This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

• I’m speaking at Boskone 62 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, which runs from February 14-16, 2025. My talk is at 4:00 PM ET on the 15th.
• I’m speaking at the Rossfest Symposium in Cambridge, UK, on March 25, 2025.

The list is maintained on this page.

Inside MIT’s Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center, on the springy blue mat of the gymnastics room, an unconventional anatomy lesson unfolded during an October meeting of class STS.024/CMS.524 (Thinking on Your Feet: Dance as a Learning Science).

Supported by a grant from the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST), Thinking on Your Feet was developed and offered for the first time in Fall 2024 by Jennifer S. Light, the Bern Dibner Professor of the History of Science and Technology and a professor of Urban Studies and Planning. Light’s vision for the class included a varied lineup of guest instructors. During the last week of October, she handed the reins to Middlebury College Professor Emerita Andrea Olsen, whose expertise bridges dance and science.

Olsen organized the class into small groups. Placing hands on each other’s shoulders conga-line style, participants shuffled across the mat personifying the layers of the nervous system as Olsen had just explained them: the supportive spinal cord and bossy brain of the central nervous system; the sympathetic nervous system responsible for fight-or-flight and its laid-back parasympathetic counterpart; and the literal “gut feelings” of the enteric nervous system. The groups giggled and stumbled as they attempted to stay in character and coordinate their movements.

Unusual as this exercise was, it perfectly suited a class dedicated to movement as a tool for teaching and learning. One of the class’s introductory readings, an excerpt from Annie Murphy Paul’s book “The Extended Mind,” suggests why this was a more effective primer on the nervous system than a standard lecture: “Our memory for what we have heard is remarkably weak. Our memory for what we have done, however — for physical actions we have undertaken — is much more robust.”

Head-to-toe education

Thinking on Your Feet is the third course spun out from Light’s Project on Embodied Education (the other two, developed in collaboration with MIT Director of Physical Education and Wellness Carrie Sampson Moore, examine the history of exercise in relation to schools and medicine, respectively). A historian of science and technology and historian of education for much of her career, Light refocused her scholarship on movement and learning after she’d begun training at Somerville’s Esh Circus Arts to counteract the stress of serving as department head. During her sabbatical a few years later, as part of Esh’s pre-professional program for aspiring acrobats, she took a series of dance classes spanning genres from ballet to hip-hop to Afro modern.

“I started playing with the idea that this is experiential learning — could I bring something like this back to MIT?” she recalls. “There’s a ton of interesting contemporary scientific research on cognition and learning as not just neck-up processes, but whole-body processes.”

Thinking on Your Feet provides an overview of recent scientific studies indicating the surprising extent to which physical activity enhances attention, memory, executive function, and other aspects of mental acuity. Other readings consider dance’s role in the transmission of knowledge throughout human history — from the Native Hawaiian tradition of hula to early forms of ballet in European courts — and describe the ways movement-based instruction can engage underserved populations and neurodiverse learners.

“You can argue for embodied learning on so many dimensions,” says Light. “I want my students to understand that what they’ve been taught about learning is only part of the story, and that contemporary science, ancient wisdom, and non-Western traditions all have a lot to tell us about how we might rethink education to maximize the benefits for all different kinds of students.”

Learning to dance

If you scan the new class’s syllabus, you’re unlikely to miss the word “fun.” It appears twice — bolded, in all caps, and garnished by an exclamation point.

“I’m trying to bring a playful, experimental, ‘you don’t have to be perfect, just be creative’ vibe,” says Light. A dance background is not a prerequisite. The 18 students who registered this fall ranged from experienced dancers to novices.

“I initially took this class just to fulfill my arts requirement,” admits junior physics major Matson Garza, one of the latter group. He was surprised at how much he enjoyed it. “I have an interest in physics education, and I’ve found that beyond introductory courses it’s often lacking intuition. Integrating movement may be one way to solve this problem.”

Similarly, second-year biological engineering major Annabel Tiong found her entry point through an interest in hands-on education, deepened after volunteering with a program that aims to spark curiosity about health-care careers by engaging kids in medical simulations. “While I don’t have an extensive background in dance,” she says, “I was curious how dance, with its free-form and creative nature, could be used to teach STEM topics that appear to be quite concrete and technical.”

To build on each Tuesday’s lectures and discussions, Thursday “lab” sessions focused on overcoming inhibitions, teaching different styles of movement, and connecting dance with academic content. McKersin of Lakaï Arts, a lecturer in dance for the MIT Music and Theater Arts section, led a lab on Haitian harvest dances; Guy Steele PhD ’80 and Clark Baker SM ’80 of the MIT Tech Squares club provided an intro to square dancing and some of its connections to math and programming. Light invited some of her own dance instructors from the circus community, including Johnny Blazes, who specializes (according to their website) in working with “people who have been told implicitly and explicitly that they don’t belong in movement and fitness spaces.” Another, Reba Rosenberg, led the students through basic partner acrobatics that Light says did wonders for the class’s sense of confidence and community.

“Afterwards, several students asked, ‘Could we do this again?’” remembers Light. “None of them thought they could do the thing that by the end of class they were able to do: balance on each other, stand on each other. You can imagine how the need to physically trust someone with your safety yields incredible benefits when we’re back in the classroom.”

Dancing to learn

The culmination of Thinking on Your Feet — a final project constituting 40 percent of students’ grades — required each student to create a dance-based lesson plan on a STEM topic of their choice. Students were exposed throughout the semester to examples of such pedagogy. Olsen’s nervous-system parade was one. Others came courtesy of Lewis Hou of Science Ceilidh, an organization that uses Scottish highland dance to illustrate concepts across the natural and physical sciences, and MIT alumna Yamilée Toussaint ’08, whose nonprofit STEM from Dance helps young women of color create performances with technical components.

As a stepping stone, Light had planned a midterm assignment asking students to adapt existing choreography. But her students surprised her by wanting to jump directly into creating their own dances from scratch. Those first forays weren’t elaborate, but Light was impressed enough by their efforts that she plans to amend the syllabus accordingly.

“One group was doing differential calculus and imagining the floor as a graph,” she recalls, “having dancers think about where they were in relation to each other.” Another group, comprising members of the MIT Ballroom Dance team, choreographed the computer science concept of pipelined processors. “They were giving commands to each other like ‘load’ and ‘execute’ and ‘write back,’” Light says. “The beauty of this is that the students could offer each other feedback on the technical piece of it. Like, ‘OK, I see that you’re trying to explain a clock cycle. Maybe try to do it this way.”

Among the pipelined processing team was senior Kateryna Morhun, a competitive ballroom dancer since age 4 who is earning her degree in artificial intelligence and decision-making. “We wanted to challenge ourselves to teach a specialized, more technical topic that isn’t usually a target of embodied learning initiatives,” Morhun says.

How useful can dance really be in teaching advanced academic content? This was a lively topic of debate among the Thinking on Your Feet cohort. It’s a question Light intends to investigate further with mechanical engineering lecturer Benita Comeau, who audited the class and offered a lab exploring the connections among dance, physics, and martial arts.

“This class sparked many ideas for me, across multiple subject matters and movement styles,” says Comeau. “As an example, the square dance class reminded me of the symmetry groups that are used to describe molecular symmetry in chemistry, and it occurred to me that students could move through symmetry groups and learn about chirality” — a geometric property relevant to numerous branches of science.

For their final presentation, Garza and Tiong’s group tackled substitution mechanisms, a topic from organic chemistry (“notoriously viewed as a very difficult and dreaded class,” according to their write-up). Their lesson plan specified that learners would first need to familiarize themselves with key points through conventional readings and discussion. But then, to bring that material alive, groups of learners representing atoms would take the floor. One, portraying a central carbon atom, would hold out an arm indicating readiness to accept an electron. Another would stand to the side with two balls representing electrons, bonded by a ribbon. Others would rotate in a predetermined order around the central carbon to portray a model’s initial stereochemistry. And so a dance would begin: a three-dimensional, human-scale visualization of a complex chemical process.

The group was asked to summarize what they hoped learners would discover through their dance. “Chemistry is very dynamic!” they wrote. “It’s not mixing chemicals to magically make new ones — it’s a dynamic process of collision, bonding, and molecule-breaking that causes some structures to vanish and others to appear.”

In addition to evaluating the impact of movement in her classes in collaboration with Raechel Soicher from the MIT Teaching + Learning Lab, Light is working on a book about how modern science has rediscovered the ancient wisdom of embodied learning. She hopes her class will kick off a conversation at MIT about incorporating such movement-assisted insights into the educational practices of the future. In fact, she believes MIT’s heritage of innovative pedagogy makes it ripe for these explorations.

As her syllabus puts it: “For all of us, as part of the MIT community, this class invites us to reconsider how our ‘mind and hand’ approach to experiential learning — a product of the 19th century — might be expanded to ‘mind and body’ for the 21st century.”

Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s chaotic approach to reform is upending government operations. Critical functions have been halted, tens of thousands of federal staffers are being encouraged to resign, and congressional mandates are being disregarded. The next phase: The Department of Government Efficiency reportedly wants to use AI to cut costs. According to The Washington Post, Musk’s group has started to run sensitive data from government systems through AI programs to analyze spending and determine what could be pruned. This may lead to the elimination of human jobs in favor of automation. As one government official who has been tracking Musk’s DOGE team told the...

The new EPA chief wants to claw back cash from a Biden administration green banking program. It could spur a court fight.

The Department of Energy, Forest Service and Office of Personnel Management are among agencies that have begun axing staffers.

The move marks an escalation from the president's first term, when American diplomats continued to attend international climate meetings.

Taylor Jordan would join the agency at a time when its workforce has been targeted for sharp reductions in staff.

The California governor wants the president to give wildfire survivors more time to apply for emergency assistance.

Biden's EPA selected, but never finalized, the award before the former president left office.

The first message announces a “new climate era” in which people who build climate wareness into business strategy are likely to beat out competitors who don’t.

The country has ushered in a series of green reversals since Prime Minister Christopher Luxon’s center-right coalition took office in late 2023.

Electric vehicles and motorbikes only make up a small fraction of the vehicles in the world’s fourth most populated country.

As calls by UK’s top leaders for the release of British-Egyptian blogger, coder, and activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah from prison in Cairo continue, Alaa’s mother, math professor Laila Soueif, grows weaker four months into a hunger strike she began in September to keep attention focused on her son and protest the lack of progress in obtaining his release.  

She has consumed only water, coffee, tea and rehydration salts for more than 135 days. She is 68 years old, and her condition is becoming dire. 

It's a shocking and unacceptable situation for Alaa’s family and his many supporters around the world. They continue to get the runaround from the British government about its efforts to get him released. The prime minister and foreign secretary, the key players in the drive to secure Alaa’s release, have expressed support for Alaa and dealt directly with Egypt’s highest authorities on his behalf. But Alaa’s family has received scant information about those discussions.  

What we do know is that Prime Minister Keir Starmer spoke directly to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi about Alaa during a phone call last summer and in December, but did not raise the issue when the two met at the G20 summit in November. Starmer told  Soueif in a January 29 letter (he has so far declined to meet with her) that he is committed to pushing Egypt to release him. “I believe progress is possible, but it will take time,” he said. 

"I don't have time, Soueif told Agence France-Presse.

Likewise, Foreign Secretary David Lammy said in January that he met with Egypt’s foreign minister in Saudi Arabia and has made securing Alaa’s release his number one priority. He spoke to his Egyptian counterpart, Badr Abdel Aty, again while in Cairo. Meanwhile, the government sent a strong message in its periodic review of Egypt before the UN Human Rights Council, saying freeing Alaa was its foremost recommendation and calling his detention “unacceptable.” 

Yet, there have been no signs that the Egyptian government will free Alaa. He remains in a maximum-security prison outside of Cairo. He has spent the better part of the last 10 years behind bars, unjustly charged for supporting online free speech and privacy for Egyptians and people across the Middle East and North Africa. The Egyptian government’s treatment of Alaa, a prominent global voice during the Arab Spring, is a travesty. 

“I don’t have time,” Soueif told Agence France-Presse.  

“We’ve been in this endless loop of imprisonment for almost 10 years,” Soueif told Middle East Eye in explaining why she went on a hunger strike. “I couldn't allow this to go on any further, and there was no reason to believe that if we waited a bit more, he'd come out.” 

Alaa should have been released on September 29, after serving his five-year sentence for sharing a Facebook post about a death in police custody, but Egyptian authorities have continued his imprisonment in contravention of the country’s own Criminal Procedure Code.  

Journalism and former foreign correspondent Peter Greste, who befriended Alaa 11 years ago when the two were locked up in the same prison—Greste on terrorism charges for his reporting—joined Soueif in a 21-day hunger strike to show his solidarity. “This injustice has gone on far too long,” he said.  

Others continue to press for Alaa’s release. This week a group of prominent Egyptian public figures called on President al-Sisi to release Alaa, citing among other things Soueif’s declining health. Allowing Alaa to get out of prison would not merely be a humanitarian response, but “a strategic decision that would foster a more conciliatory political climate,” they said.  

EFF and six international partner organizations in December called on Starmer to take immediate action to secure Alaa’s release. We told him that Alaa’s case is a litmus test of the UK’s commitment to human rights. Soueif’s future, and Alaa’s, rests in the UK government’s hands, and it must act now. Starmer needs to pick up the phone and call al-Sisi.  

If you’re based in the UK, here are some actions you can take to support the calls for Alaa’s release:

1. Write to your MP (external link): https://freealaa.net/message-mp  

1. Join Laila Soueif outside the Foreign Office in London daily between 10-11am 

1. Share Alaa’s plight on social media using the hashtag #freealaa 

 

 

 

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 14 February 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02278-1

Author Correction: Carbon burial in sediments below seaweed farms matches that of Blue Carbon habitats

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 14 February 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02251-y

Land-based carbon dioxide removals are critical for meeting the low-warming targets, yet their availability is limited when avoiding excessive risks to sustainability. Scenario-based analysis suggests that they should only be used to compensate for emissions from hard-to-abate sectors and overshoot.

Proteins are the workhorses that keep our cells running, and there are many thousands of types of proteins in our cells, each performing a specialized function. Researchers have long known that the structure of a protein determines what it can do. More recently, researchers are coming to appreciate that a protein’s localization is also critical for its function. Cells are full of compartments that help to organize their many denizens. Along with the well-known organelles that adorn the pages of biology textbooks, these spaces also include a variety of dynamic, membrane-less compartments that concentrate certain molecules together to perform shared functions. Knowing where a given protein localizes, and who it co-localizes with, can therefore be useful for better understanding that protein and its role in the healthy or diseased cell, but researchers have lacked a systematic way to predict this information.

Meanwhile, protein structure has been studied for over half-a-century, culminating in the artificial intelligence tool AlphaFold, which can predict protein structure from a protein’s amino acid code, the linear string of building blocks within it that folds to create its structure. AlphaFold and models like it have become widely used tools in research.

Proteins also contain regions of amino acids that do not fold into a fixed structure, but are instead important for helping proteins join dynamic compartments in the cell. MIT Professor Richard Young and colleagues wondered whether the code in those regions could be used to predict protein localization in the same way that other regions are used to predict structure. Other researchers have discovered some protein sequences that code for protein localization, and some have begun developing predictive models for protein localization. However, researchers did not know whether a protein’s localization to any dynamic compartment could be predicted based on its sequence, nor did they have a comparable tool to AlphaFold for predicting localization. 

Now, Young, also member of the Whitehead Institute for Biological Research; Young lab postdoc Henry Kilgore; Regina Barzilay, the School of Engineering Distinguished Professor for AI and Health in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); and colleagues have built such a model, which they call ProtGPS. In a paper published on Feb. 6 in the journal Science, with first authors Kilgore and Barzilay lab graduate students Itamar Chinn, Peter Mikhael, and Ilan Mitnikov, the cross-disciplinary team debuts their model. The researchers show that ProtGPS can predict to which of 12 known types of compartments a protein will localize, as well as whether a disease-associated mutation will change that localization. Additionally, the research team developed a generative algorithm that can design novel proteins to localize to specific compartments.

“My hope is that this is a first step towards a powerful platform that enables people studying proteins to do their research,” Young says, “and that it helps us understand how humans develop into the complex organisms that they are, how mutations disrupt those natural processes, and how to generate therapeutic hypotheses and design drugs to treat dysfunction in a cell.”

The researchers also validated many of the model’s predictions with experimental tests in cells.

“It really excited me to be able to go from computational design all the way to trying these things in the lab,” Barzilay says. “There are a lot of exciting papers in this area of AI, but 99.9 percent of those never get tested in real systems. Thanks to our collaboration with the Young lab, we were able to test, and really learn how well our algorithm is doing.”

Developing the model

The researchers trained and tested ProtGPS on two batches of proteins with known localizations. They found that it could correctly predict where proteins end up with high accuracy. The researchers also tested how well ProtGPS could predict changes in protein localization based on disease-associated mutations within a protein. Many mutations — changes to the sequence for a gene and its corresponding protein — have been found to contribute to or cause disease based on association studies, but the ways in which the mutations lead to disease symptoms remain unknown.

Figuring out the mechanism for how a mutation contributes to disease is important because then researchers can develop therapies to fix that mechanism, preventing or treating the disease. Young and colleagues suspected that many disease-associated mutations might contribute to disease by changing protein localization. For example, a mutation could make a protein unable to join a compartment containing essential partners.

They tested this hypothesis by feeding ProtGOS more than 200,000 proteins with disease-associated mutations, and then asking it to both predict where those mutated proteins would localize and measure how much its prediction changed for a given protein from the normal to the mutated version. A large shift in the prediction indicates a likely change in localization.

The researchers found many cases in which a disease-associated mutation appeared to change a protein’s localization. They tested 20 examples in cells, using fluorescence to compare where in the cell a normal protein and the mutated version of it ended up. The experiments confirmed ProtGPS’s predictions. Altogether, the findings support the researchers’ suspicion that mis-localization may be an underappreciated mechanism of disease, and demonstrate the value of ProtGPS as a tool for understanding disease and identifying new therapeutic avenues.

“The cell is such a complicated system, with so many components and complex networks of interactions,” Mitnikov says. “It’s super interesting to think that with this approach, we can perturb the system, see the outcome of that, and so drive discovery of mechanisms in the cell, or even develop therapeutics based on that.”

The researchers hope that others begin using ProtGPS in the same way that they use predictive structural models like AlphaFold, advancing various projects on protein function, dysfunction, and disease.

Moving beyond prediction to novel generation

The researchers were excited about the possible uses of their prediction model, but they also wanted their model to go beyond predicting localizations of existing proteins, and allow them to design completely new proteins. The goal was for the model to make up entirely new amino acid sequences that, when formed in a cell, would localize to a desired location. Generating a novel protein that can actually accomplish a function — in this case, the function of localizing to a specific cellular compartment — is incredibly difficult. In order to improve their model’s chances of success, the researchers constrained their algorithm to only design proteins like those found in nature. This is an approach commonly used in drug design, for logical reasons; nature has had billions of years to figure out which protein sequences work well and which do not.

Because of the collaboration with the Young lab, the machine learning team was able to test whether their protein generator worked. The model had good results. In one round, it generated 10 proteins intended to localize to the nucleolus. When the researchers tested these proteins in the cell, they found that four of them strongly localized to the nucleolus, and others may have had slight biases toward that location as well.

“The collaboration between our labs has been so generative for all of us,” Mikhael says. “We’ve learned how to speak each other’s languages, in our case learned a lot about how cells work, and by having the chance to experimentally test our model, we’ve been able to figure out what we need to do to actually make the model work, and then make it work better.”

Being able to generate functional proteins in this way could improve researchers’ ability to develop therapies. For example, if a drug must interact with a target that localizes within a certain compartment, then researchers could use this model to design a drug to also localize there. This should make the drug more effective and decrease side effects, since the drug will spend more time engaging with its target and less time interacting with other molecules, causing off-target effects.

The machine learning team members are enthused about the prospect of using what they have learned from this collaboration to design novel proteins with other functions beyond localization, which would expand the possibilities for therapeutic design and other applications.

“A lot of papers show they can design a protein that can be expressed in a cell, but not that the protein has a particular function,” Chinn says. “We actually had functional protein design, and a relatively huge success rate compared to other generative models. That’s really exciting to us, and something we would like to build on.”

All of the researchers involved see ProtGPS as an exciting beginning. They anticipate that their tool will be used to learn more about the roles of localization in protein function and mis-localization in disease. In addition, they are interested in expanding the model’s localization predictions to include more types of compartments, testing more therapeutic hypotheses, and designing increasingly functional proteins for therapies or other applications.

“Now that we know that this protein code for localization exists, and that machine learning models can make sense of that code and even create functional proteins using its logic, that opens up the door for so many potential studies and applications,” Kilgore says.

As President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order in 2020 to retaliate against online services that fact-checked him, a team within the Department of Justice (DOJ) was finalizing a proposal to substantially weaken a key law that protects internet users’ speech.

Documents released to EFF as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit reveal that the DOJ officials—a self-described “Tiger Team”—were caught off guard by Trump’s retaliatory effort, which was aimed at the same online social services they wanted to regulate further by amending 47 U.S.C. § 230 (Section 230).

Section 230 protects users’ online speech by protecting the online intermediaries we all rely on to communicate on blogs, social media platforms, and educational and cultural platforms like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. Section 230 embodies that principle that we should all be responsible for our own actions and statements online, but generally not those of others. The law prevents most civil suits against users or services that are based on what others say.

The correspondence among DOJ officials shows that the group delayed unveiling the agency’s official plans to amend Section 230 in light of Trump’s executive order, which was challenged on First Amendment grounds and later rescinded by President Joe Biden. EFF represented the groups who challenged Trump’s Executive Order and filed two FOIA suits for records about the administration’s implementation of the order.

In the most recent FOIA case, the DOJ has been slowly releasing records detailing its work to propose amendments to Section 230, which predated Trump’s Executive Order. The DOJ released the text of its proposed amendments to Section 230 in September 2020, and the proposal would have substantially narrowed the law’s protections.

For example, the DOJ’s proposal would have allowed federal civil suits and state and federal criminal prosecutions against online services if they learned that users’ content broke the law. It also would have established notice-and-takedown liability for user-generated content that was deemed to be illegal. Together, these provisions would likely result in online services screening and removing a host of legal content, based on a fear that any questionable material might trigger liability later.

The DOJ’s proposal had a distinct emphasis on imposing liability on services should they have hosted illegal content posted by their users. That focus was likely the result of the team DOJ assembled to work on the proposal, which included officials from the agency’s cybercrime division and the FBI.

The documents also show that DOJ officials met with attorneys who brought lawsuits against online services to get their perspective on Section 230. This is not surprising, as the DOJ had been meeting with multiple groups throughout 2020 while it prepared a report about Section 230.

EFF’s FOIA suit is ongoing, as the DOJ has said that it still has thousands of potential pages to review and possibly release. Although these documents reflect DOJ’s activity from Trump’s first term, they are increasingly relevant as the administration appoints officials who have previously threatened online intermediaries for exercising their own First Amendment rights. EFF will continue to publish all documents released in this FOIA suit and push back on attempts to undermine internet users’ rights to speak online.

Google continues to show us why it chose to abandon its old motto of “Don’t Be Evil,” as it becomes more and more enmeshed with the military-industrial complex. Most recently, Google has removed four key points from its AI principles. Specifically, it previously read that the company would not pursue AI applications involving (1) weapons, (2) surveillance, (3) technologies that “cause or are likely to cause overall harm,” and (4) technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and  human rights.

Those principles are gone now.

In its place, the company has written that “democracies” should lead in AI development and companies should work together with governments “to create AI that protects people, promotes global growth, and supports national security.” This could mean that the provider of the world’s largest search engine–the tool most people use to uncover the best apple pie recipes and to find out what time their favorite coffee shop closes–could be in the business of creating AI-based weapons systems and leveraging its considerable computing power for surveillance.

This troubling decision to potentially profit from high-tech warfare, which could have serious consequences for real lives and real people comes after criticism from EFF, human rights activists, and other international groups. Despite its pledges and vocal commitment to human rights, Google has faced criticism for its involvement in Project Nimbus, which provides advanced cloud and AI capabilities to the Israeli government, tools that an increasing number of credible reports suggest are being used to target civilians under pervasive surveillance in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. EFF said in 2024, “When a company makes a promise, the public should be able to rely on it.” Rather than fully living up to its previous human rights commitments, it seems Google has shifted its priorities.

Google is a company valued at $2.343 trillion that has global infrastructure and a massive legal department and appears to be leaning into the current anti-humanitarian moment. The fifth largest company in the world seems to have chosen to make the few extra bucks (relative to the company’s earnings and net worth) that will come from mass surveillance tools and AI-enhanced weapons systems.

And of course we can tell why. With government money flying out the door toward defense contractors, surveillance technology companies, and other national security and policing related vendors, the legacy companies who swallow up all of that data don’t want to miss out on the feeding frenzy. With $1 billion contracts on the table even for smaller companies promising AI-enhanced tech, it looks like Google is willing to throw its lot in with the herd.

In addition to Google and Amazon’s involvement with Project Nimbus, which involved both cloud storage for the large amounts of data collected from mass surveillance and analysis of that data, there are many other scenarios and products on the market that could raise concerns. AI could be used to power autonomous weapons systems which decide when and if to pull the trigger or drop a bomb. Targeting software can mean physically aiming weapons at people identified by geolocation or by other types of machine learning like face recognition or other biometric technology. AI could also be used to sift through massive amounts of intelligence, including intercepted communications or publicly available information from social media and the internet in order to assemble lists of people to be targeted by militaries.

Whether autonomous AI-based weapons systems and surveillance are controlled by totalitarian states or states that meet Google’s definition of “democracy”, is of little comfort to the people who could be targeted, spied on, or killed in error by AI technology which is prone to mistakes. AI cannot be accountable for its actions. If we, the public, are able to navigate the corporate, government, and national security secrecy to learn of these flaws, companies will fall on a playbook we’ve seen before: tinkering with the algorithms and declaring the problem solved.

We urge Google, and all of the companies that will follow in its wake, to reverse course. In the meantime, users will have to decide who deserves their business. As the company’s most successful product, its search engine, is faltering, that decision gets easier and easier.

In the span of just weeks, the US government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history—not through a sophisticated cyberattack or an act of foreign espionage, but through official orders by a billionaire with a poorly defined government role. And the implications for national security are profound.

First, it was reported that people associated with the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had accessed the US Treasury computer system, giving them the ability to collect data on and potentially control the department’s roughly ...

Promoters of fossil fuels accuse the International Energy Agency of promoting liberal ideas about clean energy.