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Federal court prevents breakup of top US climate center
New York City’s hydropower contract kicks off
Judge sides with EPA in venue fight over termination of $7B in solar grants
Brussels to Big Tech: Embrace sustainable AI or go away
Former Meta CTO raises clean tech fund as AI reshapes sector
EU climate chief mulls including international carbon credits in ETS reviews
Norway struggles to diversify its economy hooked on oil and gas
Ultrasound-based pacemaker noninvasively steadies the heart
MIT engineers have developed a noninvasive pacemaker that stimulates the heart using ultrasound. The design could one day provide a surgery-free alternative to traditional cardiac implants.
The new device is designed as a small sticker that can be worn on the chest. Tiny transducers on the sticker send ultrasound pulses through the chest to stimulate the heart. The ultrasound waves trigger the opening of certain ion channels in heart cells, an effect the researchers amplified through genetic engineering. When the channels open, they let in calcium, which signals a heart cell to squeeze and beat.
In experiments in the lab, the researchers applied ultrasound waves to engineered human cardiac cells and found that the pulses effectively maintained the cells’ healthy contractions. They also tested the ultrasound sticker on rats and found the device quickly, safely, and noninvasively corrected arrhythmias and restored normal, regular heart contractions.
The team has fabricated a prototype that includes the ultrasound sticker (about the size of a postage stamp) and a small, pocket-sized device containing associated batteries and electronics. The same group previously demonstrated a sticker design that uses ultrasound to image deep organs and tissues. They now plan to combine the two approaches into one ultrasound sticker to simultaneously monitor and regulate the heart’s activity.
“We believe you could one day have stickers on the body that could do long-term imaging deep in the body and also do stimulation for therapeutic effects, in a noninvasive closed-loop way,” says Xuanhe Zhao, professor of mechanical engineering and of civil and environmental engineering at MIT.
Zhao and his colleagues, together with collaborators from Professor Qifa Zhou’s group at the University of Southern California (USC), have published their results in a study appearing today in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering. The study’s MIT co-authors include first author Chen Gong, together with Runze Li, Won Jun Song, and former postdocs Gengxi Lu, Shucong Li, and Hsiao-Chuan Liu. Other collaborators include researchers from Harvard University, the University of California at Los Angeles, and other groups at USC.
Sound genes
Today, around 3 million adults in the United States live with pacemakers. The small battery-powered devices are surgically implanted in a person’s chest, and act to deliver electrical impulses to regulate heart rate. Implantable pacemakers are a well-established and generally safe medical treatment that nonetheless comes with risks.
“Pacemakers are one of the most important and widely used human implants, and they have saved millions of lives,” the paper’s co-corresponding author, Gengxi Lu, says. “But they are invasive, and they make direct contact with the beating heart. The dream for many years has been noninvasive heart stimulation with ultrasound.”
Ultrasound encompasses a range of acoustic waves that safely penetrates the body. Ultrasound waves reflect and resonate off structures in characteristic ways that allow technicians to resolve and image organs and tissues inside the body. Ultrasound can also be directed and focused to stimulate certain therapeutic effects, for instance in the brain, where scientists are exploring the use of ultrasound to treat Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s, and other brain disorders.
Scientists have also found that ultrasound can benefit the heart. Previous studies in animals have shown that focused ultrasound can safely activate heart cells, though the effect has been inconsistent and weak.
Zhao and his colleagues looked to amplify ultrasound’s effects on the heart. In their new study, they applied sonogenetics, which is a relatively new approach that takes after optogenetics — a technique that involves genetically manipulating specific parts of a cell to respond to light. Similarly, sonogenetics aims to genetically engineer cells to respond to sound, including ultrasound.
In their work to develop an ultrasound pacemaker, the team first looked to increase heart cells’ sensitivity to ultrasound, through sonogenetics. In the lab, they used standard practices to derive heart cells from embryonic stem cells, and then delivered a genetic alteration to the cells that increased their sensitivity to ultrasound. Specifically, the manipulation produced ion channels that opened more readily in response to ultrasound.
“These channels can now ‘hear’ ultrasound better, and can open to let calcium in, which is what directly activates the cell and causes it to beat,” explains by the paper’s first author, Chen Gong.
Sticker health
In experiments with sonogenetically engineered heart cells, the researchers found that when they exposed the cells to ultrasound, the cells beat in sync with the waves, unlike cells that were not genetically manipulated.
In any clinical application of an ultrasound pacemaker, the team envisions that a patient could first receive a one-time injection, similar to a vaccine, that would act to genetically boost the sensitivity of cardiac cells to the pacemaker’s ultrasound waves. The injection would be a form of gene therapy — a treatment that is currently approved by the FDA to treat certain inherited conditions such as sickle cell disease and spinal muscular dystrophy.
“We think this step would be clinically translatable as a form of gene therapy that could enable noninvasive pacemakers,” Gong says.
The team then designed the core of the ultrasound pacemaker, in the form of a postage-stamp-sized sticker embedded with tiny ultrasound transducers. The sticky part of the device is made from a hydrogel material that Zhao’s group has refined over the years to adhere strongly to skin and many types of materials, while also allowing ultrasound waves to pass through without weakening. The transducers within the sticker can be tuned to generate ultrasound waves at specific frequencies.
In experiments with rats, the researchers first administered a sonogenetic, ultrasound-boosting solution through their tails. They then adhered a miniature version of the pacemaker to the rats’ chests. When they turned the stickers on, they observed that the ultrasound quickly regulated the animals’ hearts. Some individuals with slow heart rates were brought up to a normal rate, while others with irregular heartbeats were steadied, keeping in sync with ultrasound’s “ticks.”
“We can now use low-intensity ultrasound to open ion channels in cells to have very effective heart pacing,” Gong says. “We are now making these stickers into smaller form factors, and more integrated, so they are easier to wear, more stable, and more accurate over a longer term.”
“In this paper, we demonstrated noninvasive pacemaking. However, we think this concept could be useful beyond just the heart,” Zhao says. “We believe you could one day have stickers over different parts of the body that could do long-term imaging, monitoring, and closed-loop therapeutic stimulation.”
This work was supported, in part, by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Opthamology from Research to Prevent Blindness, and the U.S. Department of War.
A plan to preserve wetlands without stopping development
Balancing economic growth and environmental protection is not easy. Consider wetlands, which provide flood protection, aid water quality, and are linchpins of larger ecosystems. How can we best preserve wetlands while enhancing economic activity?
According to a new study, one solution involves supplanting traditional conservation mandates, which require replacing affected wetlands locally, with tradeable offsets. Through this system, a developer can build on a wetland by purchasing credits representing an equivalent environmental value created by improving a wetland somewhere else in the same watershed, away from concentrated development.
While this has largely been the approach of U.S. federal and state regulators since the mid-1990s, current regulations do not account for the flood protection benefits of wetlands. The new study finds a workable solution in an offset policy that also includes a locally varying tax on development, precisely to compensate for the increased flood risk it causes.
In the lower 48 states of the U.S., wetlands are heavily concentrated in California and Florida, two high-population states. Through a highly granular look at Florida’s wetlands from 1995 to 2020, with a new scholarly methodology that carefully weighs local factors, the scholars estimate that development of wetlands led to $2.4 billion in net economic gains. Their alternate policy would have preserved most of these gains while also preventing about $1.6 billion in flood damage.
“You’re retaining two-thirds of the private gains from trade,” says Daniel Aronoff PhD ’22, a research affiliate in MIT’s Department of Economics and co-author of a newly published paper summarizing the study’s findings. “And the flood damages shrink by an order of magnitude, so only you’re incurring a small fraction of the flood damage while collecting that amount in increased tax revenue, which can subsidize the cost of restoration after flood damage has occurred.”
This system is neither a simple conservation mandate nor a free ride for developers. The scholars say it would provide a better way of balancing wetlands preservation and economic gains, while lowering flood risk.
“You could do this,” Aronoff says. “It’s an implementable thing. You could build a policy out of this.”
The paper, “Conservation Priorities and Environmental Offsets: Markets for Florida Wetlands,” appears in the May issue of the American Economic Review. The authors are Aronoff, who is also a research associate at the Laboratory for Economic Analysis and Design at MIT and a research collaborator at the Digital Currency Initiative; and Will Rafey PhD ’20, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California at Los Angeles.
No net loss — but more risk
Federal wetlands policy in the U.S. has been governed since the 1970s by a “no net loss” objective, meaning that development must be accompanied by approved actions to offset any loss of wetlands functionality. State laws have often mirrored this federal approach. The current rules work on a watershed level, enabling public and private developers to offset the impact of developing a wetland by purchasing offset credits from a “wetland mitigation bank” in the same watershed.
The researchers developed their study as an ambitious, data-rich project. They obtained comprehensive data on environmental offset credits issued, and transfers to developers from state and regional regulators; a record of offset prices from a private broker as well as state and county purchase records; maps detailing wetlands development and private property ownership; and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) data on flood risk policies and claims.
The scholars then built a detailed database of development from every wetland bank permit issued in Florida that included enhancements, land acquisition, estimated costs, and offset credit release schedules, as well as records of actual releases and sales over time. They used these data to build a dynamic model of the wetland offset market, from which they obtained their estimates of economic gains and flood risk costs.
Whereas other work has applied national data to wetlands analysis, this more granular approach allowed the scholars to conduct a locally focused examination of economic activity, floods, and policy specifically applying to Florida.
“The functional form that has been used to estimate the relationship between wetlands and flood risk across all America is not compatible with data on wetlands and flooding in Florida,” Aronoff says.
The study also underscores an important distinction in the kinds of offset policies that have previously been deployed. The first iteration of offset policy required a developer to restore wetlands adjacent to any wetlands area that is newly developed. A second iteration, the one still in use, allows developers to purchase offset credits — which might apply to wetlands that are not adjacent to the development in question. The latter carries with it greater risk of flood damage to developed property, as an equivalent amount of restored wetlands in a rural area will not serve as a flood buffer for as many structures.
The proposed policy solution would levy a tax — either on offset sellers or buyers — that would equal the estimated increase in flood risk created by the development.
“Going from the first policy iteration to the second iteration could have created a lot of value, because you have development taking place with wetlands created in the lowest-cost way,” Aronoff says. “But that gave rise to an externality: the flood risk. Because you’re creating flood risk by developing in urban areas with lots of buildings, while creating wetlands in rural areas without buildings around.”
Tuning the policy
Ultimately, that is why the empirical analysis developed by the economists shows a more optimal path using so-called Pigouvian taxes, named after 20th-century economist Arthur Pigou. These taxes add a levy when people create negative circumstances for society at large. Taxes to inhibit pollution, for instance, are Pigouvian. The modeling in the current study indicates the same concept would work effectively for wetlands policy.
“Economics is about tradeoffs,” Aronoff says. “And this is a tradeoff. Flood risk is expensive — that’s a cost. But development creates value because it is only profitable to the extent that the end user desires it.”
Ultimately, the scholars think, implementing systems that balance factors will work better in the long run than many kinds of prohibitions on economic activity — or than allowing unrestricted activity without weighing the public good.
“If you choose an absolute, you’re choosing one over the other in all instances,” Aronoff says. “And what is at the core of the outlook of an economist is to assume there’s a tradeoff, and the question is how do you negotiate that tradeoff in an optimal way. That’s what we are trying to get at here.”
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the George and Obie Schultz Fund.
New propulsion system could make tiny satellites both fast and fuel-efficient
MIT engineers are testing a new propulsion system that combines the power and speed of conventional chemical thrusters with the precision and fuel-efficiency of electrical thrusters.
The system could enable the design of nimbler, more flexible small satellites, which could perform both fast, powerful maneuvers and slower, precise adjustments, depending on the mission and moment at hand.
The key to the new system is a special propellant that can power both chemical and electrical thrusters, which traditionally have required separate, bulky fuel sources.
“If you can have chemical and electrical propulsion in one small package, it’s the best of both worlds,” says Amelia Bruno, a former postdoc in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro). “This opens the door for small satellites to do even more science, more observations, and more interesting missions, all on a smaller and cheaper platform.”
Bruno is the lead author of a study appearing this week in the Journal of Propulsion and Power showing that a type of “green monopropellant” originally developed by the U.S. Air Force for use in chemical propulsion in space can also effectively power tiny “electrospray” thrusters. Electrospray thrusters are dime-sized rockets that use electric fields to charge up a liquid propellant’s particles, which are then shot into space as a thrust-generating spray.
Electrospray thrusters are extremely fuel-efficient and can perform slow and precise maneuvers, such as pushing a small spacecraft bit by bit through a long, interplanetary journey. Chemical thrusters, in contrast, require a large fuel supply to perform short and fast bursts, for instance to quickly ascend and descend, or speed up and slow down.
Now that the MIT group has found a propellant that can fuel both chemical and electrospray thrusters, they see big potential for small spacecraft. The team is working with NASA to launch the Green Propulsion Dual Mode mission — a briefcase-sized CubeSat that will carry a chemical thruster and four electrospray thrusters, all fueled by a single propellant tank. The mission will be the first to test such a two-in-one propulsion system for small spacecraft. If it is successful, Bruno says the mission could pave the way for small satellites to explore beyond Earth’s orbit.
“We could send CubeSats to Mars, or the asteroid belt, where they could make the journey slowly, using electrospray thrusters,” says study co-author Paulo Lozano, the Miguel Alemán Velasco Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. “You could then use your chemical thrusters to quickly move to look at interesting features. You could have a lot more flexibility to do a lot more things.”
The study’s co-authors also include Matthew Corrado SM ’22, PhD ’26.
A sea of ions
Lozano’s group at MIT designs, fabricates, and tests electrospray thrusters for use in satellites that range from the size of a lunchbox to a small carry-on suitcase. Compared to conventional satellites, these microsatellites are significantly smaller and cheaper to launch into space.
But smaller spacecraft require smaller everything else, including propulsion systems. In that respect, electrospray thrusters are a good fit. The thrusters Lozano develops are about the size of a thumbnail. Each thruster sits atop a small reservoir of ionic liquid propellant. When the reservoir is connected to a battery, the battery supplies some amount of voltage that electrically charges a corresponding amount of ions in the liquid. The charged particles are then channeled out of the reservoir, through the thruster’s tips and into space as a thrust-inducing spray.
Over the past decade, Lozano has tested many thruster designs, under varying conditions, and with various types of ionic liquid propellant — a fuel that is essentially made from salts that can remain in liquid form.
“Ionic liquids are very stable and can even remain a liquid in space, which not a lot of materials can do,” Bruno says. “And it’s basically a sea of ions, which is why we base our technology around it, so we can pull those ions out into an electrospray.”
Bruno and Lozano have collaborated with the U.S. Air Force, which synthesized a new kind of ionic liquid propellant — the Advanced SpaceCraft Energetic Non-Toxic propellant (ASCENT) — which was being tested in chemical thrusters. Chemical thrusters are high-force propulsion systems typically associated with launching rockets and performing hard and fast maneuvers once in space. ASCENT was designed as a “green,” less toxic alternative to hydrazine, which has been the traditional fuel source for chemical propulsion and is extremely hazardous to handle.
“ASCENT happens to be an ionic liquid mixture,” Bruno says. “And we said, hey, that’s the stuff we typically use. Theoretically, this should work. Let’s go figure out how.”
Spray and spin
In their new study, Bruno, Lozano, and Corrado tested the performance of electrospray thrusters that they fueled with ASCENT. Each thruster they used was attached to a small cube-shaped reservoir about the size of a Lego brick. They filled each reservoir with 1 gram of ASCENT, a liquid that has a viscosity similar to baby oil. They then attached a thruster to opposite sides of a CubeSat, which they set on a MagLev stand — a custom testbed that is designed to magnetically levitate a sample or device. The MagLev in Lozano’s lab is installed inside a large vacuum chamber, which the researchers can tune to mimic the conditions in space.
Over multiple experiments, the team remotely applied varying levels of voltage to activate the thrusters, which in turn produced a spray that spun the CubeSat around, like a floating, spinning top. The researchers measured the amount of thrust produced with each trial, and calculated ASCENT’s fuel efficiency as they ran the thrusters continuously over periods lasting up to 100 hours.
In the end, they found that ASCENT was able to successfully fuel each electrospray thruster. What’s more, the propellant, which was originally intended for chemical propulsion, was just as efficient as other, conventional ionic liquids at propelling electric thrusters.
“Compared to our normal electrospray propellants, ASCENT can provide similar performance in terms of thrust,” Bruno says. “Now that we know our thrusters work with ASCENT, we can start thinking of all the ways we can make them even better.”
Now that ASCENT has been proven to work in both chemical and electrical propulsion, she and Lozano say that a single tank of the fuel can be used to power both types of thrusters, all in a compact, two-in-one system that could fit within a small CubeSat. The team will test the idea with NASA’s Green Propulsion Dual Mode mission, which is scheduled to launch in November.
“This will be the first time that a satellite will have a shared propellant tank,” says Lozano, who notes that in addition to long, exploratory interplanetary missions, small satellites equipped with both chemical and electrical propulsion could also be useful for missions closer to Earth, such as for weather and climate observations.
“Say there’s a storm coming, and you’d want to deploy your constellation of small satellites to observe over one location,” he says. “You could choose to send them quickly or slowly depending on the nature of the observation. And the only way to do that is if you have two propulsion systems, which is now possible.”
This research is supported, in part, by NASA.
Vulnerability Disclosure in the Age of AI
New article: “Responsible Disclosure in the Age of AI: A Call for Urgent Action,” by Melissa Hathaway.
Abstract: Artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping the balance between vulnerability discovery and remediation. Frontier AI models are now capable of autonomously identifying exploitable software vulnerabilities at unprecedented speed and scale. This development exposes decades of accumulated technical debt created by a software industry that prioritized rapid deployment over secure-by-design engineering practices. Drawing on the evolution of software assurance, vulnerability disclosure frameworks, and U.S. cyber policy, this perspective argues that the current moment represents a strategic inflection point for governments, industry, and critical infrastructure operators. The author examines the growing tension between offensive and defensive equities in cyberspace, the emergence of AI-enabled vulnerability discovery capabilities in both the U.S. and China, and the increasing risks posed by unsupported legacy systems and AI-assisted code generation practices. Responsible disclosure can no longer remain a reactive or fragmented process, but must become a coordinated national and international resilience effort involving governments, software vendors, infrastructure operators, and emergency response organizations. The article concludes with an urgent call for accelerated remediation, large-scale patch management coordination, and sustained investment in automated vulnerability repair capabilities before adversaries exploit this rapidly narrowing window of opportunity...
Enzymes that assemble into droplets can speed up cellular reactions
Within the past decade, biologists have discovered that one strategy cells use to keep their contents organized is a phenomenon known as phase separation.
Similar to the way oil forms droplets that float in a vinegar solution, proteins inside cells can phase separate to form highly concentrated droplets that keep them organized within the cell. In a new study, MIT researchers have now shown that this droplet formation is critical for controlling the function of a class of enzymes called kinases.
The researchers found that condensing into droplets optimizes the biochemical conditions needed for kinases to catalyze reactions, allowing them to more rapidly activate cell signaling pathways. In some cases, droplet formation can even change which reactions the kinases perform.
“Many biological molecules have this propensity to spontaneously separate. We were really interested in asking, if we have these kinases forming droplets, what is the consequence of that in the context of signaling?” says Lindsay Case, an assistant professor of biology at MIT and the senior author of the study.
Learning more about how these droplets form could help researchers design drugs that target kinases, some of which can be overactive in cancer cells.
“Understanding the chemistry of these compartments, and what molecules go into them and what molecules don’t go into them, could help us design drugs that better localize to their target of interest,” Case says.
Nicholas Lea, an MIT graduate student, is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in Cell Reports.
Forming droplets
Since her days as a graduate student, Case has been studying how the physical organization of molecules inside cells affects their function. As a postdoc, she began studying how phase separation might affect a signaling pathway that allows cells to sense when they’re attached to their environment, so they can respond appropriately.
Some of the proteins in this pathway are kinases, which activate other proteins by adding phosphate groups to them. Kinases can also activate themselves through a process called autophosphorylation.
“Inside of the cell, you have these kinase molecules that are responsible for carrying a signal through the cell, and we know that the organization of these molecules changes. When the information is present, they’re organized in a different way than when the information is not present,” Case says. “We think that having the right molecules in the right place is incredibly important for the right biochemistry to occur.”
Phase separation is one of the methods that cells appear to use for this organization. The most familiar example of phase separation can be seen in a salad dressing, where oil forms droplets to minimize contact with water-based vinegar. Proteins can phase separate when they are highly concentrated, leading them to self-assemble into dense droplets floating in the cell’s cytoplasm.
Case hypothesized that this phase separation, which brings kinases together at a high density, might help cells to boost the enzymes’ activity because they are more likely to bump into and phosphorylate each other.
In this study, Case and Lea set out to test that hypothesis, focusing on an enzyme called focal adhesion kinase (FAK). This kinase, which becomes activated when cells attach to their surrounding environment, activates pro-growth and pro-survival signals. In cancer cells, this signaling pathway can go awry, allowing cells to proliferate even when they detach from their original locations.
Scientists already knew that when cells are properly attached to their environment, that adhesion signal causes FAK to accumulate at the cell membrane. In the new study, the MIT team mimicked that effect by overexpressing FAK in cells. These cells were floating freely in a solution, not attached to any surface. Even so, the high concentration of FAK caused the kinase to phase separate into droplets, which turned on the pro-growth signal.
“It was surprising that just by condensing this protein into a droplet, you can actually turn on a signaling pathway that should be turned off,” Case says. “If FAK concentration is too high, you’re always getting these droplets and you’re always signaling, regardless of what the receptors that are supposed to be controlling this are doing.”
The findings suggest that in cancer cells, overexpression of FAK may lead to phase separation, which then helps to drive cancer progression and metastasis.
“It may be that for some kinases, you’re not supposed to form these droplets in the cytoplasm because it leads to this always-on signal, and then the cells no longer listen to the information coming from the environment,” Case says.
Interfering with FAK’s ability to form droplets could offer a new strategy for cancer drug development, she says.
Controlling reactions
The researchers also studied two other kinases, Mst2 and Abl. They found that these enzymes could also phase separate at high concentrations, and that this increased their activity. While phase separation of FAK in the cytoplasm may occur only in cancerous cells, for Mst2, it appears to be a strategy that healthy cells use to control a signaling pathway called Hippo, which promotes cell growth and survival.
Additionally, for both Mst2 and Abl, the researchers discovered that phase separation can lead the enzymes to phosphorylate additional targets, which may lead them to activate different signaling pathways.
“It’s not just that you’re getting faster phosphorylation, but in those cases, the patterns of what is actually getting phosphorylated were very different inside of the droplet compared to what might be happening in a non-droplet context,” Case says. “The kinase is able to phosphorylate amino acid residues beyond the set of canonical sites that have been described before.”
The researchers also found that when these droplets form, they attract high concentrations of ATP, the molecule that kinases use as a source of phosphate. This occurs because kinases tend to contain floppy sections containing many positively charged amino acids, which attract negatively charged ATP.
Using a machine-learning model, the researchers predicted that about 45 percent of the 500 kinases found in human cells would have the ability to form droplets like those seen in this study. Those kinases were also more likely to be highly positively charged, which could help them to recruit ATP into the droplets.
In future work, Case hopes to explore the possibility of designing drugs that could mimic ATP’s ability to be attracted into droplets within a cell, which could help reduce negative side effects of the drugs.
“By localizing drugs to the compartment where your target localizes, that could reduce off-target effects by concentrating the drug with the target of interest and reducing interactions with other molecules,” Case says.
The research was funded by a Searle Scholars Program Award, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Institutes of Health, the Royal G. and Mae H. Westaway Family Memorial Fund, and a David H. Koch Graduate Fellowship.
Welcome New EFF Executive Director Nicole Ozer
EFF welcomes our new Executive Director Nicole Ozer today!
Nicole is a legal expert on privacy and surveillance, artificial intelligence, and digital speech who previously served as the inaugural executive director of the Center for Constitutional Democracy at UC Law San Francisco. From 2004-2025, she was founding director of the Technology and Civil Liberties Program at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.
Nicole has long been a partner of EFF’s in the fight to defend civil liberties in the digital world. Many of us already know her, and she’s basically as close to EFF “family” as someone can be without actually having worked here.
Over her more than two decades leading public interest technology work, Nicole has:
- spearheaded passage of the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act – working with EFF to enact the nation’s strongest electronic surveillance law, requiring a warrant for government access to electronic information;
- modernized California law to protect reading records in the digital age by helping, along with EFF, to craft the Reader Privacy Act, requiring a “super warrant” for government access;
- created a groundbreaking model law for local democratic oversight of surveillance systems which inspired 25 laws across the country that help safeguard the rights and safety of more than 17 million people;
- litigated civil liberties cases, including work with EFF on the NSA cases, and drafted influential amicus briefs on technology issues at all levels of state and federal court, including the U.S. Supreme Court and California Supreme Court; and
- developed multi-year campaigns to strengthen the anti-surveillance policies related to social media surveillance and face recognition of major technology companies and foster stronger privacy and free expression protection for billions of people worldwide.
And that's just the TL;DR! You can read more about her bona fides here.
EFF’s work to ensure technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation is more urgent than ever. And with Nicole’s decades of leadership in public interest technology work, EFF is poised to be stronger than ever to meet this moment and build for the fights ahead.
Nicole succeeds Cindy Cohn, who has been with EFF for more than 25 years and served as executive director since 2015. Cindy is leaving EFF later this month – not to retire, but to find a role that puts her back in the courtroom doing what she does best: suing the government! She’ll still be part of the EFF community.
We are living digital lives, using technology to connect, communicate, and mobilize for change. And we need you in these critical fights to defend and advance rights in the digital world – so join EFF today, and sign up for our EFFector newsletter to make sure you’re updated on the latest EFF news including upcoming events to help you get to know Nicole.
Welcome Nicole!