The law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) recently joined a U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) task force geared towards finding and deporting immigrants, according to a report from the Washington Post. Now, immigration officials want two sets of data from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS). First, they want access to what the Post describes as the agency’s “broad surveillance systems, including Postal Service online account data, package- and mail-tracking information, credit card data and financial material and IP addresses.” Second, they want “mail covers,” meaning “photographs of the outside of envelopes and packages.”

Both proposals are alarming. The U.S. mail is a vital, constitutionally established system of communication and commerce that should not be distorted into infrastructure for dragnet surveillance. Immigrants have a human right to data privacy. And new systems of surveilling immigrants will inevitably expand to cover all people living in our country.

USPS Surveillance Systems

Mail is a necessary service in our society. Every day, the agency delivers 318 million letters, hosts 7 million visitors to its website, issues 209,000 money orders, and processes 93,000 address changes.

To obtain these necessary services, we often must provide some of our personal data to the USPS. According to the USPS’ Privacy Policy: “The Postal Service collects personal information from you and from your transactions with us.” It states that this can include “your name, email, mailing and/or business address, phone numbers, or other information that identifies you personally.” If you visit the USPS’s website, they “automatically collect and store” your IP address, the date and time of your visit, the pages you visited, and more. Also: “We occasionally collect data about you from financial entities to perform verification services and from commercial sources.”

The USPS should not collect, store, disclose, or use our data except as strictly necessary to provide us the services we request. This is often called “data minimization.” Among other things, in the words of a seminal 1973 report from the U.S. government: “There must be a way for an individual to prevent information about him that was obtained for one purpose from being used or made available for other purposes without [their] consent.” Here, the USPS should not divert customer data, collected for the purpose of customer service, to the new purpose of surveilling immigrants.

The USPS is subject to the federal Privacy Act of 1974, a watershed anti-surveillance statute. As the USPS acknowledges: “the Privacy Act applies when we use your personal information to know who you are and to interact with you.” Among other things, the Act limits how an agency may disclose a person’s records. (Sound familiar? EFF has a Privacy Act lawsuit against DOGE and the Office of Personnel Management.) While the Act only applies to citizens and lawful permanent residents, that will include many people who send mail to or receive mail from other immigrants. If USPS were to assert the “law enforcement” exemption from the Privacy Act’s non-disclosure rule, the agency would need to show (among other things) a written request for “the particular portion desired” of “the record.” It is unclear how dragnet surveillance like that reported by the Washington Post could satisfy this standard.

USPS Mail Covers

From 2015 to 2023, according to another report from the Washington Post, the USPS received more than 60,000 requests for “mail cover” information from federal, state, and local law enforcement. Each request could include days or weeks of information about the cover of mail sent to or from a person or address. The USPS approved 97% of these requests, leading to postal inspectors recording the covers of more than 312,000 letters and packages.

In 2023, a bipartisan group of eight U.S. Senators (led by Sen. Wyden and Sen. Paul) raised the alarm about this mass surveillance program:

While mail covers do not reveal the contents of correspondence, they can reveal deeply personal information about Americans’ political leanings, religious beliefs, or causes they support. Consequently, surveillance of this information does not just threaten Americans’ privacy, but their First Amendment rights to freely associate with political or religious organizations or peacefully assemble without the government watching.

The Senators called on the USPIS to “only conduct mail covers when a federal judge has approved this surveillance,” except in emergencies. We agree that, at minimum, a warrant based on probable cause should be required.

The USPS operates other dragnet surveillance programs. Its Mail Isolation Control and Tracking Program photographs the exterior of all mail, and it has been used for criminal investigations. The USPIS’s Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) conducts social media surveillance to identify protest activity. (Sound familiar? EFF has a FOIA lawsuit about iCOP.)

This is just the latest of many recent attacks on the data privacy of immigrants. Now is the time to restrain USPIS’s dragnet surveillance programs—not to massively expand them to snoop on immigrants. If this scheme goes into effect, it is only a matter of time before such USPIS spying is expanded against other vulnerable groups, such as protesters or people crossing state lines for reproductive or gender affirming health care. And then against everyone.

MIT Provost Cynthia Barnhart has announced that Vice Provost for the Arts Philip S. Khoury will step down from the position on Aug. 31. Khoury, the Ford International Professor of History, served in the role for 19 years. After a sabbatical, he will rejoin the faculty in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS).

“Since arriving at MIT in 1981, Philip has championed what he calls the Institute’s ‘artistic ecosystem,’ which sits at the intersection of technology, science, the humanities, and the arts. Thanks to Philip’s vision, this ecosystem is now a foundational element of MIT’s educational and research missions and a critical component of how we advance knowledge, understanding, and discovery in service to the world,” says Barnhart.

Khoury was appointed associate provost in 2006 by then-MIT president Susan Hockfield, with a double portfolio enhancing the Institute’s nonacademic arts programs and beginning a review of MIT’s international activities. Those programs include the List Visual Arts Center, the MIT Museum, the Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST), and the Council for the Arts at MIT (CAMIT). After five years, the latter half of this portfolio evolved into the Office of the Vice Provost for International Activities. 

Khoury devoted most of his tenure to expanding the Institute’s arts infrastructure, promoting the visibility of its stellar arts faculty, and guiding the growth of student participation in the arts. Today, more than 50 percent of MIT undergraduates take arts classes, with more than 1,500 studying music.

“Philip has been a remarkable leader at MIT over decades. He has ensured that the arts are a prominent part of the MIT ‘mens-et-manus’ [‘mind-and-hand’] experience and that our community has the opportunity to admire, learn from, and participate in creative thinking in all realms,” says L. Rafael Reif, the Ray and Maria Stata Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and MIT president emeritus. “A historian — and a humanist at heart — Philip also played a crucial role in helping MIT develop a thoughtful international strategy in research and education."

“I will miss my colleagues first and foremost as I leave this position behind,” says Khoury. “But I have been proud to see the quality of the faculty grow and the student interest in the arts grow almost exponentially, along with an awareness of how the arts are prospering at MIT.”

Stream of creativity

During his time as vice provost, he partnered with then-School of Architecture and Planning (SAP) dean Adèle Santos and SHASS dean Deborah Fitzgerald to establish the CAST in 2012. The center encourages artistic collaborations and provides seed funds and research grants to students and faculty. 

Khoury also helped oversee a significant expansion of the Institute’s art facilities, including the unique multipurpose design of the Theater Arts Building, the new MIT Museum, and the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building. Along with the List Visual Arts Center, which will celebrate its 40th anniversary this year, these vibrant spaces “offer an opportunity for our students to do something different from what they came to MIT to do in science and engineering,” Khoury suggests. “It gives them an outlet to do other kinds of experimentation.”

“What makes the arts so successful here is that they are very much in the stream of creativity, which science and technology are all about,” he adds.

One of Khoury’s other long-standing goals has been to elevate the recognition of the arts faculty, “to show that the quality of what we do in those areas matches the quality of what we do in engineering and science,” he says.

“I will always remember Philip Khoury’s leadership and advocacy as dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences for changing the definition of the ‘A’ in SHASS from ‘and’ to ‘Arts.’ That small change had large implications for professional careers for artists, enrollments, and subject options that remain a source of renewal and strength to this day,” says Institute Professor Marcus Thompson.

Most recently, Khoury and his team, in collaboration with faculty, students, and staff from across the Institute, oversaw the development and production of MIT’s new festival of the arts, known as Artfinity. Launched in February and open to the public, the Institute-sponsored, campus-wide festival featured a series of 80 performing and visual arts events.

International activities

Khoury joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 1981 and later served as dean of SHASS between 1991 and 2006. In 2002, he was appointed the inaugural Kenan Sahin Dean of SHASS.

His academic focus made him a natural choice for the first coordinator of MIT international activities, a role he served in from 2006 to 2011. During that time, he traveled widely to learn more about the ways MIT faculty were engaged abroad, and he led the production of an influential report on the state of MIT’s international activities.

“We wanted to create a strategy, but not a foreign policy,” Khoury said of the report.

Khoury’s time in the international role led him to consider ways that collaborations with other countries should be balanced so as not to diminish MIT’s offerings at home, he says. He also looked for ways to encourage more collaborations with countries in sub-Saharan Africa, South America, and parts of the Middle East.

Future plans

Khoury was instrumental in establishing the Future of the Arts at MIT Committee, which was charged by Provost Barnhart in June 2024 in collaboration with Dean Hashim Sarkis of the School of Architecture and Planning and Dean Agustín Rayo of SHASS. The committee aims to find new ways to envision the place of arts at the Institute — a task that was last undertaken in 1987, he says. The committee submitted a draft report to Provost Barnhart in April. 

“I think it will hit the real sweet spot of where arts meet science and technology, but not where art is controlled by science and technology,” Khoury says. “I think the promotion of that, and the emphasis on that, among other connections with art, are really what we should be pushing for and developing.”

After he steps down as vice provost, Khoury plans to devote more time to writing two books: a personal memoir and a book about the Middle East. And he is looking forward to seeing how the arts at MIT will flourish in the near future. “I feel elated about where we’ve landed and where we’ll continue to go,” he says.

As Barnhart noted in her letter to the community, the Future of the Arts at MIT Committee's efforts combined with Khoury staying on through the end of the summer, provides President Kornbluth, the incoming provost, and Khoury with the opportunity to reflect on the Institute’s path forward in this critical space.

What would a behind-the-scenes look at a video generated by an artificial intelligence model be like? You might think the process is similar to stop-motion animation, where many images are created and stitched together, but that’s not quite the case for “diffusion models” like OpenAl's SORA and Google's VEO 2.

Instead of producing a video frame-by-frame (or “autoregressively”), these systems process the entire sequence at once. The resulting clip is often photorealistic, but the process is slow and doesn’t allow for on-the-fly changes. 

Scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Adobe Research have now developed a hybrid approach, called “CausVid,” to create videos in seconds. Much like a quick-witted student learning from a well-versed teacher, a full-sequence diffusion model trains an autoregressive system to swiftly predict the next frame while ensuring high quality and consistency. CausVid’s student model can then generate clips from a simple text prompt, turning a photo into a moving scene, extending a video, or altering its creations with new inputs mid-generation.

This dynamic tool enables fast, interactive content creation, cutting a 50-step process into just a few actions. It can craft many imaginative and artistic scenes, such as a paper airplane morphing into a swan, woolly mammoths venturing through snow, or a child jumping in a puddle. Users can also make an initial prompt, like “generate a man crossing the street,” and then make follow-up inputs to add new elements to the scene, like “he writes in his notebook when he gets to the opposite sidewalk.”

The CSAIL researchers say that the model could be used for different video editing tasks, like helping viewers understand a livestream in a different language by generating a video that syncs with an audio translation. It could also help render new content in a video game or quickly produce training simulations to teach robots new tasks.

Tianwei Yin SM ’25, PhD ’25, a recently graduated student in electrical engineering and computer science and CSAIL affiliate, attributes the model’s strength to its mixed approach.

“CausVid combines a pre-trained diffusion-based model with autoregressive architecture that’s typically found in text generation models,” says Yin, co-lead author of a new paper about the tool. “This AI-powered teacher model can envision future steps to train a frame-by-frame system to avoid making rendering errors.”

Yin’s co-lead author, Qiang Zhang, is a research scientist at xAI and a former CSAIL visiting researcher. They worked on the project with Adobe Research scientists Richard Zhang, Eli Shechtman, and Xun Huang, and two CSAIL principal investigators: MIT professors Bill Freeman and Frédo Durand.

Caus(Vid) and effect

Many autoregressive models can create a video that’s initially smooth, but the quality tends to drop off later in the sequence. A clip of a person running might seem lifelike at first, but their legs begin to flail in unnatural directions, indicating frame-to-frame inconsistencies (also called “error accumulation”).

Error-prone video generation was common in prior causal approaches, which learned to predict frames one by one on their own. CausVid instead uses a high-powered diffusion model to teach a simpler system its general video expertise, enabling it to create smooth visuals, but much faster.

CausVid displayed its video-making aptitude when researchers tested its ability to make high-resolution, 10-second-long videos. It outperformed baselines like “OpenSORA” and “MovieGen,” working up to 100 times faster than its competition while producing the most stable, high-quality clips.

Then, Yin and his colleagues tested CausVid’s ability to put out stable 30-second videos, where it also topped comparable models on quality and consistency. These results indicate that CausVid may eventually produce stable, hours-long videos, or even an indefinite duration.

A subsequent study revealed that users preferred the videos generated by CausVid’s student model over its diffusion-based teacher.

“The speed of the autoregressive model really makes a difference,” says Yin. “Its videos look just as good as the teacher’s ones, but with less time to produce, the trade-off is that its visuals are less diverse.”

CausVid also excelled when tested on over 900 prompts using a text-to-video dataset, receiving the top overall score of 84.27. It boasted the best metrics in categories like imaging quality and realistic human actions, eclipsing state-of-the-art video generation models like “Vchitect” and “Gen-3.”

While an efficient step forward in AI video generation, CausVid may soon be able to design visuals even faster — perhaps instantly — with a smaller causal architecture. Yin says that if the model is trained on domain-specific datasets, it will likely create higher-quality clips for robotics and gaming.

Experts say that this hybrid system is a promising upgrade from diffusion models, which are currently bogged down by processing speeds. “[Diffusion models] are way slower than LLMs [large language models] or generative image models,” says Carnegie Mellon University Assistant Professor Jun-Yan Zhu, who was not involved in the paper. “This new work changes that, making video generation much more efficient. That means better streaming speed, more interactive applications, and lower carbon footprints.”

The team’s work was supported, in part, by the Amazon Science Hub, the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Adobe, Google, the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, and the U.S. Air Force Artificial Intelligence Accelerator. CausVid will be presented at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in June.

Nominations are now open for the 2025 EFF Awards! The nomination window will be open until Friday, May 23rd at 2:00 PM Pacific time. You could nominate the next winner today!

For over thirty years, the Electronic Frontier Foundation presented awards to key leaders and organizations in the fight for freedom and innovation online. The EFF Awards celebrate the longtime stalwarts working on behalf of technology users, both in the public eye and behind the scenes. Past Honorees include visionary activist Aaron Swartz, human rights and security researchers The Citizen Lab, media activist Malkia Devich-Cyril, media group 404 Media, and whistle-blower Chelsea Manning.

The internet is a necessity in modern life and a continually evolving tool for communication, creativity, and human potential. Together we carry—and must always steward—the movement to protect civil liberties and human rights online. Will you help us spotlight some of the latest and most impactful work towards a better digital future?

Remember, nominations close on May 23rd at 2:00 PM Pacific time!

GO TO NOMINATION PAGE

Nominate your favorite digital rights Heroes now!

After you nominate your favorite contenders, we hope you will consider joining us on September 10 to celebrate the work of the 2025 winners. If you have any questions or if you'd like to receive updates about the event, please email events@eff.org.

The EFF Awards depend on the generous support of individuals and companies with passion for digital civil liberties. To learn about how you can sponsor the EFF Awards, please visit eff.org/thanks or contact tierney@eff.org for more information.

 

For the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS), 2025 marks a decade of translating groundbreaking research into tangible solutions for global challenges. Few examples illustrate that mission better than NONA Technologies. With support from a J-WAFS Solutions grant, MIT electrical engineering and biological engineering Professor Jongyoon Han and his team developed a portable desalination device that transforms seawater into clean drinking water without filters or high-pressure pumps. 

The device stands apart from traditional systems because conventional desalination technologies, like reverse osmosis, are energy-intensive, prone to fouling, and typically deployed at large, centralized plants. In contrast, the device developed in Han’s lab employs ion concentration polarization technology to remove salts and particles from seawater, producing potable water that exceeds World Health Organization standards. It is compact, solar-powered, and operable at the push of a button — making it an ideal solution for off-grid and disaster-stricken areas.

This research laid the foundation for spinning out NONA Technologies along with co-founders Junghyo Yoon PhD ’21 from Han’s lab and Bruce Crawford MBA ’22, to commercialize the technology and address pressing water-scarcity issues worldwide. “This is really the culmination of a 10-year journey that I and my group have been on,” said Han in an earlier MIT News article. “We worked for years on the physics behind individual desalination processes, but pushing all those advances into a box, building a system, and demonstrating it in the ocean ... that was a really meaningful and rewarding experience for me.” You can watch this video showcasing the device in action.

Moving breakthrough research out of the lab and into the world is a well-known challenge. While traditional “seed” grants typically support early-stage research at Technology Readiness Level (TRL) 1-2, few funding sources exist to help academic teams navigate to the next phase of technology development. The J-WAFS Solutions Program is strategically designed to address this critical gap by supporting technologies in the high-risk, early-commercialization phase that is often neglected by traditional research, corporate, and venture funding. By supporting technologies at TRLs 3-5, the program increases the likelihood that promising innovations will survive beyond the university setting, advancing sufficiently to attract follow-on funding.

Equally important, the program gives academic researchers the time, resources, and flexibility to de-risk their technology, explore customer need and potential real-world applications, and determine whether and how they want to pursue commercialization. For faculty-led teams like Han’s, the J-WAFS Solutions Program provided the critical financial runway and entrepreneurial guidance needed to refine the technology, test assumptions about market fit, and lay the foundation for a startup team. While still in the MIT innovation ecosystem, Nona secured over $200,000 in non-dilutive funding through competitions and accelerators, including the prestigious MIT delta v Educational Accelerator. These early wins laid the groundwork for further investment and technical advancement.

Since spinning out of MIT, NONA has made major strides in both technology development and business viability. What started as a device capable of producing just over half-a-liter of clean drinking water per hour has evolved into a system that now delivers 10 times that capacity, at 5 liters per hour. The company successfully raised a $3.5 million seed round to advance its portable desalination device, and entered into a collaboration with the U.S. Army Natick Soldier Systems Center, where it co-developed early prototypes and began generating revenue while validating the technology. Most recently, NONA was awarded two SBIR Phase I grants totaling $575,000, one from the National Science Foundation and another from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Now operating out of Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts, NONA has grown to a dedicated team of five and is preparing to launch its nona5 product later this year, with a wait list of over 1,000 customers. It is also kicking off its first industrial pilot, marking a key step toward commercial scale-up. “Starting a business as a postdoc was challenging, especially with limited funding and industry knowledge,” says Yoon, who currently serves as CTO of NONA. “J-WAFS gave me the financial freedom to pursue my venture, and the mentorship pushed me to hit key milestones. Thanks to J-WAFS, I successfully transitioned from an academic researcher to an entrepreneur in the water industry.”

NONA is one of several J-WAFS-funded technologies that have moved from the lab to market, part of a growing portfolio of water and food solutions advancing through MIT’s innovation pipeline. As J-WAFS marks a decade of catalyzing innovation in water and food, NONA exemplifies what is possible when mission-driven research is paired with targeted early-stage support and mentorship.

To learn more or get involved in supporting startups through the J-WAFS Solutions Program, please contact jwafs@mit.edu.

When your local police department buys one piece of surveillance equipment, you can easily expect that the company that sold it will try to upsell them on additional tools and upgrades. 

Axon has been adding AI to its repertoire, and it now features a whole “AI Era” bundle plan. One recent offering is Draft One, which connects to Axon’s body-worn cameras (BWCs) and uses AI to generate police reports based on the audio captured in the BWC footage. While use of the tool may start off as a free trial, Axon sees Draft One as another key product for capturing new customers, despite widespread skepticism of the accuracy of the reports, the inability to determine which reports have been drafted using the system, and the liability they could bring to prosecutions. 

In 2024, Axon acquired a company called Fusus, a platform that combines the growing stores of data that police departments collect—notifications from gunshot detection and automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems; footage from BWCs, drones, public cameras, and sometimes private cameras; and dispatch information—to create “real-time crime centers.” The company now claims that Fusus is being used by more than 250 different policing agencies.

 

Fusus claims to bring the power of the real-time crime center to police departments of all sizes, which includes the ability to help police access and use live footage from both public and private cameras through an add-on service that requires a recurring subscription. It also claims to integrate nicely with surveillance tools from other providers. Recently, it has been cutting ties, most notably with Flock Safety, as it starts to envelop some of the options its frenemies had offered. 

In the middle of April, Axon announced that it would begin offering fixed ALPR, a key feature of the Flock Safety catalogue, and an AI Assistant, which has been a core offering of Truleo, another Axon competitor.

Flock Safety's Bundles and FlockOS

Flock Safety is another major police technology company that has expanded its focus from one primary technology to a whole package of equipment and software services. 

Flock Safety started with ALPRs. These tools use a camera to read vehicle license plates, collecting the make, model, location, and other details which can be used for what Flock calls “Vehicle Fingerprinting.” The details are stored in a database that sometimes finds a match among a “hot list” provided by police officers, but otherwise just stores and shares data on how, where, and when everyone is driving and parking their vehicles. 

Founded in 2017, Flock Safety has been working to expand its camera-based offerings, and it now claims to have a presence in more than 5,000 jurisdictions around the country, including through law enforcement and neighborhood association customers. 

flock_proposal_for_brookhaven.png flock_proposal_for_brookhaven_2.png A list of FlockOS features proposed to Brookhaven Police Department in Georgia.

Among its tools are now the drone-as-first-responder system, gunshot detection, and a software platform meant to combine all of them. Flock also sells an option for businesses to use ALPRs to "optimize" marketing efforts and for analyzing traffic patterns to segment their patrons. Flock Safety offers the ability to integrate private camera systems as well.

flockos_hardware_software.png A price proposal for the FlockSafety platform made to Palatine, IL

Much of what Flock Safety does now comes together in their FlockOS system, which claims to bring together various surveillance feeds and facilitate real-time “situational awareness.”
Flock is optimistic about its future, recently opening a massive new manufacturing facility in Georgia.

Motorola Solutions' "Ecosystem"

When you think of Motorola, you may think of phones—but there’s a good chance that you missed the moment in 2011 when the phone side of the company, Motorola Mobility, split off from Motorola Solutions, which is now a big player in police surveillance.

On its website, Motorola Solutions claims that departments are better off using a whole list of equipment from the same ecosystem, boasting the tagline, “Technology that’s exponentially more powerful, together.” Motorola describes this as an "ecosystem of safety and security technologies" in its securities filings. In 2024, the company also reported $2 billion in sales, but unlike Axon, its customer base is not exclusively law enforcement and includes private entities like sports stadiums, schools, and hospitals.

Motorola’s technology includes 911 services, radio, BWCs, in-car cameras, ALPRs, drones, face recognition, crime mapping, and software that supposedly unifies it all. Notably, video can also come with artificial intelligence analysis, in some cases allowing law enforcement to search video and track individuals across cameras.

motorola_offerings_screenshot.png A screenshot from Motorola Solutions webpage on law enforcement technology.

In January 2019, Motorola Solutions acquired Vigilant Solutions, one of the big players in the ALPR market, as part of its takeover of Vaas International Holdings. Now the company (under the subsidiary DRN Data) claims to have billions of scans saved from police departments and private ALPR cameras around the country. Marketing language for its Vehicle Manager system highlights that “data is overwhelming,” because the amount of data being collected is “a lot.” It’s a similar claim made by other companies: Now that you’ve bought so many surveillance tools to collect so much data, you’re finding that it is too much data, so you now need more surveillance tools to organize and make sense of it.

SoundThinking's ‘SafetySmart Platform’

SoundThinking began as ShotSpotter, a so-called gunshot detection tool that uses microphones placed around a city to identify and locate sounds of gunshots. As news reports of the tool’s inaccuracy and criticisms have grown, the company has rebranded as SoundThinking, adding to its offerings ALPRs, case management, and weapons detection. The company is now marketing its SafetySmart platform, which claims to integrate different stores of data and apply AI analytics.

In 2024, SoundThinking laid out its whole scheme in its annual report, referring to it as the "cross-sell" component of their sales strategy. 

The "cross-sell" component of our strategy is designed to leverage our established relationships and understanding of the customer environs by introducing other capabilities on the SafetySmart platform that can solve other customer challenges. We are in the early stages of the upsell/cross-sell strategy, but it is promising - particularly around bundled sales such as ShotSpotter + ResourceRouter and CaseBuilder +CrimeTracer. Newport News, VA, Rocky Mount, NC, Reno, NV and others have embraced this strategy and recognized the value of utilizing multiple SafetySmart products to manage the entire life cycle of gun crime…. We will seek to drive more of this sales activity as it not only enhances our system's effectiveness but also deepens our penetration within existing customer relationships and is a proof point that our solutions are essential for creating comprehensive public safety outcomes. Importantly, this strategy also increases the average revenue per customer and makes our customer relationships even stickier.

Many of SoundThinking’s new tools rely on a push toward “data integration” and artificial intelligence. ALPRs can be integrated with ShotSpotter. ShotSpotter can be integrated with the CaseBuilder records management system, and CaseBuilder can be integrated with CrimeTracer. CrimeTracer, once known as COPLINK X, is a platform that SoundThinking describes as a “powerful law enforcement search engine and information platform that enables law enforcement to search data from agencies across the U.S.” EFF tracks this type of tool in the Atlas of Surveillance as a third-party investigative platform: software tools that combine open-source intelligence data, police records, and other data sources, including even those found on the dark web, to generate leads or conduct analyses. 

SoundThinking, like a lot of surveillance, can be costly for departments, but the company seems to see the value in fostering its existing police department relationships even if they’re not getting paid right now. In Baton Rouge, budget cuts recently resulted in the elimination of the $400,000 annual contract for ShotSpotter, but the city continues to use it. 

"They have agreed to continue that service without accepting any money from us for now, while we look for possible other funding sources. It was a decision that it's extremely expensive and kind of cost-prohibitive to move the sensors to other parts of the city," Baton Rouge Police Department Chief Thomas Morse told a local news outlet, WBRZ.

Beware the Bundle

Government surveillance is big business. The companies that provide surveillance and police data tools know that it’s lucrative to cultivate police departments as loyal customers. They’re jockeying for monopolization of the state surveillance market that they’re helping to build. While they may be marketing public safety in their pitches for products, from ALPRs to records management to investigatory analysis to AI everything, these companies are mostly beholden to their shareholders and bottom lines. 

The next time you come across BWCs or another piece of tech on your city council’s agenda or police department’s budget, take a closer look to see what other strings and surveillance tools might be attached. You are not just looking at one line item on the sheet—it’s probably an ongoing subscription to a whole package of equipment designed to challenge your privacy, and no sort of discount makes that a price worth paying.

To learn more about what surveillance tools your local agencies are using, take a look at EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance and our Street-Level Surveillance Hub. 

Reporting on the rise of fake students enrolling in community college courses:

The bots’ goal is to bilk state and federal financial aid money by enrolling in classes, and remaining enrolled in them, long enough for aid disbursements to go out. They often accomplish this by submitting AI-generated work. And because community colleges accept all applicants, they’ve been almost exclusively impacted by the fraud.

The article talks about the rise of this type of fraud, the difficulty of detecting it, and how it upends quite a bit of the class structure and learning community...

The agency didn't offer an alternative in its proposed repeal of rules that limit planet-warming pollution.

The agency would continue to pay the vast majority of cleanup and rebuilding costs under a budget-cutting proposal sent to the White House.

A major solar project was unveiled last week. Some wonder if the boom will continue under President Donald Trump’s policies targeting renewable energy.

Sethuraman Panchanathan, who abruptly left the National Science Foundation last month, is a testament to the unpredictability of the Trump administration.

The Biden-era regulation targeted on-site combustion from appliances such as heaters and boilers.

Noah McQueen will serve as director of science and innovation at Carbon180.

The Microsoft co-founder said “there’s a lot of commitment to this cause in the United States.”

Two research groups said they will produce peer-reviewed documents assessing the current and future national impacts of climate change.

A global race to recruit U.S. scientists is heating up as President Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts to research funding and agencies trigger an exodus.

Experts say this is the nation's first state lodging tax that raises money for the environment and coping with climate change.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 06 May 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02353-7

Author Correction: Heterogeneous pressure on croplands from land-based strategies to meet the 1.5 °C target

As the saying goes, time is money. That’s certainly evident in the transportation sector, where people will pay more for direct flights, express trains, and other ways to get somewhere quickly.

Still, it is difficult to measure precisely how much people value their time. Now, a paper co-authored by an MIT economist uses ride-sharing data to reveal multiple implications of personalized pricing.

By focusing on a European ride-sharing platform that auctions its rides, the researchers found that people are more responsive to prices than to wait times. They also found that people pay more to save time during the workday, and that when people pay more to avoid waiting, it notably increases business revenues. And some segments of consumers are distinctly more willing than others to pay higher prices.

Specifically, when people can bid for rides that arrive sooner, the amount above the minimum price the platform can charge increases by 5.2 percent. Meanwhile, the gap between offered prices and the maximum that consumers are willing to pay decreases by 2.5 percent. In economics terms, this creates additional “surplus” value for firms, while lowering the “consumer surplus” in these transactions.

“One of the important quantities in transportation is the value of time,” says MIT economist Tobias Salz, co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s findings. “We came across a setting that offered a very clean way of examining this quantity, where the value of time is revealed by people’s transportation choices.”

The paper, “Personalized Pricing and the Value of Time: Evidence from Auctioned Cab Rides,” is being published in Econometrica. The authors are Nicholas Buchholz, an assistant professor of economics at Princeton University; Laura Doval, a professor at Columbia Business School; Jakub Kastl, a professor of economics at Princeton University; Filip Matejka, a professor at Charles University in Prague; and Salz, the Castle Krob Career Development Associate Professor of Economics in MIT’s Department of Economics.

It is not easy to study how much money people will spend to save time — and time alone. Transportation is one sector where it is possible to do so, though not the only one. People will also pay more for, say, an express pass to avoid long lines at an amusement park. But data for those scenarios, even when available, may contain complicating factors. (Also, the value of time shouldn’t be confused with how much people pay for services charged by the hour, from accountants to tuba lessons.)

In this case, however, the researchers were provided data from Liftago, a ride-sharing platform in Prague with a distinctive feature: It lets drivers bid on a passenger’s business, with the wait time until the auto arrives as one of the factors involved. Drivers can also indicate when they will be available. In studying how passengers compare offers with different wait times and prices, the researchers see exactly how much people are paying not to wait, other things being equal. All told, they examined 1.9 million ride requests and 5.2 million bids.

“It’s like an eBay for taxis,” Salz says. “Instead of assigning the driver to you, drivers bid for the passengers’ business. With this, we can very directly observe how people make their choices. How they value time is revealed by the wait and the prices attached to that. In many settings we don’t observe that directly, so it’s a very clean comparison that rids the data of a lot of confounds.”

The data set allows the researchers to examine many aspects of personalized pricing and the way it affects the transportation market in this setting. That produces a set of insights on its own, along with the findings on time valuation. 

Ultimately, the researchers found that the elasticity of prices — how much they change — ranged from four to 10 times as much as the elasticity of wait times, meaning people are more keen on avoiding high prices.

The team found the overall value of time in this context is $13.21 per hour for users of the ride-share platform, though the researchers note that is not a universal measure of the value of time and is dependent on this setting. The study also shows that bids increase during work hours.

Additionally, the research reveals a split among consumers: The top quartile of bids placed a value on time that is 3.5 times higher than the value of the bids in the bottom quartile.

Then there is still the question of how much personalized pricing benefits consumers, providers, or both. The numbers, again, show that the overall surplus increases — meaning business benefits — while the consumer surplus is reduced. However, the data show an even more nuanced picture. Because the top quartile of bidders are paying substantially more to avoid longer waits, they are the ones who absorb the brunt of the costs in this kind of system.

“The majority of consumers still benefit,” Salz says. “The consumers hurt by this have a very high willingness to pay. The source of welfare gains is that most consumers can be brought into the market. But the flip side is that the firm, by knowing every consumer’s choke point, can extract the surplus. Welfare goes up, the ride-sharing platform captures most of that, and drivers — interestingly — also benefit from the system, although they do not have access to the data.”

Economic theory and other transportation studies alone would not necessarily have predicted the study’s results and various nuances.

“It was not clear a priori whether consumers benefit,” Salz observes. “That is not something you would know without going to the data.”

While this study might hold particular interest for firms and others interested in transportation, mobility, and ride-sharing, it also fits into a larger body of economics research about information in markets and how its presence, or absence, influences consumer behavior, consumer welfare, and the functioning of markets.

“The [research] umbrella here is really information about where to find trading partners and what their willingness to pay is,” Salz says. “What I’m broadly interested in is these types of information frictions and how they determine market outcomes, how they might impact consumers, and be used by firms.”

The research was supported, in part, by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and the National Science Foundation. 

Farmers today face a number of challenges, from supply chain stability to nutrient and waste management. But hanging over everything is the need to maintain profitability amid changing markets and increased uncertainty.

Fyto, founded by former MIT staff member Jason Prapas, is offering a highly automated cultivation system to address several of farmers’ biggest problems at once.

At the heart of Fyto’s system is Lemna, a genus of small aquatic plants otherwise known as duckweed. Most people have probably seen thick green mats of Lemna lying on top of ponds and swamps. But Lemna is also rich in protein and capable of doubling in biomass every two days. Fyto has built an automated cropping system that uses nitrogen-rich wastewater from dairy farms to grow Lemna in shallow pools on otherwise less productive farmland. On top of the pools, the company has built what it believes are the largest agricultural robots in the world, which monitor plant health and harvest the Lemna sustainably. The Lemna can then be used on farms as a high-protein cattle feed or fertilizer supplement.

Fyto’s systems are designed to rely on minimal land, water, and labor while creating a more sustainable, profitable food system.

“We developed from scratch a robotic system that takes the guesswork out of farming this crop,” says Prapas, who previously led the translational research program of MIT’s Tata Center. “It looks at the crop on a daily basis, takes inventory to know how many plants there are, how much should be harvested to have healthy growth the next day, can detect if the color is slightly off or there are nutrient deficiencies, and can suggest different interventions based on all that data.”

From kiddie pools to cow farms

Prapas’ first job out of college was with an MIT spinout called Green Fuel that harvested algae to make biofuel. He went back to school for a master’s and then a PhD in mechanical engineering, but he continued working with startups. Following his PhD at Colorado State University, he co-founded Factor[e] Ventures to fund and incubate startups focused on improving energy access in emerging markets.

Through that work, Prapas was introduced to MIT’s Tata Center for Technology and Design.

“We were really interested in the new technologies being developed at the MIT Tata Center, and in funding new startups taking on some of these global climate challenges in emerging markets,” Prapas recalls. “The Tata Center was interested in making sure these technologies get put into practice rather than patented and put on a shelf somewhere. It was a good synergy.”

One of the people Prapas got to know was Rob Stoner, the founding director of the Tata Center, who encouraged Prapas to get more directly involved with commercializing new technologies. In 2017, Prapas joined the Tata Center as the translational research director. During that time, Prapas worked with MIT students, faculty, and staff to test their inventions in the real world. Much of that work involved innovations in agriculture.

“Farming is a fact of life for a lot of folks around the world — both subsistence farming but also producing food for the community and beyond,” Prapas says. “That has huge implications for water usage, electricity consumption, labor. For years, I’d been thinking about how we make farming a more attractive endeavor for people: How do we make it less back-breaking, more efficient, and more economical?”

Between his work at MIT and Factor[e], Prapas visited hundreds of farms around the world, where he started to think about the lack of good choices for farming inputs like animal feed and fertilizers. The problem represented a business opportunity.

Fyto began with kiddie pools. Prapas started growing aquatic plants in his backyard, using them as a fertilizer source for vegetables. The experience taught him how difficult it would be to train people to grow and harvest Lemna at large scales on farms.

“I realized we’d have to invent both the farming method — the agronomy — and the equipment and processes to grow it at scale cost effectively,” Prapas explains.

Prapas started discussing his ideas with others around 2019.

“The MIT and Boston ecosystems are great for pitching somewhat crazy ideas to willing audiences and seeing what sticks,” Prapas says. “There’s an intangible benefit of being at MIT, where you just can’t help but think of bold ideas and try putting them into practice.”

Prapas, who left MIT to lead Fyto in 2019, partnered with Valerie Peng ’17, SM ’19, then a graduate student at MIT who became his first hire.

“Farmers work so hard, and I have so much respect for what they do,” says Peng, who serves as Fyto’s head of engineering. “People talk about the political divide, but there’s a lot of alignment around using less, doing more with what you have, and making our food systems more resilient to drought, supply chain disruptions, and everything else. There’s more in common with everyone than you’d expect.”

A new farming method

Lemna can produce much more protein per acre than soy, another common source of protein on farms, but it requires a lot of nitrogen to grow. Fortunately, many types of farmers, especially large dairy farmers, have abundant nitrogen sources in the waste streams that come from washing out cow manure.

“These waste streams are a big problem: In California it’s believed to be one of the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the agriculture sector despite the fact that hundreds of crops are grown in California,” Prapas says.

For the last few years, Fyto has run its systems in pilots on farms, trialing the crop as feed and fertilizer before delivering to its customers. The systems Fyto has deployed so far are about 50 feet wide, but it is actively commissioning its newest version that’s 160 feet wide. Eventually, Fyto plans to sell the systems directly to farmers.

Fyto is currently awaiting California’s approval for use in feed, but Lemna has already been approved in Europe. Fyto has also been granted a fertilizer license on its plant-based fertilizer, with promising early results in trials, and plans to sell new fertilizer products this year.

Although Fyto is focused on dairy farms for its early deployments, it has also grown Lemna using manure from chicken, and Prapas notes that even people like cheese producers have a nitrogen waste problem that Fyto could solve.

“Think of us like a polishing step you could put on the end of any system that has an organic waste stream,” Prapas says. “In that situation, we’re interested in growing our crops on it. We’ve had very few things that the plant can’t grow on. Globally, we see this as a new farming method, and that means it’s got a lot of potential applications.”