Legal intern Suzanne Castillo was the principal author of this post.

The Fourth Circuit issued a disappointing opinion in U.S. v. Belmonte Cardozo, a case in which EFF filed an amicus brief, alongside the national ACLU, its Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia affiliates, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL).

We argued that electronic device searches at the border should require a warrant based on probable cause, but at minimum, regardless of whether an officer searches by hand or with forensic software that plugs into a device and downloads its entire contents for search, the same Fourth Amendment standard should apply to all device searches at the border.

Unfortunately, the court rejected that argument and ruled that a lower standard applies to manual searches, allowing the government to conduct extraordinarily invasive electronic device searches without any suspicion of wrongdoing, simply because the border officer chooses to search by hand rather than with a forensic tool.

The Border Search Exception Meets Your Phone

The Fourth Amendment requires that government searches of persons or property be reasonable, which usually means obtaining a warrant based on probable cause from a judge.

But a warrantless search can still be reasonable if it falls within an exception to the warrant requirement, including the exception that allows officers to search your belongings at the border. The border search exception allows warrantless searches of persons or property crossing the U.S. border, including the functional equivalent of the border such as international airports, given the government’s interests in controlling who and what may enter the country.

Historically, courts have categorized border searches of luggage, vehicles, and personal effects as “routine” and thus reasonable even if conducted without any suspicion that the traveler has engaged in wrongdoing; courts have also held that more invasive “nonroutine” searches, such as certain body searches and searches that damage property, require reasonable suspicion.

But a person’s privacy interests in the personal data on a phone or laptop are extraordinarily different than their limited privacy interests in the contents of their suitcase.

The Supreme Court addressed cell phone privacy in Riley v. California (2014), holding that the search-incident-to-arrest exception to the warrant requirement did not apply to cell phones, thereby generally requiring a warrant for phone searches, at least at the interior of the country. The court recognized the unprecedented privacy interests people have in their cell phones and how even brief manual searches can reveal the “sum of an individual’s private life,” including our political affiliations, religious beliefs, sexuality, and more. Accordingly, the Supreme Court held that because electronic device searches bear “little resemblance” to searches of bags or physical containers, they should be evaluated differently.

Following Riley, the Fourth Circuit considered two border device search cases involving forensic searches, in which border officers used external software to extract and analyze a device’s data.

In U.S. v. Kolsuz (2018), the Fourth Circuit held that a forensic search of a cell phone at the border “must be considered a nonroutine border search, requiring some measure of individualized suspicion” of a transnational offense, but the court declined to decide whether the standard is only reasonable suspicion or instead a probable cause warrant.

Then in U.S. v. Aigbekaen (2019), the Fourth Circuit held that a forensic device search at the border in support of a purely domestic law enforcement investigation requires a warrant. The court also reiterated the general Kolsuz rule for a forensic border-related device search: the “Government must have individualized suspicion of an offense that bears some nexus to the border search exception's purposes of protecting national security, collecting duties, blocking the entry of unwanted persons, or disrupting efforts to export or import contraband.”

In Belmonte Cardozo, manual searches were finally before the court.

A Disappointing Decision

Jose Belmonte Cardozo was already on the U.S. government’s radar when he traveled from Bolivia to the U.S. and was met by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer at Washington Dulles International Airport. The officer manually searched his cell phone and found child sexual abuse material (CSAM), considered “digital contraband,” leading to Belmonte Cardozo’s arrest and criminal prosecution.

At issue on appeal was what standard should apply to manual device searches at the border. The Fourth Circuit held that, unlike forensic searches, manual searches are “routine” and thus reasonable under the Fourth Amendment without a warrant or individualized suspicion.

The court’s holding hinged on four differences between manual and forensic searches: (1) in a manual search, a person does the searching, not a machine; (2) a manual search’s breadth depends on the officer’s time and energy, while forensic searches are comprehensive; (3) manual searches reveal only what a user can typically access, while forensic searches can uncover deleted files, cached fragments, metadata, and more; and (4) manual searches are subject to an officer’s fading memory or imperfect notes, while forensic searches create a permanent copy.

But in identifying these technical differences, the court never explains why they justify a lower standard for manual searches.

The Fourth Circuit’s holding is problematic because, as we argued in our amicus brief, manual searches reach the same categories of data as forensic searches—data that can reveal highly personal aspects of our identities and our lives. It does not matter if a search is conducted by an agent’s thumbs or by software: the end result is equally as invasive, therefore all device searches should fall under the warrant requirement, or at least the same Fourth Amendment standard.

The court repeatedly emphasized that the search here lasted only two minutes, suggesting that the time-limited search was not privacy-invasive. But an individual’s privacy interests in their personal data don’t change based on how their phone is searched or how long. Scrolling for two minutes through someone’s personal text messages or photos is an invasion of privacy that may reveal intimate details about the person even in that short period of time.

Moreover, as devices’ native search functions improve, manual searches can surface personal information in seconds through keyword searches, even for photos, where it might have taken an hour of scrolling to find the same information, further showing that a time-limited search is not necessarily less privacy-invasive. What matters is not the breadth of the search itself, but the unprecedented (and growing) breadth of data on our phones.

A Silver Lining

There’s one silver lining: by relying on the fact that the search lasted two minutes, the Fourth Circuit left open the possibility that lengthier manual searches could trigger heightened suspicion requirements. But until a clear line is drawn, border officers within the Fourth Circuit’s jurisdiction can use manual searches to sidestep heightened Fourth Amendment standards that would otherwise apply. In the meantime, EFF will keep fighting against extraordinarily invasive warrantless, suspicionless device earches at the border, and for robust privacy standards to protect our most personal data.

As a Massachusetts Boys Soccer Player of the Year and an All-American in high school, Dilin Meloni had choices when it came to college. He came to MIT because he knew he wanted to be an Engineer (on the field) and an engineer (off) after he read a paper from the Plasma Science and Fusion Center as a junior at Needham High School. 

In mid-June, Meloni, a rising senior studying nuclear science and engineering and physics, took time from his summer internship at Commonwealth Fusion Systems to discuss his role as an attacking midfielder for the Engineers, his work with the Student Athlete Advisory Council, and more.  

Q: How does being an athlete affect your experience at MIT?

A: MIT has a huge social experience people don’t really understand from the outside. A lot of it is driven by our athletic communities. 

For example, MIT was very open and welcoming when I first got here. Especially for fall athletes; when you get here, it’s all there in the first two weeks. Athletics help you meet students who are very much like yourself: people who come to MIT for academics but who have also dedicated so much of their lives to a sport that it’s a major part of them. I think this common ground makes it a lot easier to meet people and find connections you might have a harder time finding if you're not an athlete.

And it still drives how I live. My fraternity is made up of pretty much the entire soccer team now, plus people from the football team, the swimming team, and some track athletes. We have some non-athletes as well. 

But the nice part is it doesn’t have to be everything you do — and it never is, because everybody has their academic work.

Q: Are these two parts of your life — athletic and academic — separate, or integrated?

A: Maybe it’s because of my major and what I’m interested in, but I just don’t find a lot of overlap. I’m a Course 22 and Course 8 double-major, and you don’t find a ton of varsity athletes in nuclear engineering or physics, unfortunately. But I’m trying to change that — the new players coming in, I try to convince them these are good paths to take.

Growing up, I spent a lot of time playing club soccer, and my academics were in a much smaller sphere. Here, I get access to every single part of the MIT ecosystem. I’m able to spend time in my lab with people who come from very diverse backgrounds, and they don’t really play sports. Or they don’t anymore. 

And at the end of the day, I can go back and hang out with my friends on the team. It’s a privilege to be a part of all these different groups. I’m not just siloed.

Q: Describe the Student Athletics Advisory Committee (SAAC). How do you represent the needs of all 33 varsity sports?

A: Thirty-three teams is a lot of teams. … Last summer we reached out to all the coaches and athletes before the preseason to ask for their ideas. They know where the pain points are, so we encouraged them to think about what changes they wanted. Then the co-president and I met with all of them in smaller groups and came up with a list. 

The main idea is that there’s overlap on the issues that pertain to all student-athletes, such as the quality of the food, preseason planning, or the new Sports Performance Facility — every varsity student athlete needs access to that space, so it matters how access and time are allocated. 

Or it might be something more specific. There are seven teams that play on the major turf fields. If you’re a swimmer, you’re probably not going to care much about the soccer fields, but you do share the pool with the water polo team. We also discuss things like NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic Association] legislation and how the school wants to approach it.

The nice part is, it’s pretty informal. I know a lot of student athletes. If I want to get in touch with someone from the track team, I don’t have to hunt them down. I could probably just find them in class. Or I text my friends and ask, “Hey, how was the food today?”

Q: How did you get involved? 

A: I started going my freshman year. My coach suggested that we send some younger players, so I went with the captain at the time. 

Student governance has always been important to me. When I was in high school, I was part of my town’s school committee and the larger school committees for Massachusetts. Students have lots of opinions, and there are lots of issues, even at a place like MIT. But if no one takes on the role, nothing’s going to happen. That’s just always how I viewed it — if there’s an area where you can make some change, why not go do it yourself?

Q: What’s the hardest part of the job?

A: The difficult part can be communicating realistic standards between administrators and student athletes, because students are going to ask for more than they’re going to get — which is not necessarily a bad thing. For example, student athletes are aware that we have to share fields. But all these teams always want to be out there. They want to have priority. They want continuous access to facilities so they can train and get better as a team.

In these meetings I’ve come to understand fully that there’s a cost associated with everything, and some things can be difficult, logistically. So finding compromises when it comes to field time, or food, or whatever it may be — I end up explaining a lot. This is how the school works. You can’t just demand everything. We try to meet in the middle as much as possible. Students get it.

But on the flip side, I need to make sure we are voicing student athletes’ needs and ideas for how to improve our experience, because if you’re enjoying your student-athlete experience, you're going to get more out of the school as well. 

Varsity athletes feel sometimes that they are an underrepresented or unloved group. If you’re trying to have a soccer practice and there are people running on the track, or if you kick a ball over the fence and someone steals it, or if you’re trying to book an off-season practice and a student club already booked the field — all these things can be frustrating.

A big part of SAAC is voicing complaints, but also understanding the compromises — and that we can work together to try and find the best middle ground.

Q: Do you think it’s working?

A: Definitely. DAPER and Student Life staff have been willing to talk, and listen, and overhaul how they do things. With such a large portion of the student body being athletes, this is really important to them. They’re now asking me and the co-president for input on other realms of student life, too. I think this year was really a tipping point.

Obviously, it’s a privilege to come to this school, but if you’re here you still need to be heard. At the end of the day, people are always going to find things to nitpick. Yes, there are things to improve on; it’s never going to be perfect. But as long as we have this communication channel open, I think we can make small changes that’ll lead to big changes eventually.

Dimitri Bertsekas PhD ’71, the Jerry McAfee (1940) Emeritus Professor in Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), and the Fulton Professor of Computational Decision Making at Arizona State University, died on June 3 at his home in Belmont, Massachusetts. He was 83 years old. 

Over the course of his career, Bertsekas’ research spanned, and had a definitive influence upon, several fields, including optimization, control, large-scale computation, reinforcement learning, and artificial intelligence. He served as a consultant to various private companies; an editor for several scientific journals; the founder of a publishing company, Athena Scientific; and chief scientific advisor of Bayforest Technologies, a London-based quantitative investment company. However, his most lasting impact may have come through his prolific authorship and co-authorship of over 20 highly influential books, monographs, and textbooks, and through his vast network of students, mentees, friends, and collaborators.

Bertsekas earned his undergraduate degree at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, before obtaining his MS in electrical engineering at George Washington University in 1969, and his PhD in system science at MIT in 1971. He began his faculty career at Stanford University, where he spent three years, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he spent five more before returning to MIT in 1979. He would stay with MIT’s Department of EECS until 2019, at which point he became a full-time faculty member at Arizona State University at Tempe. Along the way, Bertsekas taught, advised, and mentored students who would eventually become his colleagues at all four institutions. 

“Dimitri played a defining role in my career,” says Asu Ozdaglar, department head of EECS at MIT. “I decided to change my research focus after taking his nonlinear optimization class. The conceptual clarity and the mathematical rigor he has brought to every topic, combined with his ability to connect theory to important problems established a foundation that has continued to inform my scholarly work in the years to follow.” Another former MIT student, Jinane Abounadi, now executive director of the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund Program, still remembers Bertsekas’ tutelage as a highlight of her time as a student at MIT: “I feel so fortunate to have had Dimitri as my professor and advisor. I had the opportunity to learn about optimization, dynamic programming, and neuro-dynamic programming from a true master.” 

A former student at the University of Illinois, Steven E. Shreve remembers being impressed by Bertsekas’ course on nonlinear optimization and asking if Bertsekas would consider becoming his PhD advisor. “Rather than answering my question directly, Dimitri gave me a preliminary draft of his manuscript, which eventually became his book 'Dynamic Programming and Stochastic Control,' and asked me to proofread it,” remembers Shreve, now Orion Hoch University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. “From this manuscript, I learned the theory of dynamic programming and mastered many important special cases. Talking with Dimitri as I read, I received one-on-one instruction. When the book finally appeared, Dimitri generously acknowledged my participation, as if I had done him a favor, rather than the other way around.” The gambit was typical of Bertsekas’ understated approach to mentorship; after the first successful collaboration, Bertsekas arranged a research fellowship for Shreve and challenged him to solve a fundamental question in dynamic programming. “I needed to learn a good deal of set theory to even think about the question he asked,” remembers Shreve, whose work on the problem was combined with Bertsekas’ notes to create their co-authored book “Stochastic Optimal Control: The Discrete Time Case.” 

“Working with Dimitri on [that book] is how I learned to write,” says Shreve. “I learned from Dimitri that if you want to be recognized for your research, you must present it so others want to read it, and I learned how to do that.” 

The clarity and elegance of Bertsekas’ explanatory style would become his educational hallmark. “Everyone recognized Dimitri’s great talents as a writer, but he went far beyond that, organizing entire subjects into something that was understandable and a well-organized totality,” says Robert Gallager, professor emeritus of electrical engineering at MIT, who co-authored a 1987 book with Bertsekas entitled “Data Networks.” “The field was changing rapidly then, with a factor-of-two decrease every two years in computation costs, and with optical fiber on the horizon for transmission. Dimitri and I each understood only parts of this field, with the rest a fast-moving learning experience. Dimitri was the ideal partner in this, able to quickly translate hard concepts into simple but accurate explanations and able to combine my knowledge with his into an understandable whole.” 

Bertsekas’ close colleague in LIDS, Munther Dahleh, remembers, “what always struck me was that, through his writing, one could almost hear Dimitri speaking directly to the reader. His intuition, clarity of thought, and distinctive perspective come through beautifully in his books. They reflect not only his profound technical contributions, but also his passion for teaching and his desire to help others understand the subject at a deep level. … In particular, his joint book with John Tsitsiklis on neuro-dynamic programming is a tour de force. It anticipated and helped define many of the ideas that later became central to reinforcement learning and approximate dynamic programming.” 

Tsitsiklis himself remembers the co-writing process with Bertsekas fondly: “For Dimitri, research was a creative form, combining craftsmanship and the creativity that we usually call art.” The definition of art and its practice was a subject of great fascination for Bertsekas, and one that he explored at length in his 2025 essay, “Academia, Art, and Life,” an attempt to meaningfully categorize creative work into three broadly descriptive roles — technician, craftsman, and artist — and to explore the overlaps between the three types of practice. Beyond his clear and lucid writing, Bertsekas was known for his strong graphic eye, a talent which he put to good use not only developing illustrations for all his textbooks, but in taking memorable and artistically inspired photographs of his worldwide travels. 

Longtime collaborator and friend David Castañón, now a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Boston University, remembers Bertsekas as a true Renaissance man who drew inspiration from countless sources: “Dimitri had an insatiable curiosity for algorithmic ideas, both theory and practice. Many of these ideas were inspired by new technologies (parallel computers, reinforcement learning, chess-playing algorithms) ... Whenever we met, Dimitri would introduce new concepts of interest; we would work out theoretical details, design and conduct numerical experiments, and generate results. Then, Dimitri’s artistic talents would take over: designing graphics to illustrate concepts, typesetting text and figures for the papers to be completed. He had a rare gift for generating concise explanations of complex concepts. These talents led to his publishing company Athena Scientific, where Dimitri and his coauthors generated elegant pedagogical volumes with broad appeal.” Tsitsiklis agrees, noting, “for Dimitri, [research] was about discovering meaning, to uncover the 'right' way to view a subject, enrich it, and convey it in a crystal-clear manner through his prolific writings.” 

Many of the 20-plus books either authored or co-authored by Bertsekas were adopted for use as textbooks at MIT in subjects including data networks, nonlinear programming, dynamic programming, network optimization, parallel and distributed computation, neuro-dynamic programming, convex analysis and optimization, probability, and reinforcement learning. Stephen Boyd, Samsung Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford, testifies to the great impact of Bertsekas’ collected works: “generations of researchers in optimization, control, and many related areas learned these topics from Dimitri’s exquisitely clear and beautifully written text books. I was one of them; indeed, I went into these fields in no small part because of Dimitri’s books, and his influence has been with me the whole time.”

That influence can be measured by the sheer number of awards and honors Bertsekas accumulated over the course of his career, including the INFORMS 1997 Prize for Research Excellence in the Interface Between Operations Research and Computer Science for Neuro-Dynamic Programming, the 2001 ACC John R. Ragazzini Education Award, the 2009 INFORMS Expository Writing Award, the 2014 ACC Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award for “contributions to the foundations of deterministic and stochastic optimization-based methods in systems and control,” the 2014 Khachiyan Prize for Life-Time Accomplishments in Optimization, the SIAM/MOS 2015 George B. Dantzig Prize, and the 2022 IEEE Control Systems Award. Together with his coauthor John Tsitsiklis, he was awarded the 2018 INFORMS John von Neumann Theory Prize for the contributions of the research monographs “Parallel and Distributed Computation” and “Neuro-Dynamic Programming.” In 2001, Bertsekas was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering for “pioneering contributions to fundamental research, practice and education of optimization/control theory.”

However, a more personal measure of Bertsekas’ impact can be taken by the warmth and affection with which his friends, co-workers, and former students uniformly remember him. Co-author John Tsitsiklis wrote, “I was most fortunate to be one of his apprentices, and to have lived his warmth and friendship.” His former student at MIT, Angelia Nedich, later became Bertsekas’ colleague at Arizona State University. She remembers: “Dimitri was an exceptional mind, a gifted soul that shed light for us seekers, but at the same time he was very humble as he enjoyed simple moments of life, a sip of good coffee, a bite of flavorful food, or a glass of spicy margarita on our road trips in Southwest. That is how I love to remember him.”

Former student Benjamin Van Roy, now a professor at Stanford, wrote about the transformation of Bertsekas from authority figure to friend (and the subject of friendly teasing). “I recall the intimidating comments of more senior PhD students as I began my own PhD journey in LIDS. Some referred to Dimitri as an “immortal.” Another comment I recall fondly — and often reminded Dimitri about — was: “Professor Bertsekas is a very handsome man!” Their bond continued long after Van Roy’s graduation. “Dimitri was a treasure to humanity: one of the great scholars of our time, a Renaissance man, and a phenomenal role model. I was privileged to be among the many he mentored, and even more privileged to count him as a longtime friend.” Yuchao Li, a postdoc mentored by Bertsekas at Arizona State University, remembers his mentor as an almost inexhaustible source of both inspiration and support: “For me, Professor Bertsekas was like a loving father, full of infinite wisdom. … He seemed to know everything, yet he remained deeply humble and open-minded. He was always eager to help, even at the slightest sign of difficulty in my life. He instilled in me a lasting faith in the very best qualities of human beings, and I will strive to carry that faith forward.”

Bertsekas was preceded in death by his son Costas. He is survived by his wife Joanna Bertsekas (née Palashas); his son Telis Bertsekas and his wife Wendy Bertsekas; and three grandchildren, Melina, Alexandros, and Leonidas. 

Harrowing story of an identity theft victim.

Yes, the person made a mistake—they gave the scammer a two-factor authentication code that allowed the scammer to take over their email address. But the real story here is how, for many of us, the security of most of our accounts hangs on the security of our email accounts.

The House Education and Workforce Committee approved the legislation along party lines.

Manufacturers and green groups have already challenged the Trump administration’s decision to give industries five more years to phase out potent greenhouse gases.

The groups allege the Trump administration illegally ended a $7 billion Biden-era residential solar program.

The decision could have implications for a separate but related fight over the $20 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund grants.

The decision is a loss for green groups who claimed the commission should have done more to evaluate harm.

Previous El Niños have dried up freshwater lakes supplying the canal, causing the Panama Canal Authority to impose daily transit restrictions.

Wars and geopolitical tensions can disrupt shipping, energy supplies and agricultural inputs, increasing costs across food systems already strained by inflation.

Swollen rivers and flooded roads have stranded 104,271 people, officials reported, warning that overwhelmed rivers will remain a threat even when the rainfall eases.

Video footage from the provincial capital city of Parun showed scenes of utter devastation, with piles of mud, rocks and rubble where buildings used to be

Intermediary liability laws around the world recognize that social media platforms, search engines, and other online service providers have become an integral part of our lives: they shape how we access information, communicate with others and participate in public debate, and foster innovation online. These laws generally shield platforms, to varying degrees, from legal liability for user content: the responsibility for unlawful speech should rest primarily with the speaker, not with those who merely host it.  

These liability protections are not a gift for platforms. They exist so that platforms are not encouraged to proactively monitor and filter what we say online, or to remove even lawful speech simply to avoid legal risk. 

This is why a recent judgment by the EU Court of Justice, Coyote System (Joined Cases C-188/24 and C-190/24), is concerning: it could deprive online platforms of liability protection because of how they organize and disseminate user content. The consequences for freedom of expression could be significant. 

Liability Protections in the EU 

The European Union has long embraced a system of limited liability for online service providers. Under the e-Commerce Directive and now the Digital Services Act (DSA), platforms benefit from liability exemptions for user content. To discourage censorship, they also cannot be required to generally monitor user content or actively search for illegal activity. But that liability protection comes with qualifications: Platforms lose this benefit if they play an "active role" such that they have knowledge of, or control over, user-provided information (Recital 42 ECD, Recital 18 DSA, and case law, for example para. 113 in L’Oréal v eBay). For hosting services, providers must remove or disable content they know to be illegal. The DSA has introduced extensive due diligence obligations for platforms but left these foundational immunities intact. The message is clear: platforms bear responsibility for proper systems and processes, but generally not for users' speech. 

Coyote System, however, could undermine this balance. Confronted with a case about restrictions on navigation systems that transmit information to drivers about roadside checks, the Court formulated a general test for when an intermediary ceases to be a "neutral" host and therefore loses the hosting liability exemption. In essence, the Court held that where an intermediary's algorithm goes beyond merely categorizing and indexing user information to determine, "under what conditions, how and in which order of priority" (para. 122) information is disseminated, the intermediary "controls" that information and is deprived of protection under the e-Commerce Directive. 

Let's be clear: the case is not about a service that ranked or recommended user-generated content in the way social media platforms do. It is about the collection and real-time relay of user alerts about roadside checks. However, the Court's reasoning is not confined to navigation services. Recommendation algorithms determine how and in what order user content is disseminated across virtually every major online platform. Should such platforms now cease to qualify as neutral intermediaries and lose the protection of the hosting liability exemption? The answer should be no. 

The Meaning of Control 

Control has never been understood this broadly. Nor should it be. Every hosting service provider, think of Facebook, Amazon or Bluesky, will have some control over users’ content. If that ability alone ruled the analysis, the liability exemption would become largely meaningless. Instead, the disqualifying “active role” must relate to the actual content itself, not merely the technical means by which that content is organised or disseminated. 

The Court’s own case law reinforces this conclusion: In YouTube and Cyando, it examined a platform that categorises, ranks and recommends user content through algorithms, yet still proceeded on the basis that it could generally benefit from the hosting liability exemption. To be sure, the Court was mainly addressing specific knowledge of illegal content rather than the separate category of control. Even so, the underlying premise is clear: those features do not, by themselves, place a platform outside of protection. Advocate General therefore explained that what matters is the providers "intellectual control of that content" (para 152). The relevant question is who controls the information itself, makes it their own, not who determines how it appears. 

That is precisely where Coyote System breaks new ground and offers a dangerous change of emphasis. By equating algorithmic organisation with content control, the ruling risks excluding social networks and other platforms from the liability exemption and encouraging proactive monitoring of what users say online and removal of lawful content. 

That outcome would have terrible consequences for freedom of expression in the EU. It’s also difficult to reconcile with the structure of the DSA, which certainly does not treat recommendation algorithms as incompatible with intermediary immunity. On the contrary, it accepts them as a defining feature of modern platforms, regulates them extensively through dedicated due diligence obligations, and still leaves the hosting liability regime untouched (it even integrated the YouTube ruling in its preamble!).  

This was no accident: During the DSA negotiations, proposals to deprive platforms of the hosting liability exemption if they optimize, classify, organize or otherwise promote online content were rejected, following successful advocacy by EFF and allies. Would the Court have decided this case differently under the DSA? Probably not. It’s more plausible that the EU judges were influenced by the specific nature of the service, which could explain why the judgment says remarkably, and sadly, little about why intermediary liability exists in the first place and the fundamental rights it serves. Coyote System did not merely transmit user reports but aggregated them into what the Advocate General described as a new "information layer," a distinction omitted by the Court. 

Chipping Away at Intermediary Liability Protections 

The danger is that the Court's broad language on algorithmic curation reaches well beyond that narrow category and, unintentionally or not, chips away at one of the most important safeguards for freedom of expression online.  

Unfortunately, Coyote System does not stand alone. It is the latest in a line of judgments that have gradually narrowed intermediary liability protections. Recently, in Russmedia, the Court privileged preventive content control in the name of data protection, paying little regard to the possibility of reconciling both regimes and the privacy costs of increased monitoring of user content. And in AGCOM, concerning Google's liability for YouTube videos uploaded by creators participating in its Partner Programme, the Court appears to leap from eligibility reviews to specific knowledge of illegal content. 

There is a political risk too. While the top court’s reasoning will be applied by national courts and further refined over time, the European Commission has shown little hesitation in incorporating landmark rulings into legislation. Just recently, in its digital omnibus proposal, it selectively restated part of a recent Court of Justice judgment to justify narrowing privacy rights of users. 

If these trends continue, freedom of expression online will become collateral damage in the EU. 

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 22 July 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02697-8

The authors review ecological novelty—ecological situations with no precedent—arising from climate change. They discuss ecological novelty due to direct and indirect effects of climate change, and due to adaptation and mitigation measures, and explore management options that are against, for or tolerant of ecological novelty.

Stars and galaxies make up much of the universe’s ordinary, observable matter. But for decades, scientists have wrestled with a cosmic conflict: There should be much more. 

Physicists have good estimates of how much matter was present in the early universe. Shortly after the Big Bang, roughly 83 percent of all matter in the universe was composed of invisible dark matter, with ordinary matter making up the rest. And yet, these estimates exceed the amount of ordinary matter seen in stars and galaxies today. Where, then, did all the missing ordinary matter go? 

Now MIT scientists, as part of the CHIME/FRB Collaboration, are using far-off radio signals to reveal missing matter in the vast space between galaxies. The team has developed a new method to search out missing matter by combining locations of galaxies with detections of fast radio bursts. 

A fast radio burst, or FRB, is an ultrabright, millisecond flash of radio waves emitted by extremely energetic phenomena in the distant universe. As it travels through space, the signal from a fast radio burst gets stretched, or “smeared,” in time. The more missing matter that it passes through, the more smeared the signal becomes. 

The MIT-led team measured the degree of smearing experienced by thousands of FRB signals detected on Earth. Then they compared each FRB smear with locations of galaxies across the universe to determine how much of an FRB’s smearing was due to galaxy matter versus other, missing matter. 

The new method revealed not only whether missing matter was present, but also where. Specifically, the researchers discovered that it exists in very diffuse clouds surrounding groups of galaxies. These clouds extend out from the galaxies, to much further distances than scientists had predicted. 

“We find that, overall, where there are more galaxies, there tends to be more missing matter around them,” says Haochen Wang, a graduate student in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

The results, reported today in the journal Physical Review Letters, support the idea that matter is flung outside a galaxy through black hole jets, exploding stars, and other highly energetic processes within a galaxy. What’s more, the findings suggest that such processes are more energetic than scientists had thought. 

“We’re finding missing matter that is pushed out to larger scales,” says Kiyoshi Masui, associate professor of physics at MIT. “These measurements indicate that star activity, and activity from black holes, is stronger and much more violent than predicted.”

Masui and Wang are co-authors of the new study, which includes Shion Andrew, Adam Lanman, Kenzie Nimmo, and Ryan Raikman from MIT, and collaborators from multiple other institutions as part of the CHIME/FRB Collaboration. 

The shape of matter

The vast majority of ordinary, observable matter in the universe is built from baryons — a type of subatomic particle that includes protons and neutrons, and that makes up most of an atom’s mass. Scientists estimate that just 17 percent of the early universe was made from this “baryonic” matter, shortly after the Big Bang. 

Some of that early matter was forged into every substantial thing we see today, from planets, stars, and galaxies, to our own bodies. But as scientists have realized, this matter doesn’t quite add up. The total mass of all the stars, galaxies, and galactic clouds is about a tenth of the baryonic matter that existed in the early universe. There must be more matter, likely in the spaces between galaxies. But the universe is vast. Any leftover matter likely exists at extremely low densities, of around a single proton per cubic meter, making it extremely challenging to detect.  

Recently, however, Masui and others have found that such missing matter could be sussed out using fast radio bursts. FRBs were first discovered in 2007, and since then astronomers have detected several thousand of the mysterious, ultrashort signals from distant galaxies, billions of light years away. 

“What makes FRBs good to probe missing matter is that they have a special property,” Wang says. “They start out as a very quick flash, and as they pass through matter, they smear out in time. And we can measure that smearing very precisely, which is directly proportional to how much missing matter the FRB passed through.”

Researchers have previously taken advantage of this smearing property of FRBs to detect missing matter around galaxies. These efforts have confirmed that tenous clouds exist in the vast spaces between galaxies. Masui and Wang wanted to go a step further. 

“We’re not just probing if the gas is with the galaxy or not, but we are seeing the shape of the missing matter that’s around the galaxies,” Wang says. “By mapping the shape of missing matter, we can understand how galaxies form and how they interact with their environment.”

Galactic fountains

For their new study, the team mapped the shape of missing matter around galaxies by cross-correlating thousands of FRB measurements with locations of millions of galaxies. They used data from two sources: the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey. 

CHIME is a large radio telescope located in British Columbia, Canada, that is designed to scan the entire northern sky for incoming radio waves. The telescope is sensitive to ultrashort, ultrabright radio signals, and since it began observing, CHIME has detected about 4,000 fast radio bursts across the sky. 

DESI is an instrument that is mounted on the Mayall Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, near Tucson, Arizona. The instrument makes detailed measurements of the light coming from over 30 million galaxies, to provide estimates of dark energy — the mysterious force that drives the expansion of the universe. 

From CHIME’s catalog of detections, members of the CHIME/FRB collaboration analyzed 2,870 FRB signals. Each signal is a burst of radio waves, at multiple wavelengths, from highest to lowest energy. The higher-energy “blue” waves typically are less affected by any missing matter they travel through, and therefore should arrive at a detector before lower-energy “red” wavelengths, which are more delayed, or “smeared,” in time. 

The team measured the smearing of each FRB’s various wavelengths, which they could then directly relate to the amount of matter that the FRB must have traveled through before reaching CHIME’s detectors. Masui and Wang then correlated these measurements with the locations of over 6 million galaxies provided by DESI data. In this way, they could look for an association between the missing matter and the galaxies, and measure where one is in relation to the other. 

Their analysis revealed a pattern: Missing baryonic matter tended to be found around galaxies and galaxy clusters. But rather than gathering close to galaxies in a dense ball, missing matter was scattered across a large radius, similar to a diffuse puff. 

“A galaxy is maybe a few 100,000 light years across, and we found missing matter out to about 4 million light years,” Masui says. “That’s further than the simulations predict, by quite a bit.”

“We are finding that the activity in galaxies is messier than we thought,” Wang says. “They’re more like fountains, and really push out gas to very large distances.”

The new results show that fast radio bursts can be a reliable method by which to search for missing matter. As CHIME continues to detect more FRBs, the team says its method can only improve.

“We got it to work for the first time, and will get it to work even more precisely as data gets better,” Masui says. 

CHIME and CHIME/FRB are supported by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and, the provinces of British Columbia, Québec, and Ontario. This study was supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

On June 4, colleagues held homemade signs, waved pompoms, and cheered loudly for award recipients in Kresge Auditorium. Twenty individuals and three teams received MIT Excellence Awards — the Institute’s highest honor for staff. Additional honors included the Collier Medal, the Staff Award for Distinction in Service, and the Gordon Y. Billard Award. 

The Collier Medal honors the memory of MIT police officer Sean Collier, who gave his life in service to the MIT community. Recipients embody a deep commitment to community and approach their work with compassion for others. The Staff Award for Distinction in Service is presented to an individual who approaches their work with kindness, empathy, and approachability, and serves as a trusted adviser at the Institute. The Gordon Y. Billard Award is given to staff or faculty members, or MIT-affiliated individuals, who make "significant and lasting contributions to the MIT community."

The 2026 MIT Excellence Award recipients and their categories are: 

Bringing Out the Best 

• Robin Elices 

• Kate McCarthy 

• Jim Mitchell 

Embracing Inclusion 

• Allison Chang 

• Mandana Sassanfar 

Innovative Solutions 

• Kayla S. (KB) Burt 

• Amanda Jarvis 

• Julie Uva 

• Sustainability Team (Yu Cheng, Brian Goldberg, Susy Jones, Steve Lanou, Ellie McLane, and Julie Newman) 

Outstanding Contributor 

• Barry Pugatch 

• Emma Shortall 

• Chao Li 

• Catherine Nunziata 

• Trinidad Carney 

• Gang Liu 

• Laura von Bosau 

• James Daley 

• Craig Rowe 

• MIT Health Housekeeping Team (Michael Batista, Maria Coelho, Mae Evans, Maria Fatima Rosario, Selam Stefanos, Claudia Teixeira, and Claudia Vidal)

Serving Our Community 

• Olivia Cheo 

• Clayton Hainsworth 

• Atsushi Takahashi 

• MIT Health Ambulatory Safety Net and Population Management Team (Michele M. A. David, Solanlly Mendez, Pamela Mensah, Nicole Napier, Lucus David Sensius, and Stephanie Shaprio)

The 2026 Collier Medal recipient was Michael Grenier, pub manager, dining, Division of Student Life. At the Muddy Charles and the Thirsty Ear pubs, Grenier creates spaces where MIT community members can relax, meet friends, and find unconditional support. His acts of kindness are woven into the atmosphere he creates, and alumni regard him as someone who shaped an important part of their early adult lives. 

This year’s winner of the Staff Award for Distinction in Service was Christina Couch, associate director and lecturer, MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing, Comparative Media Studies, School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (SHASS). Couch has been an invaluable member of the SHASS community — as a student, alumna, and staff member. Through her work, she has created opportunities for students to interact and build relationships with professional journalists, and underlying everything she does is her compassion and deep belief in student potential.

Three community members were honored with a 2026 Gordon Y. Billard Award.  

• Cullen R. Buie, professor of mechanical and biological engineering, associate department head of mechanical engineering, and head of house, Maseeh Hall 

• Traci Swartz, assistant director, Community Services Office, Institute Affairs, Office of the President 

• David L. Verrill, executive director, Initiative on the Digital Economy, MIT Sloan School of Management 

Presenters included Provost Anantha Chandrakasan; MIT Chief of Police John DiFava and Captain Andrew Turco; Executive Vice President and Treasurer Glen Shor; Associate Provost Maria Yang; Dean of the School of Science Nergis Mavalvala; Lincoln Laboratory Assistant Director Justin Brooke; Vice President for Human Resources Ramona Allen; and Chancellor Melissa Nobles. 

Visit the MIT Human Resources website for more information about the award recipients, categories, and to view photos and video of the event. 

Every year, MIT’s graduation coincides with the joyful reunion of classes past, but this year brought a special occasion for the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). Senior Lecturer Gim Hom hosted a special reunion for around 15 of his classmates from the Class of 1971 in the Cypress Engineering Design Studio, a staffed makerspace and classroom run by the department. (Yes, for those of you doing some hasty subtraction, that is a 55th-year reunion.) Participants worked with electronic components just as they did in labs long ago, building their choice of two projects: a simplified electrocardiogram (ECG) and an audio amplifier. But the event wasn’t only a reunion. For Hom, the activity doubled as his chance to teach a “last class.” 

He explains: “As a lecturer, I use real-world problems and solutions to teach concepts in analog and digital design. For the reunion activity, I drew upon two existing labs from my courses and stripped out the theory material, leaving only the assembly for the reunion activity.”

For the first activity, attendees refreshed their soldering skills, assembling a printed circuit board (PCB) that approximated the design of an ECG before attaching electrodes and rolling up their sleeves (literally) to view the electrical impulses of their heartbeats. Hom explains that “in 6.2040 (Analog Lab), I use the ECG as a platform for teaching signal acquisition, filtering, and display. Students first analyze the design of an ECG circuit and then build and solder the board themselves, gaining hands-on experience with printed circuit board assembly. For many students, this is their first exposure to soldering.”

In the second activity, the alumni learned to surface mount solder, a skill that, while technically possible, had not yet become popularized during their time as undergraduates at MIT. “Modern electronics primarily rely on surface-mount technology (SMT),” explains Hom. “To give students exposure to SMT assembly, I designed an optional laboratory project: a small USB-powered audio amplifier that students can use to play music from their phones. While external speakers must be connected, the amplifier yields surprisingly good sound quality.”

Throughout the day, technical instructors Anthony Pennes and Liam Ackerman (both coincidentally celebrating their own reunions, at 10 and 5 years out from MIT, respectively) remained on hand to answer questions and familiarize attendees with the technology available in the Engineering Design Studio, which is open to the EECS community from morning until nearly midnight throughout the school year. 

“It was wonderful to see alumni leave with a working board with big smiles on their faces,” says Hom, who, while no longer teaching, will continue part time as an advisor to EECS students.

Meanwhile, his classmates have a working memento of their time at MIT — and a reminder that technical skills can last a lifetime. 

It’s a lot:

According to information obtained by The Tech, MIT is spending over $3 million on more than 500 AI surveillance cameras in academic buildings, residence halls, and outdoor areas along Memorial Drive. Installation of the new cameras, along with the wiring and infrastructure that will support them, began November 2025 and will likely continue until September 2026.

Technical specifications for the cameras suggest that they will be capable of collecting real-time face and object classification data, including detection of motion, loitering, crowds, face masks, and camera tampering. Individuals can also be automatically classified on the basis of clothing color, gender, and age, up to a distance of 35 feet (11 meters) from the camera. According to a statement from MIT spokesperson Kimberly Allen, any collected data is “retained up to 30 days,” unless an exception is granted...

The president invoked an obscure process to review the institution's federal grants over what he says is "climate fraud."