Reporters, community advocates, EFF, and others have used public records laws to reveal and counteract abuse, misuse, and fraudulent narratives around how law enforcement agencies across the country use and share data collected by automated license plate readers (ALPRs). EFF is alarmed by recent laws in several states that have blocked public access to data collected by ALPRs, including, in some cases, information derived from ALPR data. We do not support pending bills in Arizona and Connecticut that would block the public oversight capabilities that ALPR information offers.

Every state has laws granting members of the public the right to obtain records from state and local governments. These are often called “freedom of information acts” (FOIAs) or “public records acts” (PRAs). They are a powerful check by the people on their government, and EFF frequently advocates for robust public access and uses the laws to scrutinize government surveillance. 

But lawmakers across the country, often in response to public scrutiny of police ALPRs, are introducing or enacting measures aimed at excluding broad swaths of ALPR information from disclosure under these public records laws. This could include whole categories of important information: general information about the extent of law enforcement use; details on ALPR sharing across policing agencies; data on the number of license plate scans conducted, where they happened, and how many “hits” for license plates of interest actually occur; analyses on how many false matches or other errors occur; and images taken of individuals’ own vehicles. 

No thanks. Public records and public scrutiny of ALPR programs have shown that people are harmed by these systems and that retained ALPR data violates people’s privacy. In this moment, lawmakers should not be completely cutting off access to public records that document the abuses perpetuated by ALPRs. 

Transparency with privacy

To be sure, there are legitimate concerns about wholesale public disclosure of raw ALPR data. After all, many of the harms people experience from these systems are based on the government’s collection, retention, and use of this information. Public transparency rights should not exacerbate the privacy harms suffered by people subjected to ALPR surveillance. But many current proposals do not address legitimate privacy concerns in a measured way, much less seek to harmonize people’s privacy with the public’s right to know.

There is a better path to balancing privacy and transparency rights than outright bans or total disclosure. 

Any legislative proposal concerning public access to ALPR data must start with this reality: ALPR data is deeply revealing about where a person goes, and thus about what they are doing and who they are doing it with. That’s a reason why EFF opposes ALPRs. It is dangerous that the police have so much of our ALPR information. Even worse for our privacy would be for police to disclose our ALPR information to our bosses, political opponents, and ex-friends. Or to surveillance-oriented corporations that would use our ALPR information to send us targeted ads, or monetize it by selling it to the highest bidder.

On the other hand, EFF’s firsthand experience using public records from ALPR systems demonstrates the strong accountability value of public access to many kinds of ALPR data, including information like data-sharing reports and network audits. For example, in our “Data Driven” series, we used ALPR data-sharing and hit ratio reports to investigate the extent of ALPR data sharing between police departments and to analyze the number of ALPR scans that are ultimately associated with a crime-related vehicle. We have also identified racist uses of ALPR systems, ALPR surveillance of protestors, and ALPR tracking of a person who sought an abortion. Across the country, municipalities have been shutting down their contracts for ALPR use, often citing concerns with data sharing with federal and immigration agents. 

These records are not just informational—they are leverage. Communities, journalists, and local officials have used ALPR disclosures to block new deployments, refuse contract renewals, and terminate existing agreements with surveillance vendors whose practices proved too dangerous to continue. Without this evidentiary record, it is far harder for cities to exercise their procurement power to say no.

It is not always easy to harmonize transparency and privacy when one person wishes to use a public records law to obtain government records that reveal people’s personal information. The best approach is for public records laws to contain a privacy exemption that requires balancing, on a case-by-case basis, of the transparency benefits versus the privacy costs of disclosure. Many do. These provisions of public records laws already accommodate similar concerns about disclosing personal information of private individuals whose information the government may have collected, government employee’s private data, and other personal information. 

The balancing provisions in these laws are often flexible and allow for nuance. For example, if a government record contains a mix of information that does not reveal people’s private information and some that does, agencies and courts can disclose the non-private information while withholding the truly private information. This is often accomplished with blacking out, or redacting, the private information.

Applying this privacy-and-transparency balancing to ALPR records, it will often be appropriate for the government to disclose some information and withhold other information. Everybody should generally have access to records showing their own movements and other information captured by ALPRs, but the privacy protections in public records laws should foreclose a single person’s ability to get a copy of similar records about everyone else. And even with accessing your own data, there are complications with shared vehicles that should be considered when balancing privacy and transparency.

An example of where it may be appropriate to release unredacted data and images would be vehicles engaged in non-sensitive government business. For example, a member of the public might use ALPR scans of garbage trucks to identify gaps in service, which would not reveal private information. On other hand, it would be inappropriate to release the scans of a government social worker visiting their clients. 

Public records laws should allow a requester to obtain some ALPR information about government surveillance of everyone else, in a manner that accommodates the public transparency interest in disclosure and people’s privacy interests. For example, the best public records laws would disclose the times and places that plate data was collected, but not plate data itself. This can be done, for example, by an agency or court finding that disclosing aggregated and/or deidentified ALPR data protects the privacy or other interests of individuals captured within the data. The best laws recognize that aggregation or de-identification of databases are redactions in service of individual privacy (which responding agencies must do), and are not creating new public records (which responding agencies sometimes need not do). 

Likewise, in a government audit log of police searches of stored ALPR data, it will often be appropriate to disclose an officer’s investigative purposes to conduct a search, and the officer’s search terms – but not the search term if it is a license plate number. Many people do not want the world to know that they are under police investigation, and many public records laws generally limit the disclosure of such sensitive facts because of the reputational and privacy harm inherent in that disclosure.

Aggregate ALPR information about, for example, the amount of data collected and error rates can have important transparency value and impact government policy. Requiring the public release of that kind of data contributes to informed public discussion of how our policing agencies do their jobs. This kind of information has been used to study, critique, and provide oversight of ALPR use.

Thus, the wholesale exemption of ALPR information from disclosure under state public records laws would stymie the public’s ability to monitor how their government is using powerful and controversial surveillance technology. EFF cannot support such laws.

Blocking transparency

In Connecticut, SB 4 is a pending bill that would exclude, from that state’s public records law, information “gathered by” an ALPR or “created through an analysis of the information gathered by” an ALPR. This could ultimately harm individual civilians, who would have less ability to protect themselves from law enforcement that indiscriminately collect vehicle information. Other provisions of this bill would limit government use of ALPRs, and regulate data brokers.

In Arizona, SB 1111 would restrict public access to ALPR data “collected by” an ALPR. The bill would even make it a felony to access or use data from an ALPR (or disseminate it) in violation of this article, which apparently might apply to a member of the public who obtained ALPR data with a public records request. The bill’s author claims it adds “guardrails” for ALPR use.

Earlier this year, Washington state enacted a law that will exempt data “collected by” ALPRs from the state’s public records law. While “bona fide research” will still be a way for some people to obtain ALPR data, this may not include journalists and activists who analyze aggregate data to identify policy flaws. Notably, Washington courts found last year that information generated by ALPR, including images of an individual’s own vehicle, are public records; this new legislation will override that decision, blocking the ability for people to see what photos police have taken of their own vehicles. Other provisions of this new law will limit government use of ALPRs.

A year ago, Illinois’ HB 3339 ended use of that state’s public records law to obtain ALPR information used and collected by the Illinois State Police (ISP), including both information “gathered by an ALPR” and information “created from the analysis of data generated by an ALPR.” This Illinois language for just the ISP is very similar to what is now being considered in Connecticut for all state and local agencies. 

Sadly, the list goes on. Georgia exempted ALPR data (both “captured by or derived from” ALPRs) of any government agency from its open records law. Adding insult to injury, Georgia also made it a misdemeanor to knowingly request, use, or obtain law enforcement’s plate data for any purpose other than law enforcement. Maryland exempted “information gathered by” an ALPR from its public information act. Oklahoma exempted from its open records act the ALPR data “collected, retained or shared” by District Attorneys under that state’s Uninsured Vehicle Enforcement Program.

These laws and bills in seven states are an unwelcome national trend.

Next steps

We urge legislators to reject efforts to amend state public records laws to wholly exempt ALPR information. This would diminish meaningful oversight over these controversial technologies. Public disclosure of some ALPR information is important. 

There is a better approach for states that want to harmonize privacy and transparency in the context of ALPR data: 

1. Open records laws should cover, and not exclude, information collected by ALPRs, and also any public records derived from that information.
2. Open records laws should have a privacy exemption that applies to all records, including information collected or derived from ALPRs. That exemption should require a case-by-case balancing of the transparency benefits and privacy costs of disclosure. These provisions work best when agencies and courts can analyze the context of the particular records, the weight of the privacy interests and public interests at stake, and other specific facts to fashion the best balance between these competing values. 
3. When a document contains both exempt and non-exempt information, open records laws should require disclosure of the latter and withholding of the former. The best public records laws allow agencies to black out, or redact, specific private information while disclosing non-private information in the same records, threading the privacy and transparency needle.
   
4. Finally, in the context of a law enforcement ALPR database (including both data collected by ALPRs and audit logs of police searches of stored ALPR data), the law should permit agencies to disclose aggregated and/or deidentified data, while withholding personally identifiable data. Importantly, the law should recognize that the steps an agency takes to protect individual privacy in ALPR databases should not be construed as creating a new public record. 

FOIA balancing standards are one layer in a larger governance stack, and work best alongside strong guardrails on whether and how governments procure ALPR systems in the first place: public debate over vendor contracts, binding surveillance ordinances, strict data‑retention limits, and clear pathways to end ALPR programs entirely where the risks prove too great.

An unprecedented nationwide data collection will show where storms and wildfires are causing large insurer losses and rate hikes.

Colombia and the Netherlands will pass the baton to Ireland and Tuvalu to carry on what nearly 60 countries hope becomes a new form of multilateral cooperation.

The Trump administration has been circulating flyers at this week’s gathering of the International Maritime Organization.

Legislators in at least 28 states this year introduced bills that would roll back tax incentives for the energy-hungry facilities.

Oil producers are facing a May 7 deadline to stop gas from burning off at some newer wells.

A Democratic bill would give Congress the authority to override presidential rejections of recovery aid.

The EPA administrator achieved a string of viral moments to play up online, which could serve his ambitions beyond the agency.

Researchers have reverse-engineered a piece of malware named Fast16. It’s almost certainly state-sponsored, probably US in origin, and was deployed against Iran years before Stuxnet:

“…the Fast16 malware was designed to carry out the most subtle form of sabotage ever seen in an in-the-wild malware tool: By automatically spreading across networks and then silently manipulating computation processes in certain software applications that perform high-precision mathematical calculations and simulate physical phenomena, Fast16 can alter the results of those programs to cause failures that range from faulty research results to catastrophic damage to real-world equipment.”...

Trucking fleets are buying Tesla’s lower-cost, higher-range electric big rig — and boosting the state’s climate goals.

The European Commission is considering temporary relief from methane penalties as energy firms warn of supply risks.

Host cities, stadiums and FIFA are working to protect players and spectators by conducting heat risk assessments, enhancing shade and more.

The work at Blue Hill Observatory and Science Center serves not just to keep weather records, but also to connect ordinary people to climate science.

This is the fifth and final installment of a blog series reflecting on the global digital legacy of the 2011 Arab uprisings. You can read the rest of the series here.

If the Arab Spring was defined by optimism about what the internet could do, the years since have been marked by a more sober understanding of what it takes to defend it. 

Back in 2011, the term “digital rights” was still fairly new. While in the decades prior, open source and hacker communities—as well as a handful of organizations including EFF—had advocated for digital freedoms, it was through the merging of disparate communities from around the world in the 2000s that digital rights came to be more clearly understood as an extension of fundamental human rights.

In 2011, we observed that there were only a few organizations focused on digital rights in the region. Groups like Nawaat, which emerged from the Tunisian diaspora under the Ben Ali regime; the Arab Digital Expression Foundation, formed to promote the creative use of technology; and SMEX, which was initially created to teach journalists and others about social media but has grown to become a powerful force in the region, led the way. Since that time, dozens of organizations have emerged throughout the region to promote freedom of expression, innovation, privacy, and digital security.

Understanding how the digital rights movement evolved in the Middle East and North Africa requires a closer look at the communities that shaped it, and the organizations that are carrying on the fight today. Perspectives from people and organizations that were key to these efforts offer critical insight into how the movement has grown and what challenges lie ahead.

Reem Almasri, a senior researcher and digital sovereignty consultant, says that:

‘Digital rights’ emerged as a term around the Arab Spring, when the internet was still a fairly unregulated space, we were still trying to figure out the tech companies’ policies, and force governments to look at the internet as a fundamental right like water and electricity.

But then the need to converge digital rights to everyday rights—economic, political, social rights—and to connect it to geopolitics has started to be thought about, and to be in discussion as well. And to not look at digital rights as a separate field from everything else that’s affecting it, from the geopolitical context.

Mohamad Najem, who co-founded SMEX in 2008 and has led it to become the largest organization in the region, told me that, at the time, “Nobody gave [social media] a lot of attention in our region.” Their work was “a positive approach to social media, how we can democratize sharing information, how we can share more from civil society, change people’s minds, et cetera.”

“After that phase,” he continues, “we can think about 2012-2013—after the Arab Spring, as an organization we started looking at the infrastructure of the internet, and how freedom of expression and privacy are affected. That’s when we started looking more at what we call digital rights.”

Towards Tech Accountability

In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, social media companies moved from a largely hands-off approach to governance toward more formalized—and often opaque—content moderation systems. Platforms expanded their trust and safety teams and began working more closely with civil society through trusted partnerships in the region and globally. But, Mohamad Najem says:

After the expansion of tech accountability itself and the adaptation of tech companies, we’ve noticed that it’s not taking us anywhere. Gradually we’ve come to a new phase where it feels like tech accountability is an economy by itself that is not leading to real results. So the next phase for us at least and maybe for others in global majority communities is how we can focus on digital public good, how we can push more governments, private and public institutions to adopt more open source software, to look at the ecosystem and understand the US threats happening now, et cetera.

Another group that has played a key role in the fight for digital rights and tech accountability in the region is 7amleh, a Palestinian organization that was founded in 2013. At the time, says Jalal Abukhater:

[I]t was unique and interesting in Palestinian society to have a human rights organization dedicated fully to the topic of digital rights, you know, human rights in a digital format. However, with the years, we saw various milestones, we saw progress of policy decisions and movements through the Israeli government to influence content moderation in Big Tech companies. We saw problems there as an organization.

7amleh took a leading stance in fighting to preserve the digital rights of Palestinians during a period where there was a very strong influence through the Israeli government. There was actually quite important reporting coming through 7amleh on the situation of online content moderation at a time when it wasn’t really a topic being discussed but it was very clearly a situation where there was major influence by government and political suppression happening as a result.

An Ever-Expanding Ecosystem

While in the early days, the digital rights movement attracted specialists, today, people from other fields have recognized how digital rights intersect with their work, and the digital rights community has embraced them.

Almasri says:

Because the digital rights movement has been decentralizing and has stopped being a speciality, it stopped being an exclusive thing for digital rights specialists, since of course the internet not only in the Arab region but all over the world has become a fundamental infrastructure for running any kind of sensitive operations, or operations in general…all types of organizations, and companies, and initiatives are thinking about their digital security, about how internet laws are affecting the use of the internet, or putting them at risk, and how surveillance technologies are affecting their operations.

Abukhater credits the collaborative work that emerged within the region over the years in building the movement’s strength:

[Today], civil society and digital civil society have many forums, many coalitions and networks, but it’s always important to remember that this is work that builds over many years of experience, and relationships, and networks—that it’s different parties coming to support each other at different phases to ensure that this kind of work succeeds and that this ecosystem is sustained globally with support from partner organizations which were very crucial in ensuring that this ecosystem is sustained, especially in Palestine.

Growing Collaborations

Conferences like Bread and Net, first held in Beirut in 2018, and the Palestine Digital Activism Forum (PDAF), first held in Ramallah in 2017, bring activists, academics, journalists, and other practitioners together to network and learn about each other’s work. The pandemic, conflict, and other barriers haven’t stopped either conference from carrying on: PDAF has become an annual virtual event that draws big-name speakers, while Bread & Net has spaced out its meetings but continues to draw bigger crowds each time. 

Almasri credits these meetings with expanding the movement beyond the traditional techies and activists who first got involved. “You see a wide spectrum of different fields. You see artists, archivists, journalists joining these conversations, which is definitely on the brighter side of things when it comes to this field, or this scene.”

She also credits the emergence of alliances such as the Middle East Alliance for Digital Rights (MADR, of which EFF is a member), founded in 2020 by individuals and organizations who had been working together for many years to formalize those collaborations.

“Other than the collaborations at the advocacy level, [MADR] creates a sort of pressure point on Big Tech, on content moderation policies, allows for certain coordination at the level of the UN, et cetera, which I see as really positive because it brings some of the redundant efforts together and helps decide on priorities.”

Looking Forward

In thinking about the future of the movement, Almasri and Najem agree that digital rights are no longer a niche. In Najem’s words, “It’s about everything else…it’s about everything.” 

Almasri adds:

[W]hen it comes to priorities, things that this scene has been working on, I feel that October 7 [2023] was a big turning point in the way that digital rights activists, researchers, and academics—this field—is looking at digital rights in general. Of course, there is the major question of the need to revise tactics to fight Israel’s tech-enabled genocide that is also empowered by the global economy, big tech, and governments of the world?  What alliances should we start building on a regional and global level?

She sees ‘digital sovereignty,’ the ability of people and communities to choose, control, and use technology that serves their needs and values, as one of the next big topics for the movement to tackle, as debates over who owns and hosts our data have sharpened amid revelations that U.S. companies have played a role in regional conflicts.

There have been pockets of debates on how to achieve digital sovereignty, especially from human rights organizations documenting war crimes … There’s an awareness of how the dependence on US-based providers, cloud storage, even hosting infrastructure is a risk, especially after how using these services has been weaponized against the digital existence of certain organizations in the region that have been deplatformed or had their content removed on platforms like Meta and YouTube because their content doesn’t align with the foreign policy of the United States…so it raises a big question about how we look at digital independence, what is the spectrum of independence that civil society in the region can achieve, and in relation to what’s available as well.

Almasri also points to the role of researchers in the region:

There has been a lot more research on the political economy of surveillance technologies, so not only looking at how governments are using them, but their supply chain, who’s investing in these technologies, and how geopolitical networks empowered their proliferation in the hands of governments.

This is where studies looking at the political economy of AI and the military become important, trying to understand how this field of weapons, the military, and AI grew together as part of this global capitalist system rather than looking at these technologies in silos, that is. Looking at the proliferation of these technologies from a geopolitical point of view, looking at the bigger ecosystem rather than zooming in to the specifics of it. I think this has been a big development in the way that we look at digital rights, and the way that digital rights have been converged and integrated into the geopolitical scene.

As the global digital rights community continues to expand, it’s clear that the questions at its core are no longer just about access or expression, but about power—who holds it, how it is exercised, and who is left out of its protections. What began as a fight to keep the internet open has become a broader effort to reimagine it—an effort that is grappling with questions of infrastructure, ownership, and the global inequalities embedded in both.

And yet, despite the scale of these challenges, the movement’s strength lies in the solidarity, the ecosystems, and the networks it has spent more than a decade building. From the early days of the blogging and techie communities to the increasingly powerful digital rights community, advocates in the region have gone up against dictators, endured war and repression, yet remain determined to push forward.

“The thing that really struck me when I came to MIT and strikes me every single day is the stuff that’s going on here is amazing. The science, the engineering… every day I hear something that makes my jaw drop,” remarked President Sally Kornbluth during a live discussion with Lizzie O’Leary of Slate’s “What Next: TBD” podcast.

Kornbluth spoke about everything from the importance of curiosity-driven science and why basic science is critical to our nation’s future, to AI and education, and even bravely joined O’Leary in a rendition of the Williams College song, “The Mountains,” in honor of their shared alma mater.

“We are in this time of incredible uncertainty,” said Kornbluth of the current state of higher education and funding for scientific research. “What we are trying to do is keep the science robust.”

Bouncing back to her time at Duke and her love of college basketball, she noted it’s a combination of zone coverage and man-to-man defense when trying to address skepticism about higher education in Washington, D.C. She emphasized: “As one of the top institutions in the world it’s part of our responsibility to articulate the importance of science. Behind the scenes, I am – along with many other [university] presidents – I am in D.C. all the time now. I want to speak to Congressmen and women, Senators, people in the executive branch to explain the importance of what we are doing.”

Kornbluth emphasized that the pipeline of basic science that flows from U.S. universities is a critical asset for our country, cautioning that to keep straining this pipeline could have enormous negative ramifications for the U.S. down the line.

“If you think about research done in this country, it’s done in in universities, it’s done in national labs, and it’s done in industry,” said Kornbluth. Universities are where most of the science with a long pathway to impact, requiring patience, starts. She pointed to immunotherapy for cancer, which began 30-40 years ago in basic immunotherapy research, as an example. With that pipeline being drained, what does the future hold for new cancer therapies or new AI and quantum technologies?

Kornbluth also underscored that uncertainty and lost funding are having a “huge impact on the talent pipeline,” delving into the unique role universities play in training graduate students, who are the next generation of scientific researchers. “We hear, ‘Oh it would be okay if research was more in industry.’ I say, ‘Would you fly on a plane with a pilot who had never flown?’ How do they think people learn how to do research? We are training the next generation… and we are losing funding for them.” She added: “I think we are going to see reverberations for many decades if we don’t rectify that issue.”

When asked how she and her colleagues are working to keep research moving forward, Kornbluth explained that at MIT, “we have tried to find alternative ways to elevate the science. We have a series of presidential initiatives that cut across the whole campus in things like health and life sciences, quantum, humanities and social sciences. The notion is that we are trying to create new opportunities.”

Still, she acknowledged that losses from the endowment tax and diminished federal funding are painful. “There are only four schools right now that are subject to the 8% endowment tax, which is a tax on our earnings. For us, that means $240 million dollars a year plus other losses in grants. So, let’s say the whole thing is, we budgeted for a loss of $300 million a year on a $1.7 billion budget… That has definitely had an impact on us. No question about it. 

“The other thing about it is again there’s all this uncertainty. Our investigators are writing a ton of grants. They don’t know if they’re going off into the void or they really have the sort of competitive opportunities they’ve always had in the past.”

Asked why universities did not see this moment coming, Kornbluth offered a few thoughts. “Look at MIT – 30,000 companies have come from MIT. When you look at something like that, why would you think any government that wants economic flourishing in their country would come after MIT?” she reflected. “It just never would have occurred to us.”

Turning towards the rapid advances in AI, and how the field is impacting education, Kornbluth noted that at MIT and other universities, “we have to focus on the human element, we have to educate our students, they need to know how to write and do mathematics…they have to view AI as a tool to augment their capabilities. That is how we are thinking about it.”

In the course of the conversation, Kornbluth also expressed her unwavering support for international students, noting that most want the opportunity to stay and contribute to research in the U.S. after graduation. “The talent brought to us through our international community is unbelievable. We can attract the very best in the world. You can bet when they talk about competitiveness with China, for example, in AI, quantum, etc., they are not sitting around in China saying, ‘Oh it’s great America is taking all our students.’ They’re thinking, ‘It’s great that America doesn’t want to take as many of our students anymore because we can train them.’ It’s a competitive issue that we really should lean into.”

Good caregivers are often in short supply, but after the Covid-19 pandemic hit the U.S. in early 2020, staff levels at nursing homes dropped by 10 percent. What was a simple personnel shortage has moved closer to being a nursing-care crisis.

“We have an aging population, care for them is labor-intensive, and there are shortages everywhere in that supply chain,” says MIT economist Jonathan Gruber.

As it happens, about one-fifth of health care support workers in the U.S. are immigrants. And as a newly published study of the nation’s metro areas shows, changes in immigration levels can affect how much nursing care the elderly receive.

“When immigration rises in a city, it significantly increases the health care workforce,” says Gruber, co-author of the study and a paper detailing its findings.

Overall, Gruber and his colleagues determined that when there is more immigration, registered nurses and other aides work more hours at nursing homes, without displacing already-employed caregivers, while patient outcomes improve. Essentially, a 10 percent increase in female immigrants in a given metro area leads to a 1.1 percent increase in hours that registered nurses spend with elderly patients, while hospitalizations for those patients drop, among other things.

“Even if immigration actually increases labor supply to the medical sector, it was an open question if that would improve outcomes, and it does,” adds Gruber, the Ford Professor of Economics and head of the MIT Department of Economics.

The paper, “Immigration, the Long-Term Care Workforce, and Elder Outcomes in the U.S.,” appears in the American Journal of Health Economics. The authors are Gruber; David C. Grabowski, a professor in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School; and Brian E. McGarry, an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine and the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Rochester.

More care, fewer hospitalizations

To conduct the study, the researchers tapped into multiple data sources, including immigration information from 2000 to 2018 appearing in the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Extensive nursing home data came from different types of reports that facilities are required to file in order to maintain Medicare and Medicaid eligibility, allowing the scholars to examine care staffing levels and patient outcomes.

All told, the study encompasses 16 million Medicare beneficiaries in over 13,000 nursing homes in metropolitan statistical areas of the U.S., and evaluates immigrations flows for two decades.

“One of the key groups that’s taking care of our nation’s elders is immigrants,” Gruber says. “So I thought it would be fascinating to understand how much does immigration actually matter for elder care.”

More specifically, the scholars find that for every 10 percent increase in immigration above the norm in metro areas, in addition to the 1.1 percent increase in registered nurse hours, there is a 0.7 percent increase in hours of care provided by certified nurse assistants. There is a 0.6 percent decline in hospitalizations for patients making short-term stays, of up to a month, in nursing homes.

Beyond that, the study yielded other markers showing that patient outcomes improve in these situations. The roughly 1 percent increase in hours of care was accompanied by a decline in the use of physical restraints needed for patients, who also needed less psychiatric medication prescriptions and had fewer urinary tract infections, among other things.   

The fact that those outcomes improved in more immigrant-staffed situations is among the new insights provided by the research.

“There’s a lot of evidence that providing more labor supply to the elderly sector improves patient outcomes,” Gruber says. “But it wasn’t clear whether more immigrants would work the same way, because of language issues or other factors.”

A new lens

The study comes as immigration policy has become a major issue in the U.S., something that Gruber says helped spur his curiosity about its health care implications — although he did not know what the study would reveal, one way or another. In this case, he notes, the impact of immigration on eldercare may be another factor to be considered in the larger debates about the subject.

“I think it provides a new lens on the debate over immigration,” Gruber says. “The debate over immigration has been solely about what will it do to native workers, what will it do to the crime rate, what will it do to tax collection. This adds a new element, which is: What will it do to our citizens’ care? By having more immigration, we provide more care.”

Gruber, Grabowski, and McGarry are continuing to study this issue. In a new working paper, released in February, they found that increases in immigration are consistent with a reduction in the mortality rate, in part by allowing more elderly people the opportunity to receive care at home.

Gruber recognizes that there will continue to be sharp policy disagreements over immigration. Still, as the just-published paper states, to this point, when it comes to nursing care, the “results paint a consistent picture of improved quality of care resulting from increased immigration.”

In today’s hospitals and clinics, a dermatologist may use an artificial intelligence model for classifying skin lesions to assess if the lesion is at risk of developing into a cancer or if it is benign. But if the model is biased toward certain skin tones, it could fail to identify a high-risk patient.

Perhaps one of the best known and most persistent challenges that AI research continues to reckon with is bias. Bias is often discussed in relation to training data, but model architecture can also contain and amplify bias, negatively influencing model performance in real-world settings. In high-stakes medical scenarios, the very real consequences of poor performance have made bias into a quintessential safety issue.

A new paper from researchers at MIT, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Google that was accepted to the 2026 International Conference for Learning Representations proposes a novel debiasing approach called “Weighted Rotational DebiasING” (i.e., WRING) that can be applied to vision language models (VLMs), like OpenAI’s OpenCLIP.

VLMs are multi-modal models that can understand and interpret different data modalities like video, image, and text simultaneously. While debiasing approaches for VLMs do exist, the most commonly used approach is known as “projection debiasing,” which leads to what has been termed the “Whac-A-Mole dilemma”, an empirical observation that was formally introduced to AI research in 2023.

Projection debiasing is a post-processing approach that removes the undesirable, biased information from model embeddings by “projecting” the subspace out of a representation space of relationships, thereby cutting out the bias. But this approach has its drawbacks.

“When you do that, you inadvertently squish everything around,” says Walter Gerych, the paper’s first author, who conducted this research last year as a postdoc at MIT. “All the other relationships that the model learns change when you do that.”

Gerych, who is now an assistant professor of computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, is joined on the paper by MIT graduate students Cassandra Parent and Quinn Perian; Google’s Rafiya Javed; and MIT associate professors of electrical engineering Justin Solomon and Marzyeh Ghassemi, who is an affiliate of the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning and Health and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. 

While projection debiasing stops the model from acting upon the bias that’s been projected out of the subspace, it can end up amplifying and creating other biases, hence the Whac-A-Mole dilemma. According to Ghassemi, the unintended amplification of model biases is “both a technical and practical challenge. For instance, when debiasing a VLM that retrieves images of clinical staff — if racial bias is removed — it could have the unintended consequence of amplifying gender bias.” 

WRING works by moving certain coordinates within the high-dimensional space of a model — the ones that appear to be responsible for bias — to a different angle, so the model can no longer distinguish between different groups within a certain concept. This changes the representation within a specific space while leaving the model’s other relationships intact. And like projection debiasing, WRING is a post-processing approach, which means it can be applied “on the fly” to a pre-trained VLM. 

“People already spent a lot of resources, a lot of money, training these huge models, and we don’t really want to go in and modify something during training because then you have to start from scratch,” Gerych explains. “[WRING is] very efficient. It doesn’t require more training of the model and it’s minimally invasive.”

In their results, the researchers found that WRING significantly reduced bias for a target concept without increasing bias in other areas. But for now, the approach is somewhat limited to Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models, a type of VLM that connects images to language for search or classification.

“Extending this for ChatGPT-style, generative language models, is the reasonable next step for us,” says Gerych.

This work was supported, in part, by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, AI2050 Award Early Career Fellowship, Sloan Research Fellow Award, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Award, and MIT-Google Computing Innovation Award.

The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 recently announced a study addressing the killings and attacks against Palestinian journalists and media workers, the destruction of media infrastructure in Gaza, and the production and dissemination of narratives that may enable, justify, or incite international crimes. 

As part of this consultation, EFF contributed a submission that identifies a significant deterioration of press freedom and free expression in the period since October 2023, including an increase in censorship and wave of killings of journalists; adding to an already pervasive censorship and surveillance regime for Palestinians. 

In particular, concerns raised in our submission relate to:

1. Government takedown requests 
2. Disinformation and content moderation
3. Attacks on internet infrastructure

The concerns about censorship in Palestine are ever increasing, and include multiple international forums. Ending the deliberate digital isolation of the Palestinian people is critical to protecting fundamental human rights.

Read the briefing in full here.

A U.S. citizen who teaches Persian poetry classes online is suddenly unable to receive payments or access funds when his account is flagged and frozen by Paypal and its subsidiary Venmo. A Muslim city councilwoman in New York City has a Venmo payment blocked because she uses the name of a Bangladeshi restaurant in the transaction. Online hubs for erotic storytelling repeatedly lose their payment accounts. Others active in drug legalization fights struggle to keep their bank accounts.

These may sound like one-off issues, but they are not. They occur with frightening regularity, as former EFF Activism Director and Chief Program Officer, Rainey Reitman, who left EFF in 2022, describes in her new book, Transaction Denied. The book sheds new light on a serious problem that often hides in the shadows, and pushes us to ask an increasingly important question: “Is it ever OK for financial intermediaries to act as the arbiters of online expression?"  

Both a storyteller and an advocate, Rainey exposes hidden systems of power that shape our choices, our speech, and, ultimately, our society. - Cindy Cohn

Reitman makes her case about the impact of financial institutions and payment intermediaries shutting down accounts and inhibiting transactions through compelling individual stories, some of which have not been shared before. The people impacted are diverse: authors, teachers, journalists, elected politicians, and more are suddenly unable to retrieve or receive funds, with little explanation, transparency, or recourse. Reitman shows the reasons are frequently speech-related, resulting often from arbitrary corporate policy, a broad (mis)interpretation of the law, or in response to pressure from anti-speech advocates. 

In the example of the Persion poetry teacher, the blocking is due to the highly risk averse interpretation of U.S. sanctions on Iran—sanctions aimed at deterring weapons development or terrorism instead snared a poetry professor and a New York city councilwoman.  Reitman demonstrates how these sanctions, and others, have an outsized impact on Muslims.

But Transaction Denied is also a guide for those interested in fighting for free speech. The book covers over a decade of successful campaigns and shows that advocacy can win the day—and is sometimes necessary to counter pro-censorship campaigns. Reitman offers a behind-the-scenes view of the campaign to help restore the Stripe account of the Nifty Archive Alliance, a nonprofit which supports the Nifty Archive, a hub of erotic storytelling for the queer community since 1992. She covers EFF's successful coalition and campaign to restore the PayPal account of Smashwords, a hub for self-published fiction. And in what has become a critical moment for free speech and free press, she describes how several EFF staff members and two EFF board members became the seed for a new nonprofit, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which continues to partner with EFF today in advancing the rights of journalists.

It’s a banner time for books by EFF staff members and friends. If you're concerned about how online privacy has changed over the last three decades, read EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn's book, Privacy Defender, released in May. (All proceeds from the sale of hard copies of Privacy’s Defender are being donated to EFF, so your book order will help EFF continue fighting for the principles Cindy holds dear.) If you are worried about the individuals trapped in a system where massive financial companies can shut down their individual accounts, effectively locking up their access to money, based entirely on their speech, grab Transaction Denied, released earlier this month, at Beacon Press, Amazon, and Bookshop.org. (Half of the author proceeds go to Freedom of the Press Foundation.) 

More likely—you'll want both books on your shelf. Happy reading! 

A new immersive sound installation at Oulu Cathedral, Finland, brings the research of MIT astrophysicist and associate professor of physics Kiyoshi Masui into a striking sensory form, transforming more than 4,000 cosmic signals into spatial audio.

With its grand opening on April 4, “The Logos” project invites visitors to experience deep-space phenomena not as distant abstractions, but as something immediate and resonant. The work is led by artist and creative technologist Andrew Melchior in collaboration with Masui, philosopher Timothy Morton, and cathedral dean Satu Saarinen. Together, they treat the cathedral, built in 1832, not just as a setting but as part of the instrument itself. Its stone surfaces and reverberant acoustics give physical presence to signals that have traveled from distant galaxies.

At the heart of the installation are data gathered by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) radio telescope, which detects fast radio bursts (FRBs). FRBs are immensely energetic flashes lasting only milliseconds and originating in distant galaxies across the observable universe. The Logos represents one of the most extensive artistic sonifications of FRB data to date. Each day at noon, the cathedral is filled with a one-hour procedural composition derived from these bursts. Some bursts are singular events, never repeating, while others pulse again and again from unknown sources. These patterns remain one of astrophysics’ most compelling mysteries.

“The fast flashes will echo as snare-like beats bouncing through the cathedral,” says Masui. “The sweeping dispersion of the signal — where different radio frequencies arrive at slightly different times — creates harmonies between high and low tones. It should feel rich and layered, while also revealing something real about how these signals travel across billions of years of cosmic space before reaching Earth.”

By converting FRB data into a shared listening experience, the collaboration suggests a different way of understanding the universe: not only through analysis, but through attention.

Running through April 2027 to mark the cathedral’s 250th anniversary, The Logos will feature as part of Oulu2026 European Capital of Culture and the Lumo Art and Tech Festival.