Nature Climate Change, Published online: 14 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02780-0

Species hybridization belongs on the climate change agenda

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 14 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02755-1

Deliberative citizen participation, such as climate assemblies, has been promoted in climate governance. This study finds that, although assemblies proposed more ambitious recommendations than existing climate policy, these recommendations rarely translated into actual policy decisions.

Hiroshi Ishii, the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and associate director of the MIT Media Lab, recently received the 2026 Industrial Designers Society of America Special Achievement Award for “...pioneering work that has greatly influenced human-computer interaction and design.”

For over 30 years, Ishii has explored how the digital and physical worlds can merge more meaningfully. Working with students, MIT colleagues, and international collaborators through his Tangible Media group, Ishii has pursued research marked by intellectual tension and artistic vision. He and his collaborators have produced truly original concepts including Tangible User Interfaces, which are interactive systems where physical objects, rather than screens, mice, or keyboards, are used to control and interact with digital information; and Tangible Bits, introduced at CHI ‘97, which established how people engage with digital information through physical objects. His later concepts, Radical Atoms and TeleAbsence, inspire researchers and designers worldwide.

“Beyond his research, Ishii has made lasting contributions to the global design community through ACM CHI [the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems], TEI [conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction], and UIST [User Interface Software and Technology], and by mentoring generations of designers and researchers,” said Professor Leila Ensaniat in her Industrial Designers Society of America Awards committee chair introduction.

Ishii's approach shows how bringing the arts, science, engineering, and design together creates innovations with real-world applications. His models now influence product development across industries, shaping how millions of people interact with information and each other.

As artificial intelligence becomes more and more powerful, its ability to handle human-like tasks is undeniable. Artificial neural networks can learn to recognize images, use language, or write computer code. Like the brain’s circuits, they reorganize themselves as they learn, adjusting the strengths of their connections to improve their performance.

The question for many neuroscientists is: What can these machine systems teach them about how the brain learns? And what kinds of models are likely to be the most informative?

In a paper published Oct. 9 in the journal PNAS, scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and K. Lisa Yang Integrative Computational Neuroscience (ICoN) Center argue that a crucial metric for the biological plausibility of an artificial neural network’s approach to learning is the network’s ability to organize itself, without the guiding hand of a developer. They show that it is possible for an artificial neural network to build its own learning machinery. With some simple instructions about how and when connections should change, a group of randomly connected units can reshape itself into an effective information-processing network, learning from the data it is trained on.

Biological learning

“Current AI technology is working very well, but it doesn’t necessarily use a learning algorithm that is used by the brain,” says Qianli Liao, a K. Lisa Yang ICoN Center Postdoctoral Fellow in the labs of MIT professors and McGovern Institure members Tomaso Poggio and Mark Harnett, and co-first author of the PNAS paper with MIT Research Scientist Liu Ziyin and graduate student Yulu Gan. Liao explains that engineers design the rules about how connections change as an artificial neural network processes training data and receives feedback about its mistakes. 

When it comes to training AI to do its job, the approach is powerful. But Liao and his colleagues caution that networks designed in this way may not offer much insight into biological learning. “The brain doesn't have an external designer or architect,” Liao says. “The brain has to organize itself. And we need to know how simple rules are going to make the brain organize.”

The rules that reshape neural connections as an animal learns may be different in different parts of the brain, or they may change as the brain becomes more mature. Neuroscientists are working to understand how those rules work and how they might be disrupted by aging or disease — a vital step toward developing new therapies and prevention strategies. Liao points to the development of brain-computer interfaces, which aim to restore communication when the brain’s language abilities are lost or let paralyzed patients control neuroprosthetic limbs, as one potential application.

“None of these can work without knowing the rules behind neuron-neuron interactions,” he says. “That’s not achievable by just designing a circuit that works very well.” An artificial neural network’s value to neuroscience should instead be judged by the extent to which it can organize itself — not just its connections, but also the machinery that adjusts those connections.

Self-organized artificial learning

Working with Poggio and Hartnett, Liao, Ziyin, and Gan set out to develop and validate a self-organizing computational network capable of learning. Liao explained that the network’s structure begins with multiple layers of randomly interconnected neuron-like units. Within each layer, every neuron-like component is subject to the same rules about how connections should be adjusted. “They just interact with each other using that rule, and they develop some type of behavior,” he says.

The team’s network implements the kind of simple rules thought to rewire brain circuits as humans and other animals learn from their experiences. In both the brain and the machine network, for example, “neurons that fire together wire together.” In other words, when two connected neurons are activated at the same time, the connection between them strengthens. 

The team showed that a self-organizing network governed by rules like these can learn to recognize patterns and classify images. They explain that in their model, learning is enabled by self-assembling motifs that emerge according to simple rules, then serve as building blocks for functional circuits. As their network learned, these motifs reorganized themselves using an optimization strategy similar to the approach built into most modern machine learning systems, called gradient descent, in which connections are gradually adjusted in response to errors in order to improve performance.

Most modern AI implements gradient descent through some form of the back-propagation algorithm, which neuroscientists say is unlikely to be used by the brain. The team compared its self-organizing network to networks designed to learn in this way and found that it performed at a similar level.

Connecting brains and machines

Poggio says finding a biological parallel to back-propagation could trigger significant progress in both AI and neuroscience. 

“If the synaptic motifs we propose are, in fact, used by the brain to do what backpropagation does for artificial neural networks, then we will have a strong connection at the level of fundamental mechanisms between artificial and natural networks — between machines and brains,” he says.

Liao says a self-organizing network does not necessarily learn the same way the brain does — but it’s a critical starting point for biological plausibility. 

“Self-organization is the first high-level framework,” he says. “Once we are good with self-organization as a measure, then we can talk about next thing.”

While the group’s main objective is better understanding the brain, Liao says that knowledge could ultimately improve machine learning systems, too, enabling engineers to develop networks that perform better or in more human-like ways.

MIT Lincoln Laboratory hosted the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB) on Sept. 3, for a stop on its national roadshow. The event convened representatives of state organizations, defense centers, universities, technology companies, and business executives to discuss how Massachusetts' biotechnology ecosystem can strengthen national biodefense capabilities.

"We have a lot to leverage in this region to advance biotechnology," said Christina Rudzinski, assistant head of the Biotechnology and Human Systems Division at Lincoln Laboratory. "Many people are already working together to push the bioindustrial sector beyond biopharmaceuticals and into a broader ecosystem across industries. This synergy is where NSCEB comes in — connecting policy to the real-world work already happening, including here at Lincoln Laboratory and across the state."

Biotechnology touches many economic and defense sectors, from disease-resistant crops and lifesaving medicines to biofuels and advanced manufacturing materials. In 2022, Congress established the NSCEB to study the national security implications of this rapidly advancing field and issue policy recommendations to ensure continued U.S. leadership. 

In April 2025, the 11-member bipartisan and bicameral commission released its report, calling for a minimum of $15 billion in federal investment over five years. According to the report, China is investing aggressively to dominate the field, echoing a pattern the United States has seen before in sectors such as semiconductors.

"The coalition of stakeholders working in the Massachusetts biotech ecosystem illustrates how collaborative regional work will help keep the U.S. in the lead by producing exceptional innovation across all areas of biotechnology," said NSCEB Executive Director Caitlin Frazer. 

Now in the final year of its three-year mandate, NSCEB is touring the country to see local biotechnology ecosystems in action. The commission will bring insights back to Washington to help members of Congress support their regions' strengths. 

Advancing Massachusetts as a defense-biotechnology hub

Massachusetts has identified biotechnology as a priority technology area under its Strategic Hub for Innovation, Exchange, and Leadership in Defense (SHIELD) initiative. Launched by Governor Maura Healey in October 2025 alongside $47 million of initial aligned investment, the initiative has moved with speed and at scale. This includes standing up the BioNexus program that leverages state matching funds to develop biotechnology and biomanufacturing solutions for the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM). Further, Healey included a $100 million authorization for defense sector capital projects in the Mass Wins Act, an economic development bill filed in April. The bill is currently being considered by the state legislature.

During the roadshow event, Ben Linville-Engler, who co-chairs the SHIELD Working Group and serves as deputy director of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, led a panel discussion with representatives from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, Business Executives for National Security, Activate, DEVCOM Soldier Center, MassChallenge, Perimeter, Center for Advanced Manufacturing, and the Massachusetts AI Hub. They are among more than 40 partner organizations participating in SHIELD. 

"There is incredible convergence between economic development and national security in all domains — land, air, sea, space, cyber, and bio," said Linville-Engler, citing the state's $48.6 billion in defense-sector economic contributions last year. "Massachusetts is committed to biotechnology and national security, and not just in Boston and Cambridge but across the entire state."

In July, the SHIELD Working Group submitted a report outlining steps to speed the transition of technology into deployable capabilities, strengthen the defense workforce pipeline, and reinforce the state's national security industrial base. 

Lincoln Laboratory is well positioned to support these priorities. As a Department of War federally funded R&D center, the laboratory has deep knowledge of national security needs and sustained ties to academic, commercial, and U.S. government laboratories. "These attributes can help strengthen biotechnology collaborations and integrate and transition solutions across Massachusetts and New England," Rudzinski said.

Scaling up biomanufacturing

One project advancing this vision is the Biotechnology Scale-up Hub for Innovation, Economic Development, Labor Training, and Defense (BioSHIELD). Planned for Worcester, Massachusetts, this 200,000-square-foot biomanufacturing facility is designed to mobilize the region's defense-biotechnology sector.

"BioSHIELD's mission is to accelerate breakthrough biomanufacturing solutions that strengthen national resilience, support commercial innovation, and grow the regional economy," said Edward Wack, project co-lead and principal staff in the laboratory's Biotechnology and Human Systems Division. "It will bring together industry, academia, and government to transform ideas into scalable biological products, supporting a secure and competitive bioindustrial future." 

The project responds to NSCEB's call for a national network of biomanufacturing scale-up facilities, a capacity currently missing in New England, according to Wack. The facility will offer shared equipment, infrastructure, and secure laboratory space to help bridge the "valley of death" between early-stage discovery and commercial- or defense-scale production. BioSHIELD's ready-built support networks will be key to overcoming technological and regulatory hurdles, helping innovators rapidly move capabilities to market or military use. 

A coalition supporting the project includes Massachusetts Biomedical Initiatives, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant, and Lincoln Laboratory. It builds on a foundational effort in central Massachusetts funding the Massachusetts TechHubs program. At the event, Wack announced the coalition has signed a memorandum of understanding to formalize the partnership. Design workshops are scheduled to begin soon, ahead of funding and construction.

Connecting AI and biotechnology

Other discussions centered on the intersection of biotechnology and AI, another critical area for national security. Panelists represented Boston University, the University of Massachusetts Boston, Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, Wyss Institute, and Phicil-itate Change. They discussed challenges in collecting and disseminating high-quality, AI-ready datasets and opportunities for AI to improve biomanufacturing and therapeutics. 

Closing the event, Wack called for continued collaboration as the nation moves at speed and scale to stay at the forefront of biotechnology.

"At Lincoln Laboratory, we've built a strong foundation in biotechnology for more than 25 years, and it's heartening to see this level of coordinated work taking shape. It resonates with so many of us who view biotechnology as both an economic and national security imperative," Wack said. 

“This tomato is blowing my mind,” says Nermine Hassanin. The MIT graduate student in architecture is marveling at the fruit in her salad. 

She and several MIT School of Architecture and Planning classmates had spent their morning working at Hannan Healthy Foods Farm in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and then harvested the contents of the salad they were sharing at a picnic table: lettuce, kale, cucumbers, green onions, and tomatoes. 

“It doesn’t get much fresher unless you’re eating this in the field,” responds Zachary Rapaport, a classmate and co-founder of MIT Farm, a community-driven program at MIT that is radically changing what it means to eat farm-fresh food on campus and gain practical experience in urban farming. 

In fact, the program resonated so quickly with so many that it was awarded the Karl Taylor Compton Prize for a group this spring — the highest award presented by the Institute to students in recognition of excellent achievements in citizenship and devotion to the welfare of MIT. 

Seated with Hassanin and Rapaport were classmates Aisha Cheema and MIT Farm co-founder Aleks Banaś, undergraduate architecture major Amy Kim, Sanne Wright MCP ’24, and Mohammed Hannan, the owner of Hannan Healthy Foods Farm. The story of how they came to enjoy this meal on a brilliant summer Sunday is equal parts vision, hard work, and serendipity. 

Community in Cambridge

In their first year at MIT, Rapaport and Banaś were classmates in a design workshop 4.184 (ClimateCorps@MIT) that focused on climate action within communities. Bonding over their interest in food systems, the two shared a desire to continue the community service work that took them outside of the classroom.

“We started ideating on what it would mean to create relationships with students, faculty, and staff on campus with partners who were already growing food in the community,” says Banaś. “We saw many organizations in the community already doing inspiring work, so instead of starting from scratch we wanted to plug into this system.”

Their concept for MIT Farm explored a holistic view of community, food security, and supporting local farming in a time of climate resilience. It also capitalized on the desires of two budding architects to develop practices they see as essential for sustainable communities.

“After working in an architecture practice, I came to grad school to find a way to create an architecture practice grounded within real communities,” says Banaś. “For me, architecture is not just about creating a building, but creating an environment for other interactions. I think we have a certain level of responsibility to the people around us; we need to learn how to work together with them.”

“What I’ve learned through developing MIT Farm is that farming requires you to be accountable to seasonal change, to people, and to the environment in which we’re working,” adds Rapaport. “There are things you only begin to notice when you spend time with a place and really engage with it. In many ways, architecture is the same. We need to be very attentive to the world around us if we’re going to make good design.”

In 2025, Rapaport and Banaś actively sought out like-minded organizations on campus — including MIT Professor Miho Mazereeuw’s Urban Risk Lab, the MIT Office of Sustainability, and the Open Space Committee — to build relationships and germinate ideas. They found enthusiastic supporters for their ideas which kept them both engaged and excited. That spring, they entered their concept for MIT Farm into the iCampus competition, which recognizes innovative and creative applications of technology that improve living and learning at MIT; they were awarded one of the three cash prizes. 

Between supporters on campus and burgeoning relationships with like-minded organizations off campus, Rapaport and Banaś began to execute their vision.

One idea — a farm cart — kick-started what Rapaport terms “the growing side” of MIT Farm. He, Banaś, and classmate Courage Dzidula Kpodo MArch ’25 designed and built the two-tiered cart. It is constructed of pine with polycarbonate panels and divided into sections that support active vegetable gardens. Repurposed pipette tip containers sourced from campus labs serve as seedling planters. Supported on four wheels, the cart can be pushed or pulled anywhere.

“By introducing mobility, we began growing food without having it tethered to a specific plot of land,” says Rapaport. 

They discovered it was more than just a “moveable farm.” The cart became a DJ booth at school happy hours; was wheeled to nearby public schools as a learning tool; showcased at the “Day of Climate” event at the MIT Museum; and transformed into a tiny winter greenhouse at the East Campus dorms.

Field work

Rapaport and Banaś also located farm communities in Boston and beyond to develop volunteering and mentoring opportunities. Now, through MIT Farm, students can volunteer to work the two rooftop gardens at Boston Medical Center (BMC), a compact farm that generates 6,000 pounds of produce to serve patients and the BMC community. 

A second option for students to work at a city farm is with Eastie Farm in East Boston. A nonprofit with a focus on food security and climate justice, the organization supports local farms that struggle to compete with industrial agriculture.

Last summer, Rapaport and Banaś connected with Mohammed Hannan, the Lincoln farm owner and a laboratory manager at MIT. MIT students had already found their way to his farm, about 15 miles from Cambridge. Four years earlier, Heather Paxson, an anthropology professor and associate dean for faculty at MIT School of Humanities and Social Sciences, brought her anthropology class to visit Hannan Farm to learn about small-scale certified organic operations. 

Hannan was open to the idea of the MIT community working on the farm. He says it is “increasingly challenging” to find people who want to farm. He stresses the broader importance of community support for local agriculture, noting that food security and sustainable farming require collective effort from society — not just from farmers. 

“Many farmers around me are leaving farming to make their living elsewhere,” says Hannan. “It is a silent pandemic.” 

When classes resumed last fall, Rapaport, Banaś, and classmates began volunteering on weekends at the farm. Working with the MIT Office of Sustainability and the Anthropology Section, the group started a pilot program selling Hannan Farm’s produce for a reduced price to students on campus on Mondays. The Fresh Food Bag program offered curated bags of produce that had been harvested a day earlier. The program was met with delight among the MIT community, with nary a vegetable left behind each week. Rapaport and Banaś say they will expand the program this fall to include offering bags of fresh produce in MIT dorms.

The work on the farm changes constantly, based on the season and business needs. One day students may be in the field replanting plants that didn’t establish properly; on another, they may be maintaining tools or working on infrastructure projects.

“There isn't really an ‘off season’ since the farm operates year-round, and we've worked to bring MIT students out in every season and semester,” says Rapaport. “During the winter, we repaired greenhouses, prepared seedling trays, and started getting ready for the next growing season.” 

Hannan describes his collaboration with MIT students as “game changing,” highlighting how students gain practical, problem-solving experience while advising him on how to improve the farm’s infrastructure.

“It’s hard to visualize real-world problems when you are working in a lab [on campus],” says Hannan. “But the students are seeing the day-to-day challenges farmers are facing here. They are coming up with solutions that can alleviate these problems — and not just on my farm. We need more people from different backgrounds to see how we can locally grow more efficiently using the tools and technologies that we have. Sometimes we farmers don’t know where the technologies are — such as using solar irrigation. We’re not always tech-savvy, or we don’t have the expertise. Farming needs all of it.”

To everything, there is a season

In January, during MIT’s Independent Activities Period, Rapaport and Banaś conducted a weeklong workshop to design a root cellar to support food storage and preservation for the farm. The group also developed a curriculum for K-12 students to teach how to design a community garden with the support of a Day of Climate Grant they were awarded.

Kahlen Wheaton, a Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) undergrad, was among the students who worked on the curriculum and helped organize volunteers at the farm last spring.

“I really love the club,” says Wheaton. “It’s a great opportunity for MIT students to get out of their bubble and do some service work. It’s also great just to bring fresh produce to campus because, as an undergrad, I’m not always eating the most healthy or local foods.”

Wheaton had originally planned to study environmental engineering at MIT, but found urban planning and the opportunity to impact policy — especially as it influences designing cities for healthy lifestyles — exciting. She has planned her thesis on urban farming and will use the connections she is making in local farming to inform her work.

Pastures of plenty

This past spring saw dozens of volunteers spending weekends at Hannan Farm. Among them was Rania Ghosn, an MIT associate professor of architecture and urbanism, who brought her family. She says she enjoyed working shoulder-to-shoulder with colleagues in the field, and that MIT Farm provides a “tangible public good while strengthening a sense of belonging and joy.

“Working in the fields with my husband and our 10-year-old son became a kind of Sunday ritual: purposeful, physical, joyful, and full of meaning. For my son, the farm was a lesson no classroom could quite reproduce.”

On a recent Sunday, five architecture students tended to rows and rows of vegetables. Weeds had grown high with the recent rain, but after some tugging and digging, they released their hold in the dirt and lay in piles. The hot sun, the smell of fresh herbs, and the sounds of birds and insects made Cambridge and MIT feel very far away.

Nermine Hassanin has spent several Sundays here. She says she enjoys meeting new people on the farm each time.

“It’s a good sense of community here,” she says. “And being out of the city is very therapeutic.”

Growing up, Aisha Cheema worked with her dad on their family garden. She says working on the farm is “a nice way to stay connected” to those experiences.

“I’m interested in how this environment can be pulled into architecture,” says Cheema. “So many spaces seem siloed from the outdoors. I’d like to connect the outdoors to indoor spaces. I think some of the structures here — like the greenhouse — are great inspiration for me.”

Rapaport and Banaś spent their summer designing additional interventions for the Lincoln farm: an improved washing station and an upgraded farm stand that allows for cold storage to keep produce fresh longer. The design has been approved by the Lincoln Conservation Commission and permits are pending. 

Also, this summer, Amy Kim oversaw the design of a dormant garden plot on campus near Tang Hall. The undergraduate performed the work as part of MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program. Kim says she designed the project because it allowed her “to get hands-on experience building a space that would foster community and collaboration, with the added environmental benefit of repurposing material such as scrap brick and scrap wood. 

“The garden's primary goal is to be a pleasant space to sit and relax with friends while surrounded by aromatic herbs and flowers,” Kim adds.

With their theses underway in preparation for Commencement next year, Rapaport and Banaś will hand off their oversight of MIT Farm to Wheaton and others this fall. They could not have guessed how the popularity of MIT Farm would have connected with so many students, or how many friends they cultivated off campus — and they are overjoyed with the results. They believe the community they have developed and fostered will keep MIT Farm vibrant into the future. 

Ghosn agrees.

“MIT Farm feels deeply MIT: mind and hand, ethics and experimentation, systems thinking and dirt under the fingernails,” she says. “Aleks and Zach have created a student-led project with moral clarity, organizational intelligence, and genuine public purpose. It is modest in its means and expansive in its imagination and impact."

In an extremely disappointing ruling, a California trial court dismissed SIREN v. San Jose, our case challenging the city of San Jose’s warrantless searches of its vast stores of automated license plate reader (ALPR) data. EFF and the ACLU of Northern California represent SIREN and CAIR California, two non-profits that serve San Jose residents, in this case.

Make no mistake: We believe this ruling is wrong on the law, and we will appeal. The ruling ignores the importance of landmark rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the invasiveness of aggregating collected data on an individual over time, including one issued just months ago. It also severely underestimates the harm that ALPRs cause, in San Jose and around the country. 

San Jose’s ALPR surveillance system is inescapable. It blankets the city’s streets in nearly five hundred cameras that continuously photograph every car that passes by and retains the collected data for a month or longer. In our briefs, we argued that law enforcement officers who warrantlessly search the resulting ALPR database are violating the California Constitution’s ban on unreasonable searches and its guarantee of privacy. The court disagreed, explaining that based on one California appeals court case involving individual streetlight cameras, people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy when driving on a public road. This is wrong. Networked ALPRs are not individual streetlight cameras. Their net effect of tracking and mapping cars as they travel reveals patterns of life, intimate relationships, and much more.

Fortunately, there are signs that the tide is turning against ALPRs in the courts. Just a day before the ruling in our case, a federal district court in Oklahoma called ALPRs “a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance” and decided that a law enforcement officer’s warrantless search of ALPR data violated the Fourth Amendment. The officer was observing traffic on an Oklahoma highway when he saw a woman driving a car with California plates. According to the court order, the officer began following the woman “for no apparent reason” other than her out of state plates. While following her, the officer decided to run the woman’s license plate number through Flock’s ALPR system – again, with no apparent reason other than her California plates. The Flock search returned at least 30 days of data, allowing the officer to track the car across at least three states, over the span of a month, from a single search.

The facts of this case demonstrate how ALPRs allow law enforcement to grab a breathtakingly vast sweep of information about a car (and the driver within) with no more effort than a Google search. It’s true that when a person drives on public roads, they can be observed, including by police. But as the Supreme Court has explained, we don’t expect law enforcement to be able to secretly track and store every movement our cars while we’re driving. The federal court in the Oklahoma case aptly illustrated this difference in societal expectations:

We might reasonably expect our friends and family to tell us something like: “Hey, I saw you out driving by the store last week.” But we do not expect people we know—let alone strangers, and especially not law enforcement—to randomly approach us to say: “Hey, I have been following your car for the last 30 days, and here is a detailed log of every place your vehicle has been with supporting photographic evidence. I am also going to share this information with law enforcement throughout the country so they know your whereabouts, too.

This decision is the first of its kind, and EFF will continue working to ensure that it is the first of many. Outside the courts, we’ve seen people across the country step up to reject ALPRs at the state and local level. EFF will continue challenging this technology on every front as well.

Related Cases: SIREN and CAIR-CA v. San Jose

When we communicate online today – from your personal emails and DMs to secure international commerce – we usually do so with encryption. Encryption converts readable data into unreadable gibberish to protect our privacy and security. This didn’t just happen organically. Three decades ago, the U.S government treated encryption like a weapon, and it took some unlikely heroes to set it free: a grad student, a junior lawyer, and a fledgling digital rights group who sued the federal government. 

The ruling in Bernstein v. Department of Justice held that code is speech and so is protected by the First Amendment – a precedent that underpins the internet as we know it today. This landmark case was led by Cindy Cohn, then a young pro bono lawyer working on behalf of EFF, who went on to become EFF’s legal director and then executive director. 

Welcome to the second episode of “Privacy’s Defenders,” a podcast about the people – lawyers, journalists, hackers, and others – who’ve fought to secure your digital liberties since before most people even knew what the internet was. 

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(You can also find this episode on the Internet Archive and on YouTube.)

In this episode, Cindy – who left EFF in June – speaks with Dan Bernstein, who was a Cal Berkeley grad student when he developed a simple encryption algorithm called “Snuffle.” Because federal law classified encryption as a war munition, publishing Snuffle meant submitting it to the government for review, getting a license as an arms dealer, and being granted a license the government had no intention of granting. Bernstein felt this violated his free-speech rights and in 1995 he sued, represented by Cindy working with EFF. 

Cindy also talks with Tony Coppolino, the Justice Department lawyer she battled in court – who admits she intimidated him from their very first phone call, and who offers a surprising perspective on the case all these years later. 

The “Privacy’s Defenders” podcast (new episodes drop every other Tuesday!) is a follow-up to Cindy’s book, “Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance,” bringing to life pivotal moments in the voices of those who fought for your rights. Sales of “Privacy’s Defender” benefit EFF, so pick up your copy today!

Joanne Elgart Jennings co-produced and created this podcast.   

Jarod Sport co-produced, mixed, and mastered it.   

Corinne Ruff is our story editor. 

We had additional help from Rachel Estabrook and Alison Broverman. 

The original music was composed and performed by Nat Keefe of Hot Buttered Rum with Ben Andrews on the fiddle.

MIT engineers have developed a new way to program natural killer (NK) immune cells to target cancerous T cells or T cells that have become autoreactive, leading to diseases such as lymphoma and autoimmune hepatitis. 

Using their new technique, the researchers can reprogram NK cells to target diseased T cells without ever removing the NK cells from the patient’s body. Instead, they use lipid nanoparticles to deliver messenger RNA directly to NK cells. These mRNA molecules encode proteins that allow the NK cells to seek and destroy the dysfunctional T cells.

Known as CAR NK cells, these cells could be deployed against a variety of diseases. The MIT team’s new approach could bypass one of the major obstacles to using these cells, which is the time and expense of manufacturing them outside the body.

“The manufacturing challenges with CAR NK cells are significant. The idea here is you can deliver a nanoparticle that will modify your own NK cells with a CAR construct and teach them to attack tumor cells,” says Daniel Anderson, a professor in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science.

Anderson is the senior author of the study, which appears today in Nature Biotechnology. The paper’s lead authors are MIT postdoc Yuang Chen and MIT graduate students Julia Monkovic and Haseeb Mughal. Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT, is also an author.

Easier reprogramming

Over the past decade, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved seven new cancer treatments based on engineered T cells called chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells. Chimeric antigen receptors are proteins that can be embedded into T cells, allowing them to detect a target antigen, such as a cancer protein. When the target is detected, the T cell becomes activated and destroys the target cell.

This approach has had great success in treating blood cancers, primarily those that originate from B cells, including several types of leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma. 

To make CAR T cells, doctors take a blood sample from the patient. The sample is sent to a lab where the T cells are isolated and then engineered to express the CAR protein. When enough CAR T cells have been generated, they are shipped back to the hospital and infused into the patient. 

In recent years, scientists have begun using a similar strategy to create CAR NK cells. One potential advantage of CAR NK cells over CAR T cells is that they could be used to kill diseased T cells. Using CAR T cells to treat T cell diseases often doesn’t work well because T cells that are engineered to target T cell proteins may end up killing each other, in addition to the diseased T cells. That issue doesn’t arise when using NK cells to target T cells.

“NK cells can treat these T cell malignancies — not only T cell cancer, but also T cell autoimmune diseases,” Chen says.

However, manufacturing large quantities of CAR NK cells poses many of the same difficulties as generating CAR T cells. To simplify the process, the MIT team wanted to come up with a way to generate CAR NK cells “in vivo” — that is, in the patient’s own body, without having to remove any cells.

“If a patient can just get an infusion of nanoparticles, it would dramatically simplify the process and reduce costs,” Anderson says.

Currently, there are no FDA-approved CAR NK cell therapies, but many researchers are working on developing them to treat cancer or autoimmune disorders. 

To generate these cells, the MIT team designed lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) that can deliver an mRNA payload. These strands of mRNA encode a CAR that can be targeted to specific cell types. For example, they could deliver a CAR that targets CD19, a protein found on B cells, or CD3, a protein found on autoreactive T cells. 

The particles are coated with antibody fragments that bind to receptors found on the surface of NK cells, to ensure they reach the correct targets.

Targeting dysfunctional T cells

After these particles were infused into mice, the researchers found that they could successfully reprogram about 80 percent of the targeted NK cells. The researchers then tested the particles’ potential to treat cancer and autoimmune hepatitis, which is caused by autoreactive T cells. 

In a mouse model of an aggressive form of melanoma, three of the five mice that received LNPs that reprogrammed their NK cells to target the cancer cells went into complete remission.

The researchers also saw significant tumor destruction when they used the LNPs to treat T cell lymphoma in a humanized mouse model, created when mice receive transfusions of human blood cells, allowing them to transiently generate a human-like immune system.

In these mice, tumors were eradicated after five injections of the reprogramming LNPs. This result was similar to what the researchers saw when they treated mice with CAR NK cells that were generated using the conventional approach — removing NK cells, reprogramming them, and returning them to the mice.

Lastly, the researchers demonstrated that their LNPs could generate CAR NK cells that target autoreactive T cells. For this application, they studied mice with autoimmune hepatitis, in which T cells attack hepatocytes in the liver. They found that in the treated mice, the autoreactive T cells were destroyed, and liver damage healed. These effects were seen after just one injection of the LNPs.

“This study is an excellent example of the power of nano delivery systems and their ability to potentially treat cancer and other diseases,” Langer says. 

The researchers hope that these kinds of engineered NK cells could be used to treat a variety of autoimmune disorders caused by dysfunctional T cells, including multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. 

The research was funded by Sanofi, the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine, and a Koch Institute Support (core) Grant from the National Cancer Institute.

When government officials craft policies, there is often a comment period for public feedback. Lawmakers have long had to sort through fake feedback that is mass-produced in an effort to sway policy, but they’ve generally gotten used to detecting it. With, artificial intelligence, however, people can submit realistic-seeming comments, which are harder to dismiss as being fabrications with no person behind them. That’s just one way AI can be used to generate text and statements, in civic conversations, for which no one can be found to be answerable.

This issue, among others, has caught the attention of Deb Roy, professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and director of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication (CCC). In a new essay published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, titled, “Who stands behind the words?,” Roy calls for a renewed emphasis on responsibility in communication, asserting that even when AI is used to craft text, there needs to be accountability and “answerability.”

Building better group dialogues to produce more public trust is a core part of the work of CCC. The group, along with Cortico, the closely affiliated nonprofit Roy co-founded, has helped facilitate group discussions on important issues in many situations — including civic meetings, schools, deliberative assemblies, and private organizations — and used tech tools, including AI, to help find themes among comments, and more. But the center also designs this process so that participants can check and override the tech-based output at each key step. Ultimately, a person is responsible for every public comment. MIT News spoke to Roy about the essay and the work of the center. 

Q: You’ve identified this problem about the lack of accountability behind words that are generated by AI. When did you really first notice this?

A: It came into focus when Chat-GPT [which is powered by a large language model, or LLM] launched. As for my own history with language models, my PhD work explored what we might now call PLMs — Puny Language Models — so I’m quite familiar with language models and have tracked the field’s rapid evolution. But Chat-GPT turned a corner. Two things changed at the same time: the depth of the model and its knowledge, and the way you could interact with it. 

I became obsessed with trying to find the limits of what it could do. And I felt that no matter how hard I tried to stretch my arms around it, I couldn’t. I built my tenure case at MIT on language grounding — the idea that it’s not enough for an AI system to just process lots of words and other symbols. I believed that to understand what words mean, you actually need a physical body and life experiences as part of the process. So I revisited the philosophy-of-AI literature I had once been steeped in, which asks what fundamentally distinguishes the kind of system that large language models exemplify, in extraordinarily advanced form, from the kind of processing we humans engage in. I gave several presentations to my own graduate students trying to make the case that, even though AI seems so intelligent, it’s actually different in kind — and I could not convince them. 

And I thought, I know the difference, but I’m having trouble convincing even myself of what it is. And that led me to ask, “Wait a minute: Is there someone or something that stands behind the words, a human responsible for what is being said?” That’s the thing this extraordinary new language machine doesn’t have. 

Whether these systems genuinely understand language is actively debated. But even if you grant them all the comprehension you like, they still lack standing. The buck can’t stop at a thing, a software system, with nothing to lose.

Q: The Bulletin piece has these interesting examples of civic feedback forums where it looks like there are real people saying things, and instead you have a barrage of comments from AI. How did you find some of these other examples in society where things go off the rails in this way? 

A: After the release of ChatGPT, I started hearing a concern from people inside government who review public comments on proposed rules: a suspicion that not all of the comments were written by humans.

My reaction was: That’s going to delegitimize this channel for public feedback. That was several years ago, but everyone now knows this is happening. Public comment is a pillar of democracy. You don’t just put a new rule in place. People need to have a voice and feel like they’ve been heard before a rule is imposed on them. If you skip that step, people don’t accept rules as legitimate. That’s why that process is baked into how America works. And that pillar just cracked, and by now, in my mind, it’s fallen over. Has anyone noticed? My sense is the people on the receiving end of these comments have quietly adjusted the weight they give to public comments. It was never perfect, but boy, now much of its value is being swept away. 

I open my essay with this example: In 2017, the Federal Communications Commission received more than 22 million public comments on its proposal to repeal net neutrality rules, and the New York attorney general later found that nearly 18 million of them were fake. As I write in the essay, “That fraud was caught because it left fingerprints: templated text, duplicated phrasing.” But large language models erase the fingerprints. Now every comment can be fluent and different, and reviewers can no longer tell which ones express views that real people formed and stand behind.

If you have enough of the stuff that’s fake — words that no one with a stake actually stands behind — it desensitizes you to what’s real. That filters back to the public, and people realize: If I take the time to express myself, they’re not even listening any more.

Q: Could you say a little bit more about your point that we need people with “standing,” who will take “accountability” for all pieces of text, even when those bits of text are generated by AI? 

A: In the legal system, standing is a formal idea: sometimes a case isn’t heard because the people bringing it don’t have standing. But informally we use that term all the time. I’m not trying to formalize standing in everyday life. Instead I’m asking:  What is the informal sense of the term, borrowed from the legal one, that we need to pay more attention to now? Here in New England, consider the open town meeting: The person who stands up to speak is generally expected to have standing, as someone from that town with a stake in what gets decided. And if it’s a stranger who drove from across the state, or from out of state, everyone’s like: Wait a minute, who is that? They’re not from around here. In general, there’s just enough friction and it’s costly enough to show up somewhere you don’t actually have standing, that it doesn’t happen much.

Now LLMs and the current digital networked environment collapse those boundaries. We always took for granted that if someone has a voice, it’s because they have standing. They have some basis to be heard. We need to pay attention to this, and really consider how to design systems so that the people with standing are the ones who get heard. 

The other idea I tried to develop is “answerability.” It isn’t formalized in law, but it’s baked into the legal process. If you have standing to give testimony, there you are, ready for cross-examination. You have to be able to answer for what you’re saying. And if you’re making a specific accusation about someone, you have to be willing to back it with facts. Standing and answerability have to travel together: The right to be heard comes with the obligation to answer for what you say.

That doesn’t mean everyone has to attach their name to everything. I write in the Bulletin essay, “Privacy and answerability aren’t opposites. … An institution can verify a person and stand behind their words without exposing them.” To voice a view, you only need to show that a distinct, eligible person is speaking. An accusation asks more: Someone trusted, like a reporter, has to be able to know who is speaking. As I say: “Disclosure obligations should scale with power, and identity protections with vulnerability.”

None of this means AI can’t help. AI can do a lot of the work inside the chain of accountability — drafting, summarizing, finding patterns. If someone with a stake in a rule uses AI to draft a comment, adopts it as their own, and is ready to answer for it, that’s legitimate, in this context. What AI can’t do is anchor the chain. There has to be a person at the end who stands behind the words.

In the essay I lay out four design principles for building that in: “attributable authorship,” a “decomposed and inspectable process,” the use of “provenance as infrastructure,” and the need to “widen standing rather than concentrating it.” As I write, the “animating rule is that autonomy is permitted while unaccountability is not.” And the metric that matters most isn’t the efficiency gained by removing humans, but the number of people AI places into roles where they can answer for what they do.

Q: There is a phrase in the documents of the Center for Constructive Communication, that we need things to move “at the speed of trust,” not at the “speed of tech.” And that implies really thinking about building up these systems. Could you just say a little more about what that phrase means to you?

A: I learned that phrase when I was in Appleton, Wisconsin, with Katherine Cramer [of the University of Wisconsin], a longtime collaborator, talking with community organizers who were running “Dialogue across Divides” conversations there. They had hundreds of people involved. I thought I was developing technology tools with exactly that same purpose, and was so excited to see it. And I asked one of the people who ran that organization, “How fast did you scale this?” And he paused, and then he said, “At the speed of trust.” 

And I took that to mean “slow.” Then I realized he was saying: For you, slow, because you haven’t yet earned our trust. And I’ve since learned that when you do have trust, things can move fast. So bringing in technology is really a process of engagement. It doesn’t work to say, “Trust us, we’re doing this because we think it’s for your own good.” People will turn to someone they already trust and ask, “Is this good for us?” And if that person says “Yes,” things can move fast.

Look at what’s happening at the intersection of AI and society: The speed of AI and the speed of democracy are running on different clocks. Talk to people who work in democratic practice and they say, “AI must slow down, because democracy can’t move that fast.” Talk to people in AI and they say, “AI cannot slow down, democracy needs to speed up.” If we can’t get these two time scales in sync, we’re headed for a breakway situation, where AI gets deployed faster than democratic processes can respond, and decisions get made without the public. That’s starting to happen right now. 

Q: We need people actively doing things to build dialogue and figure out how tech tools can interact with that. At the Center for Constructive Communication, you’ve done a few iterations of the center’s Real Talk initiatives to build civic dialogues, as well as the Youth Voices Initiative in school settings, and currently you’re working on the New Social Forms project. Could you say a few words about them? 

A: The Real Talk effort represents the longest-standing thread in this work. A huge emphasis of our work has been developing better ways to listen to one another. We create a context that is always small — small is beautiful here — where people are willing to share authentically. And we have the consent architecture and the technology to reveal the larger patterns, and then share them. We’ve done this with hundreds of communities around the country. And closer to home, we’ve brought the same approach to our campus here at MIT through the realtalk@MIT program, with support from the Office of the President and the Office of the Provost, to help our community build a culture around dialogue and listening. 

The second thing I’d emphasize is that we’ve been doing more and more work on deliberative processes and citizen assemblies, and on how to make them more accessible. What if a group of high schoolers says, “We have a real problem with our cellphone policy?” Suppose you want to have an assembly that brings students, teachers, and administrators together, not just to listen to people’s concerns but to make policy recommendations. So we did that. The center worked with a high school in New York City, where technology helped people reveal their preferences and differences and listen to each other.

We’re also building answerability into the technology. A prototype called VoiceTrace, developed by PhD student Cassandra Overney in our group, links every output statement — a summary of what was heard in a listening process, or a recommendation coming out of a deliberation — to the specific voices behind it, so any claim can be traced back to the conversations it came from.

The New Social Forms project pertains to a very interesting pattern emerging in workplaces around the world, certainly the ones we’re connected to. AI is an extraordinary tool for individual empowerment, but in the words of one of our collaborators at the Google Experience Institute, people are tunneling. They go deep, using AI to develop refined ideas, but when they surface, their ideas have diverged from their teammates’. So groups and teams trying to work together with AI, there’s a human coordination problem.

We’re going to expand the initial work we’ve started with Google because there’s a lot of interest in collective communication, trust, and interaction among people trying to work together. 

So is that a civic context? It’s a workplace, but workplaces are civic spaces, too. They govern people’s daily lives, they’re where many of us build civic skills and learn to cooperate across difference, and there’s a long tradition of civic life rooted in shared work. We’re all humans trying to interact with each other. These are the same issues. Justice Louis Brandeis once used the phrase “industrial democracy” to capture this. When workplaces lacked certain kinds of civic processes and civility — two interestingly related terms — labor disputes used to turn violent. Procedural justice, mediators, and people hearing one another are just as necessary in the workplace. In the end, it’s all about human beings. Hearing the humanity in one another is what democracy depends on, and it’s just as necessary for communities and organizations to function.

The Sierra Nevada mountain range in California is as stunning as it is diverse, with storms from the Pacific Ocean dumping rain and snow on the range’s western slopes while arid conditions mark much of its eastern face. David Des Marais, MIT’s Amgen Career Development Associate Professor, knows the mountains well. His childhood in San Francisco was filled with hiking and camping excursions throughout the range.

At some point during those trips, he started wondering about one of the few constants of the landscape: the presence of plants. How were plants able to thrive in all those conditions? He turned the question into a career.

Des Marais, who directs the Parsons Laboratory in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, studies how plants interact with their environment. The research spans molecules and mountain ranges, exploring everything from how individual genes change a plant’s ability to grow to how climate change will impact populations of red oak trees across the eastern U.S. His work also considers how evolutionary forces act on plants to change populations over time.

Plants are central to his lab, but Des Marais sees them as a window into all living things. He’s even quick to credit the health of his houseplants and garden to his wife, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University.

“Understanding why life is so diverse is fascinating to me,” Des Marais says. “Understanding how different organisms, from bacteria to dinosaurs, have figured out how to interact with their challenging environment and optimize their fitness is inherently interesting. Why plants in particular? As a geneticist and a physiologist, plants are compelling experimental systems. If I have a theory about gene X causing function Y, I can go into the lab and delete gene X from this species and put it into that species and test function directly. It’s a powerful approach.”

Des Marais does not spend all his days in a lab. In addition to directing the Parsons Laboratory, he teaches four classes at MIT and has two sons who are active in baseball and theater. He welcomes these responsibilities.

At MIT especially, he embraces service.

“The only reason MIT works is because there are people willing to sacrifice some of their research to keep the place running,” Des Marais says. “One of the things I like about academia is that there’s sort of an institutional memory, and you try to honor the legacy of where you’ve been while you shape the future.”

From California to MIT

Des Marais grew up near Stanford University as well as near facilities for NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, which meant there were always plenty of scientists and engineers around. His mother was a teacher, and his father was a geochemist with a knack for pointing out that the landscape around them was the result of geological processes dating back millions of years — a habit Des Marais admits he didn’t like at the time but that, in hindsight, influenced his thinking.

“I’m pretty sure that got into my brain, especially the idea that what looks static often comes about because of processes, and we can study those processes,” he says.

Des Marais studied integrative biology as an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley. He completed his PhD at Duke University around plant genetics.

“There’s a whole series of outdoor events, from the Boy Scouts through college, that made me start to think about the challenges that plants face living in these stressful environments,” he says. “That drove me to plant science and environmental science.”

In a long postdoc at the University of Texas at Austin, Des Marais learned to conduct experiments teasing out the effect of specific genes as he studied how they changed a model plant’s relationship with water.

Des Marais came to Boston primarily for personal reasons: He and his wife, who was also a postdoc at UT Austin, entered the job market at the same time. After some awkward moments competing for the same jobs, his wife landed a tenure-track position at Harvard University. Shortly after, he joined Harvard as a staff scientist.

In 2017, Des Marais discovered MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering was hiring a plant ecologist.

“I don’t even think of myself as a plant ecologist, but I applied on a whim and they were interested,” Des Marais says. “I do a lot around plant water relations, and I joke that there are all these hydrologists in the department who study how water moves through the soil and into the atmosphere through these magical pipes. The magical pipes are plants, which play an important role in the water cycle. I realized a ton of people at MIT were studying that phenomenon at regional or global scales, but no one really studied how or why plants move water in the first place.”

Today Des Marais’ lab work can be broken into two broad categories. The first is centered around how plants function, including their relationship with environmental factors like water, temperature, and nutrients. Des Marais says some of his most impactful studies link specific molecules to how a plant functions in a given ecosystem.

The second centers around fundamental questions in plant evolution, what Des Marais describes as how plants “make decisions” about when to grow, reproduce, germinate, and more.

One current research project looks at how climate change will impact red oak trees, an important species and carbon sink. He is also examining climate change’s impact on plants that are important for food systems.

“We know that climate change is impacting plant function, and it’s impacting plant nutrition, and that impacts human nutrition,” Des Marais says. “Climate change is going to affect where we can grow which plants efficiently and how we can get them where they need to be eaten. All that stuff is critically important for humans.”

Understanding plants for the planet

Des Marais says it’s been fascinating working with experts in environmental chemistry and fluid mechanics as part of the Parsons Laboratory. He sees his role as director as being primarily about fostering community.

“The students are great,” Des Marais says. “It’s a funky old building, but we all work well together. We try to make sure everyone feels comfortable and welcome in the space.”

Even if he can’t take credit for his houseplants, Des Marais appreciates the vital role plants play for the planet.

“Plants are the foundation of the food chain, and there’s no way to get around that,” Des Marais says. “The efficiency of plant photosynthesis directly impacts our nutrition, and it impacts what we can feed the animals that we eat. It affects carbon cycling and water cycling — put simply, plant biology matters.”

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 13 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02751-5

Achieving climate neutrality requires policies perceived as fair, with equity both between and within income groups. Here researchers evaluate the equity implications of different European Union climate policy packages and show how a mixed policy design can balance trade-offs between two equity dimensions.

In September, hackers from a group called ShinyHunters announced that they stole a trove of FBI data about its own agents. It was an intelligence disaster.

Last week, the FBI arrested (alternate link) someone associated with that crime.

Robert Hall PhD ’67 and Michael Woodford PhD ’83, scholars who both earned their doctorates at MIT, have been awarded the 2026 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

Hall, a professor at Stanford University, and Woodford, a professor at Columbia University, were recognized for work that helped revitalize ideas about how government policy can spur growth to help end economic downturns. The Nobel citation describes their research as contributing to “new macroeconomic models that have significantly improved our ability to implement effective stabilisation policy.”

Both scholars helped integrate microeconomic analysis into macroeconomic models. In Hall’s case, the Nobel committee particularly cited research he conducted in the late 1970s shedding new light on economic expectations and household consumption. The committee also spotlighted Woodford’s construction of a comprehensive and influential macroeconomic model that was built on microeconomic foundations and introduced in his 2003 book, “Interest and Prices: Foundations of a Theory of Monetary Policy.” 

The work of both scholars helped update models for intervention during economic crises, based on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, which had worked many times in the 20th century but encountered newfound difficulties adapting to the conditions of the 1970s. So-called New Keynesian models used for economic stabilization today are a result of both economists’ research, the citation noted. 

Hall is the Robert and Carole McNeil Joint Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Professor in the Department of Economics at Stanford University. He received his BA in economics from the University of California at Berkeley before earning his PhD from MIT.

Woodford is the the John Bates Clark Professor of  Political Economy at Columbia University. He received a BA from the University of Chicago and a JD from Yale University Law School prior to receiving his PhD from MIT. 

Remarkably, Hall becomes the fifth former doctoral student principally advised by MIT economist Robert M. Solow to earn the Nobel Prize in economics. The others are George Akerlof PhD ’66, Peter Diamond PhD ’63, William Nordhaus PhD ’67, and Joseph Stiglitz PhD ’67, all of whom had Solow as their principal advisor in MIT’s graduate program. Additionally, MIT professor of biology H. Robert Horvitz ’68, a Nobel laureate in 2002 in the category of physiology or medicine, wrote his undergraduate thesis in economics under the direction of Solow. In 1987, Solow received the Nobel Prize himself. 

Woodford did his doctoral work under the primary supervision of Timothy Kehoe, now of the University of Minnesota — although Woodford does thank Solow in the first paragraph of his doctoral thesis, for helping him “distinguish important problems from exercises of merely technical interest.”

There are now 17 MIT alumni who have won the Nobel Prize in economics. Previously, 10 people have won the award while serving on the MIT faculty, and eight former faculty have also been named recipients.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 12 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02771-1

Selecting climate solutions creates new institutional authority

In the past two years, the federal government has unlawfully consolidated data exposing our private information. 

This consolidation has been chaotic but generally came in three rolling waves: It started with DOGE, moved to agency-to-agency data sharing with ICE, and then attempted data-driven purges of state voter rolls.

We all deserve to live in a world where the data we use to pay our taxes, receive benefits, and vote is not combined and weaponized against us. The amalgamation of data leads to mistakes, abuses, and a lack of trust in institutions meant to protect us. Overall, it can chill our participation in society. This is particularly true for groups disfavored by this administration—especially immigrants and protesters.

Congress highlighted similar abuses—including the creation of enemies lists and snooping on activists and federal employees—following the McCarthy and Watergate eras. And the increasing use of computers to magnify those harms led Congress to pass a slate of protections like the federal Privacy Act of 1974.

The good news is that many people have stepped forward to resist the federal government’s unprecedented and unlawful data consolidations. Many groups, including EFF, have filed lawsuits to enforce our data privacy laws, and many states have, too. Legislators at the federal and state levels have worked to expose and oppose these surveillance programs. And many people have protested for their right to data privacy.

Existing data privacy protections have been essential in the past two years, but they can be improved. This should include: narrowing loopholes and increasing enforcement in existing laws, limiting the government’s purchase of data on the commercial market, and passing a comprehensive consumer privacy law.

Data Consolidation by DOGE

Starting on January 20, 2025, President Trump created DOGE—essentially renaming an existing agency originally meant to modernize government technology. Rather than engage in modernization, DOGE quickly obtained high-level access to sensitive databases across the government that store millions of people’s personal records—including at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Social Security Administration, and the Treasury Department.

DOGE was staffed with people with little government or cybersecurity knowledge and who often had conflicts of interest. DOGE’s early aim was not always clear, aside from gaining “prompt access to all unclassified agency records” and the “sharing and consolidation” of those records.

The result? The indiscriminate firing of government employees and the decimation of important agencies that focused on consumer protection and foreign aid. It also resulted in clear misuses of data. For example, while working with DOGE at the Social Security Administration, one individual signed an outside agreement with an advocacy group with the aim of using SSA data to find evidence of alleged voter fraud and “overturn election results in certain States.”

DOGE’s data access and consolidation violated the federal Privacy Act, which limits the sharing and consolidation of government databases. Many groups stepped in to sue. For example, EFF and our co-counsel at Lex Lumina LLC and Democracy Defenders Fund, on behalf of two public employee unions (AFGE and AALJ), sued the OPM for unlawfully disclosing federal workers’ information to DOGE. After EFF and others secured early victories, the government sought to end the lawsuits by firing many DOGE agents and removing their access to records. A great deal of damage remains in need of a judicial remedy.

Data Consolidation by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)

Even as DOGE’s influence diminished, federal agencies have attempted to share, compare, and seize large databases, in order to target immigrants. In some cases, they have succeeded. This happened with tax records at the IRS, Medicaid data from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and public housing data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Department of Agriculture also sought to collect databases regarding Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs (SNAP) from states.

Many groups have filed lawsuits to block this anti-immigrant-motivated data consolidation, alleging it violates privacy protection laws. EFF filed amicus briefs in support of two of these lawsuits: Centro de Trabajadores v. Bessent, which concerns IRS data; and California v. HHS, which concerns Medicaid data (and where we teamed up with EPIC and Protect Democracy). Most recently, states have stepped up to challenge the federal government’s attempted seizure, for immigration enforcement purposes, of state commercial driver’s license data held by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, a non-profit organization.

This data consolidation for immigration enforcement has also included government purchase of commercial products. This includes ICE’s purchase of commercial location data without a warrant, and its interest in “Big Data and Ad Tech providers.” ICE also has contracts with companies like Palantir, which help organize all the datasets the agency collects.

Data Consolidation for Voter Purges

The right to vote is fundamental to every democracy. That’s why EFF has long advocated for cybersecurity in voting systems, to make sure every vote is properly counted.

Voter purges are a longstanding threat to the right to vote. State and local officials regularly delete people from the voter registration rolls, often for bad reasons and without adequate notice. This has a disparate impact against people of color.

Now the federal government is trying to purge voters, too. To do so, it has consolidated our data in three ways. First, it is using an old data system called SAVE for a new purpose: checking voter eligibility. Second, it has seized voter information from states. Third, it has created a federal list of eligible voters.

As a direct result, people with a right to vote will be purged from voter rolls because of erroneous data. Others will be intimidated from voting or registering. And all registered voters suffer a violation of their data privacy rights: information collected for one purpose is being used against them for another purpose.

Expansion of SAVE

Since 1986, the federal government has operated SAVE, which stands for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements. It is not a database, but it facilitates easy access to databases. It is used to determine whether immigrants and naturalized citizens are eligible for various government benefits, such as food stamps.

In 2025, the federal government started using SAVE for a new purpose: checking voters’ eligibility. Further, SAVE now provides access to new databases and allows bulk searches. More than 60 million voters have been run through SAVE, and 21,000 were flagged as potential noncitizens who are ineligible to vote. Erroneous flags have caused purges of lawful voters – such as Anthony Nell.

A case called League of Women Voters v. DHS challenges this expansion of SAVE. The plaintiffs are represented by CREW, Democracy Forward, the Fair Elections Center, and EPIC. A federal judge held this program unlawful and set it aside. DHS appealed and asked for a stay of this order, and a federal appellate court denied the stay. Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court granted the stay, exercising its controversial “shadow docket” authority by a six-to-three vote.

Federal employees in DHS’s “Fraud Detection and National Security Unit,” which ordinarily investigates alleged immigration fraud, have been re-assigned to examine voter eligibility. A whistleblower alleges that employees have been directed to go to state election agency websites, enter some of a voter’s personal information, and thereby access more of it. This may violate state laws requiring a person, before accessing a voter’s information, to attest they are that voter or have that voter’s authorization.

Federal Seizure of States’ Voter Information

Since 2025, the federal government has demanded that at least 48 states hand over their voter information. At least 16 states have complied. The federal government is running this information through SAVE, searching for voters to purge.

The federal government has sued 30 states for refusing to comply. So far, courts have dismissed 25 of these suits. There’s also a lawsuit against this data grab, titled Common Cause v. DOJ, brought by CREW, Protect Democracy, and the ACLU.

The New Federal Voter Eligibility List

In March 2026, President Trump issued an executive order requiring DHS to create a list of people who are U.S. citizens, aged 18 or older, and residents of the state. The order also requires DOJ to prosecute anyone, including state and local officials, who provides a ballot to a person who is not eligible to vote in federal elections.

In California v. Trump, 24 states allege that this executive order violates the Constitution’s separation of powers. A federal judge enjoined this program, and an appellate court denied a stay. But the U.S. Supreme Court by a six-to-three vote granted a stay, which allows the program to move forward. (By a seven-to-two vote, the Court denied a stay of an injunction against a different part of the same executive order, which concerned mail-in ballots.) Another legal challenge, titled EPIC v. USCIS, alleges that the new federal voter eligibility list violates the Privacy Act as well as the separation of powers.

Next Steps

It is encouraging to see so many people, groups, and states step forward to protect our data privacy from these unlawful waves of federal data consolidations. Still, more work remains. For example:

• The Privacy Act of 1974 has proven a critical bulwark. But after a half century, it could use a refresh. For example, Congress should close its loopholes and expand its enforceability.
• Law enforcement agencies must be prohibited from avoiding the Constitution’s warrant requirement by buying our personal data from brokers. For example, Congress should pass the “Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act.”
• We need a comprehensive consumer data privacy law, among other reasons to reduce the flood of our personal data that corporations provide to law enforcement agencies. Legislators should check out EFF’s “privacy first” framework.

In the meantime, there’s no time like the present to practice surveillance self-defense, like using strong passwords and disabling your phone’s ad identification.

 

Related Cases: American Federation of Government Employees v. U.S. Office of Personnel Management

On Wednesday I spent a day fishing, on a small boat out of Gloucester, MA. We caught many cod (none of which we could keep), and a bunch of hake and mackerel (all of which we could keep). And…I caught a squid! Near as I can tell, it’s a longfin squid, sometimes called a Boston squid (Doryteuthis (Amerigo) pealeii).

That night I cooked it over a barbecue grill—hot and fast. Delicious.

EFF was thrilled to join organizers, advocates, and activists in the East Bay for the second annual Oakland Tech Week last week. We are grateful to our friends at MediaJustice and Upturn for inviting us co-present this all-day event, “Building Beyond Big Tech: Organizing Oakland’s Future”, on Sept. 30.  The event, hosted by the Kapor Center in downtown Oakland, offered a unique chance to spend time with people across The Town and the Bay Area working to create a better future for everyone.

“We’re at this truly consequential moment,” said EFF executive director Nicole Ozer, in her speech kicking off the day’s events. “We know that in this community’s work—and communities across the country—our ability to ensure that technology empowers rather than oppresses is fundamental to the future of countries, our livelihoods, and, literally, our lives.”

We also participated in a panel on the state of play in California, moderated by MediaJustice executive director Steven Renderos. Director of State Affairs Hayley Tsukayama joined reporter Khari Johnson of CalMatters and Crystal Zemero of People Over Billionaires to talk about the landscape at the state level. The day also included smaller conversations focused on building better tech and fine-tuning messaging, facilitated by our colleagues at MediaJustice.

Seeing the people—our neighbors—who are fighting back against surveillance in their communities was inspiring. They’re casting doubt on the claims large technology companies make about what’s happening in their neighborhoods. They’re speaking up at council meetings and rallies. They’re seeking changes that would give their workplaces and neighborhoods a better, safer relationship with technology. It was so important to come together in solidarity to compare notes, spend time together, find opportunities to support each other, and scheme together.

We can work together to build a future that works for everyday people. A better world is possible—and Oakland Tech Week was a great reminder that, all around us, folks are working together to tackle huge challenges.

“There are formidable forces,” Ozer said.  “But we can pierce the other side’s narrative of inevitability with our power of indignation. The future of AI and other technology is not written and we can work together to get it right.”

Whether you’re in Oakland or Aukland, consider this a renewed invitation to join us.

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EFF strongly condemns Turkey’s state-led discriminatory, oppressive attacks on feminist and LGBTQ+ organisations, media platforms, student groups, and rights defenders and activists within the country.

Since mid-September, access to the websites and social media accounts of a dozen organizations have been blocked by court order, while over 60 members and activists have been detained, their offices and homes raided, mobile phones, laptops and other digital devices seized, and judicial proceedings launched against them. 

These actions threaten the very existence of the LGBTQ+ organizations targeted, limiting their ability to carry out legitimate human rights work, deterring participation and support, and chilling the free speech rights of not just these groups, but any organization that even reports on LGBTQ+ oppression.

A little over a week ago, an Istanbul court shut down the website and social media accounts of T24, Turkey’s longest running independent digital news organization—which has covered government-backed campaigns against and earlier crackdowns on gay rights groups—alleging it had aired “LGBT propaganda” over the past year. 

It’s all part of Turkey’s efforts to portray LGBTQ+ groups and support networks for those living with HIV as criminal organizations that must be suppressed, purportedly to protect family values. Homosexuality is not illegal in Turkey (unlike Uganda, Nigeria, and Egypt, where it is criminalized), but LGBTQ+ organizations and activists have in recent years faced increased government oppression, including criminal proceedings on allegations related to obscenity and violations of Turkey’s Law on Associations, which regulates the activities of nonprofits.

In its new crackdown, the government is targeting LGBTQ+ groups’ websites and social media channels for alleged obscene posts accessible to children. Kaos GL, Turkey’s oldest gay rights organization, said investigations are being led by the Cyber Crimes Bureau of the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, which took members of its Board of Directors into custody, raided their homes, and searched the organization’s offices, where electronic devices were seized. 

According to Human Rights Watch, prosecutors in Istanbul said those targeted were suspected of “founding, leading, or being a member of a criminal organization,” as well as sex work and drug-related offenses. Publicly available law enforcement and judicial documents about the investigation reportedly don’t say which publications or posts are alleged to be obscene.

The prosecutor’s office launched an investigation of the organization and others under Article 226 of the Turkish Penal Code, which regulates the offense of “obscenity” (without clearly defining it), while the overall operation, dubbed “My Family is Safe” and launched as part of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “Decade of the Family” program, is being brought under Article 220 of the code. Justifying the crackdown by invoking family values and child safety suggests that the government is trying to enforce a moral code on society based on intolerance of and discrimination against LGBTQ+ people.

New Low for Turkey

Framing the activities of LGBTQ+ rights organizations as violations of organized crime provisions is a new low for Turkey, where free speech and press freedoms have long been under attack. The implication from these raids and investigations is that the organizations’ legitimate civil society work advocating for the rights of queer people—monitoring human rights violations, offering legal aid, running news portals, sponsoring cultural events such as symposiums and film screenings, publishing an online magazine and supporting LGBTQ+ refugees—is suspected of being criminal threatens the basic human rights of the LGBTQ+ community in Turkey.

These actions send a dangerous message to people and organizations exercising freedom of speech and association in support of queer people. Under the penal code, directing a criminal organization is punishable by five to ten years in prison, while merely being a member carries a sentence of two to five years. 

EFF joins hundreds of human, civil, LGBTQ+, and digital rights organizations around the world in calling for the immediate release of all those detained for exercising their rights to freedom of expression, association and legitimate human rights work, and the unblocking of all websites and social media accounts of affected organizations. 

For many LGBTQ+ individuals the world over, the internet can be a safer space for exploring identity, finding community, and seeking support. The anti-LGBTQ+ crackdown in Turkey is not happening in a vacuum—unfortunately we are seeing anti-LGBTQ+ bills restricting free expression and privacy, content moderation decisions that disproportionately impact LGBTQ+ users, and other forms of intolerance around the world. 

We urge international civil society and diplomatic partners to raise awareness of and to speak out against the crackdown, and to publicly show support for the legitimacy of Turkey’s LGBTQ+ organizations and the important work they do to ensure that queer people are safe and free.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 09 October 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02773-z

The authors developed simulations to examine the role of topographic variation in mediating species response to climate change. They show that topographic variation can reduce energy expenditure by up to 20.8% and increase buffering benefits of elevation shifts by 82.1% for a diurnal ectotherm.