't use any AI features locally on the glasses. So anytime you use AI features, like when you say, “Hey Meta, start recording,” the footage is fed to Meta. You can use the glasses without the Meta AI app entirely, but considering you can’t easily download footage from the glasses to your phone without it, most people will likely use the app.

Some videos are fed to Meta for AI training, and we know at least in some cases that those videos go through human review. An investigation by Swedish newspapers found that workers were reviewing and annotating camera footage, which includes all sorts of sensitive videos, including nudity, sex, and going to the bathroom. Meta claimed to the BBC that this is in accordance with its terms of use, all in the name of AI training, which states:

In some cases, Meta will review your interactions with AIs, including the content of your conversations with or messages to AIs, and this review may be automated or manual (human).

This all means that Meta and their third-party contractors will have access to at least some of what you record, and it’s very hard as a user to know where footage goes, who will have access to it, and what they will do with it. When you save footage to your phone’s camera roll, which is where the Meta AI app stores content, that might also be sent to Apple or Google’s servers, depending on your settings. Employees at these companies can then possibly access that media, and it could be shared with law enforcement.

The recorded audio from conversations with Meta AI are also saved by default, and if you don’t like that, tough luck, unless you go in and manually delete them every time you say something.

Filming all the time is even more privacy invasive than you think

A common argument in favor of using the cameras in smartglasses is that phones and cameras can do this too, and it’s never been a problem. 

But smartglasses are designed to resemble regular glasses, to the point where most reviews point out how friends didn’t notice that they had cameras embedded in them. They’re designed to be invisible to those being recorded outside of a small indicator light when they’re recording video footage (that cheap hacks can disable). Whereas it is often obvious that a person is recording if they pull their phone out of their pocket and point it at someone else.

They’re designed to be invisible to those being recorded outside of a small indicator light when they’re recording video footage

Moreover, constant recording of everything in public spaces can create all sorts of potential privacy problems, some more obvious than others. This is another way that cameras on glasses are different from cameras on phones: it is far easier to constantly record one’s whereabouts with the former than the latter. If you continuously record, maybe you just happen to catch someone entering their passcode or password onto their phone or computer at a coffee shop, or broadcast someone’s bank details when you’re standing in line at an ATM. That doesn’t even begin to get into when smartglasses are intentionally used for less socially responsible means. And some people may forget to turn off their smartglasses when they enter a private space like a bathroom.  

And if you find yourself caught on someone’s camera, there’s not much you can do in recourse. If you do notice a stranger recording you, it’s up to you to intervene and ask not to be included in that footage, which can easily turn awkward or confrontational.

Our expectations of privacy shift when we’re in public, but bystanders in many cases will still have privacy interests. Public spaces are a place where you will be seen, but that shouldn’t mean it’s suddenly okay to catalog and identify everyone.

Consider the company’s the track record and public statements

Meta, Google, Apple—perhaps one benefit of all the major tech companies entering this market is that we already have a good idea of how much they tend to respect the privacy of their users or the openness of their platforms. Spoiler, it’s often not much.

Meta has a long history of privacy invasive technologies and practices. We’ve heard rumblings that Meta hopes to add face recognition to its smartglasses, preferably, “during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.” Yikes. This is a monumentally bad idea that should be abandoned by Meta and any of its competitors considering a similar feature. But regardless of whether they launch this feature, it’s a pretty clear indication of where Meta wants these sorts of devices to go. 

If You Have Smartglasses Already Opt out of sharing with Meta where you can

You can disable a couple of the features where unnecessary data is sent to Meta. In the Meta AI app, under the device settings, there’s a privacy page where you can disable sharing additional data, and more importantly, turn off “Cloud media,” where your photos and videos are sent to Meta’s cloud for processing and temporary storage. 

Decide your use-case and stick to it

These glasses can be useful for filming a variety of activities. We’ve seen fascinating scenes of tattoo artists doing their work (with client’s permission), and it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to see how people might use it to film extreme sports. Even on an everyday level, you might find them useful for capturing holidays, birthdays, and all sorts of other private occasions. 

But if you buy these glasses for a specific, mostly private purpose, it is probably best to stick to that, instead of wearing them everywhere and recording everything you do.

Follow the rules of a businesses and social expectations

You often have a right to record in public spaces, but that doesn’t mean other people will like it. Businesses, including restaurants and stores, may want nothing to do with continuous filming and may either post a sign asking you not to use smartglasses, or ask you to stop. This may reflect the preferences not just of the business owner, but the people around you. And don’t use glasses to record when you enter other people’s private spaces like bathrooms or changing rooms.

It’s also a good idea to check in with friends and family before tapping that record button at a social gathering. Some people may not be as comfortable with these glasses as they are with other recording equipment.

Consider blurring strangers if you’re going to upload video

Blurring video footage isn’t an easy task, but if you’re considering uploading footage from something like a protest, it may be worth the effort to do so (apps like Meta’s Edits simplify this process, as do some other video sites, like YouTube). Some people don’t want the government to see their faces at protests, and might be afraid to attend if other people are uploading their faces.

Some people don’t want the government to see their faces at protests, and might be afraid to attend if other people are uploading their faces.

It would be better if Meta leveraged its AI features to offer this sort of feature automatically, especially with livestreaming. It’s not that outlandish of a request, as it seems like the company tries to blur faces automatically in footage it captures for annotation, though it’s not always reliable. After all, Google began redacting faces in Street View years ago, following privacy concerns from groups like EFF.

Resist face recognition

Adding facial recognition technology to smartglasses would obliterate the privacy of everyone. We cannot let companies push face recognition into these glasses, and as a user, you should make your voice clear that this is not something you want.

Smartglasses don’t have to be used to decimate the privacy of anyone you encounter during the day. There are legitimate uses out there, but it’s up to those who use them to respect the social norms of the spaces they enter and the people they encounter.

The rapidly escalating conflict between Anthropic and the Pentagon, which started when the company refused to let the government use its technology to spy on Americans, has now gone to court. The Department of Defense retaliated by designating the company a “supply chain risk” (SCR). Now, Anthropic is asking courts to block the designation, arguing that the First Amendment does not permit the government to coerce a private actor to rewrite its code to serve government ends.

We agree.

As EFF, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and multiple other public interest organizations explained in a brief filed in support of Anthropic’s motion, the development and operation of large language models involve multiple expressive choices protected by the First Amendment. Requiring a company to rewrite its code to remove guardrails means compelling different expression, a clear constitutional violation. Further, the public record shows that the SCR designation is intended to punish the company both for pushing back and for its CEO’s public statements explaining that AI may supercharge surveillance practices that current law has proven ill-equipped to address.

As we also explain, the company’s concerns about how the government will use its technology are well-founded. The U.S. government has a long history of illegally surveilling its citizens without adequate judicial oversight based on questionable interpretations of its Constitutional and statutory obligations. The Department of Defense acquires vast troves of personal information from commercial entities, including individuals’ physical location, social media, and web browsing data. Other government agencies continue to collect and query vast quantities of Americans’ information, including by acquiring information from third party data brokers.

A growing body of social science research illustrates the chilling effects of these pervasive activities. Fearing retribution for unpopular views, dissenters stay silent. And AI only exacerbates the problem. AI can quickly analyze the government’s massive datasets or combine that information with data scraped off the internet, purchased through the commercial data broker market, or from local police surveillance devices and use all of that data to construct a comprehensive picture of a person’s life and infer sensitive details like their religious beliefs, medical conditions, political opinions, or even sex partners. For example, an agency could use AI to infer an individual’s association with a particular mosque based on data showing that they visited its website, followed its social media accounts, and were located near the mosque during religious services. AI can also deanonymize online speech by using public information to unmask anonymous users.

It is easy to conceive how an agency, a government employee with improper intent, or a malicious hacker could exploit these capabilities to monitor public discourse, preemptively squelch dissent, or persecute people from marginalized communities. Against this background and absent meaningful changes to the governing national security laws and judicial oversight structure, it is entirely reasonable for Anthropic—or any other company—to insist on its own guardrails.

Without action from Congress, the task of protecting your privacy has fallen in large part to Big Tech—something no one wants, including Big Tech. But if Congress won’t do it, companies like Anthropic must be allowed to step in, without facing retribution.

The SAFE act, introduced by Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Dick Durbin (D-IL), is the first of many likely proposals we will see to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act of 2008—and while imperfect, it does propose a litany of real and much-needed reforms of Big Brother’s favorite surveillance authority. 

The irresponsible 2024 reauthorization of the secretive mass surveillance authority Section 702 not only gave the government two more years of unconstitutional surveillance powers, it also made the policy much worse. But, now people who value privacy and the rule of law get another bite at the apple. With expiration for Section 702 looming in April 2026, we are starting to see the emergence of proposals for how to reauthorize the surveillance authority—including calls from inside the White House for a clean reauthorization that would keep the policy unchanged. EFF has always had a consistent policy: Section 702 should not be reauthorized absent major reforms that will keep this tactic of foreign surveillance from being used as a tool of mass domestic espionage. 

What is Section 702?

Section 702 was intended to modernize foreign surveillance of the internet for national security purposes. It allows collection of foreign intelligence from non-Americans located outside the United States by requiring U.S.-based companies that handle online communications to hand over data to the government. As the law is written, the intelligence community (IC) cannot use Section 702 programs to target Americans, who are protected by the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. But the law gives the intelligence community space to target foreign intelligence in ways that inherently and intentionally sweep in Americans’ communications.

We live in an increasingly globalized world where people are constantly in communication with people overseas. That means, while targeting foreigners outside the U.S. for “foreign intelligence Information” the IC routinely acquires the American side of those communications without a probable cause warrant. The collection of all that data from U.S telecommunications and internet providers results in the “incidental” capture of conversations involving a huge number of people in the United States.

But, this backdoor access to U.S. persons’ data isn’t “incidental.” Section 702 has become a routine part of the FBI’s law enforcement mission. In fact, the IC’s latest Annual Statistical Transparency Report documents the many ways the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) uses Section 702 to spy on Americans without a warrant. The IC lobbied for Section 702 as a tool for national security outside the borders of the U.S., but it is apparent that the FBI uses it to conduct domestic, warrantless surveillance on Americans. In 2021 alone, the FBI conducted 3.4 million warrantless searches of US person’s 702 data.

The Good

Let’s start with the good things that this bill does. These are reforms EFF has been seeking for a long time and their implementation would mean a big improvement in the status quo of national security law.

First, the bill would partially close the loophole that allows the FBI and domestic law enforcement to dig through 702-collected data’s “incidental” collection of the U.S. side of communications. The FBI currently operates with a “finders keeper” mentality, meaning that because the data is pre-collected by another agency, the FBI believes it can operate with almost no constraints on using it for other purposes. The SAFE act would require a warrant before the FBI looked at the content of these collected communications. As we will get to later, this reform does not go nearly far enough because they can query to see what data on a person exists before getting a warrant, but it is certainly an improvement on the current system. 

Second, the bill addresses the age-old problem of parallel construction. If you’re unfamiliar with this term, parallel construction is a method by which intelligence agencies or domestic law enforcement find out a piece of information about a subject through secret, even illegal or unconstitutional methods. Uninterested in revealing these methods, officers hide what actually happened by publicly offering an alternative route they could have used to find that information. So, for instance, if police want to hide the fact that they knew about a specific email because it was intercepted under the authority of Section 702, they might use another method, like a warranted request to a service provider, to create a more publicly-acceptable path to that information. To deal with this problem, the SAFE Act mandates that when the government seeks to use Section 702 evidence in court, it must disclosure the source of this evidence “without regard to any claim that the information or evidence…would inevitably have been discovered, or was subsequently reobtained through other means.” 

Next, the bill proposes a policy that EFF and other groups have nonetheless been trying to get through Congress for over five years: ending the data broker loophole. As the system currently stands, data brokers who buy and sell your personal data collected from smartphone applications, among other sources, are able to sell that sensitive information, including a phone’s geolocation, to the law enforcement and intelligence agencies. That means that with a bit of money, police can buy the data (or buy access to services that purchase and map the data) that they would otherwise need a warrant to get. A bill that would close this loophole, the Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale Act passed through the House in 2024 but has yet to be voted on by the Senate. In the meantime, states have taken it upon themselves to close this loophole with Montana being the first state to pass similar legislation in May 2025. The SAFE Act proposes to partially fix the loophole at least as far as intelligence agencies are concerned. This fix could not come soon enough—especially since the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has signaled their willingness to create one big, streamlined, digital marketplace where the government can buy data from data brokers. 

Another positive thing about the SAFE Act is that it creates an official statutory end to surveillance power that the government allowed to expire in 2020. In its heyday, the intelligence community used Section 215 of the Patriot Act to justify the mass collection of communication records like metadata from phone calls. Although this legal authority has lapsed, it has always been our fear that it will not sit dormant forever and could be reauthorized at any time. This new bill says that its dormant powers shall “cease to be in effect” within 180 of the SAFE Act being enacted. 

What Needs to Change 

The SAFE Act also attempts to clarify very important language that gauges the scope of the surveillance authority: who is obligated to turn over digital information to the U.S. government. Under Section 702, “electronic communication service providers” (ECSP) are on the hook for providing information, but the definition of that term has been in dispute and has changed over time—most recently when a FISA court opinion expanded the definition to include a category of “secret” ECSPs that have not been publicly disclosed.  Unfortunately, this bill still leaves ambiguity in interpretation and an audit system without a clear directive for enforcing limitations on who is an ECSP or guaranteeing transparency. 

As mentioned earlier, the SAFE Act introduces a warrant requirement for the FBI to read the contents of Americans’ communications that have been warrantlessly collected under Section 702. However, the law does not in its current form require the FBI to get a warrant before running searches identifying whether Americans have communications present in the database in the first place. Knowing this information is itself very revealing and the government should not be able to profit from circumventing the Fourth Amendment. 

When Congress reauthorized Section 702 in 2014, they did so through a piece of policy called the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA). This bill made 702 worse in several ways, one of the most severe being that it expanded the legal uses for the surveillance authority to include vetting immigrants. In an era when the United States government is rounding up immigrants, including people awaiting asylum hearings, and which U.S officials are continuously threatening to withhold admission to the United States from people whose politics does not align with the current administration, RISAA sets a dangerous precedent. Although RISAA is officially expiring in April, it would be helpful for any Section 702 reauthorization bill to explicitly prohibit the use of this authority for that reason. 

Finally, in the same way that the SAFE Act statutorily ends the expired Section 215 of the Patriot Act, it should also impose an explicit end to “Abouts collection” a practice of collecting digital communications, not if their from suspected people, but if their are “about” specific topics. This practice has been discontinued, but still sits on the books, just waiting to be revamped. 

We're celebrating the launch of Privacy's Defender, a new book by EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn on Thursday, March 12—and we want you to join us! Cindy has tangled with the feds, fought for your data security, and argued before judges to protect our access to science and knowledge on the internet. In Privacy's Defender she asks: can we still have private conversations if we live our lives online?

Join the festivities for a live conversation between Cindy Cohn and Annalee Newitz followed by a book signing with Cindy.

REGISTER TODAY! 

$20 General Admission for 1
$30 Discounted tickets for 2
$12.50 Student Ticket
All proceeds benefit EFF's mission.

Want your own copy of Privacy's Defender?
Save $10 when you preorder the book with your ticket purchase

WHEN:
Thursday, March 12th, 2026
6:30 pm to 9:30 pm

WHERE:
Ciel Creative Space
Entrance located at:
940 Parker St, Berkeley, CA 94710

6:30 PM Doors Open
7:15 PM Program Begins

About the book

Throughout her career, Cindy Cohn has been driven by a fundamental question: Can we still have private conversations if we live our lives online? Privacy’s Defender chronicles her thirty-year battle to protect our right to digital privacy and shows just how central this right is to all our other rights, including our ability to organize and make change in the world.

Shattering the hypermasculine myth that our digital reality was solely the work of a handful of charismatic tech founders, the author weaves her own personal story with the history of Crypto Wars, FBI gag orders, and the post-9/11 surveillance state. She describes how she became a seasoned leader in the early digital rights movement, as well as how this work serendipitously helped her discover her birth parents and find her life partner. Along the way, she also details the development of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which she grew from a ragtag group of lawyers and hackers into one of the most powerful digital rights organizations in the world.

Part memoir and part legal history for the general reader, the book is a compelling testament to just how hard-won the privacy rights we now enjoy as tech users are, but also how crucial these rights are in our efforts to combat authoritarianism, grow democracy, and strengthen other human rights. Learn about the Privacy's Defender book tour.

Parking

Street parking is available around the building.

Accessibility

The main event space is wheelchair accessible, on concrete. Lively music will be playing, and the speakers will be using a microphone, so louder volumes are expected. EFF is committed to improving accessibility for our events. If you will be attending in-person and need accommodation, or have accessibility questions prior to the event, please contact events@eff.org.

Food and Drink

Wine & Beer will be available for purchase. Cellarmaker Brewing Co., located next door to Ciel Space, will be serving food until 8:00 pm. 

Questions?

Email us at events@eff.org.

About the Speakers

Cindy Cohn
Cindy Cohn is the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. From 2000-2015 she served as EFF’s Legal Director as well as its General Counsel.  Ms. Cohn first became involved with EFF in 1993, when EFF asked her to serve as the outside lead attorney in Bernstein v. Dept. of Justice, the successful First Amendment challenge to the U.S. export restrictions on cryptography. 

Ms. Cohn has been named to TheNonProfitTimes 2020 Power & Influence TOP 50 list, honoring 2020's movers and shakers.  In 2018, Forbes included Ms. Cohn as one of America's Top 50 Women in Tech. The National Law Journal named Ms. Cohn one of 100 most influential lawyers in America in 2013, noting: "[I]f Big Brother is watching, he better look out for Cindy Cohn." She was also named in 2006 for "rushing to the barricades wherever freedom and civil liberties are at stake online."  In 2007 the National Law Journal named her one of the 50 most influential women lawyers in America. In 2010 the Intellectual Property Section of the State Bar of California awarded her its Intellectual Property Vanguard Award and in 2012 the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists awarded her the James Madison Freedom of Information Award.  

Ms. Cohn is the author of the professional memoir, called Privacy's Defender to be published by MIT Press in March, 2026. She is also the co-host of EFF's award-winning podcast, How to Fix the Internet.  

 

Annalee Newitz
Annalee Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the author of four novels: Automatic Noodle, The Terraformers, The Future of Another Timeline, and Autonomous, which won the Lambda Literary Award. As a science journalist, they are the author of Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age and Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in science. They are a writer for the New York Times and elsewhere, and have a monthly column in New Scientist. They have published in The Washington Post, Slate, Scientific American, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and Technology Review, among others. They were the co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, and have contributed to the public radio shows Science Friday, On the Media, KQED Forum, and Here and Now. Previously, they were the founder of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.

Join EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn in conversation with 404 Media Cofounder Jason Koebler to discuss Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance, Cindy’s personal story of standing up to the Justice Department, taking on the NSA, and tangling with the FBI to protect our right to digital privacy. The highly anticipated book asks the fundamental question: Can we still have private conversations if we live our lives online? Join the livestream for a live discussion followed by by Q&A.

EFFecting Change Livestream Series:
Privacy's Defender
Thursday, March 19th
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM Pacific
This event is LIVE and FREE!

Accessibility

This event will be live-captioned and recorded. EFF is committed to improving accessibility for our events. If you have any accessibility questions regarding the event, please contact events@eff.org.

Event Expectations

EFF is dedicated to a harassment-free experience for everyone, and all participants are encouraged to view our full Event Expectations.

Upcoming Events

Want to make sure you don’t miss our next livestream? Here’s a link to sign up for updates about this series: eff.org/ECUpdates. If you have a friend or colleague that might be interested, please join the fight for your digital rights by this link: eff.org/EFFectingChange. Thank you for helping EFF spread the word about privacy and free expression online.

Recording

We hope you and your friends can join us live! If you can't make it, we’ll post the recording afterward on YouTube and the Internet Archive!

About the Speakers

 

 Cindy Cohn 
Cindy Cohn is the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. From 2000-2015 she served as EFF’s Legal Director as well as its General Counsel.  Ms. Cohn first became involved with EFF in 1993, when EFF asked her to serve as the outside lead attorney in Bernstein v. Dept. of Justice, the successful First Amendment challenge to the U.S. export restrictions on cryptography. Ms. Cohn has been named to TheNonProfitTimes 2020 Power & Influence TOP 50 list, honoring 2020's movers and shakers.  In 2018, Forbes included Ms. Cohn as one of America's Top 50 Women in Tech. The National Law Journal named Ms. Cohn one of 100 most influential lawyers in America in 2013, noting: "[I]f Big Brother is watching, he better look out for Cindy Cohn." She was also named in 2006 for "rushing to the barricades wherever freedom and civil liberties are at stake online."  In 2007 the National Law Journal named her one of the 50 most influential women lawyers in America. In 2010 the Intellectual Property Section of the State Bar of California awarded her its Intellectual Property Vanguard Award and in 2012 the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists awarded her the James Madison Freedom of Information Award.  

 Jason Koebler 
Jason Koebler is a cofounder of 404 Media, a journalist-owned investigative tech publication. He reports on surveillance and privacy, the ways that artificial intelligence is changing the internet, labor, and society, and consumer rights. Before 404 Media, he was the editor-in-chief of Motherboard, VICE's technology publication and an executive producer on Encounters, a Netflix documentary about the search for alien life.

For the last hundred years, women have had pivotal and far too often unsung roles in building and shaping the technology that we now use every day. Many have heard of Ada Lovelace’s contributions to computer programming, but far fewer know Mary Allen Wilkes, a prominent modern programmer who wrote much of the software for the LINC, one of the world’s first interactive personal computers (it could fit in a single office and cost $40,000, but it was the 60’s). Decades earlier, when the first all-electronic, digital Eniac computer was built in the 40’s, the “software” for it was written by women: Kathleen McNulty, Jean Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Frances Bilas and Ruth Lichterman. 

It’s thankfully become more common knowledge that actor and inventor Hedy Lamarr co-created the concept of "frequency-hopping" that became a basis for radio systems from cell phones to wireless networking systems. But too few know Laila Ohlgren, who in the 1970’s solved a major problem with the development of mobile networks and phones by recognizing that dialed numbers could be stored and sent all at once with a “call button,” rather than sent one number at a time, which created connection issues before a call was even made. 

Women in tech deserve more and brighter spotlights. At EFF, we’ve had the honor of celebrating some of our heroes at our annual EFF Awards, including many women who are leading the digital rights community. For International Women’s Day, we’re highlighting the contributions of just a few of these recipients from the last decade, whose work to protect privacy, speech, and creativity online has had a global impact.

Carolina Botero (EFF Award Winner, 2024) 

Carolina Botero is a leader in the fight for digital rights in Latin America. For over a decade, she led the Colombia-based Karisma Foundation and cultivated its regional and international impact. Botero and Karisma helped connect indigenous peoples to the internet and made it possible to contribute content to Wikipedia in their native language, expanding access to both history and modern information. They built alliances to combat disinformation, pushed for legal tools to protect cultural and heritage institutions from digital blackholes, and were, and remain, a necessary voice speaking for human rights in the online world. EFF worked closely with Karisma and Botero to help free Colombian graduate student Diego Gomez, who shared another student’s Master’s thesis with colleagues over the internet. Diego’s story demonstrates what can go wrong when nations enact severe penalties for copyright infringement, and thanks to work from Karisma, many partners, and many EFF supporters, he was cleared of the criminal charges that he faced for this harmless act of sharing scholarly research.

Carolina Botero receiving her EFF Award

Botero stepped down from the role in 2024, opening the door for a new generation. While her work continues—she’s currently on the advisory board of CELE, the Centro de Estudios en Libertad de Expresión—her EFF Award was well-deserved based on her strong and inspiring legacy for those in Latin America and beyond who advocate for a digital world that enhances rights and empowers the powerless. Learn more about Botero on her EFF Awards page and the recap of the 2024 event. 

Chelsea Manning (EFF Award Winner, 2017)

Chelsea Manning became famous as a whistleblower: In 2010, she disclosed classified Iraq War documents, including a video of the killings of Iraqi civilians and two Reuters reporters by U.S. troops. These documents exposed aspects of U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that infuriated the public and embarrassed the government. But she is also a transparency and transgender rights advocate, network security expert, author, and former U.S. Army intelligence analyst. 

Manning joined the military in 2007. Her role as an intelligence analyst to an Army unit in Iraq in 2009 gave her access to classified databases, but more importantly, it gave her a uniquely comprehensive view of the war in Iraq, and she became increasingly disillusioned and frustrated by what she saw, versus what was being shared. In 2010, she approached major news outlets hoping to give information to them that would reveal a new side of the war to the public. Ultimately, she shared the documents with Wikileaks. 

Manning’s bravery did not end there. When she was arrested a few months later, she endured "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment, according to the UN Special Rapporteur on torture. She was locked up alone for 23 hours a day over an 11-month period, before her trial. The mistreatment resulted in public outcry and advocacy by organizations like Amnesty International. Even a State Department spokesperson, Philip Crowley, criticized the treatment as "ridiculous, counterproductive, and stupid," and resigned. She was moved to a medium-security facility in April 2011. 

The government’s charges against Manning were outrageous, but in 2013 she was convicted of 19 of 22 counts as a result of her whistleblowing activities. She became one of fewerthan a dozen people prosecuted for espionage in the entire history of the United States, and she was sentenced to the longest punishment ever imposed on a whistleblower. Then, the day after her conviction, isolated from her community and in all likelihood expecting to remain in prison for years if not decades, she courageously issued a statement identifying herself as a trans woman, which she’d wanted to reveal for years. 

Over the next several years, while imprisoned, she became an advocate both for government transparency and for transgender rights. Her conviction and sentence pointed to the need for legal reform of both the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and the Espionage Act.  EFF filed an amicus brief to the U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals arguing that the CFAA was never meant to criminalize violations of private policies like those of government systems, and EFF also pushed, and continues to fight for, narrower interpretations of the Espionage Act and stronger protections for whistleblowers, particularly to take into account both the motivation of individuals who pass on documents and the disclosure’s ramifications. 

Even after President Obama commuted her sentence in 2017, and EFF celebrated her work and her release with an EFF award in September, 2017, her fight wasn’t over. She was imprisoned again twice in 2019 and ultimately fined $256,000 for refusing to testify before grand juries investigating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on torture again criticized Manning’s treatment, writing that "the practice of coercive detention appears to be incompatible with the international human rights obligations of the United States." 

Manning was released in 2020 after having spent almost a decade in total imprisoned for her courage. She wrote a memoir, README.txt, in 2022, to take back control over her story.

EFF Award Winners Mike Masnick, Annie Game, and Chelsea Manning

Annie Game (EFF Award Winner, 2017)

Annie Game spent over 16 years as the Executive Director of IFEX, a global network of journalism and civil liberties organizations working together to defend freedom of expression.  IFEX (formerly International Freedom of Expression Exchange) began in the 1990s, when a group of organizations and the Canadian Committee to Protect Journalists came together to consider how to respond as a single voice to free-expression violations around the world. IFEX now is a global hub for the protection of free speech and journalism. 

Game recognized early on that digital rights and freedom of expression groups needed one another. Under her leadership, IFEX paired more traditional free-expression organizations with their more digital counterparts, with a focus on building organizational security capacities. IFEX Initiatives under Game’s leadership have been expansive. For example, the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists, November 2, has been an annual wake-up call and reminder for UN member states to live up to their commitments to protecting journalists. UNESCO observed more than 1,700 journalists were killed globally between 2006 and 2024, and nearly 90% of these cases went unsolved in the courts. 

Game and IFEX have also focused on high-profile cases of journalists threatened by governments for their work, such as Bahey eldin Hassan in Egypt. Bahey is the director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) and has advocated for freedom of expression and the basic human rights of Egyptians, but has lived in exile since 2014. The charges against him, of “disseminating false information” and “insulting the judiciary,” are common tactics of intimidation and harassment. Bahey’s supposed crimes were sharing social media posts criticising the Egyptian judiciary’s lack of independence, and speaking about the killing in Egypt of Italian researcher Giulio Regeni. Bahey—an IFEX member—is just one of many reporters and human rights workers in danger when they speak. But when journalists and those defending their rights online speak out as one voice, as IFEX helps them do, it makes a difference. 

Another initiative has been the Faces of Free Expression project, a partnership between IFEX and the International Free Expression Project. If you’re looking for more heroes, this project details the stories of “risk-takers and change-makers – individuals who put their careers, their freedom, their safety, and sometimes even their lives on the line,” while reporting, or defending free expression and the right to information. 

Wherever authoritarianism and repression of speech have been on the rise, Game has unapologetically called out injustices and made it safer for journalists to do their work, while ensuring accountability when crimes are committed. The work is more critical now than ever, and since leaving IFEX in 2022, she’s remained an activist while focusing increasingly on environmental protection. 

Twelve More Heroes 

EFF has honored many more women with awards over the years—from Anita Borg and Hedy Lamarr to Amy Goodman and Beth Givens. This blog from 2012 looks back and acknowledges the important contributions from twelve more EFF Award winners. 

We’ve also asked five women at EFF about women in digital rights, freedom of expression, technology, and tech activism who have inspired us. You can read that here.

Donate to Support EFF's Work

Your donations empower EFF to do even more.

For the last hundred years, women have had pivotal and far too often unsung roles in building and shaping the technology that we now use every day. Many have heard of Ada Lovelace’s contributions to computer programming, but far fewer know Mary Allen Wilkes, a prominent modern programmer who wrote much of the software for the LINC, one of the world’s first interactive personal computers (it could fit in a single office and cost $40,000, but it was the 60’s). Decades earlier, when the first all-electronic, digital Eniac computer was built in the 40’s, the “software” for it was written by women: Kathleen McNulty, Jean Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Frances Bilas and Ruth Lichterman. 

It’s thankfully become more common knowledge that actor and inventor Hedy Lamarr co-created the concept of "frequency-hopping" that became a basis for radio systems from cell phones to wireless networking systems. But too few know Laila Ohlgren, who in the 1970’s solved a major problem with the development of mobile networks and phones by recognizing that dialed numbers could be stored and sent all at once with a “call button,” rather than sent one number at a time, which created connection issues before a call was even made. 

Women in tech deserve more and brighter spotlights. At EFF, we’ve had the honor of celebrating some of our heroes at our annual EFF Awards, including many women who are leading the digital rights community. For International Women’s Day, we’re highlighting the contributions of just a few of these recipients from the last decade, whose work to protect privacy, speech, and creativity online has had a global impact.

Carolina Botero (EFF Award Winner, 2024) 

Carolina Botero is a leader in the fight for digital rights in Latin America. For over a decade, she led the Colombia-based Karisma Foundation and cultivated its regional and international impact. Botero and Karisma helped connect indigenous peoples to the internet and made it possible to contribute content to Wikipedia in their native language, expanding access to both history and modern information. They built alliances to combat disinformation, pushed for legal tools to protect cultural and heritage institutions from digital blackholes, and were, and remain, a necessary voice speaking for human rights in the online world. EFF worked closely with Karisma and Botero to help free Colombian graduate student Diego Gomez, who shared another student’s Master’s thesis with colleagues over the internet. Diego’s story demonstrates what can go wrong when nations enact severe penalties for copyright infringement, and thanks to work from Karisma, many partners, and many EFF supporters, he was cleared of the criminal charges that he faced for this harmless act of sharing scholarly research.

Carolina Botero receiving her EFF Award

Botero stepped down from the role in 2024, opening the door for a new generation. While her work continues—she’s currently on the advisory board of CELE, the Centro de Estudios en Libertad de Expresión—her EFF Award was well-deserved based on her strong and inspiring legacy for those in Latin America and beyond who advocate for a digital world that enhances rights and empowers the powerless. Learn more about Botero on her EFF Awards page and the recap of the 2024 event. 

Chelsea Manning (EFF Award Winner, 2017)

Chelsea Manning became famous as a whistleblower: In 2010, she disclosed classified Iraq War documents, including a video of the killings of Iraqi civilians and two Reuters reporters by U.S. troops. These documents exposed aspects of U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that infuriated the public and embarrassed the government. But she is also a transparency and transgender rights advocate, network security expert, author, and former U.S. Army intelligence analyst. 

Manning joined the military in 2007. Her role as an intelligence analyst to an Army unit in Iraq in 2009 gave her access to classified databases, but more importantly, it gave her a uniquely comprehensive view of the war in Iraq, and she became increasingly disillusioned and frustrated by what she saw, versus what was being shared. In 2010, she approached major news outlets hoping to give information to them that would reveal a new side of the war to the public. Ultimately, she shared the documents with Wikileaks. 

Manning’s bravery did not end there. When she was arrested a few months later, she endured "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment, according to the UN Special Rapporteur on torture. She was locked up alone for 23 hours a day over an 11-month period, before her trial. The mistreatment resulted in public outcry and advocacy by organizations like Amnesty International. Even a State Department spokesperson, Philip Crowley, criticized the treatment as "ridiculous, counterproductive, and stupid," and resigned. She was moved to a medium-security facility in April 2011. 

The government’s charges against Manning were outrageous, but in 2013 she was convicted of 19 of 22 counts as a result of her whistleblowing activities. She became one of fewerthan a dozen people prosecuted for espionage in the entire history of the United States, and she was sentenced to the longest punishment ever imposed on a whistleblower. Then, the day after her conviction, isolated from her community and in all likelihood expecting to remain in prison for years if not decades, she courageously issued a statement identifying herself as a trans woman, which she’d wanted to reveal for years. 

Over the next several years, while imprisoned, she became an advocate both for government transparency and for transgender rights. Her conviction and sentence pointed to the need for legal reform of both the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and the Espionage Act.  EFF filed an amicus brief to the U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals arguing that the CFAA was never meant to criminalize violations of private policies like those of government systems, and EFF also pushed, and continues to fight for, narrower interpretations of the Espionage Act and stronger protections for whistleblowers, particularly to take into account both the motivation of individuals who pass on documents and the disclosure’s ramifications. 

Even after President Obama commuted her sentence in 2017, and EFF celebrated her work and her release with an EFF award in September, 2017, her fight wasn’t over. She was imprisoned again twice in 2019 and ultimately fined $256,000 for refusing to testify before grand juries investigating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on torture again criticized Manning’s treatment, writing that "the practice of coercive detention appears to be incompatible with the international human rights obligations of the United States." 

Manning was released in 2020 after having spent almost a decade in total imprisoned for her courage. She wrote a memoir, README.txt, in 2022, to take back control over her story.

EFF Award Winners Mike Masnick, Annie Game, and Chelsea Manning

Annie Game (EFF Award Winner, 2017)

Annie Game spent over 16 years as the Executive Director of IFEX, a global network of journalism and civil liberties organizations working together to defend freedom of expression.  IFEX (formerly International Freedom of Expression Exchange) began in the 1990s, when a group of organizations and the Canadian Committee to Protect Journalists came together to consider how to respond as a single voice to free-expression violations around the world. IFEX now is a global hub for the protection of free speech and journalism. 

Game recognized early on that digital rights and freedom of expression groups needed one another. Under her leadership, IFEX paired more traditional free-expression organizations with their more digital counterparts, with a focus on building organizational security capacities. IFEX Initiatives under Game’s leadership have been expansive. For example, the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists, November 2, has been an annual wake-up call and reminder for UN member states to live up to their commitments to protecting journalists. UNESCO observed more than 1,700 journalists were killed globally between 2006 and 2024, and nearly 90% of these cases went unsolved in the courts. 

Game and IFEX have also focused on high-profile cases of journalists threatened by governments for their work, such as Bahey eldin Hassan in Egypt. Bahey is the director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) and has advocated for freedom of expression and the basic human rights of Egyptians, but has lived in exile since 2014. The charges against him, of “disseminating false information” and “insulting the judiciary,” are common tactics of intimidation and harassment. Bahey’s supposed crimes were sharing social media posts criticising the Egyptian judiciary’s lack of independence, and speaking about the killing in Egypt of Italian researcher Giulio Regeni. Bahey—an IFEX member—is just one of many reporters and human rights workers in danger when they speak. But when journalists and those defending their rights online speak out as one voice, as IFEX helps them do, it makes a difference. 

Another initiative has been the Faces of Free Expression project, a partnership between IFEX and the International Free Expression Project. If you’re looking for more heroes, this project details the stories of “risk-takers and change-makers – individuals who put their careers, their freedom, their safety, and sometimes even their lives on the line,” while reporting, or defending free expression and the right to information. 

Wherever authoritarianism and repression of speech have been on the rise, Game has unapologetically called out injustices and made it safer for journalists to do their work, while ensuring accountability when crimes are committed. The work is more critical now than ever, and since leaving IFEX in 2022, she’s remained an activist while focusing increasingly on environmental protection. 

Twelve More Heroes 

EFF has honored many more women with awards over the years—from Anita Borg and Hedy Lamarr to Amy Goodman and Beth Givens. This blog from 2012 looks back and acknowledges the important contributions from twelve more EFF Award winners. 

We’ve also asked five women at EFF about women in digital rights, freedom of expression, technology, and tech activism who have inspired us. You can read that here.

Donate to Support EFF's Work

Your donations empower EFF to do even more.

In honor of International Women’s Day, we asked five women at EFF about women in digital rights, freedom of expression, technology, and tech activism who have inspired us.  

Anna Politkovskaya 

Jillian York, Activist 
This International Women’s Day, I want to honor the memory of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian investigative journalist who relentlessly exposed political and social abuses, endured harassment and violence for her work, and was ultimately killed for telling the truth. I had just started my career when I learned of her death, and it forced me to confront that freedom of expression isn’t an abstract principle but rather something people risk—and sometimes lose—their lives for. 

Her story reminds me that journalism at its best is an act of moral courage, not just a profession. In the face of threats, poison, and relentless pressure to stay silent, she chose to continue writing about what she saw, insisting that ordinary people’s lives were worth the world’s attention. She refused to compromise with power, even when she knew it could cost her life. To me, defending freedom of expression means defending those like Anna who bear witness to injustice, prioritize truth, and hold power to account for those whose voices are silenced.  

Cindy Cohn 

Corynne McSherry, Legal Director 
There are so many women who have shaped tech history–most of whom are still unsung heroes—that it’s hard to single out just one. But it’s easier this year because it’s a chance to celebrate my boss, Cindy Cohn, before she leaves EFF for her next adventure.  

Cindy has been fighting for our digital rights for 30 years. leading EFF’s legal work and eventually the whole organization. She helped courts understand that code is speech deserving of constitutional protections at a time when many judges weren’t entirely sure what code even was. She led the fight against NSA spying, and even though outdated and ill-fitting doctrines like the state secrets privilege prevented courts from ruling on the obvious unconstitutionality of the NSA’s mass surveillance program, the fight itself led to real reforms that have expanded over time.   

I’ve worked closely with her for much of her EFF career, starting in 2005 when we sued Sony for installing spyware in millions of computers, and I’ve seen firsthand her work as a visionary lawyer, outstanding writer, and tireless champion for user privacy, free expression, and innovation. She’s also warm and funny, with the biggest heart in the world, and I’m proud to call her a friend as well as a mentor.  

Jane

Sarah Hamid, Activist 
When talking about women in tech, we usually mean founders, engineers, and executives. But just as important are the women who quietly built the practices that underpin today’s movement security culture. 

For as long as social movements have organized in the shadow of state surveillance, women have been designing the protocols, mutual aid networks, and information flows that keep people alive. Those threats feel ever-escalating: fusion‑center monitoring of protests, federal agencies infiltrating and subpoenaing encrypted Signal and social media chats, prosecutors mining search histories.  

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the underground Jane abortion counseling service—formally the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation—built what we would now recognize as a feminist infosec project for abortion access. Jane connected an estimated 11,000 people with safer abortions before Roe v. Wade, using a single public phone number—“Call Jane”—paired with code names, compartmentalized roles, and minimal records so no one person held the full story of who needed care, who was providing it, and where. When Chicago police raided the collective in 1972, members destroyed their index‑card files rather than let them become a ready‑made map of patients and helpers—an analog secure‑deletion choice that should feel familiar to anyone who has ever wiped a phone or locked down a shared drive. 

The lesson we should take from Jane is a set of principles that still hold in our encrypted‑but‑insecure present: Collect less, separate what you do collect, and be ready to burn the file box. When a search query, a location ping, or a solidarity post can become evidence, treating information as both lifeline and liability is not paranoia—it is care work.  

Ebele Okobi

Babette Ngene, Director of Public Interest Technology 
In the winter of 2013, I had just landed my first job at the intersection of tech and human rights, working for a prominent nonprofit and I was encouraged to attend regular tech and policy events around town. One such event on internet governance was happening at George Washington Universit,  focusing on multistakeholder engagement on internet policy and governance issues, with companies, nonprofits, and government representatives in attendance. I was inexperienced with these topics, and I’ll admit I was a bit intimidated. 

Then I saw her. She was the only woman on the opening panel, an African woman, an accomplished woman. Not only was she a respected lawyer at Yahoo at the time, but her impressive background, presence, and confident speaking style immediately inspired me. She made me feel like I, too, belonged in that room and could become a powerful voice. 

Ebele Okobi would go on to become one of the most powerful and respected voices in the tech and human rights space, known for her advocacy for digital rights and responsible innovation across Africa and the broader global majority during her tenure at Facebook. Beyond her corporate advocacy, Ebele has consistently championed ethical technology and social justice. She embodies the leadership qualities I value most: empathy, speaking truth to power, integrity, and authenticity. 

I remain in the tech and human rights space because I saw her, because seeing her made me feel seen. Representation truly does matter.  

Ada Lovelace 

Allison Morris, Chief Development Director 
I’m not a lawyer, activist, or technologist; I’m a fundraiser and a lover of stories. And what storyteller at EFF couldn’t help but love Ada Lovelace? The daughter of Lord Byron – the human embodiment of Romanticism – Ada was an innovator in math and science and, ultimately, the writer of the first computer program.  

Lovelace saw the potential in Charles Babbage’s theoretical General Purpose Computer (which was never actually built) and created the foundations of modern computing long before the digital age. In creating the first computer code, Lovelace took Babbage’s concept of a machine that could perform mathematical calculations and realized that it could manipulate symbols as well as numbers. 

Given the expectations of women in her time and the controversy of what work should be attributed to Lovelace as opposed to the man she often worked with, I can’t help but be inspired by her story.  

Donate to Support EFF's Work

Your donations empower EFF to do even more.

Women in tech deserve more and brighter spotlights. At EFF, we’ve had the honor of celebrating some of our heroes at our annual EFF Awards, including many women who are leading the digital rights community. For International Women’s Day, we also highlighted the contributions of just a few of these recipients from the last decade, whose work to protect privacy, speech, and creativity online has had a global impact.

In honor of International Women’s Day, we asked five women at EFF about women in digital rights, freedom of expression, technology, and tech activism who have inspired us.  

Anna Politkovskaya 

Jillian York, Activist 
This International Women’s Day, I want to honor the memory of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian investigative journalist who relentlessly exposed political and social abuses, endured harassment and violence for her work, and was ultimately killed for telling the truth. I had just started my career when I learned of her death, and it forced me to confront that freedom of expression isn’t an abstract principle but rather something people risk—and sometimes lose—their lives for. 

Her story reminds me that journalism at its best is an act of moral courage, not just a profession. In the face of threats, poison, and relentless pressure to stay silent, she chose to continue writing about what she saw, insisting that ordinary people’s lives were worth the world’s attention. She refused to compromise with power, even when she knew it could cost her life. To me, defending freedom of expression means defending those like Anna who bear witness to injustice, prioritize truth, and hold power to account for those whose voices are silenced.  

Cindy Cohn 

Corynne McSherry, Legal Director 
There are so many women who have shaped tech history–most of whom are still unsung heroes—that it’s hard to single out just one. But it’s easier this year because it’s a chance to celebrate my boss, Cindy Cohn, before she leaves EFF for her next adventure.  

Cindy has been fighting for our digital rights for 30 years. leading EFF’s legal work and eventually the whole organization. She helped courts understand that code is speech deserving of constitutional protections at a time when many judges weren’t entirely sure what code even was. She led the fight against NSA spying, and even though outdated and ill-fitting doctrines like the state secrets privilege prevented courts from ruling on the obvious unconstitutionality of the NSA’s mass surveillance program, the fight itself led to real reforms that have expanded over time.   

I’ve worked closely with her for much of her EFF career, starting in 2005 when we sued Sony for installing spyware in millions of computers, and I’ve seen firsthand her work as a visionary lawyer, outstanding writer, and tireless champion for user privacy, free expression, and innovation. She’s also warm and funny, with the biggest heart in the world, and I’m proud to call her a friend as well as a mentor.  

Jane

Sarah Hamid, Activist 
When talking about women in tech, we usually mean founders, engineers, and executives. But just as important are the women who quietly built the practices that underpin today’s movement security culture. 

For as long as social movements have organized in the shadow of state surveillance, women have been designing the protocols, mutual aid networks, and information flows that keep people alive. Those threats feel ever-escalating: fusion‑center monitoring of protests, federal agencies infiltrating and subpoenaing encrypted Signal and social media chats, prosecutors mining search histories.  

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the underground Jane abortion counseling service—formally the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation—built what we would now recognize as a feminist infosec project for abortion access. Jane connected an estimated 11,000 people with safer abortions before Roe v. Wade, using a single public phone number—“Call Jane”—paired with code names, compartmentalized roles, and minimal records so no one person held the full story of who needed care, who was providing it, and where. When Chicago police raided the collective in 1972, members destroyed their index‑card files rather than let them become a ready‑made map of patients and helpers—an analog secure‑deletion choice that should feel familiar to anyone who has ever wiped a phone or locked down a shared drive. 

The lesson we should take from Jane is a set of principles that still hold in our encrypted‑but‑insecure present: Collect less, separate what you do collect, and be ready to burn the file box. When a search query, a location ping, or a solidarity post can become evidence, treating information as both lifeline and liability is not paranoia—it is care work.  

Ebele Okobi

Babette Ngene, Director of Public Interest Technology 
In the winter of 2013, I had just landed my first job at the intersection of tech and human rights, working for a prominent nonprofit and I was encouraged to attend regular tech and policy events around town. One such event on internet governance was happening at George Washington Universit,  focusing on multistakeholder engagement on internet policy and governance issues, with companies, nonprofits, and government representatives in attendance. I was inexperienced with these topics, and I’ll admit I was a bit intimidated. 

Then I saw her. She was the only woman on the opening panel, an African woman, an accomplished woman. Not only was she a respected lawyer at Yahoo at the time, but her impressive background, presence, and confident speaking style immediately inspired me. She made me feel like I, too, belonged in that room and could become a powerful voice. 

Ebele Okobi would go on to become one of the most powerful and respected voices in the tech and human rights space, known for her advocacy for digital rights and responsible innovation across Africa and the broader global majority during her tenure at Facebook. Beyond her corporate advocacy, Ebele has consistently championed ethical technology and social justice. She embodies the leadership qualities I value most: empathy, speaking truth to power, integrity, and authenticity. 

I remain in the tech and human rights space because I saw her, because seeing her made me feel seen. Representation truly does matter.  

Ada Lovelace 

Allison Morris, Chief Development Director 
I’m not a lawyer, activist, or technologist; I’m a fundraiser and a lover of stories. And what storyteller at EFF couldn’t help but love Ada Lovelace? The daughter of Lord Byron – the human embodiment of Romanticism – Ada was an innovator in math and science and, ultimately, the writer of the first computer program.  

Lovelace saw the potential in Charles Babbage’s theoretical General Purpose Computer (which was never actually built) and created the foundations of modern computing long before the digital age. In creating the first computer code, Lovelace took Babbage’s concept of a machine that could perform mathematical calculations and realized that it could manipulate symbols as well as numbers. 

Given the expectations of women in her time and the controversy of what work should be attributed to Lovelace as opposed to the man she often worked with, I can’t help but be inspired by her story.  

Donate to Support EFF's Work

Your donations empower EFF to do even more.

Women in tech deserve more and brighter spotlights. At EFF, we’ve had the honor of celebrating some of our heroes at our annual EFF Awards, including many women who are leading the digital rights community. For International Women’s Day, we also highlighted the contributions of just a few of these recipients from the last decade, whose work to protect privacy, speech, and creativity online has had a global impact.

OpenAI, the maker of ChaptGPT, is rightfully facing widespread criticism for its decisions to fill the gap the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) created when rival Anthropic refused to drop its restrictions against using its AI for surveillance and autonomous weapons systems. After protests from both users and employees who did not sign up to support government mass surveillance—early reports show that ChaptGPT uninstalls rose nearly 300% after the company announced the deal—Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, conceded that the initial agreement was “opportunistic and sloppy.” He then re-published an internal memo on social media stating that additions to the agreement made clear that “Consistent with applicable laws, including the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, National Security Act of 1947, [and] FISA Act of 1978, the AI system shall not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons and nationals.”

Trouble is, the U.S. government doesn’t believe “consistent with applicable laws” means “no domestic surveillance.” Instead, for the most part, the government has embraced a lax interpretation of “applicable law” that has blessed mass surveillance and large-scale violations of our civil liberties, and then fought tooth and nail to prevent courts from weighing in. 

"After all, many of the world’s most notorious human rights atrocities have historically been “legal” under existing laws at the time."

“Intentionally” is also doing an awful lot of work in that sentence. For years the government has insisted that the mass surveillance of U.S. persons only happens incidentally (read: not intentionally) because their communications with people both inside the United States and overseas are swept up in surveillance programs supposedly designed to only collect communications outside the United States. 

The company’s amendment to the contract continues in a similar vein, “For the avoidance of doubt, the Department understands this limitation to prohibit deliberate tracking, surveillance, or monitoring of U.S. persons or nationals, including through the procurement or use of commercially acquired personal or identifiable information.” Here, “deliberate” is the red flag given how often intelligence and law enforcement agencies rely on incidental or commercially purchased data to sidestep stronger privacy protections.

Here’s another one: “The AI System shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons’ private information as consistent with these authorities. The system shall also not be used for domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law.” What, one wonders, does “unconstrained” mean, precisely—and according to whom? 

Lawyers sometimes call these “weasel words” because they create ambiguity that protects one side or another from real accountability for contract violations. As with the Anthropic negotiations, where the Pentagon reportedly agreed to adhere to Anthropic’s red lines only “as appropriate,” the government is likely attempting to publicly commit to limits in principle, but retain broad flexibility in practice.

OpenAI also notes that the Pentagon promised the NSA would not be allowed to use OpenAI’s tools absent a new agreement, and that its deployment architecture will help it verify that no red lines are crossed. But secret agreements and technical assurances have never been enough to rein in surveillance agencies, and they are no substitute for strong, enforceable legal limits and transparency.

OpenAI executives may indeed be trying, as claimed, to use the company’s contractual relationship with the Pentagon to help ensure that the government should use AI tools only in a way consistent with democratic processes. But based on what we know so far, that hope seems very naïve.

Moreover, that naïvete is dangerous. In a time when governments are willing to embrace extreme and unfounded interpretations of “applicable laws,” companies need to put some actual muscle behind standing by their commitments. After all, many of the world’s most notorious human rights atrocities have historically been “legal” under existing laws at the time. OpenAI promises the public that it will  “avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power,” but we know that enabling mass surveillance does both.     

OpenAI isn’t the only consumer-facing company that is, on the one hand, seeking to reassure the public that they aren’t participating in actions that violate human rights while, on the other, seeking to cash in on government mass surveillance efforts.  Despite this marketing double-speak, it is very clear that companies just cannot do both. It’s also clear that companies shouldn’t be given that much power over the limits of our privacy to begin with. The public should not have to rely on a small group of people—whether CEOs or Pentagon officials—to protect our civil liberties.

OpenAI, the maker of ChaptGPT, is rightfully facing widespread criticism for its decisions to fill the gap the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) created when rival Anthropic refused to drop its restrictions against using its AI for surveillance and autonomous weapons systems. After protests from both users and employees who did not sign up to support government mass surveillance—early reports show that ChaptGPT uninstalls rose nearly 300% after the company announced the deal—Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, conceded that the initial agreement was “opportunistic and sloppy.” He then re-published an internal memo on social media stating that additions to the agreement made clear that “Consistent with applicable laws, including the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, National Security Act of 1947, [and] FISA Act of 1978, the AI system shall not be intentionally used for domestic surveillance of U.S. persons and nationals.”

Trouble is, the U.S. government doesn’t believe “consistent with applicable laws” means “no domestic surveillance.” Instead, for the most part, the government has embraced a lax interpretation of “applicable law” that has blessed mass surveillance and large-scale violations of our civil liberties, and then fought tooth and nail to prevent courts from weighing in. 

"After all, many of the world’s most notorious human rights atrocities have historically been “legal” under existing laws at the time."

“Intentionally” is also doing an awful lot of work in that sentence. For years the government has insisted that the mass surveillance of U.S. persons only happens incidentally (read: not intentionally) because their communications with people both inside the United States and overseas are swept up in surveillance programs supposedly designed to only collect communications outside the United States. 

The company’s amendment to the contract continues in a similar vein, “For the avoidance of doubt, the Department understands this limitation to prohibit deliberate tracking, surveillance, or monitoring of U.S. persons or nationals, including through the procurement or use of commercially acquired personal or identifiable information.” Here, “deliberate” is the red flag given how often intelligence and law enforcement agencies rely on incidental or commercially purchased data to sidestep stronger privacy protections.

Here’s another one: “The AI System shall not be used for unconstrained monitoring of U.S. persons’ private information as consistent with these authorities. The system shall also not be used for domestic law-enforcement activities except as permitted by the Posse Comitatus Act and other applicable law.” What, one wonders, does “unconstrained” mean, precisely—and according to whom? 

Lawyers sometimes call these “weasel words” because they create ambiguity that protects one side or another from real accountability for contract violations. As with the Anthropic negotiations, where the Pentagon reportedly agreed to adhere to Anthropic’s red lines only “as appropriate,” the government is likely attempting to publicly commit to limits in principle, but retain broad flexibility in practice.

OpenAI also notes that the Pentagon promised the NSA would not be allowed to use OpenAI’s tools absent a new agreement, and that its deployment architecture will help it verify that no red lines are crossed. But secret agreements and technical assurances have never been enough to rein in surveillance agencies, and they are no substitute for strong, enforceable legal limits and transparency.

OpenAI executives may indeed be trying, as claimed, to use the company’s contractual relationship with the Pentagon to help ensure that the government should use AI tools only in a way consistent with democratic processes. But based on what we know so far, that hope seems very naïve.

Moreover, that naïvete is dangerous. In a time when governments are willing to embrace extreme and unfounded interpretations of “applicable laws,” companies need to put some actual muscle behind standing by their commitments. After all, many of the world’s most notorious human rights atrocities have historically been “legal” under existing laws at the time. OpenAI promises the public that it will  “avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power,” but we know that enabling mass surveillance does both.     

OpenAI isn’t the only consumer-facing company that is, on the one hand, seeking to reassure the public that they aren’t participating in actions that violate human rights while, on the other, seeking to cash in on government mass surveillance efforts.  Despite this marketing double-speak, it is very clear that companies just cannot do both. It’s also clear that companies shouldn’t be given that much power over the limits of our privacy to begin with. The public should not have to rely on a small group of people—whether CEOs or Pentagon officials—to protect our civil liberties.