The electricity to an island goes out. To find the break in the underwater power cable, a ship pulls up the entire line or deploys remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to traverse the line. But what if an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) could map the line and pinpoint the location of the fault for a diver to fix?

Such underwater human-robot teaming is the focus of an MIT Lincoln Laboratory project funded through an internally administered R&D portfolio on autonomous systems and carried out by the Advanced Undersea Systems and Technology Group. The project seeks to leverage the respective strengths of humans and robots to optimize maritime missions for the U.S. military, including critical infrastructure inspection and repair, search and rescue, harbor entry, and countermine operations.

"Divers and AUVs generally don't team at all underwater," says principal investigator Madeline Miller. "Underwater missions requiring humans typically do so because they involve some sort of manipulation a robot can't do, like repairing infrastructure or deactivating a mine. Even ROVs are challenging to work with underwater in very skilled manipulation tasks because the manipulators themselves aren't agile enough."

Beyond their superior dexterity, humans excel at recognizing objects underwater. But humans working underwater can't perform complex computations or move very quickly, especially if they are carrying heavy equipment; robots have an edge over humans in processing power, high-speed mobility, and endurance. To combine these strengths, Miller and her team are developing hardware and algorithms for underwater navigation and perception — two key capabilities for effective human-robot teaming.

As Miller explains, divers may only have a compass and fin-kick counts to guide them. With few landmarks and potentially murky conditions caused by a lack of light at depth or the presence of biological matter in the water column, they can easily become disoriented and lost. For robots to help divers navigate, they need to perceive their environment. However, in the presence of darkness and turbidity, optical sensors (cameras) cannot generate images, while acoustic sensors (sonar) generate images that lack color and only show the shapes and shadows of objects in the scene. The historical lack of large, labeled sonar image datasets has hindered training of underwater perception algorithms. Even if data were available, the dynamic ocean can obscure the true nature of objects, confusing artificial intelligence. For instance, a downed aircraft broken into multiple pieces, or a tire covered in an overgrowth of mussels, may no longer resemble an aircraft or tire, respectively.

"Ultimately, we want to devise solutions for navigation and perception in expeditionary environments," Miller says. "For the missions we're thinking about, there is limited or no opportunity to map out the area in advance. For the harbor entry mission, maybe you have a satellite map but no underwater map, for example."

On the navigation side, Miller's team picked up on work started by the MIT Marine Robotics Group, led by John Leonard, to develop diver-AUV teaming algorithms. With their navigation algorithms, Leonard's group ran simulations under optimal conditions and performed field testing in calm waters using human-paddled kayaks as proxies for both divers and AUVs. Miller's team then integrated these algorithms into a mission-relevant AUV and began testing them under more realistic ocean conditions, initially with a support boat acting as a diver surrogate, and then with actual divers.

"We quickly learned that you need more sensing capabilities on the diver when you factor in ocean currents," Miller explains. "With the algorithms demonstrated by MIT, the vehicle only needed to calculate the distance, or range, to the diver at regular intervals to solve the optimization problem of estimating the positions of both the vehicle and diver over time. But with the real ocean forces pushing everything around, this optimization problem blows up quickly."

On the perception side, Miller's team has been developing an AI classifier that can process both optical and sonar data mid-mission and solicit human input for any objects classified with uncertainty.

"The idea is for the classifier to pass along some information — say, a bounding box around an image — to the diver and indicate, "I think this is a tire, but I'm not sure. What do you think?" Then, the diver can respond, "Yes, you've got it right, or no, look over here in the image to improve your classification," Miller says.

This feedback loop requires an underwater acoustic modem to support diver-AUV communication. State-of-the-art data rates in underwater acoustic communications would require tens of minutes to send an uncompressed image from the AUV to the diver. So, one aspect the team is investigating is how to compress information into a minimum amount to be useful, working within the constraints of the low bandwidth and high latency of underwater communications and the low size, weight, and power of the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware they're using. For their prototype system, the team procured mostly COTS sensors and built a sensor payload that would easily integrate into an AUV routinely employed by the U.S. Navy, with the goal of facilitating technology transition. Beyond sonar and optical sensors, the payload features an acoustic modem for ranging to the diver and several data processing and compute boards.

Miller's team has tested the sensor-equipped AUV and algorithms around coastal New England — including in the open ocean near Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with the University of New Hampshire's (UNH) Gulf Surveyor and Gulf Challenger coastal research vessels as diver surrogates, and on the Boston-area Charles River, with an MIT Sailing Pavilion skiff as the surrogate.

"The UNH boats are well-equipped and can access realistic ocean conditions. But pretending to be a diver with a large boat is hard. With the skiff, we can move more slowly and get the relative motion in tune with how a diver and AUV would navigate together."

Last summer, the team started testing equipment with human divers at Michigan Technological University's Great Lakes Research Center. Although the divers lacked an interface to feed back information to the AUV, each swam holding the team's tube-shaped prototype tablet, dubbed a "tube-let." The tube-let was equipped with a pressure and depth sensor, inertial measurement unit (to track relative motion), and ranging modem — all necessary components for the navigation algorithms to solve the optimization problem.

"A challenge during testing was coordinating the motion of the diver and vehicle, because they don't yet collaborate," Miller says. "Once the divers go underwater, there is no communication with the team on the surface. So, you have to plan where to put the diver and vehicle so they don't collide."

The team also worked on the perception problem. The water clarity of the Great Lakes at that time of year allowed for underwater imaging with an optical sensor. Caroline Keenan, a Lincoln Scholars Program PhD student jointly working in the laboratory's Advanced Undersea Systems and Technology Group and Leonard's research group at MIT, took the opportunity to advance her work on knowledge transfer from optical sensors to sonar sensors. She is exploring whether optical classifiers can train sonar classifiers to recognize objects for which sonar data doesn't exist. The motivation is to reduce the human operator load associated with labeling sonar data and training sonar classifiers.

With the internally funded research program coming to an end, Miller's team is now seeking external sponsorship to refine and transition the technology to military or commercial partners.

"The modern world runs on undersea telecommunication and power cables, which are vulnerable to attack by disruptive actors. The undersea domain is becoming increasingly contested as more nations develop and advance the capabilities of autonomous maritime systems. Maintaining global economic security and U.S. strategic advantage in the undersea domain will require leveraging and combining the best of AI and human capabilities," Miller says.

The MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) was founded in 1950 in response to “a new era emerging from social upheaval and the disasters of war,” as outlined in the 1949 Lewis Committee Report. 

The report’s findings emphasized MIT’s role and responsibility in the new nuclear age, which called for doubling down on genuine “integration” of scientific and technical topics with humanistic scholarship and teaching. Only that way, the committee wrote, could MIT tackle “the most difficult and complicated problems confronting our generation.”

As SHASS marks its 75th anniversary, Dean Agustín Rayo answers questions about why the need for developing students with broad minds and human understanding is as urgent as ever, given pressing challenges in the midst of a new technological revolution.

Q: Many universities are responding to artificial intelligence by launching new technical programs or updating curricula. You’ve suggested the change is deeper than that. Why?

A: Artificial intelligence isn’t just changing the way students learn — it’s transforming every aspect of society. The labor market is experiencing a dramatic shift, upending traditional paths to financial stability. And AI is changing the ways we bring meaning to our lives: the ways we build relationships, the ways we pay attention, and the things we enjoy doing.

The upshot is that the most important question universities need to ask is not how to adapt our pedagogy to AI — although we certainly need to address that. The most important question we need to ask is how to provide an education that brings real value to students in the age of AI. 

We need to ensure that universities provide students with the tools they need to find a path to financial security and to build meaningful lives.

We need to produce students with minds that are both nimble and broad. We need our students to not only be able to execute tasks effectively, but also have the judgment to determine which tasks are worth executing. We need students who have a moral compass, and who understand how the world works, in all of its political, economic, and human complexity. We need students who know how to think critically, and who have excellent communication and leadership skills.

Q: What role do the humanities, arts, and social sciences play in preparing MIT students for that future?

A: They’re essential, and are rightly a core part of an MIT education: MIT has long required its undergraduates take at least eight courses in HASS disciplines to graduate.

Fields like philosophy, political science, economics, literature, history, music, and anthropology are crucial to developing the parts of our lives that are essentially human — the parts that will not be replaced by AI.

They are crucial to developing critical thinking and a moral compass. They are crucial to understanding people — our values, institutions, cultures, and ways of thinking. They are crucial to creating students who are broad thinkers who understand the way the world works. They are crucial to developing students who are excellent communicators and are able to describe their projects — and their lives — in a way that endows them with meaning.

Our students understand this. Here is how one of them put the point: “Engineering gives me the tools to measure the world; the humanities teach me how to interpret it. That balance has shaped both how I do science and why I do it.” (Full interview here.)

Q: Some people worry that emphasizing humanistic study could dilute MIT’s technological edge. How do you respond to that concern?

A: I think the opposite is true. 

MIT is an important engine for social mobility in the United States, and a catalyst for entrepreneurship, which has added billions of dollars to the American economy. That cannot be separated from the fact that we are a technical institution, which brings together the country’s most talented undergraduates — regardless of socioeconomic background — and transforms them into the next generation of our country's top scientific and engineering leaders. 

MIT plays an incredibly important role in our country. So, the last thing I want to do is mess with our secret sauce.

But I also think that the age of AI is forcing us to rethink what it means to be a top engineer. 

Think about artificial intelligence itself. The challenges we face are not just technical. Issues like bias, accountability, governance, and the societal impact of automation are no less important. Understanding those dimensions helps technologists design better systems and anticipate real-world consequences.

Strengthening the humanities at MIT isn’t a departure from our core mission — it’s a way of ensuring that our technical leadership continues to matter in the world.

Q: What kinds of changes is MIT SHASS pursuing to support this vision?

A: There’s a lot going on! 

We’ve launched the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC) as a way of strengthening research in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, and of deepening collaboration with colleagues across MIT.

We’re shaping the undergraduate experience to ensure that every MIT student engages with the big societal questions shaping our time, from democratic resilience to climate change to the ethics of new technologies.

We’re building stronger connections through initiatives like the creation of shared faculty positions with the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing (SCC). And we recently launched a new Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program with the School of Engineering.

We’re partnering with SERC (the SCC’s Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing) to design new classes on the intersection of computing and human-centered issues, such as ethics.

And we’re elevating the humanities — for their own sake, and as a space for experimentation, bringing together students, faculty, and partners to explore new forms of research, teaching, and public engagement.

This is a very exciting time for SHASS.

All the ingredients to leave the first layer of the atmosphere were laying on a picnic table. T-minus 30 minutes before launch from the New York Catskills, students in MIT's reborn 16.00 (Introduction to Aerospace Engineering) course tore open hand warmers to fight the December morning chill. One hot pack for cold hands. One for the electronics payload, which would need the warmth on the way up. This series of balloon launches rose to more than 20 kilometers above the surface.

Five student teams completed stratospheric balloon launches for a final project in the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) first-year exploratory course. This fall semester was the first iteration of the reimagined 16.00. The course was co-taught by MIT professors Jeffery Hoffman, a former NASA astronaut, and Oliver de Weck, Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics and Engineering Systems. The course was reintroduced to the curriculum in 2025 to give first-year students a design-build experience from the very start, says de Weck, who is also AeroAstro's associate department head. 

"This course had been taught for more than 25 years. And then the pandemic came," he explains. "We felt that it was time to bring the course back, to revive it, give it new life."

De Weck taught a version of this hands-on project from 2012 to 2016 in Unified Engineering, with 20 balloon launches over that time. Hoffman taught a version that focused on blimps, indoor flights, and achieving neutral buoyancy and control. Those prior courses inspired the new program. The current 16.00 course is an early introduction to design-build flying, offered before the well-known Unified Engineering course for Course 16 sophomores.

"Students don't want to sit through long lectures, with lots of PowerPoints and notes and blackboards," says de Weck. He referenced feedback from students that is framing the department's upcoming strategic plan. "Those hands-on visceral experiences is what we want to provide them."

The AeroAstro program adds about 60 undergraduates per year. Future students can expect to see different versions of the 16.00 course, including those focused on fixed-wing aircraft, quadcopter drones, and rockets. Future balloon courses will be called 16.00B. A fixed-wing remote-controlled aircraft course will be 16.00A.

Over 13 weeks, the students attended lectures on subjects including atmospheric composition, radio waves, and flight planning and regulations. In labs, they practiced building Arduino-based pressure and temperature sensors, and testing communication systems.

On that cold launch day, Jackson Lunfelt kept his grip against the pull of an oversized helium balloon moments before his team's launch. His team worked for weeks configuring GPS and radio communications and testing balloon buoyancy. Among their trials and errors, they had to find the right weight for a 3D printed frame to attach the balloon and parachute. It was too heavy at first. They figured out how to reduce the weight of the plastic to keep the payload buoyant.

"Fortunately, a lot of preparation had helped us," he says.

Lunfelt, a first-year student, grew up just a few hours away from the Catskills in upstate New York. In high school, he was active in Future Farmers of America, welding, and robotics. On launch day, his team was worried their onboard GoPro would shut off from the cold high-altitude temperatures. They got the green light to add a battery bank. They would need to re-calculate the weight and helium needed at the final hour.

"It was one of those things that if you don't do this, you're not gonna launch,” says Lunfelt.

That first week of December brought frigid air, gusts, and wind patterns that meant the class would have to rethink its launch site. The team aimed to fly east, over Massachusetts, and land before reaching the ocean. The new weather pattern pushed the team even farther west across the New York border.

The balloon lifted the 3.5 pound payload from the Catskills while the mission control group monitored progress from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It rose hundreds of feet per minute. It passed the troposphere and flew across Western Massachusetts at 100 miles an hour, pushed by the strong upper-level winds of the jet stream. It climbed to an estimated 22 kilometers above the surface. At that height, an onboard GoPro camera recorded the curvature of the Earth.

"Every single moment of that video was amazing. It was truly a story in itself," says Lunfelt.

Then the latex balloon burst, as designed, and descended back down — aided by a parachute. The GoPros captured that spectacular moment, too. The winds carried them just north of the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border. They landed in a neighborhood around Nashua, New Hampshire. Locals saw the MIT identifiers written on the side of the payloads and helped the teams recover them. The landing made it onto the local news.

After a very early morning and late evening monitoring the launch returns, de Weck, alongside teaching assistant Jonathan Stoppani and Senior Technical Instructor Dave Robertson, agreed that the feeling of pride from the whole class was palpable. The payloads all came back in one piece, a test of successful design-builds and last-minute adjustments. The AeroAstro flying tradition is back for first-year students. 

Trump’s blockade of Iran is rippling beyond oil, squeezing fertilizer and helium supplies and raising the risk of higher food prices and wider economic disruption.

A new federal report shows weather — not data centers — remains the biggest force shaping U.S. electricity trends.

The first-in-the-nation tax — which is currently on ice — seeks to raise funds to deal with the effects of a warming planet.

Interesting paper: “What hackers talk about when they talk about AI: Early-stage diffusion of a cybercrime innovation.”

Abstract: The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) is raising concerns about its potential to transform cybercrime. Beyond empowering novice offenders, AI stands to intensify the scale and sophistication of attacks by seasoned cybercriminals. This paper examines the evolving relationship between cybercriminals and AI using a unique dataset from a cyber threat intelligence platform. Analyzing more than 160 cybercrime forum conversations collected over seven months, our research reveals how cybercriminals understand AI and discuss how they can exploit its capabilities. Their exchanges reflect growing curiosity about AI’s criminal applications through legal tools and dedicated criminal tools, but also doubts and anxieties about AI’s effectiveness and its effects on their business models and operational security. The study documents attempts to misuse legitimate AI tools and develop bespoke models tailored for illicit purposes. Combining the diffusion of innovation framework with thematic analysis, the paper provides an in-depth view of emerging AI-enabled cybercrime and offers practical insights for law enforcement and policymakers...

Colorado weighs a program to pay for installing disaster-resistant roofs in an effort to reduce damage — and property insurance costs.

Young climate activists are appealing their court loss against directives to unleash American fossil fuel production.

Despite early predictions of a rapid recovery, the rate of rebuilding in Los Angeles 15 months after the blazes has fallen behind other recent California wildfires, a new POLITICO analysis finds.

Local opposition to solar has long been an obstacle for green energy developers. But some communities are working to reverse local restrictions, citing tax benefits and jobs.

The country's leaders insist their atomic exit is final. Inside a dismantled reactor, that certainty looks less than convincing.

Scientists are studying what caused the glacial slope's collapse and trying to understand other hazards in the Tracy Arm region.

Myrrh trees that once formed a dense forest in the Somali region of Ethiopia are in danger, locals say.

Oceans absorb roughly 25 to 30 percent of the carbon dioxide (CO2) that is released into the atmosphere. When this CO2 dissolves in seawater, it forms carbonic acid, making the water more acidic and altering its chemistry. Elevated levels of acidity are harmful to marine life like corals, oysters, and certain plankton that rely on calcium carbonate to build shells and skeletons.

“As the oceans absorb more CO2, the chemistry shifts — increasing bicarbonate while reducing carbonate ion availability — which means shellfish have less carbonate to form shells,” explains Kripa Varanasi, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “These changes can propagate through marine ecosystems, affecting organism health and, over time, broader food webs.”

Loss of shellfish can lead to water quality decline, coastal erosion, and other ecosystem disruptions, including significant economic consequences for coastal communities. “The U.S. has such an extensive coastline, and shellfish aquaculture is globally valued at roughly $60 billion,” says Varanasi. “With the right innovations, there is a substantial opportunity to expand domestic production.”

“One might think, ‘this [depletion] could happen in 100 years or something,’ but what we’re finding is that they are already affecting hatcheries and coastal systems today,” he adds. “Without intervention, these trends could significantly alter marine ecosystems and the coastal economies that rely on them over time.”

Varanasi and T. Alan Hatton, the Ralph Landau Professor of Chemical Engineering, Post-Tenure, at MIT, have been collaborating for years to develop methods for removing carbon dioxide from seawater and turn acidic water back to alkaline. In recent years, they’ve partnered with researchers at the University of Maine Darling Marine Center to deploy the method in hatcheries.

“The way we farm oysters, we spawn them in special tanks and rear them through about a two-week larval period … until they’re big enough so that they can be transferred out into the river as the water warms up,” explains Bill Mook, founder of Mook Sea Farm. Around 2009, he noticed problems with production of early-stage larvae. “It was a catastrophe. We lost several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of production,” he says.

Ultimately, the problem was identified as the low pH of the water that was being brought in: The water was too acidic. The farm’s initial strategy, a common practice in oyster farming, was to buffer the water by adding sodium bicarbonate. The new approach avoids the use of chemicals or minerals.

“A lot of researchers are studying direct air capture, but very few are working in the ocean-capture space,” explains Hatton. “Our approach is to use electricity, in an electrochemical manner, rather than add chemicals to manipulate the solution pH.”

The method uses reactive electrodes to release protons into seawater that is collected and fed into the cells, driving the release of the dissolved carbon dioxide from the water. The cyclic process acidifies the water to convert dissolved inorganic bicarbonates to molecular carbon dioxide, which is collected as a gas under vacuum. The water is then fed to a second set of cells with a reversed voltage to recover the protons and turn the acidic water back to alkaline before releasing it back to the sea.

Maine’s Damariscotta River Estuary, where Mook farms is located, provides about 70 percent of the state’s oyster crop. Damian Brady, a professor of oceanography based at the University of Maine and key collaborator on the project, says the Damariscotta community has “grown into an oyster-producing powerhouse … [that is] not only part of the economy, but part of the culture.” He adds, “there’s actually a huge amount that we could learn if we couple the engineering at MIT with the aquaculture science here at the University of Maine.”

“The scientific underpinning of our hypothesis was that these bivalve shellfish, including oysters, need calcium carbonate in order to form their shells,” says Simon Rufer PhD ’25, a former student in Varanasi’s lab and now CEO and co-founder of CoFlo Medical. “By alkalizing the water, we actually make it easier for the oysters to form and maintain their shells.”

In trials conducted by the team, results first showed that the approach is biocompatible and doesn't kill the larvae, and later showed that the oysters treated by MIT's buffer approach did better than mineral or chemical approaches. Importantly, Hatton also notes, the process creates no waste products. Ocean water goes in, CO2 comes out. This captured CO2 can potentially be used for other applications, including to grow algae to be used as food for shellfish.

Varanasi and Hatton first introduced their approach in 2023. Their most recent paper, “Thermodynamics of Electrochemical Marine Inorganic Carbon Removal,” which was published last year in journal Environmental Science & Technology, outlines the overall thermodynamics of the process and presents a design tool to compare different carbon removal processes. The team received a “plus-up award” from ARPA-E to collaborate with University of Maine and further develop and scale the technology for application in aquaculture environments.

Brady says the project represents another avenue for aquaculture to contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation. “It pushes a new technology for removing carbon dioxide from ocean environments forward simultaneously,” says Brady. “If they can be coupled, aquaculture and carbon dioxide removal improve each other’s bottom line."

Through the collaboration, the team is improving the robustness of the cells and learning about their function in real ocean environments. The project aims to scale up the technology, and to have significant impact on climate and the environment, but it includes another big focus.

“It’s also about jobs,” says Varanasi. “It’s about supporting the local economy and coastal communities who rely on aquaculture for their livelihood. We could usher in a whole new resilient blue economy. We think that this is only the beginning. What we have developed can really be scaled.”

Mook says the work is very much an applied science, “[and] because it’s applied science, it means that we benefit hugely from being connected and plugged into academic institutions that are doing research very relevant to our livelihoods. Without science, we don’t have a prayer of continuing this industry.”

California’s bill, A.B. 2047, will not only mandate censorware — software which exists to bluntly block your speech as a user — on all 3D printers; it will also criminalize the use of open-source alternatives. Repeating the mistakes of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies won’t make anyone safer. What it will do is hurt innovation in the state and risk a slew of new consumer harms, ranging from surveillance to platform lock-in. California must stand with creators and reject this legislation before it’s too late.

3D printing might evoke images of props from blockbuster films, rapid prototyping, medical research, or even affordable repair parts. Yet for a growing number of legislators, the perceived threat of “ghost guns” is a reason to impose restrictions on all 3D printers. Despite 3D printing of guns already being rare and banned under existing law, California may outright criminalize any user having control over their own device. 

This bill is a gift for the biggest 3D printer manufacturers looking to adopt HP’s approach to 2D printing: criminalize altering your printer’s code, lock users into your own ecosystem, and let enshittification run its course. Even worse, algorithmic print blocking will never work for its intended purpose, but it will threaten consumer choice, free expression, and privacy.

A misstep here can have serious repercussions across the whole 3D printing industry, lead the way for more bad bills, and leave California with an expensive and ineffective bureaucratic mess.

What’s in the California Proposal?

Compared to the Washington and New York laws proposed this year, California’s is the most troubling. It criminalizes open source, reduces consumer choice, and creates a bureaucratic burden.

Criminalizing Open Source and User Control

A.B. 2047 goes further than any other legislation on algorithmic print-blocking by making it a misdemeanor for the owners of these devices to disable, deactivate, or otherwise circumvent these mandated algorithms. Not only does this effectively criminalize use of any third-party, open-source 3D printer firmware, but it also enables print-blocking algorithms to parallel anti-consumer behaviors seen with DRM.

Manufacturers will be able to lock users into first-party tools, parts, and “consumables” (analogous to how 2D printer ink works). They will also be able to mandate purchases through first-party stores, imposing a heavy platform tax. Additionally, manufacturers could force regular upgrade cycles through planned obsolescence by ceasing updates to a printer’s print-blocking system, thereby taking devices out of compliance and making them illegal for consumers to resell. In short, a wide range of anti-consumer practices can be enforced, potentially resulting in criminal charges.

Independent of these deliberate harms manufacturers may inflict, DRM has shown that criminalizing code leads to more barriers to repair, more consumer waste, and far more cybersecurity risks by criminalizing research.

Less Consumer Choice

The bill favors incumbent manufacturers over newer competitors and over the interests of consumers.

Less-established manufacturers will need to dedicate considerable time and resources to implementing the ineffective solutions discussed above, navigating state approval, and potentially paying licensing fees to third-party developers of sham print-blocking software. While these burdens may be absorbed by the biggest producers of this equipment, it considerably raises the barrier to entry on a technology that can otherwise be individually built from scratch with common equipment. The result is clear: fewer options for consumers and more leverage for the biggest producers. 

Retailers will feel this pinch, but the second-hand market will feel it most acutely. Resale is an important property right for people to recoup costs and serves as an important check on inflating prices. But under this bill, such resale risks misdemeanor penalties. 

The bill locks users into a walled garden; it demands manufacturers ensure 3D printers cannot be used with third-party software tools. By creating barriers to the use of popular and need-specific alternatives, this legislation will limit the utility and accessibility of these devices across a broad spectrum of lawful uses.

Bureaucratic Burden 

A.B. 2047’s title 21.1 §3723.633-637 creates a print-blocking bureaucracy, leaning heavily on the California Department of Justice (DOJ). Initially, the DOJ must outline the technical standards for detecting and blocking firearm parts, and later certify print-blocking algorithms and maintain lists of compliant 3D printers. If a printer or software doesn’t make it through this red tape, it will be illegal to sell in the state.

The bill also requires the department to establish a database of banned blueprints that must be blocked by these algorithms. This database and printer list must be continually maintained as new printer models are released and workarounds are discovered, requiring effort from both the DOJ and printer manufacturers. 

For all the cost and burden of creating and maintaining such a database, those efforts will inevitably be outpaced by rapid iterations and workarounds by people breaking existing firearms laws.

Not just California

Once implemented, this infrastructure will be difficult to rein in, causing unintended consequences. The database meant for firearm parts can easily expand to copyright or political speech. Scans meant to be ephemeral can be collected and surveilled. This is cause for concern for everyone, as these levers of control will extend beyond the borders of the Golden State.

While California is at the forefront of print blocking, the impacts will be felt far outside of its borders. Once printer companies have the legal cover to build out anti-competitive and privacy-invasive tools, they will likely be rolled out globally. After all, it is not cost-effective to maintain two forks of software, two inventories of printers, and two distribution channels. Once California has created the infrastructure to censor prints, what else will it be used for?

As we covered in “Print Blocking Won’t Work” these print-blocking efforts are not only doomed to fail, but will render all 3D printer users vulnerable to surveillance either by forcing them into a cloud scanning solution for “on-device” results, or by chaining them to first-party software which must connect to the cloud to regularly update its print blocking system.

This law demands an unfeasible technological solution for something that is already illegal. Not only is this bad legislation with few safeguards, it risks the worst outcomes for grassroots innovation and creativity—both within the state and across the global 3D printing community.

California should reject this legislation before it’s too late, and advocates everywhere should keep an eye out for similar legislation in their states. What happens in California won't just stay in California.

Protecting privacy and free speech online takes more than policy work—it takes community. Conferences like HOPE are where that community comes together to learn, connect, and push these ideals forward. That's why EFF is proud to be at HOPE 26.

Join us at this year's Hackers On Planet Earth, August 14-16 at the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan! Get your ticket now and support our work: throughout April EFF will receive 10% of all ticket proceeds for HOPE 26. 

Grab your ticket!

See EFF at HOPE 26 in New York

While you're there, be sure to catch talks from EFF's technologists, attorneys, and activists covering a wide range of digital civil liberties topics. You can get a taste of the talks to come by watching last year's EFF presentations at HOPE_16 on YouTube:

How a Handful of Location Data Brokers Actively Tracked Millions, and How to Stop Them
In the past year, a number of investigations have revealed the outsized role of a few select companies in gathering, storing, and selling the location data of millions of devices - and by extension people - worldwide. This talk will elaborate on the technologies, data flows, and industry players which comprise this complicated ecosystem.

Ask EFF
Get an update on current EFF work, including the ongoing case against the "Department" of Government Oversight, educating the public on their digital rights, organizing communities to resist ongoing government surveillance, and more.

Systems of Dehumanization: The Digital Frontlines of the War Against Bodily Autonomy
Daly covers the bad Internet bills that made sex work more dangerous, the ongoing struggle for abortion access in America, and the persecution of trans people across all spectrums of life. These issue-spaces are deeply connected, and the digital threats they face are uniquely dangerous. Come to learn about these threat models, as well as the cross-movement strategies being built for collective liberation against an authoritarian surveillance state. 

Snag a ticket by the end of April to help support EFF's work ensuring that technology works for everyone. We hope to see you there!

When people see Customs & Border Protection's giant, tethered surveillance blimp flying 20 miles outside of Marfa, Texas, lots of them confuse it with an art installation. Elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border, surveillance towers get mistaken for cell-phone towers. And that traffic barrel? It's actually a camera. That piece of rusted litter? That's a camera too.

Today we are publishing a major update to our zine, "Surveillance Technology at the U.S.-Mexico Border," the first since the second Trump administration began. To help people identify the machinery of homeland security, we've added more models of surveillance towers, newly deployed military tech, and a gallery of disguised trail cams and automated license plate readers.

You can get this 40-page, full-color guide through EFF's Shop or download a Creative-Commons licensed version here.

"The Battalion Search and Rescue always carries the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s zine in our desert rig," says James Holman, who founded the humanitarian group that looks for human remains in remote parts of New Mexico and Arizona. "We’re finding new surveillance all the time, and without a resource like that, we wouldn't know what the hell we're looking at.”

The original version of the zine was distributed nearly exclusively to our allies in the borderlands—journalists, humanitarian aid workers, immigrant advocates—to help them better identify and report on the technology they discover on the ground. We only made a handful available in our online shop, and they went fast.

This time, we've printed enough for our broader EFF membership. Even if you don't live near the border, you can support our work uncovering how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's technology threatens human rights by picking up a copy.

The zine is the culmination of a dozen trips to the border, where we hunted surveillance towers and other tech installations. We attended multiple border security conventions to collect promotional and technical materials directly from vendors. We filed public records requests, reviewed thousands of pages of docs, and analyzed satellite imagery of the entire 2,000-mile border several times over. Some of the images came from local allies, like geographer Dugan Meyer and Borderlands Relief Collective, who continue to share valuable intelligence on the changing landscape of border surveillance.

The update is available in English, with an updated Spanish version expected later this year. In the meantime, we have reprinted the original Spanish edition.

If you want to know more, a collection of EFF's broader work on border technology is available here. And if you're curious exactly where these technologies are located, you can check our ongoing map.

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The cybersecurity industry is obsessing over Anthropic’s new model, Claude Mythos Preview, and its effects on cybersecurity. Anthropic said that it is not releasing it to the general public because of its cyberattack capabilities, and has launched Project Glasswing to run the model against a whole slew of public domain and proprietary software, with the aim of finding and patching all the vulnerabilities before hackers get their hands on the model and exploit them.

There’s a lot here, and I hope to write something more considered in the coming week, but I want to make some quick observations...

Dr. Jean Linis-Dinco is an activist-researcher working at the intersection of human rights and technology. Born in the Philippines and shaped by firsthand experience with inequality and state violence, Jean has spent her life pushing back against systems that profit from oppression. She refuses to accept a world where tech is just another tool for corporate gain. Instead, she fights for technologies and policies that put people before profit and justice before convenience. Jean earned her PhD in Cybersecurity from the University of New South Wales, Canberra, where she exposed how governments weaponized propaganda and disinformation during the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar. She currently serves as the Digital Rights Advisor for the Manushya Foundation.

David Greene: Welcome. To get started can you just introduce yourself to folks?

Jean Linis-Dinco: I'm not very good at introducing myself and I rarely do so within the context of work because I always believe that people are more than their jobs.

But first, I would like to thank you for this opportunity to share my thoughts. I've learned this kind of introduction from Kumu Vicky Holt Takamine in Hawai’i. She taught me how to introduce myself beyond titles.

So, my name is Jean, my waters are the West Philippine Sea, and I was born and raised in the land of resistance, one of the original eight provinces that revolted against Spain as they are represented by the eight rays of the sun on the Philippine flag. My ancestors fought for the freedom of the Filipino people against Spanish colonial rule, before we became subjugated once again, this time under the United States for another 48 years. The impacts of that history continue to reverberate through the domestic and international policies that ultimately pushed me out of my own country as an overseas Filipino worker.

DG: Can you tell us a bit about Manushya Foundation?

JLD: Absolutely. Manushya Foundation is a women-led organization that works with activists and human rights defenders who are targeted, who face harassment and transnational repression for their work. My work with them is on the policy and advocacy side in relation to their digital rights portfolio. It involves challenging laws and policies that criminalize freedom of expression or freedom of speech online.

It also means confronting the role of private corporations and private platforms. Because that power is rarely transparent. Big tech power is often unaccountable, as we've seen in recent years. Working in a civil society organization like Manushya, you get involved with the work on the ground and take part in grassroot-led advocacy confronting corporate abuse.

In my work, I have met people from all sorts of backgrounds. And across those encounters, I've noticed some troubling trends in some civil society organizations. There are heaps of civil society leaders who are very keen to have a seat at the table with big tech companies. It’s often hidden behind the language of ‘stakeholder engagement’. We refuse to do that at Manushya Foundation. We don’t want to be used as a rubber stamp for decisions that have already been made behind NDAs or decisions where communities most affected by these technologies were never even in the room to begin with.

I think civil society organizations should not allow themselves to be drawn into that orbit. That is very contentious in this era, because I feel like civil society bought the story that big tech could be partners in progress. We walked into their boardrooms, signing NDAs as if proximity to power meant that we were shaping it. And we've seen how in the end we're actually just giving them legitimacy. They turn our critiques and our statements to endorsements. I don't think there is any progressive form of collaboration with big tech companies that is not extractive, because the uncomfortable truth is that not everyone who wants a seat at the table is there to change what is being served.

DG: I, as someone who participates in multi-stakeholder things all the time, I completely hear that criticism. One of the things I've said is, multi-stakeholder engagement as a member of civil society takes a few forms. One, you're in the room, but you don't have a seat at the table. Two, you have a seat at the table, but you don't have a microphone. And three, they give you a microphone, but they leave the room when you talk. When we as civil society do engage, we have to be very, very intentional about ensuring it’s effective engagement. We've left many things that were “multi-stakeholder” because it was actually just NGO-washing. You know, it was only so they could say that we were sort of invited to the cocktail party afterwards.

 I've heard from you before that Manushya has a bit of a regional focus. Would you say it has a feminist focus or is it broader in terms of marginalized communities?

JLD: At its core, Manushya is a decolonial intersectional feminist organization. What that means is that we are fundamentally concerned with systems of power. In our work, we always ask who holds the power? Who is crushed by it? And who has been deliberately kept from it?

Personally, I am critical of lean-in feminism, which was popularized by a certain Meta executive. I do not agree with that kind of feminism, because it tells us women that if we just work harder, speak louder within existing power structures, we will be free. But free to do what, exactly? To participate in the same system that exploits people? The women who can afford to lean in are women who already occupy a certain class position that makes them legible to power. And most of them are white women who already have the capacity or already have a standing in society to be listened to.

I cannot lean in. Because lean-in feminism was never designed for women like me.

And then there is girl boss feminism, which I am also very, very critical of. Because more often than not, the women who call themselves girl bosses or self-made are not actually self-made. Behind every ‘self-made’ woman is a hidden economy of invisible labor. Often, they have maids. And often, those maids are Filipino women, women like my mother. Girl boss feminism is about one woman’s liberation built on another woman's bondage. I think it is absurd to call it feminism when it is basically just class warfare with better branding.

So, yes. It gets very personal.

DG: Why don’t you tell us what freedom of expression and free speech mean to you?

 JLD: Well, there is this concept of freedom of speech and freedom of expression, and it is viewed as something abstract because we cannot see speech. It is intangible. We can hear it, but we cannot see it. It's not something that we hold. It is not like food, water or housing. That is precisely the problem. Because at its core freedom of expression must be understood through material conditions.

What that means is that it dies in the structures that govern who gets heard, who gets punished, who gets killed, who is made disappeared, whose voices are treated as disposable. I would say freedom of expression must be understood as inseparable from justice because I do not believe anyone can claim to defend freedom of expression while tolerating systems that silence through fear, that silence through poverty, that silence through surveillance. Because a person working two jobs to make ends meet, a person targeted by the state, a person whose community is over-policed, I don't think they stand on equal ground with a media mogul or a political elite.

The definition of free expression must move beyond the question of whether speech is allowed. The real foundation of freedom of expression and freedom of speech is who can speak without consequences and who pays the price for doing so. It demands responsibility and it's not a shield for domination, because when speech is used to dehumanize or to incite violence or to reinforce structures of oppression, the imperialism of domination, then that participates in harm.

A serious commitment to freedom requires us to confront that harm and not hide behind languages of rights while ignoring the realities of power.

DG: How do you see that? What's the example of how that plays out, for instance in the digital rights realm now?

JLD: Well, there is, as you know—one could say it's even more evident in the United States—the “freedom of speech absolutist” as we’ve seen through Elon Musk. I don’t think he actually believes in freedom of speech at all. Because from what it appears, what he only cares about is maintaining the conditions under which people who look like him get to speak.

Speech does not exist in a vacuum. It is always in service of something.

The question is what kind of society are we actually building? I want a society where people can speak truthfully about the conditions and be heard, where dissent is not criminalized and where expression becomes a force for transformation rather than a tool for control. Free speech is a collective condition and not an individual right. It is inseparable from the question of what kind of society we are building. Because you cannot suddenly say that you are for freedom of expression while owning the platform that decides whose speech is amplified and whose is buried by an algorithm designed to serve capital. Building that society requires dismantling the structures that have always decided who gets to speak and who gets disappeared for saying the wrong thing to the wrong people.

DG: It always bothers me when I hear someone like Musk being called like a free speech absolutist, because, first of all, he’s certainly not an absolutist. I actually don't know anyone who is an absolutist. But also, I don't even think he cares about free speech that much. I think that's what we see in the US a lot now, people for whom it's not a sincere belief, but they get to speak as part of their privilege. There are also other people who think they deserve the privilege to speak because, societally, they've never been subjected to controls. When they see their community of people, who historically have been able to speak, and if it's not like that, that strikes them as the most horrible infringement on freedom of speech because it disturbs their view of privilege and who speaks. And when they see marginalized voices get silenced, it doesn't bother them because that's their norm. That's how I see it.

JLD: I'm here on a fellowship in the UK and my main study is on the American conquest of the Philippines through national language processing. And it's really interesting. I said during my talk that the United States no longer needs to use Nazi Germany as a metaphor to describe their contemporary politics. You know, American people just need to read history books not written by white men.

DG: Okay, let's dive into the age verification stuff. I think that age verification and age mandates and age regulations trying to age gate the internet are really interesting examples of the interplay between freedom of speech and a broader repression of rights. I met you at Digital Rights in Asia Pacific Assembly (DRAPAC) 2025, and I want to just give you a platform here to share your views on age verification. I was really moved by your statement at DRAPAC and what you all published on your website.

JLD: I wrote that piece at a time when Australia was pushing through that legislation. And now, we are now seeing a lot of Southeast Asian countries following that route. It always just takes one domino to fall for everyone to follow, doesn’t it?

But, what surprised me is how there’s also a lot of defeatism among some civil society organizations. I feel like they already accepted the logic of the state. There’s always this preemptive surrendering the ground on which the struggle should be taking place. And I realized the same thing is happening again.

I was on a call recently with a group of civil society organizations and someone floated the idea of supporting identity verification on social media in the Philippines as a way to counter disinformation. She came from a different understanding of the political economy, but the moment I heard it, I was disappointed. The argument is dangerous and it plays with fire because it assumes that anonymity is the problem. It assumes that the solution is to hand the state and the corporations even more power, more information, more control, and give them even more ability to track and discipline people.

I feel like this is the same trend we see with age-gating, because the claim with identity verification in the context of the Philippines, that it can be used responsibly if there are guardrails. That’s gambling with people’s lives. There has never been a single historical precedent where the state doesn't expand monitoring powers when it can once the door is open to surveillance. I don't think any guardrails will ever hold.

Civil society groups who entertain the idea of breaking anonymity to solve misinformation are rehearsing a dangerous illusion because anonymity is not a luxury. And it feels like it is being framed that way. Anonymity is a response to the political conditions where speaking freely can cost you your life. It exists because the risks are there and they are not imagined.

DG: I do think there are some people who look at age-gating from a good place. Would you say you see age verification mandates as just inevitably being tools of oppression for marginalized young people?

JLD: Above everything, it shifts the Overton window toward the broader acceptance of surveillance. In political science, when we say we're shifting the Overton window, we mean the space of political debate in public discourse is being narrowed. And now we are seeing it move towards the same old thing of, ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.’ And when you shift the Overton window towards the broader acceptance of surveillance, we're doing something very simple and very dangerous. And it turns intrusive monitoring into a normal routine of everyday life. It starts with policies that redefine surveillance as safety. Then age-gating will be established through technical infrastructure that of course can be repurposed later.

Any system capable of verifying age is also capable of verifying identity, tracking behavior, matching accounts to real people, and storing data that can be accessed by literally anyone. These policies teach people to internalize the idea that anonymity is suspicious. I think that is the most dangerous part of it--how that cultural shift is getting more and more powerful, because it moves us, the public, towards believing that only those with nothing to hide deserve rights. Then what comes next after that? Surveillance becomes a default condition for digital participation. If you cannot enter a platform without proving who you are, then surveillance becomes a prerequisite for basic communication.

Then, of course, the most powerful shift is the desensitization of younger generations to being monitored. We are raising children in a system where every login requires identity checks, they will grow into adults who assume that constant tracking is normal. Then this is what shifting the Overton window looks like in practice, because once you accept that premise, you have already surrendered the most important ground. The fight is no longer about whether surveillance should exist, but how much of it you're willing to tolerate. And we know the people who pay the price are not men in suits.

DG: Then who does pay the price?

JLD: It is always the working class children and working class families. The homeless youth who rely on social media to find food, to find a place to shower. The homeless youth who rely on social media to find community and get jobs. Then we have queer young people who are also getting locked out of spaces where they could find community. And we're locking them out of those spaces because it's ‘for their safety.’

DG: So even if there was magic tech that could solve the verification part in a completely privacy protective way, you still can't get around the infringement on the rights of young people. That seems to be the goal of the law.

JLD: Yeah, absolutely. Because why do you need to age-gate social media if it's not for control? We always frame things like this as protection under the guise of paternalism. But deep inside, we see how it is a tool to control a young population who are just now getting very politically active. And I feel like--as I'm now a geriatric millennial--people of my age and older generation have betrayed the younger generation for doing this at this precarious time, where there is a genocide happening, where there are countries being bombed. We are in a time of conflicts started by rich men, amid an ecological collapse, and our concern is children being online? Let’s not rob the children of today of their future. Age gating punishes the young for crises they did not create, whilst protecting those truly responsible from accountability.

The reality outside of social media will not go away even if kids are shut off from it. We need to confront the truth that the conditions that ruin childhood are not on social media. They are bombs, poverty, divisive politics. They're due to how we’re killing public funding and putting it through private corporations, lining the pockets of billionaires in the name of what? That is the main problem of our society, but we're not addressing that. We're just locking kids out of social media, because it's easier to do that than to address the fact that society needs an overhaul.

DG: And I think what we've seen with Australia is a lot of talk about how kids can evade the protections, whether they're using VPNs or somehow faking the ID and so all age-gating is doing is adding friction to the process. And that tends to have highly discriminatory effects also, right?

JLD: Friction might be a minor obstacle for a wealthy child with supportive parents, but friction keeps a different child off the internet. A wealthy child might have the technical means to buy a workaround to allow them to have access. There was a story in the news about an influencer family who just moved out of the country because of the age-restricted social media ban. This is the reality—people who have the means to move will move. And those who have no means to move, those who are struggling just to put food on the table—will just stay. This is anti-poor. Age gating is anti-poor.

DG: Okay, switching gears just a little bit. Was there any sort of personal experience you've had with freedom of expression that has informed how you think about the issue? Was there any kind of formative experience where you felt censored or witnessed censorship happening to someone else that really informs how you think about it now or made you care about the issue deeply?

JLD: I don't think there's one specific personal experience, per se, that has shaped how I feel about freedom and liberty in general. Growing up in the Philippines, you're forced to care, especially if you're in a working-class neighborhood like where I grew up. At an early age you realize how unfair the world is. And at first, you think that it is just unfair that the other children in my classroom families can afford a pencil case and we cannot.

It was also very difficult to fit in in the Philippines. I was labeled a troublemaker as a child. And I think some of that is actually still reminiscent of what I am today. I remember my sixth-grade history teacher approached me after reading an essay I wrote about the Philippines. She said that I should tone down my language because it will get me in trouble later in life. And I didn't understand what she meant by that. I didn't listen to her, clearly.

But that instinct stayed with me and I think it followed me through life. It followed me here—you know, the idea that you should say it, but not like that. Speak, but don't disrupt. Critique, but don't offend. And I think this is where my relationship with liberty and freedom or, specifically, freedom of expression kind of took place. It was not one defining moment, but it's in a series of small friction, as you called it. Because over time, you realize that the pressure to soften your voice never disappears. And I don't think it ever will. And I chose not to then, and I choose not to now. And there’s a lot of consequences that come with that. I don't think I will be invited to a lot of panels or keynotes. But it's a hill I'm willing to die on.

This is also the same pattern we see at a larger scale in the Philippines. You see communities speak out about land or about labor and then suddenly they are surveilled, they're either disappeared or dead. I realized quickly that freedom of expression exists on paper, but in practice it depends on who you are.

DG: Do you think there are situations where it might be appropriate for governments, or even companies, to limit freedom of expression? And if the answer is yes, what might those be?

JLD: Freedom of speech should always demand a responsibility. It has always existed within structures of power that determine whose speech is protected. So when we ask whether speech should be limited, we have to first ask. limited by whom, and in whose interest?

But I don't think the government or corporations can do that. Corporations’ end goal is always profit. And governments have historically used the language of limitation to silence the very people who dare to challenge their authority.

I believe in community-based understanding of how we actually could solve this problem, because, in the end, our relationship with our community is the core of our identity. And through those moments of interactions, we can see the freedom of speech is collective. It is always tied to building a society where people can speak truthfully, and dissent is not criminalized. It’s a matter of making sure that we understand that freedom and liberty is not an individual issue, but it’s something that affects the whole community.

DG: You’re saying this is more about community norms or our broader social compact.

JLD: When I say the community must decide, I am not offering you a utopia. I am offering you a different site of struggle. One that centers the people who have always known, in their bodies, what dehumanizing language does before it becomes dehumanizing violence. We have seen this dynamic in the way hate speech fuels violence back home in the Philippines, against indigenous communities, queer people, Muslims in Mindanao and the urban poor. Because language becomes permission that activates the system of policing and militarization already pointed at the most vulnerable. The main boundaries must be rooted in the politics of liberation, not the politics of control. Speech that punches up, that reveals injustice, that challenges power, that speech must be protected. But speech that punches down, that facilitates state violence, that dehumanizes people, I think that must be confronted, if not challenged or destroyed. We have to stop pretending that those two forms of speech are morally equivalent.

 DG: Okay, last question, one that we like to ask everyone. Who's your free speech hero? And why?

JLD: This is actually a really tough question for me because I don't actually think I have one, to be honest. I want to push back on the idea of having a single hero. Because, freedom of speech—any freedom or liberty that we have today—has never been secured by one individual alone. It has been fought for by movements. The eight-hour workday, unions, women's suffrage, despite that it was just white women who were first able to vote, and so on and so forth. It was fought for by movements, by working class people, whose names we often forget. Because a lot of movements in history, the public memory of a movement narrows it down to a single figure, often male. Movement starts from the people, because the movement would not be sustained without the drive of the working people who dedicated free, unpaid labor for it to succeed. Because without them, I don't think there would be any movement to speak of. Without them there's no platform from which any of these figures could actually emerge.