Paragon is an Israeli spyware company, increasingly in the news (now that NSO Group seems to be waning). “Graphite” is the name of its product. Citizen Lab caught it spying on multiple European journalists with a zero-click iOS exploit:

On April 29, 2025, a select group of iOS users were notified by Apple that they were targeted with advanced spyware. Among the group were two journalists that consented for the technical analysis of their cases. The key findings from our forensic analysis of their devices are summarized below:

• Our analysis finds forensic evidence confirming with high confidence that both a prominent European journalist (who requests anonymity), and Italian journalist Ciro Pellegrino, were targeted with Paragon’s Graphite mercenary spyware. ...

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 13 June 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02350-w

Glancing forward to view alternative futures for limiting global warming requires understanding complex societal–environmental systems that drive future emissions. Now a study explores the potential, and limits, of deep learning to generate core characteristics of these futures.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 13 June 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02356-4

Fire emissions can be an important source of nutrients such as iron, particularly for the oceans. Here the authors estimate that climate-change-driven changes in fire emissions could increase iron deposition in ocean ecosystems, enhancing productivity particularly in the North Atlantic.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 13 June 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02326-w

Content delivery algorithms on social media exhibit biases in audience selection, which are understudied in the climate context. This study combines observational analysis and a field experiment to reveal algorithmic bias in Facebook’s climate ad data across location, gender and age groups.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 13 June 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02352-8

Integrated assessment model-based scenarios are commonly used to project future emission pathways but suffer from submission biases and high computational cost. Here researchers develop a deep learning framework to generate synthetic scenarios and replicate key variables across a wide range of mitigation ambitions.

This is news:

A data broker owned by the country’s major airlines, including Delta, American Airlines, and United, collected U.S. travellers’ domestic flight records, sold access to them to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and then as part of the contract told CBP to not reveal where the data came from, according to internal CBP documents obtained by 404 Media. The data includes passenger names, their full flight itineraries, and financial details.

Another article.

U.S. sanctions on Syria have for several decades not only restricted trade and financial transactions, they’ve also severely limited Syrians’ access to digital technology. From software development tools to basic cloud services, Syrians were locked out of the global internet economy—stifling innovation, education, and entrepreneurship.

EFF has for many years pushed for sanctions exemptions for technology in Syria, as well as in Sudan, Iran, and Cuba. While civil society had early wins in securing general licenses for Iran and Sudan allowing the export of communications technologies, the conflict in Syria that began in 2011 made loosening of sanctions a pipe dream.

But recent changes to U.S. policy could mark the beginning of a shift. In a quiet yet significant move, the U.S. government has eased sanctions on Syria. On May 23, the Treasury Department issued General License 25, effectively allowing technology companies to provide services to Syrians. This decision could have an immediate and positive impact on the lives of millions of Syrian internet users—especially those working in the tech and education sectors.

A Legacy of Digital Isolation

For years, Syrians have found themselves barred from accessing even the most basic tools. U.S. sanctions meant that companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon—either by law or by cautious decisions taken to avoid potential penalties—restricted access to many of their services. Developers couldn’t access GitHub repositories or use Google Cloud; students couldn’t download software for virtual classrooms; and entrepreneurs struggled to build startups without access to payment gateways or secure infrastructure.

Such restrictions can put users in harm’s way; for instance, not being able to access the Google Play store from inside the country means that Syrians can’t easily download secure versions of everyday tools like Signal or WhatsApp, thus potentially subjecting their communications to surveillance.

These restrictions also compounded the difficulties of war, economic collapse, and internal censorship. Even when Syrian tech workers could connect with global communities, their participation was hampered by legal gray zones and technical blocks.

What the Sanctions Relief Changes

Under General License 25, companies will now be able to provide services to Syria that have never officially been available. While it may take time for companies to catch up with any regulatory changes, it is our hope that Syrians will soon be able to access and make use of technologies that will enable them to more freely communicate and rebuild.

For Syrian developers, the impact could be transformative. Restored access to platforms like GitHub, AWS, and Google Cloud means the ability to build, test, and deploy apps without the need for VPNs or workarounds. It opens the door to participation in global hackathons, remote work, and open-source communities—channels that are often lifelines for those in conflict zones. Students and educators stand to benefit, too. With sanctions eased, educational tools and platforms that were previously unavailable could soon be accessible. Entrepreneurs may also finally gain access to secure communications, e-commerce platforms, and the broader digital infrastructure needed to start and scale businesses. These developments could help jumpstart local economies.

Despite the good news, challenges remain. Major tech companies have historically been slow to respond to sanctions relief, often erring on the side of over-compliance to avoid liability. Many of the financial and logistical barriers—such as payment processing, unreliable internet, and ongoing conflict—will not disappear overnight.

Moreover, the lifting of sanctions is not a blanket permission slip; it’s a cautious opening. Any future geopolitical shifts or changes in U.S. foreign policy could once again cut off access, creating an uncertain digital future for Syrians.

Nevertheless, by removing barriers imposed by sanctions, the U.S. is taking a step toward recognizing that access to technology is not a luxury, but a necessity—even in sanctioned or conflict-ridden countries.

For Syrian users, the lifting of tech sanctions is more than a bureaucratic change—it’s a door, long closed, beginning to open. And for the international tech community, it’s an opportunity to re-engage, responsibly and thoughtfully, with a population that has been cut off from essential services for too long.

EPA contradicts itself — and legal precedent — in its bid to undo Biden-era limits on power plant pollution.

Court rulings and two Trump administrations have derailed regulators' attempts to forestall rising temperatures, while scientists' warnings grow more dire.

It's the first time in three decades that the United States will miss the annual global warming conference.

State regulators are reviewing plans for more than 100 new gas-fired energy projects.

Groups are split over using market revenue for highway widening. Some say it would undercut climate efforts by increasing carbon emissions.

A data center developers group filed testimony in Florida Power & Light's $2.5 billion rate request pending before the Public Service Commission.

Fossil fuel power plants and producers of iron, steel and cement will be covered under the initial phase, according to a government report.

The Swedish climate activist and fellow boat passengers were mocked and deprived of sleep, Baptiste André claimed.

Eastern Cape officials said at least 58 schools and 20 hospitals were damaged by floodwaters.

Back in 1676, a Dutch cloth merchant with a keen interest in microscopes, Antony van Leeuwenhoek, discovered microbes and began cataloging them. Two hundred years later, a German doctor in current-day Poland, Robert Koch, identified the anthrax bacterium, a crucial step toward modern germ theory. Those two signal advances, with others, have helped create the conditions of modern living as we know it.

After all, germ theory led to modern medical advances that have drastically limited deaths from infectious diseases. In the U.S. in 1900, the leading causes of death were pneumonia, influenza, tuberculosis, and gut infection, which combined for close to half of the country’s fatalities. For that matter, due to the threat of disease, childhood was a precarious thing more or less from the start of civilization until the last half-century.

“The world we’ve experienced since the 1950s, and really since the 1970s, is unprecedented in human history,” says MIT Professor Thomas Levenson. “Think of all the grandparents able to dance at their grandkids’ weddings who would not have been able to, because either they or the kids would have died from one of these diseases. Human flourishing has come from this extraordinary scientific development.”

To Levenson, two things about this historical trajectory stand out. One is that it took 200 years to develop germ theory. Another is our ability to combat these diseases so thoroughly — something he believes we should not take for granted.

Now in a new book, “So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs — and May Still Lose the War against Infectious Disease,” published by Penguin Random House, Levenson explores both these issues, crafting a historically rich narrative with relevance today. In writing about the development of germ theory, Levenson says, he is aiming to better illuminate “the single most lifesaving tool that human ingenuity has ever come up with.”

A 200-year incubation period

The starting point of Levenson’s research was the simple fact that van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery — accompanied by his illustrations of microbes we can identify today — did not lead to concrete advances for a long, long time.

“It’s almost exactly 200 years between the discovery of bacteria and the definitive proof that they matter to us in life-and-death ways,” Levenson says. “Infectious disease is a big deal and yet it took two centuries to get there. And I wanted to know why.”

Among other things, a variety of ideas, often about the structure of society, blocked the way. The common notion of a “great chain of being” steered people away from the idea that microorganisms could affect human health. Still, some people did recognize the possibility that tiny creatures might be spreading disease. In the late 1600s, the Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather wondered if specific types of “animacules” might each be responsible for spreading different diseases.

Into the 19th century, a few intellectually lonely figures recognized the significance of microbes in the spread of infectious disease, without their ideas gaining much traction. An 18th-century physician in Aberdeen, Scotland, Alexander Gordon, traced the spread of puerperal fever — a disease that killed new mothers — to something doctors and midwives carried on their hands as they delivered babies. A few decades later a doctor in Vienna, Ignaz Semmelweis, deduced that doctors performing autopsies were spreading illness into maternity wards. But skeptics doubted that respectable, gentlemanly doctors could be vectors of disease, and for decades, little was done to prevent the spread of infection.

Eventually, as Levenson chronicles, more scientists, especially Louis Pasteur in France, accumulated enough evidence to establish bacteriology as a field. Medicine advanced through much of the 20th century to the point where, in the postwar years in the U.S., vaccines and antibiotics had enormously reduced human deaths and suffering.

Ultimately, acceptance of new ideas like microbes causing disease involve “how strong cultural presuppositions are and how strong the hierarchical organization of society is,” Levenson says. “If you think you’ve shown that doctors can carry infections from patient to patient, but other people can’t entertain that insight because of other assumptions, that tells you why it took so long to arrive at germ theory. The facts of the science may win out in the end, but even if they do, the end can be delayed.”

He adds: “It can happen when a solution then gets entangled with things that have nothing to do with science.”

Science and society

Understanding that entanglement, between science and society, is a key part of “So Very Small,” as it is in Levenson’s numerous books and other works. Science almost never stands apart from society. The question is how they interact, in any given circumstance.

“One of the themes of my work is how science really works, as opposed to how we’re told it works,” Levenson says. “It’s not simply an ongoing iterative machine to generate new knowledge and hypotheses. Science is a huge human endeavor. The human beings who do it have their own beliefs and cultural assumptions, and are part of larger societies which they interact with all the time, and which have their own characteristics. Those things matter a lot to what science gets done, and how. And that’s still true.”

To be sure, infectious diseases have never entirely been a thing of the past. Some are still prevalent in developing countries, while Covid and the HIV/AIDS epidemics are cases where new medical treatments needed to be developed to staunch emerging illnesses. Still, as Levenson observes in the book, the interplay of science and society may produce yet more uncertainties for us in the future. Antibiotics can lose effectiveness over time, for one thing.

“If we want new antibiotics that can defeat bacterial infections, we need to fund research into them and market them and regulate them,” Levenson says. “That isn’t a political statement. Bacteria do what they do, they evolve when they are challenged.” Meanwhile, he notes, while “there has always been [human] resistance to vaccines,” the greater prevalence of that today introduces new questions about how widely vaccines will be available and used.

“So Very Small” has earned strongly positive reviews in major publications. The Wall Street Journal stated that “With extraordinary detail and authoritative prose … What Mr. Levenson’s book makes clear is that the battle against germs never ends.” The New York Review of Books has called it “an elegant, wide-ranging history of the discovery of microorganisms and their relation to disease.”

Ultimately, Levenson says, “Science both gives us the material power that drives changes in society, that drives history, and science is done by people who are embedded in places and times. Looking at that is a wonderful way into bigger questions. That’s true of germ theory as well. It tells you a great deal about what societies value, and probes the society we now live in.”

Join us for our next EFFecting Change livestream this Thursday! We're talking about emerging laws and platform policies that affect the digital privacy and free expression rights of the LGBT+ community, and how this echoes the experience of marginalized people across the world.

EFFecting Change Livestream Series:
Pride in Digital Freedom
Thursday, June 12th
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM Pacific - Check Local Time
This event is LIVE and FREE!

Join our panel featuring EFF Senior Staff Technologist Daly Barnett, EFF Legislative Activist Rindala Alajaji, Chosen Family Law Center Senior Legal Director Andy Izenson, and Woodhull Freedom Foundation Chief Operations Officer Mandy Salley while they discuss what is happening and what should change to protect digital freedom.

effectingchangepride_social_banner.png

We hope you and your friends can join us live! Be sure to spread the word, and share our past livestreams. Please note that all events will be recorded for later viewing on our YouTube page.

Want to make sure you don’t miss our next livestream? Here’s a link to sign up for updates about this series: eff.org/ECUpdates.

State, federal, and international regulators are increasingly concerned about the harms they believe the internet and new technology are causing to users of all categories. Lawmakers are currently considering many proposals that are intended to provide protections to the most vulnerable among us. Too often, however, those proposals do not carefully consider the likely unintended consequences or even whether the law will actually reduce the harms it’s supposed to target. That’s why EFF supports Rep. Sara Jacobs’ newly reintroduced “My Body, My Data" Act, which will protect the privacy and safety of people seeking reproductive health care, while maintaining important constitutional protections and avoiding any erosion of end-to-end encryption. 

Privacy fears should never stand in the way of healthcare. That's why this common-sense bill will require businesses and non-governmental organizations to act responsibly with personal information concerning reproductive health care. Specifically, it restricts them from collecting, using, retaining, or disclosing reproductive health information that isn't essential to providing the service someone requests.

The bill would protect people who use fertility or period-tracking apps or are seeking information about reproductive health services.

These restrictions apply to companies that collect personal information related to a person’s reproductive or sexual health. That includes data related to pregnancy, menstruation, surgery, termination of pregnancy, contraception, basal body temperature or diagnoses. The bill would protect people who, for example, use fertility or period-tracking apps or are seeking information about reproductive health services. 

We are proud to join Center for Democracy and Technology, Electronic Privacy Information Center, National Partnership for Women & Families, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Reproductive Freedom for All, Physicians for Reproductive Health, National Women’s Law Center, National Abortion Federation, Catholics for Choice, National Council for Jewish Women, Power to Decide, United for Reproductive & Gender Equity, Indivisible, Guttmacher, and National Network of Abortion Funds, and All* Above All in support of this bill. 

In addition to the restrictions on company data processing, this bill also provides people with necessary rights to access and delete their reproductive health information. Companies must also publish a privacy policy, so that everyone can understand what information companies process and why. It also ensures that companies are held to public promises they make about data protection and gives the Federal Trade Commission the authority to hold them to account if they break those promises. 

The bill also lets people take on companies that violate their privacy with a strong private right of action. Empowering people to bring their own lawsuits not only places more control in the individual's hands, but also ensures that companies will not take these regulations lightly. 

Finally, while Rep. Jacobs' bill establishes an important national privacy foundation for everyone, it also leaves room for states to pass stronger or complementary laws to protect the data privacy of those seeking reproductive health care. 

We thank Rep. Jacobs and Sens. Mazie Hirono and Ron Wyden for taking up this important bill and using it as an opportunity not only to protect those seeking reproductive health care, but also highlight why data privacy is an important element of reproductive justice. 

The long-term aspirational goal of the Paris Agreement on climate change is to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, and thereby reduce the frequency and severity of floods, droughts, wildfires, and other extreme weather events. Achieving that goal will require a massive reduction in global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions across all economic sectors. A major roadblock, however, could be the industrial sector, which accounts for roughly 25 percent of global energy- and process-related CO2 emissions — particularly within the iron and steel sector, industry’s largest emitter of CO2.

Iron and steel production now relies heavily on fossil fuels (coal or natural gas) for heat, converting iron ore to iron, and making steel strong. Steelmaking could be decarbonized by a combination of several methods, including carbon capture technology, the use of low- or zero-carbon fuels, and increased use of recycled steel. Now a new study in the Journal of Cleaner Production systematically explores the viability of different iron-and-steel decarbonization strategies.

Today’s strategy menu includes improving energy efficiency, switching fuels and technologies, using more scrap steel, and reducing demand. Using the MIT Economic Projection and Policy Analysis model, a multi-sector, multi-region model of the world economy, researchers at MIT, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and ExxonMobil Technology and Engineering Co. evaluate the decarbonization potential of replacing coal-based production processes with electric arc furnaces (EAF), along with either scrap steel or “direct reduced iron” (DRI), which is fueled by natural gas with carbon capture and storage (NG CCS DRI-EAF) or by hydrogen (H2 DRI-EAF).

Under a global climate mitigation scenario aligned with the 1.5 C climate goal, these advanced steelmaking technologies could result in deep decarbonization of the iron and steel sector by 2050, as long as technology costs are low enough to enable large-scale deployment. Higher costs would favor the replacement of coal with electricity and natural gas, greater use of scrap steel, and reduced demand, resulting in a more-than-50-percent reduction in emissions relative to current levels. Lower technology costs would enable massive deployment of NG CCS DRI-EAF or H2 DRI-EAF, reducing emissions by up to 75 percent.

Even without adoption of these advanced technologies, the iron-and-steel sector could significantly reduce its CO2 emissions intensity (how much CO2 is released per unit of production) with existing steelmaking technologies, primarily by replacing coal with gas and electricity (especially if it is generated by renewable energy sources), using more scrap steel, and implementing energy efficiency measures.

“The iron and steel industry needs to combine several strategies to substantially reduce its emissions by mid-century, including an increase in recycling, but investing in cost reductions in hydrogen pathways and carbon capture and sequestration will enable even deeper emissions mitigation in the sector,” says study supervising author Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (MIT CS3) and a senior research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI).

This study was supported by MIT CS3 and ExxonMobil through its membership in MITEI.