Nature Climate Change, Published online: 21 July 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02716-8

Whether news presents climate change as something happening now or in the future impacts public risk perceptions and climate action. A recent study shows that, in US news, the timing of anticipated climate impacts has got closer but coordinated climate actions are consistently deferred to the future.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 21 July 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02723-9

COP meetings have faced criticism and calls for reform, yet evidence on reform choices remains limited. Here a survey of COP participants reveals broad support for enhancing transparency and implementation, while proposals to change consensus rules or the COP presidency are less favoured.

Are you a California resident? Then we've got exciting news for you: there's a tool just for you that lets you take a single, relatively easy step to protect your privacy. 

It's called a DROP request. (That's Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, if you're fancy). This one bit of paperwork lets you tell every data broker registered in the state of California that you'd like them to delete your information from their databases and request they stop selling and sharing your information. 

Here are some things to know about DROP. 

(Don’t want all the details and want to just learn how to file a request? Skip to this section.)

What does a request do?

Filing a request on the DROP will send a request to delete and opt-out of sale to all the data brokers in California's registry. Data brokers are companies that collect information about people, repackage that information, and sell it. As of time of writing, a single DROP request reaches 614 brokers.

After August 1, once data brokers receive a request, they will have 45 days to address the request. 

DROP officially launched on Jan. 1 of this year, but companies have until Aug. 1 to begin complying with requests. That means if you file a request now, you'll be in on the ground floor.

Didn't I hear about this before?

If you pay attention to EFF, you sure did. With your help, we advocated for the law creating the DROP tool, the Delete Act. As we said then, we needed the DROP because Californians have a right to request that companies delete information collected about them, and a right to opt-out of having businesses sell information about them. Yet, in reality, making those requests is an incredibly time-consuming and tedious process. Filing each request is hard. Plus, because data brokers buy, sell, and exchange information with so many companies (and each other) people may not even know who to file a request with. By linking a request to California's data broker registry, DROP cuts this process down considerably.

We advocated for DROP and the Delete Act because it makes our privacy law more user-friendly, which gives us better control over our data and reduces the risks that the uncontrolled collection and sale of personal information creates in our everyday lives. 

What's in it for me?

Filing a request benefits you in a few ways. For one, data brokers are often how spammers (or companies that act like spammers) get your email address, phone number, and other ways of contacting you. Removing yourself from data broker lists could lead to a decrease in these kinds of messages. Second, reducing the number of companies that have your personal information also improves your personal cybersecurity, as it decreases the number of firms with your information who could be hacked. Third and finally, it gives you an opportunity to exert more control over how your personal information is collected and used—an important element of privacy. Unless you opt out, data brokers can sell your private information to predatory companies, scammers, stalkers, insurance companies, and law enforcement.

What kinds of information will (and won't) be deleted?

The California Privacy Protection Agency, which administers the DROP, has a great resource explaining what data are and are not included in a request. But in summary, a request will often deal with identifying information such as: social security number, precise geolocation, browsing history, email address, and phone numbers. It will also enter a request to delete guesses that data brokers may have made about you based on identifying information, such as political views, inferences about your health—inferences about pregnancy or chronic illness, for example, that may be based on purchases or browsing history.

Not all information will be deleted. Some information, such as vehicle or real estate ownership, contains information that is a matter of public record. 

If there is a specific data broker you'd like to be able to retain and continue selling your data, the system also gives you a way to remove them from the list of brokers that get any given request. 

How do I file?

Head to the California Privacy Protection Agency's DROP website to start your request. Before you start, there are a few pieces of information you may want to gather for your request, such as your advertising ID or your VIN number, if you want this information to be deleted from data broker databases. 

The agency does ask to collect some personal information—name, address, phone number, email address, etc.—in order to fulfill a request. (Yes, there is an irony to this.) This is to verify that you're the right person asking for your deletion and opt-out request in any given database, and the agency itself is bound to its terms of service that say they won't sell or share it for other purposes.  

If you're interested in filing a request for someone else, such as an elderly relative drowning in junk mail, you can also do that but will need to attest that you're filing for someone else who is a resident of California. 

Once you've filed, you will get a DROP ID, which you can use to check in on your request. If you lose this ID, you can contact the agency to recover it, but keep it in a safe place if you want to check in on the status of your request.  

If I file once, am I done forever?

Unfortunately, no. While the opt-out of sale request should last indefinitely, California's privacy law still allows companies to collect information without asking for permission first in most cases. That means data brokers are likely to continue to collect information for profiles of you—but they will will have less data and be limited in how they use it after an opt-out request. New data brokers may also register with the state after you file your request. And DROP won't stop companies who aren't registered data brokers, like Google, from collecting and sharing your personal information.

Two things can be true. DROP is a fantastic tool to help more people exercise their California privacy rights. We also still need even stronger privacy laws to make things more fair for everyday people. 

That fact shouldn't undercut the power of this tool, but it does mean that you may want to make updating your request a regular part of a broader plan to manage your digital footprint. For example, might we suggest doing it as a part of Opt-Out October—a thing we totally made up but also totally stand behind?

What if I'm not in California?

Also unfortunately for those who don't live in California, this tool only works for California residents. But it's not all bad news. Versions of the Delete Act have been introduced around the country, and many regulators are monitoring how California's system works to see whether a similar system might work in their own states. Residents of all states can use EFF’s Opt-Out October guide to bolster their online privacy and limit the ways that data brokers harvest their personal data. 

A new report from the Government Accounting Office reveals that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to nearly triple the number of surveillance towers along U.S. borders, from the current 830 to 2,300 by 2034.

DHS expects to expend $1 billion in taxpayer dollars for this dangerous expansion of a surveillance network indiscriminately trained on towns, school playgrounds, backyards, and vehicles—threatening the privacy and civil liberties of everyone in the border regions.

The towers are planned as part of DHS component Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Integrated Surveillance Tower (IST) program, which captures images of people and vehicles. The IST program operates autonomous surveillance towers, consisting of autonomous surveillance towers, consisting of AI-based systems using radar, thermal infrared and optical systems to track targets over long distances; integrated fixed towers, optimized for surveilling foot traffic and vehicles; and remote video surveillance systems, which can often be found very close to the border fence in Arizona, including residential neighborhoods where cameras are capable of spying on homes on both sides of the border. (For a description and photos of these technologies, see EFF’s updated guide to surveillance at the U.S.-Mexico Border.)

DHS expects to purchase more long-range autonomous towers and to upgrade existing towers with autonomous capabilities. The $1 billion comes from the so-called One Big Beautiful Act—a massive tax and spending law that President Trump signed in 2025, the report says.

The explosive expansion of border surveillance is a digital dumpster fire for human rights and civil liberties. It’s not just surveillance towers; drones, aerostats, surveillance vehicles, ground sensors, game cameras, and license plate readers are also part of the vast taxpayer-funded infrastructure that threatens all those who live, work, or seek refuge in the borderlands. This technology isn’t exclusive to U.S. federal agencies: it’s also deployed by state and local law enforcement, and even by governments on the Mexican side.

Since 2022, EFF has studied and mapped surveillance technology along the U.S.-Mexico border using public records research, open-source intelligence, and fact-finding trips, and created a handy interactive map to provide researchers and journalists with the tools they need to analyze the impact of U.S. border security policy. We have also documented the different types of surveillance technology in a zine, "Surveillance Technology at the U.S.-Mexico Border." We updated the publication earlier this year to help people identify the machinery of homeland security by adding more models of surveillance towers, newly deployed military tech, and a gallery of disguised trail cams and automated license plate readers.

EFF’s work includes defending the rights of individuals whose devices have been searched or seized upon entering the country; pushing back on the collection of biometric and social media identifiers; and developing digital security guidance for people crossing borders.

With the web of surveillance tech at the borders about to explode, EFF will continue to investigate and expose it and find ways to fight back with the communities that live in the shadow of this technological threat to human rights.

There’s a new boogeyman in the battles over AI: so-called “stealth crawlers.” We’ll admit it—the term “stealth crawlers” sounds quite nefarious. In reality, they’re anything but.

“Stealth crawlers” are simply automated tools to access and collect public web data—without disclosing the user’s identity. Private crawlers like these facilitate all kinds of important work that benefits the public, including investigative reporting, academic research, cybersecurity protection, and more.

Many publishers want to unmask crawlers anyways—and are pushing for new legislation that would give them new powers to do so. These legislative proposals threaten the open web, user privacy, and valuable research without directly addressing the problems they’re supposedly intending to solve.

Alarmingly, these harmful proposals are gaining traction. The New York state legislature has already passed such a bill, the NY Stealth Crawler Protection Act, which is now on Governor Hochul’s desk. We expect to see similar bills introduced in other states, and potentially in Congress. That’s a big problem for the open web—and the many benefits it provides.

Anonymous crawling is worth protecting

Anonymous crawling enables some of the most publicly beneficial uses of the open web. Researchers, journalists, and other watchdog groups use unidentified automated tools to gather the information necessary to hold powerful institutions accountable and protect the public.

Anonymous crawling fuels important investigative journalism. For example, The Markup, a non-profit news site, used anonymous crawlers to investigate potentially anti-competitive practices by tech companies, such as Amazon’s tendency to prioritize Amazon brands and Amazon-exclusive products over competitors with higher ratings. The crawlers identified themselves as ordinary Firefox browsers to web servers, which allowed The Markup to understand how Amazon search results pages would appear to ordinary users. Similarly, ProPublica used an automated tool designed to simulate an ordinary Amazon customer to reveal that the site steered shoppers to more expensive products over cheaper alternatives.

Anonymous web scraping is also crucial for cybersecurity professionals, who use automated tools to monitor the web for information that helps them protect against malicious attackers. Privacy tools, including EFF’s own Privacy Badger, also crawl sites anonymously to identify trackers without compromising user privacy.

However, without the ability to scrape anonymously, these tools would likely be blocked. Sites can—and do—block crawlers operated by researchers, journalists, and activists who criticize them. For example, Facebook shut down accounts belonging to researchers who used automated tools to study misinformation on the platform and demanded that they take down published research. Many sites block automated access by anyone who hasn’t paid to crawl public webpages.    

Unmasking crawlers threatens the open web

News publishers—and their allies in government—say that unmasking crawlers is necessary to protect news organizations from technological strain caused by AI-related crawling, and fears that AI could reduce news sites’ traffic and ad revenue. These are legitimate concerns.

But enacting broad, reactionary restrictions on automated access is not the answer. Legislation targeting anonymous crawling threatens the open web, user privacy, and valuable research without actually addressing these technological and potential economic harms of scraping.

The New York state legislature recently passed the NY Stealth Crawler Protection Act, a law that would make it illegal to crawl news websites without revealing who is operating the crawler and all possible future uses of the data collected by the crawler. The law would give websites the power to obtain court orders that unmask anyone using an unidentified crawler—without any evidence that they broke the law.

Laws like the New York bill sweep far beyond AI, and do not meaningfully address the technological or potential harms of AI-related web scraping. These policies would chill beneficial crawling by allowing publishers to veto lawful public access, giving them the power to block not just bad actors, but also security professionals, researchers, dissidents, or anyone who has not paid for a license to view public text. This needlessly undermines the free and open internet.

Digital news publishers—like most websites—face real technological challenges in the AI era. While web crawling has been around for decades, with the proliferation of AI, crawlers now collect far more public web data than they used to. This pushes servers closer to their maximum capacity, and if some bots collect information too aggressively, they may strain web servers to the point that it degrades site performance. The problem is not anonymity—so unmasking crawlers won’t solve it. The real problem is overaggressive crawling, which can be effectively addressed with technical measures that target harmful conduct without impeding anonymous access to information.

A better path forward

There are other, far less harmful ways to protect publishers from the harms these “stealth crawler” laws claim to target. Addressing the harms of AI-related crawling requires policies that narrowly target the causes of these issues–without undermining free expression and the open web. Policies that target crawlers and scrapers are anything but.

A physician and neuroscientist who studies how anesthesia affects the brain; a leader in aerospace engineering, policy, and education; and the founding head of MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering have been awarded MIT’s highest faculty honor: the title of Institute Professor.

With the appointments of Emery Brown, Daniel Hastings SM ’78, PhD ’80, and Douglas Lauffenburger, there are now 12 Institute Professors at MIT, along with 10 Institute Professors Emeriti.

The appointments, which took effect July 1, were announced today in an email to the faculty from Sally Kornbluth, MIT’s president; Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT provost; and Roger Levy, chair of the faculty and a professor of brain and cognitive sciences. 

Emery Brown

Brown, who has been a member of the MIT faculty since 2005, says he is “tremendously honored” to be appointed as an Institute Professor.

“It’s a pleasure to know that your colleagues hold you in such high esteem and that the work that you’re doing is valued,” says Brown, who is the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience, an investigator at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, and a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science. “When you look down the list of people who have had this title, it’s an amazing group.”

After graduating from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics in 1978, Brown earned a PhD in statistics, also from Harvard, and an MD from Harvard Medical School. Since 1992, he has been a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty, and until recently he was a practicing anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. 

Throughout his career, Brown has made contributions in several different areas of neuroscience. In the early stages of his research career, he developed statistical methods to characterize the properties of the human circadian clock. He showed how light exposure can shift the phase of the human clock, depending on the circadian phase during which the light is administered. He also developed methods to demonstrate, from analyses of physiological data collected under special low-light conditions, that the intrinsic period of the human clock, like that of other species, is closer to 24 hours and not 25. Brown also measured the impact of shift work schedules that were designed using circadian physiology. 

Later, he developed new statistical techniques and signal processing methods to analyze data collected in systems neuroscience experiments. As part of this work, he devised algorithms to decode the position of an animal in its environment by reading the activity of a small group of place cell neurons in the animal’s brain. 

Joining MIT’s faculty just over 20 years ago represented an “inflection point” in his career, Brown says. 

“I was an anesthesiologist doing statistical research, interested in neuroscience, and MIT allowed me to tie all those together,” he says. “I could work with colleagues who could help me understand the neuroscience of anesthesia, have another outlet for the statistical research that I was doing, and also more direct interactions with undergraduates and grad students.”

Over the past two decades, Brown has applied statistical techniques to studying what happens to the brain under anesthesia. His work has revealed how drugs such as propofol alter the brain’s intrinsic oscillations, which can be seen with electroencephalography (EEG).

During the awake state, these oscillations usually have high frequencies and low amplitudes, but as anesthetic drugs are given, they shift to low frequencies and high amplitudes. These changes disrupt normal communication between different brain regions, leading to loss of consciousness.

Brown has also shown that these EEG oscillations can be used to monitor whether a patient is too deeply unconscious, and he has developed a closed-loop anesthesia delivery system that can monitor these oscillations in real-time and guide anesthetic dosing during surgery. 

In 2024, Brown was presented with the National Medal of Science. Among his other awards, he is also a recipient of a National Institute of Health Director’s Pioneer Award, the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience, and the Swartz Prize for Computational and Theoretical Neuroscience. He one of a small group of researchers to be an elected member of all three National Academies of Medicine, Sciences, and Engineering, as well as the National Academy of Inventors.

From 2012 to 2022, he served as co-director of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. He has also played an instrumental role in several important efforts at MIT, including the 2010 Report on the Initiative for Faculty Race and Diversity, and the founding of the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) in 2015.

Outside of his work at MIT, Brown served on President Obama’s Brain Initiative Working Group, as well as the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Women in Science and Engineering and the Council of the National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Brown is also known for his commitment to teaching and mentoring students. In 2024, he was named a recipient of MIT’s “Committed to Caring” award — an honor given by MIT’s Office of Graduate Education to faculty members who have served as exceptional mentors to graduate students.

Daniel Hastings

When Hastings, the Cecil (1923) and Ida Green Professor in Education, was notified of the new distinction, it came as a total surprise.

“The people who were there will tell you that I could not believe it at first,” he says. “I never thought of myself as being in the same league as some of the Institute Professors I knew.”

Hastings grew up in England and Jamaica, and developed an early fascination with space, as a fan of the fictional “Star Trek,” and later “Star Wars” and “Stargate” (he’s seen every episode and movie of all three franchises), as well as the very real NASA Apollo program. 

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Oxford University, he enrolled at MIT, earning his master’s degree in 1978 and PhD in 1980, both in aeronautics and astronautics. In 1985 he joined the faculty as an assistant professor and was promoted to full professor in 1993. 

Throughout his tenure, Hastings has made significant and lasting impacts in astronautical engineering, particularly through his studies in space plasma environment interactions, electric propulsion, and space systems architecture. 

His early research on the physical interactions between plasma and spacecraft, for which he co-wrote the definitive text (“Spacecraft Environment Interactions,” published in 1996), enabled the safe operation of solar panels on spacecraft today. Prior to Hastings’ work, high voltage solar arrays on satellites often experienced catastrophic arcing — a dangerous jumping of electrical current from one panel to another. These failures turned out to be a result of interactions with the surrounding space plasma. 

Hastings developed theories to characterize these interactions. His theories informed NASA’s design of the solar panels to power the International Space Station, which are still in operation today. His work also established guidelines across the aerospace industry on the design of resilient solar panels and ways to handle issues once in orbit. 

In his studies of electric propulsion, Hastings characterized the fundamental physical interactions between ion engine plumes and spacecraft systems. His work was pivotal in incorporating ion propulsion systems into many commercial satellites and deep space probes and helped to push what was an experimental technology into mainstream use in space propulsion.

In his more recent work, Hastings has explored the concept of flexible and distributed space architectures. He and his students are developing models for spacecraft that can serve purposes beyond their original mission intent. For instance, a spacecraft may incorporate a port that could serve as a waystation for future satellites to dock and refuel. Such a flexible and distributed system could help to support future missions to the moon and Mars.

In recognition of his research contributions, Hastings received the AIAA Losey Atmospheric Sciences Award in 2002, was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2017, and was recognized as an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) in 2021. 

Throughout his career, Hastings has taken on numerous leadership roles, at the national, international, and Institute levels. Shortly after becoming full professor, he served as associate department head of research in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro). He then took a two-year leave from the Institute to serve as chief scientist of the U.S. Air Force. During that time, he advised the Air Force chief of staff and secretary and successfully strengthened investments in space research in the U.S.  Air Force space program. 

Hastings has served as an advisor on multiple expert panels and boards, including as the chair of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, and as a member of the NASA Advisory Council, the National Science Board, the Intelligence Science Board, and most recently, the Defense Science Board and User Advisory Group of the National Space Council. He has also chaired multiple National Research Council studies and advised the space and engineering industries in various capacities, including serving on the boards of the Aerospace Corporation, Draper, and Blue Origin. He has just finished a two-year term as president of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

At MIT, Hastings has stepped up to serve in pivotal leadership posts. From 2000 to 2005, he served as the director of MIT’s Technology and Policy Program, then director of the Engineering Systems Division. From 2006 to 2013, as dean for undergraduate education, he helped to develop initiatives in equity, financial aid, and curriculum development, and strengthened international education and study abroad programs during a nationally challenging economic period. He received the Gordon Y. Billard Award in 2013 for his work on international education. In 2014 he began a five-year term as director of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, during which he worked to reinforce MIT’s global collaborations. And from 2019 to 2023 he served as head of AeroAstro, supporting new research and educational initiatives as he navigated the department through the global pandemic.

Hastings has also worked in multiple capacities to make the Institute a more welcoming and inclusive community. He has served as associate dean of engineering for diversity, equity, and inclusion (2021-2023), Institute Community and Equity Officer (interim, 2023-2024), and co-chair of the MIT Values Statement Committee, as well as vice chancellor for undergraduate and graduate education (interim, 2024-2025). 

“MIT has been a great place for me,” Hastings reflects. “It has a mission to address some of the most pressing problems in the world. It is a high-energy place. This is a place that I am excited to work in and I want to give back to make it better.”

Douglas Lauffenburger

Lauffenburger, who is the Ford Professor of Biological Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Biology, was the central founder of MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering, which he chaired from its inception in 1998 until 2019.

Before coming to MIT, Lauffenburger earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975 and a PhD from the University of Minnesota at the Twin Cities in 1979, both in chemical engineering. 

While in graduate school, he became fascinated by the biological sciences. Early in his career, as a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania and at the University of Illinois, his research and teaching straddled the line between chemical engineering and cell biology. Due to his unique background, MIT recruited Lauffenburger in the late 1990s to launch its new Department of Biological Engineering.

At the time, many universities had programs in biomedical engineering — an interdisciplinary field that applies techniques from electrical, chemical, or mechanical engineering to medical problems. Lauffenburger envisioned a distinct discipline of biological engineering, in which engineers would pursue an understanding of how biological systems function at the level of molecular and cellular mechanisms, with the goal of manipulating them to create new technologies for applications across medicine, energy, the environment, nutrition, and manufacturing.

“What was clear to me was that because biological systems comprise molecular processes, which are integrated in very complex ways, a true engineering analysis and design approach ought to be useful in moving it beyond mere tinkering and trial-and-error,” he says. “We needed to develop engineering frameworks for biology based on design principles, models, and predictions.”

As department head, Lauffenburger guided the development of new curricula at both graduate and undergraduate levels, and recruited faculty members whose work spanned engineering, molecular and cellular biology, microbiology, and immunology. The new department began offering graduate degrees in the late 1990s, and an undergraduate major beginning in 2005. Since its inception, the program has served as a model for similar programs at many other institutions worldwide.

Lauffenburger described being named an Institute Professor as “an honor that is especially gratifying because it recognizes the extraordinary impact of our unique MIT biological engineering department. I’ve been blessed with the rare opportunity to help create something revolutionary, here in this remarkable institution.”

Lauffenburger also played key roles in launching new interdisciplinary programs within MIT and with other institutions, including the Center for Biomedical Engineering, the Computational and Systems Biology Initiative, the DuPont-MIT Alliance, and the Cambridge-MIT Initiative.

His research has touched on many areas of biological science, including molecular cell biology, systems biology, and computational biology. Much of his work focuses on unraveling cell signaling mechanisms, using a combination of computational modeling and quantitative experiments. This work has shed light on processes such as cell proliferation, death, adhesion, and migration.

In the field of systems biology, he has created computational models across a spectrum of mathematical approaches, which can be used to identify drug targets and patient stratification strategies for a variety of diseases, including cancer and chronic inflammation, and predict the efficacy of drugs against those targets. 

In 2021, he and Linda Griffith, the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation at MIT, were jointly awarded the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education, the most prestigious engineering education award in the United States.

Lauffenburger is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a founding fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and has served as president of the Biomedical Engineering Society.

A recent story of a writer who was mistakenly identified, tracked, and arrested using data from Flock cameras has gone viral.

The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw ...

With states still brawling over how to share dwindling flows, the Trump administration is about to take control.

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty will also have to bridge policy differences inside the solar industry.

President Donald Trump’s latest pick to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency faced a tense confirmation hearing last month.

The preparations come as meteorologists warn that El Niño is already underway and increasingly likely to strengthen through the remainder of the year.

More than one-third of species of shark are at risk of extinction due to overfishing, habitat degradation and climate change, according to officials.

A U.N. agency said Brussels’ draft bill “would undermine the only globally harmonized measure applying to CO2 emissions from international aviation and result in duplicative measures."

The region relies almost exclusively on technology to produce fresh water that sustains cities, hotels, industry and some agriculture.

Lots of articles about this.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

The MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) and Dean Agustín Rayo recently welcomed six new professors to the MIT community. They arrive with diverse backgrounds and vast knowledge in their areas of research.

Grisha Coleman is a full professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section. Her research explores tensions between our physiological, technological, and ecological systems; human movement, our machines, and the places we inhabit. Her practice engages an interdisciplinary approach to these explorations. Coleman received the Doris Duke Foundation’s Performing Arts Technologies Lab Award. Her work has been supported by Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, MacDowell, the MAP Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Pioneer Works, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Stanford University’s Mohr Visiting Artist program, and the Surdna Foundation. Coleman was previously a professor at Northeastern University and an associate professor at Arizona State University. She earned an MFA in music composition and integrated media from California Institute of the Arts.

Tung-Hui Hu is an associate professor with tenure in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing program. A poet and a scholar of digital media, he is the author of five books, most recently “Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection” (MIT Press, 2022), “A Prehistory of the Cloud” (MIT Press, 2015), and “Greenhouses, Lighthouses” (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). Hu is interested in how concepts such as race and normal language became measurable, governable objects in the form of datasets. His research on data centers, artificial intelligence, burnout, and visual art has been featured in places such as CBS News, BBC Radio 4, WIRED, and MoMA R&D. He has been awarded fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy in Berlin. Prior to joining MIT, he was a faculty member at the University of Michigan.

Claire Luchette is an assistant professor in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing program. Luchette is the author of the novel “Agatha of Little Neon.” The winner of a Whiting Award and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, Luchette has received fellowships from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Their writing appears in Best American Short Stories, Ploughshares, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. Their second novel, “Swans,” and a story collection, “Big Whoop,” are forthcoming.

Shota Momma is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. Momma is a specialist in psycholinguistics and its interaction with linguistic theory — with a particular focus on the mechanisms of sentence production. Previously, Momma taught as an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He earned a PhD in linguistics from the University of Maryland and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California San Diego. 

Lindsey Raymond PhD ’24 is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics, holding an MIT Schwarzman College of Computing shared position with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Her research examines how new technologies shape labor markets and market competition, and how insights from economics can inform algorithm design. She is a Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellow and served as a staff economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers in 2021–22. Before joining MIT, Raymond was a postdoc at Microsoft Research. She earned her PhD from MIT and her BA from Yale University.

Makoto Harris Takao is the Class of 1957 Career Development Professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section. Working at the intersection of cultural history, religious studies, and musicology, Takao maps Japan’s entanglement with other world regions over the past 500 years. His current book project, “The Clef and the Cross: Music and Kirishitan Transculturation in Sixteenth-Century Japan,” asks what early modern Japanese Catholicism sounded like and how it was understood and expressed through Buddhist frameworks of sound, music, and movement. His work to date has appeared in such venues as Early Music, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, Journal of Religious History, Journal of Jesuit Studies, Zeithistorische Forschungen, and Oxford Bibliographies in Music. A player of the viola da gamba, Takao completed a joint PhD in history and musicology at the University of Western Australia. Before joining MIT, he was an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Ever since she was a child playing on her family’s farmland in Wisconsin, Bailey Flanigan was guided by her own selective, yet wide-ranging, curiosity. Describing her young self as spirited and a bit unruly, she directed her energies to everything from building booby traps to doing experimental construction projects to exploring an intense interest in medicine to writing fiction and music to planning nonprofit organizations to help lessen social inequality.

By high school, Flanigan was intensely drawn to particular subjects.

“I found myself unmotivated to take all the AP [advanced placement] classes for the sake of it. My interest was captured by classes where I could be creative — where I could use math to solve real-world problems, creatively write, make music, connect distant ideas, or deeply explore the humanities — and I worked on such classes obsessively, as an opportunity to explore my intuitions and interests,” she says. “Instead of joining clubs, I ended up spending a lot of time thinking and creating on my own, and trying to understand what I enjoyed.”

Today Flanigan is a shared faculty member between the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the MIT departments of Political Science and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and a principal investigator in the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. She has been involved in research at the University of Wisconsin, the National Institutes of Health, Google, and Carnegie Mellon, Drexel, Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford universities. Her current work focuses on using computational and mathematical tools to create new avenues for meaningful democratic participation.

Perhaps not surprisingly, her path has crossed huge expanses of subject matter and specialties — from medicine and bioengineering to public health, and from economics to her joint appointment at MIT in computer science and political science, which began in fall 2025.

“My trajectory across disciplines was just a result of me chasing down the problems I felt were most pressing or inspiring at the time. Along the way, I wound up in a lot of situations where I was less well-trained or qualified in the standard ways. While this was sometimes precarious, it was also incredibly fun, and it cultivated my ability to learn the languages of new disciplines more easily — a skill pretty much essential to my current research and job.”

In college at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Flanigan worked in a wet lab on therapeutic targets in cancer and computationally on tumor genetics. She says she found the research intellectually interesting, but eventually began to wonder about whether it would have the kind of impact she wanted.

“At the time, I started to worry that the science I was developing might only, in the best case, be used by a small, relatively wealthy fraction of the world, when there were people suffering from much more-preventable diseases in much larger numbers,” she says.

So Flanigan moved toward public health, where she researched microfluidic devices for HIV detection that could be used in low-resource settings. Still bothered by the circumstances driving these settings’ limited resources to begin with, she then started to dabble in economics.

Around the same time, Flanigan’s academic advisors were chipping away at preconceptions she held about her own abilities.

Steven Wright, a professor of law and creative writing at UW-Madison, served as Flanigan’s informal mentor throughout college, and they worked together on a case at the Wisconsin Innocence Project.

“He guided me through my evolving interests in science, social inequality, and economics,” she says. “He was one of the people most responsible for convincing me that I could aim higher in my career, and that I could actually go to places like MIT or Harvard.”

Also while she was in college, the two heads of the UW-Madison scholarship office, Debbie Berger and Julie Stubbs, sent Flanigan repeated emails, encouraging her to apply for a Goldwater Scholarship.

“I kept deleting their emails, thinking they were spam — I didn’t think I was the kind of person that would apply for something like that. Their persistence convinced me to apply, and in the process, the horizons I perceived for myself started to change,” she says.

After graduating from UW-Madison, Flanigan worked as a predoctoral research assistant in economics at Princeton. There, Professor Evita Nestoridi, now an associate professor at Stony Brook University, also provided a pivotal moment of support, letting Flanigan audit her real analysis class.

“Evita’s class was my first real exposure to formal mathematics and proofs, and I loved it so much that it completely changed my career trajectory,” Flanigan says. “Despite my initial doubts, she convinced me that I could do math at the graduate level; because of her encouragement, I applied to computer science PhD programs the subsequent fall.”

Choosing Carnegie Mellon for her PhD, Flanigan began research on social choice and democratic decision-making, serving her dual passions for technical research and the issue of “who gets what and why,” she says, quoting Nobel Prize-winning economist Al Roth. 

Flanigan has developed algorithms that randomly choose participants of citizens’ assemblies, designed for the common case where willing participants self-select in ways that do not reflect the larger population. In a policy brief, Flanigan gave a hypothetical  example of an assembly on artificial intelligence, whose willing participants might skew toward younger, more educated citizens with an interest in technology, leaving other groups underrepresented despite their stake in the issue. The tools Flanigan has developed help balance representation with such features of the selection process as equality among individuals’ chances to participate, resistance to manipulation of the process, and transparency — all of which can affect the general perception of a decision-making group’s legitimacy.

Flanigan’s work is now deployed on panelot.org, a widely used open-access website hosting algorithms for randomly selecting citizen assembly participants.

“The site basically walks practitioners through a series of otherwise very technical trade-offs, making those trade-offs legible and then optimizing according to the priorities practitioners dictate,” she says.

Flanigan says she is motivated to improve how the public makes political decisions, “because if any political solution is going to be viable, the public needs to feel that it was arrived at via a legitimate political process — at least under the forms of government I find most appealing.”

Beyond her work on citizens’ assemblies, Flanigan’s research is exploring new avenues related to how to more systematically get public input on complex decisions, and how the format of questions we ask people in preference elicitation contexts can affect the substance of what we conclude.

“I feel so lucky to be studying these questions from within both political science and EECS, because I have the freedom to explore both the political and technical substance of tools for more direct governance as deeply as I want,” she says.

Flanigan’s curiosity-driven journey through widely varying terrain feels right in the MIT environment, she says.

“From the beginning, I got this sense of belonging at MIT — like my ways of thinking and problem-solving, which had seemed peculiar in many situations, actually made me belong more,” she says. “This was a super refreshing feeling, and it has been 100 percent borne out since I arrived.”

Reversing course, Flock Safety—the surveillance technology vendor most known for its extensive network of automated license plate readers—has announced that it will end a pilot for its acoustic gunshot detection devices to identify signs of “human distress.”

In October 2025, EFF warned the public that Flock was rolling out a new feature called “Distress Detection” that would be deployed through their acoustic gunshot detection devices (formerly known as Flock Raven, now called Audio Detection). This feature purported to use high-powered microphones scattered throughout a city to search for sounds of human distress, with original advertisements from the product indicating it would search for “screaming.” (Since the publication of our original blog post, Flock quietly amended the ad on this webpage to say “distress” instead of “screaming.”)

Now, Flock has published a blog post stating that “[a]fter careful consideration and community consultation, we decided to remove the feature.” Good riddance. 

We said it when the product was announced and we’ll say it again: this was a misguided and dangerous feature because of the civil liberties concerns it poses, the possibility it could summon armed police to every loud interaction happening on the street, and because in several places this type of spying would be illegal under state eavesdropping laws. 

We were not quiet about this potential new feature. Flock even mentioned our concern about Distress Detection in an attempt to rebut our opposition to the mass surveillance their products enable.

The suspension of Distress Detection, however, does not mean that these high-powered microphones are now magically safe or beyond our concern. Acoustic gunshot detection is still a dangerous and often highly inaccurate technology that has resulted in real world harm, as in Chicago where it resulted in police shooting at children lighting fireworks. As Flock itself states, “No acoustic system is perfect, and we don't claim otherwise.” But police response to a situation where they believe guns are actively in use seems like a pretty high-stakes situation to be making, selling, and deploying technology known to be imperfect. Flock’s devices also listen for more than just gunshots. Their marketing materials admit to be listening for “community disruption,” which includes “non-violent” threats like car sideshows and fireworks. 

Flock’s failed attempt to roll out Distress Detection teaches us a few important lessons about the current state of police surveillance. First, we should not assume that just because these companies are large and well-funded, that does not ensure that they are complying with local privacy laws before floating new products to customers. Second, companies roll out and police adopt invasive technology under the justification that it will be used to address our society’s very worst crimes. However, both the companies and police will leverage deployed surveillance infrastructure to introduce new uses without necessarily seeking the consent or approval of the public. Gunshot detecting microphones eventually being used to listen for screaming is exactly the type of mission creep that we’ve seen happen with other pieces of surveillance technology, including Flock’s license plate readers. Finally, gun violence is too serious and complex of an issue to purport to solve with one flawed piece of technology. It has become too easy for police and cities to listen to the fancy marketing pitches of tech companies claiming they’re going to solve all crime instead of doing the hard work of addressing the root causes of societal issues. And, in the meantime, that technology creates more problems and hazards for the communities they blanket in police surveillance. 

As we’ve also seen with people across the country pushing back on Flock license plate reader contracts in their communities, public pressure can sometimes work to influence both companies and lawmakers that control a city’s purse strings to discontinue or divest from harmful products. Flock’s decision to end “Distress Detection” for human voices is a win.  

This month, we celebrate 36 years of EFF and a mission that is bigger than any one of us. Thanks to EFF, communities around the world are demanding that technology protects their freedom, advances justice, and opens doors to opportunity. That's not a small thing—it's a life's work worth continuing.

If you are committed to staying on the cutting edge of digital rights issues, I'd like to invite you to consider taking that commitment one step further by joining EFF’s Lighthouse Society, our way to acknowledge and thank the community of supporters who are including EFF in their legacy plans.

Learn About the Lighthouse Society

By including EFF in your will or estate plans, you can ensure that EFF’s work and values don't just live beyond you; they thrive because of you. A legacy gift is one of the most powerful ways to say: This matters, and I want it to matter long after I'm gone.

Your gift will fuel our mission for generations by protecting freedom, advancing justice, and driving innovation for communities who need it most. There is still so much more to do, so much more to fight for. With your foresight, it can go so much further.

Planned giving is also more flexible than you might realize. A bequest in your will, a simple beneficiary designation, or another estate planning option can all make a profound difference, often without affecting your finances today.

Get in touch and learn more about what's possible with the Lighthouse Society. Reach out to Jocelyn Wicker at majorgifts@eff.org or fill out our online form to share your intention to give. Thank you for considering a legacy that will carry this work forward for years to come.

When Ubisoft's Watch Dogs 2 was released in 2016, it was a headtrip for those of us working on digital-rights issues in the Bay Area. During the day, I'd fight tech-authoritarianism from EFF's San Francisco offices and then, at night, I'd fight tech-authoritarianism in an uncanny simulation of San Francisco from my home gaming console.  

Watch Dogs 2 is an open-world video game that follows a hacktivist collective called Dedsec as they take on surveillance tech and discriminatory AI systems that are being controlled by tech bros, government contractors, and corrupt cops. The game's missions often felt like they were ripped from the pages of EFF's Deeplinks blog.  

EFF’s mission is defending civil liberties in the digital world, and we do that with activists, technologists, and lawyers. If you've ever dreamt of joining Dedsec, you should definitely join us as a member.  

 Join the movement to Take Back CTRL.  

In fact, we've even got the same merch aesthetic. I cosplayed as the lead character, Marcus, at Dragon Con, and no one even knew I was in costume. 

Dave (left) as Marcus takes a selfie with a Wrench cosplayer at Dragon Con 2018.

To commemorate Watch Dog 2's 10th anniversary, I'll be speaking on a panel at San Diego Comic-Con reflecting on how the game predicted tech issues we're facing today. Organized by Mia Ginae of The Mighty Hostess and Black in Gaming, we've got voice actors Ruffin Prentiss lll and Shawn Baichoo, cinematic producer Timmy Fisher, and music producer Hudson Mohawke, who did the soundtrack, with Mia Ginae moderating. That's at 3:15 PM on Friday, July 24 in room 6BCF. 

But not everyone can get to Comic-Con and I certainly have more to say that can fit in. So here are a few ways where Watch Dogs 2 mirrored our work back then and foresaw what we're facing today.

Check out our full San Diego Comic Schedule, including panels and a meet-up. 

Insecure Surveillance Cameras 

One of the signature gameplay elements of the Watch Dogs series is the ability for your character to hack into nearby security cameras from your phone and use that to gain a strategic advantage over hostile adversaries. 

About a year before, that's exactly the issue that we were working on. EFF Technologist Cooper Quintin and I used the service Shodan to identify a slew of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) that Louisiana police had left unprotected on the internet. We found that the controls were open to anyone to manipulate and, just like in the game, you could watch the live video feeds.

We didn't use the data to acquire a skill point or collectible outfit. Instead, we forced police agencies to lock down their equipment and then used what we learned to persuade then Gov. Bobby Jindal to veto a bill that would have created a new statewide surveillance dragnet.  

This issue still persists today. Most recently, security researchers Benn Jordan and Jon “GainSec” Gaines, and the award-winning journalists at 404 Media, uncovered how at least 60 pan-tilt-zoom cameras from the vendor Flock Safety were left exposed online.

Cell-Site Simulators 

In Watch Dogs 2 there's a mission called "Stolen Signals," in which Marcus and his best friend Wrench are trying to locate "stingrays," police devices that gather nearby cell-phone data by masquerading as legit cellular towers. We call these "cell-site simulators" (CSSs) and they're are an extremely alarming mass surveillance technology that allows police to track individual users through their phone identifiers. We've long advocated that this should require a search warrant.   

Like Dedsec, we also had initiated a project to do the exact same thing. And in true Dedsec fashion, we also gave it a pop-culture name: Crocodile Hunter, an homage to wildlife expert Steve Irwin, who had famously died after a stingray attack.  

But while Marcus was running around Telegraph Hill, staff technologist Cooper Quintin and I were running around downtown San Francisco, testing out our own device for detecting suspicious cell phone towers during Salesforce's annual Dreamforce conference. And while we didn't find a CSS that day, we did find a mobile surveillance tower that a start-up had set up for the event.

Cooper Quintin, EFF's own 'Wrench,' testing out Crocodile Hunter at Dreamforce

Today, that project has evolved into Rayhunter, which allows anyone to use a cheap mobile hotspot to detect the type of cellular anomalies associated with CSSs. We're proud to say that now there's a whole international Dedsec-style network of researchers using this technology to look for surveillance at protests, at the border, and in metropolitan areas.  

Security Robots 

Throughout the game, Marcus encounters a number of autonomous pickle-shaped security robots wandering the city. At one point, Wrench reprograms one to become "Wrench Jr," a bona fide member of the Dedsec team.  

In real life, these robots are made by a company called Knightscope, and EFF started shining light on them in 2020-2021, when they were first being deployed by companies and government agencies.

A Knightscope robot patrols a casino parking lot in Reno, Nevada.

Today, law enforcement is pursuing weaponized robots and drones, and EFF is at the forefront to stop this dystopian reality. In fact, in December 2022, we successfully fought for San Francisco to ban the police department from weaponizing drones. In 2024, New York Police Department also retired its subway robot.

A Citywide Surveillance "Operating System" 

In the Watch Dog series, one of the ominous developments is CTOS 2.0 (Central Operating System 2.0). Through this system, Blume, a government contractor, tries to collect a massive amount of data through citywide sensors and infrastructure, and to combine all that data into one unified—and totally insecure—analytics system.  

At the time we'd only just begun to see this idea floated, with a limited number of cities trying tools like Palantir's Gotham to manage data.  

Today, it is a frighteningly competitive market, particularly when it comes to law enforcement surveillance. For example, both Axon and Flock Safety are trying to offer products that integrate with every function of policing that sound like CTOs. In fact, Flock Safety product is literally titled, "Flock OS."

Fusus demonstrated at a police chief's conference.

Meanwhile, Axon's camera networking product, "Fusus," sounds like it came straight from the Watch Dogs' writers room. Fusus allows for central live-streaming of all types of surveillance cameras in a city, including body-worn cameras, which was another prediction from the Watch Dog series that came true.  

EFF has been part of many local battles to reject Flock and Axon surveillance systems, and we've also advocated against recent efforts at the federal level to consolidate government data.  

Join the Fight Against Authoritarian Tech 

Watch Dogs 2's protagonists aren't just the merry band of core hackers: It's a distributed movement spread across the region and social media. The sequel, Watch Dogs Legion, is even designed so that every single person in the city of London is a potential playable Dedsec member, ready to take on tech tyranny with whatever skills they have.  

That's also our philosophy: If you use tech, if you're affected by tech, this is your fight. And it's time to take back control. 

There are a lot of ways to do this. You can become a member by donating. You can contact public officials through our Action Center. You can join the thousands of volunteers who are helping gather data on surveillance through our Atlas of Surveillance project. You can also hunt cell-site simulators with us—and help improve our code—through the Rayhunter project.  

And just like Watch Dogs 2, this is a game we can win if we work together.