In April, WhatsApp launched its “Advanced Chat Privacy” feature, which, once enabled, disables using certain AI features in chats and prevents conversations from being exported. Since its launch, an inaccurate viral post has been ping-ponging around social networks, creating confusion around what exactly it does.

The viral post falsely claims that if you do not enable Advanced Chat Privacy, Meta’s AI tools will be able to access your private conversations. This isn’t true, and it misrepresents both how Meta AI works and what Advanced Chat Privacy is.

The confusion seems to spawn from the fact that Meta AI can be invoked through a number of methods, including in any group chat with the @Meta AI command. While the chat contents between you and other people are always end-to-end encrypted on the app, what you say to Meta AI is not. Similarly, if you or anyone else in the chat chooses to use Meta AI's “Summarize” feature, which uses Meta’s “Private Processing” technology, that feature routes the text of the chat through Meta’s servers. However, the company claims that they cannot view the content of those messages. This feature remains opt-in, so it's up to you to decide if you want to use it. The company also recently released the results of two audits detailing the issues that have been found thus far and what they’ve done to fix it.

For example, if you and your buddy are chatting, and your friend types in @Meta AI and asks it a question, that part of the conversion, which you can both see, is not end-to-end encrypted, and is usable for AI training or whatever other purposes are included in Meta’s privacy policy. But otherwise, chats remain end-to-end encrypted.

Advanced Chat Privacy offers some bit of control over this. The new privacy feature isn’t a universal setting in WhatsApp; you can enable or disable it on a per-chat basis, but it’s turned off by default. When enabled, Advanced Chat Privacy does three core things:

• Blocks anyone in the chat from exporting the chats,
• Disables auto-downloading media to chat participant’s phones, and
• Disables some Meta AI features

Outside disabling some Meta AI features, Advanced Chat Privacy can be useful in other instances. For example, while someone can always screenshot chats, if you’re concerned about someone easily exporting an entire group chat history, Advanced Chat Privacy makes this harder to do because there’s no longer a one-tap option to do so. And since media can’t be automatically downloaded to someone’s phone (the “Save to Photos” option on the chat settings screen), it’s harder for an attachment to accidentally end up on someone’s device.

How to Enable Advanced Chat Privacy

Advanced Chat Privacy is enabled or disabled per chat. To enable it:

• Tap the chat name at the top of the screen.
• Select Advanced chat privacy, then tap the toggle to turn it on.

There are some quirks to how this works, though. For one, by default, anyone involved in a chat can turn Advanced Chat Privacy on or off at will, which limits its usefulness but at least helps ensure something doesn’t accidentally get sent to Meta AI.

There’s one way around this, which is for a group admin to lock down what users in the group can do. In an existing group chat that you are the administrator of, tap the chat name at the top of the screen, then:

• Scroll down to Group Permissions.
• Disable the option to “Edit Group Settings.” This makes it so only the administrator can change several important permissions, including Advanced Chat Privacy.

You can also set this permission when starting a new group chat. Just be sure to pop into the permissions page when prompted. Even without Advanced Chat Privacy, the “Edit Group Settings” option is an important one for privacy, because it also includes whether participants can change the length that disappearing messages can be viewed, so it’s something worth considering for every group chat you’re an administrator of, and something WhatsApp should require admins to choose before starting a new chat.

When it comes to one-on-one chats, there is currently no way to block the other person from changing the Advanced Chat Privacy feature, so you’ll have to come to an agreement with the other person on keeping it enabled if that’s what you want. If the setting is changed, you’ll see a notice in the chat stating so:

There are already serious concerns with how much metadata WhatsApp collects, and as the company introduces ads and AI, it’s going to get harder and harder to navigate the app, understand what each setting does, and properly protect the privacy of conversations. One of the reasons alternative encrypted chat options like Signal tend to thrive is because they keep things simple and employ strong default settings and clear permissions. WhatsApp should keep this in mind as it adds more and more features.

A new and powerful particle detector just passed a critical test in its goal to decipher the ingredients of the early universe.

The sPHENIX detector is the newest experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and is designed to precisely measure products of high-speed particle collisions. From the aftermath, scientists hope to reconstruct the properties of quark-gluon plasma (QGP) — a white-hot soup of subatomic particles known as quarks and gluons that is thought to have sprung into existence in the few microseconds following the Big Bang. Just as quickly, the mysterious plasma disappeared, cooling and combining to form the protons and neutrons that make up today’s ordinary matter.

Now, the sPHENIX detector has made a key measurement that proves it has the precision to help piece together the primordial properties of quark-gluon plasma.

In a paper in the Journal of High Energy Physics, scientists including physicists at MIT report that sPHENIX precisely measured the number and energy of particles that streamed out from gold ions that collided at close to the speed of light.

Straight ahead

This test is considered in physics to be a “standard candle,” meaning that the measurement is a well-established constant that can be used to gauge a detector’s precision.

In particular, sPHENIX successfully measured the number of charged particles that are produced when two gold ions collide, and determined how this number changes when the ions collide head-on, versus just glancing by. The detector’s measurements revealed that head-on collisions produced 10 times more charged particles, which were also 10 times more energetic, compared to less straight-on collisions.

“This indicates the detector works as it should,” says Gunther Roland, professor of physics at MIT, who is a member and former spokesperson for the sPHENIX Collaboration. “It’s as if you sent a new telescope up in space after you’ve spent 10 years building it, and it snaps the first picture. It’s not necessarily a picture of something completely new, but it proves that it’s now ready to start doing new science.”

“With this strong foundation, sPHENIX is well-positioned to advance the study of the quark-gluon plasma with greater precision and improved resolution,” adds Hao-Ren Jheng, a graduate student in physics at MIT and a lead co-author of the new paper. “Probing the evolution, structure, and properties of the QGP will help us reconstruct the conditions of the early universe.”

The paper’s co-authors are all members of the sPHENIX Collaboration, which comprises over 300 scientists from multiple institutions around the world, including Roland, Jheng, and physicists at MIT’s Bates Research and Engineering Center.

“Gone in an instant”

Particle colliders such as Brookhaven’s RHIC are designed to accelerate particles at “relativistic” speeds, meaning close to the speed of light. When these particles are flung around in opposite, circulating beams and brought back together, any smash-ups that occur can release an enormous amount of energy. In the right conditions, this energy can very briefly exist in the form of quark-gluon plasma — the same stuff that sprung out of the Big Bang.

Just as in the early universe, quark-gluon plasma doesn’t hang around for very long in particle colliders. If and when QGP is produced, it exists for just 10 to the minus 22, or about a sextillionth, of a second. In this moment, quark-gluon plasma is incredibly hot, up to several trillion degrees Celsius, and behaves as a “perfect fluid,” moving as one entity rather than as a collection of random particles. Almost immediately, this exotic behavior disappears, and the plasma cools and transitions into more ordinary particles such as protons and neutrons, which stream out from the main collision.

“You never see the QGP itself — you just see its ashes, so to speak, in the form of the particles that come from its decay,” Roland says. “With sPHENIX, we want to measure these particles to reconstruct the properties of the QGP, which is essentially gone in an instant.”

“One in a billion”

The sPHENIX detector is the next generation of Brookhaven’s original Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment, or PHENIX, which measured collisions of heavy ions generated by RHIC. In 2021, sPHENIX was installed in place of its predecessor, as a faster and more powerful version, designed to detect quark-gluon plasma’s more subtle and ephemeral signatures.

The detector itself is about the size of a two-story house and weighs around 1,000 tons. It sits at the intersection of RHIC’s two main collider beams, where relativistic particles, accelerated from opposite directions, meet and collide, producing particles that fly out into the detector. The sPHENIX detector is able to catch and measure 15,000 particle collisions per second, thanks to its novel, layered components, including the MVTX, or micro-vertex — a subdetector that was designed, built, and installed by scientists at MIT’s Bates Research and Engineering Center.

Together, the detector’s systems enable sPHENIX to act as a giant 3D camera that can track the number, energy, and paths of individual particles during an explosion of particles generated by a single collision.

“SPHENIX takes advantage of developments in detector technology since RHIC switched on 25 years ago, to collect data at the fastest possible rate,” says MIT postdoc Cameron Dean, who was a main contributor to the new study’s analysis. “This allows us to probe incredibly rare processes for the first time.”

In the fall of 2024, scientists ran the detector through the “standard candle” test to gauge its speed and precision. Over three weeks, they gathered data from sPHENIX as the main collider accelerated and smashed together beams of gold ions traveling at the speed of light. Their analysis of the data showed that sPHENIX accurately measured the number of charged particles produced in individual gold ion collisions, as well as the particles’ energies. What’s more, the detector was sensitive to a collision’s “head-on-ness,” and could observe that head-on collisions produced more particles with greater energy, compared to less direct collisions.

“This measurement provides clear evidence that the detector is functioning as intended,” Jheng says.

“The fun for sPHENIX is just beginning,” Dean adds. “We are currently back colliding particles and expect to do so for several more months. With all our data, we can look for the one-in-a-billion rare process that could give us insights on things like the density of QGP, the diffusion of particles through ultra-dense matter, and how much energy it takes to bind different particles together.”

This work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, and the National Science Foundation.

The ruling Tuesday lifts an injunction that prevented the agency from clawing back the money for renewable energy in lower-income communities.

In the early 1960s, National Security Agency cryptanalyst and cryptanalysis instructor Lambros D. Callimahos coined the term “Stethoscope” to describe a diagnostic computer program used to unravel the internal structure of pre-computer ciphertexts. The term appears in the newly declassified September 1965 document Cryptanalytic Diagnosis with the Aid of a Computer, which compiled 147 listings from this tool for Callimahos’s course, CA-400: NSA Intensive Study Program in General Cryptanalysis.

The listings in the report are printouts from the Stethoscope program, run on the NSA’s Bogart computer, showing statistical and structural data extracted from encrypted messages, but the encrypted messages themselves are not included. They were used in NSA training programs to teach analysts how to interpret ciphertext behavior without seeing the original message...

The administration has raised the specter of undersea drone attacks and radar interference in its explanation for halting Revolution Wind.

Barnes Farming was originally fined $187,500 after a worker died without access to water or shade. Now it will pay just $3,750.

Inflation and new fees on imports have combined to increase the cost of construction for roads, bridges and other transit infrastructure.

Colorado and California are among the states expediting clean energy projects to beat the phase-out of tax credits.

The host of this year's climate talks is trying to soothe concerns about hotel shortages and other logistical pitfalls.

Peatlands can help stop both Russian tanks and climate change.

Governments can’t use climate change as an excuse for failing to take preventive measures, scientists say.

The storms are a rare threat, with fewer than 1 out of every 10 of the storms crashing into the United States.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 02 September 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02380-4

The ocean carbon sink strengthened in previous warm El Niño years due to reduced CO2 outgassing in the tropics. Here the authors show that the ocean carbon sink declined in 2023 despite record-high sea surface temperatures (SSTs), primarily due to SST-driven outgassing of CO2 in the subtropics.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 01 September 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02415-w

The vulnerability of women and children in West Africa

The Electronic Frontier Alliance is growing and this year we’ve been honored to welcome Open Austin into the EFA. Open Austin began in 2009 as a meetup that successfully advocated for a city-run open data portal, and relaunched as a 501(c)3 in 2018 dedicated to reimagining civic engagement and digital equity by building volunteer open source projects for local social organizations.

As Central Texas’ oldest and largest grassroots civic tech organization, their work has provided hands-on training for over 1,500 members in the hard and soft skills needed to build digital society, not just scroll through it. Recently, I got the chance to speak with Liani Lye, Executive Director of Open Austin, about the organization, its work, and what lies ahead:

There’s so many exciting things happening with Open Austin. Can you tell us about your Civic Digital Lab and your Data Research Hub?

Open Austin's Civic Digital Lab reimagines civic engagement by training central Texans to build technology for the public good. We build freely, openly, and alongside a local community stakeholder to represent community needs. Our lab currently supports 5 products:

• Data Research Hub: Answering residents' questions with detailed information about our city
• Streamlining Austin Public Library’s “book a study room” UX and code
• Mapping landlords and rental properties to support local tenant rights organizing
• Promoting public transit by highlighting points of interest along bus routes
• Creating an interactive exploration of police bodycam data

We’re actively scaling up our Data Research Hub, which started in January 2025 and was inspired by 9b Corp’s Neighborhood Explorer. Through community outreach, we gather residents’ questions about our region and connect the questions with Open Austin’s data analysts. Each answered question adds to a pool of knowledge that equips communities to address local issues. Crucially, the organizing team at EFF, through the EFA, have connected us to local organizations to generate these questions.

Can you discuss your new Civic Data Fellowship cohort and Communities of Civic Practice? 

Launched in 2024, Open Austin’s Civic Data Fellowship trains the next generation of technologically savvy community leaders by pairing aspiring women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ data analysts with mentors to explore Austin’s challenges. These culminate in data projects and talks to advocates and policymakers, which double as powerful portfolio pieces.  While we weren’t able to fully fund Fellow stipends through grants this year, thanks to the generosity of our supporters, we successfully raised 25% through grassroots efforts.

Along with our fellowship and lab, we host monthly Communities of Civic Practice peer-learning circles that build skills for employability and practical civic engagement. Recent sessions include a speaker on service design in healthcare, and co-creating a data visualization on broadband adoption presented to local government staff. Our in-person communities are a great way to learn and build local public interest tech without becoming a full-on Labs contributor.

For those in Austin and Central Texas that want to get involved in-person, how can they plug-in?

If you can only come to one event for the rest of the year, come to our Open Austin’s 2025 Year-End Celebration. Open Austin members plus our freshly graduated Civic Data Fellow cohort will give lightning talks to share how they’ve supported local social advocacy through open source software and open data work. Otherwise, come to a monthly remote volunteer orientation call. There, we'll share how to get involved in our in-person Communities of Civic Practice and our remote Civic Digital Labs (aka, building open source software).

Open Austin welcomes volunteers from all backgrounds, including those with skills in marketing, fundraising, communications, and operations - not just technologists. You can make a difference in various ways. Come to a remote volunteer orientation call to learn more. And, as always, donate. Running multiple open source projects for structured workforce development is expensive, and your contributions help sustain Open Austin's work in the community. Please visit our donation page for ways to give; thanks EFF!

First-person account of someone accidentally catching several Humboldt squid on a fishing line. No photos, though.

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

Blog moderation policy.

For a long time, Satik Movsesyan envisioned a future of working in finance and also pursuing a full-time master’s degree program at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She says the MITx MicroMasters Program in Finance provides her with the ideal opportunity to directly enhance her career with courses developed and delivered by MIT Sloan faculty.

Movsesyan first began actively pursuing ways to connect with the MIT community as a first-year student in her undergraduate program at the American University of Armenia, where she majored in business with a concentration in accounting and finance. That’s when she discovered the MicroMasters Program in Finance. Led by MIT Open Learning and MIT Sloan, the program offers learners an opportunity to advance in the finance field through a rigorous, comprehensive online curriculum comprising foundational courses, mathematical methods, and advanced modeling. During her senior year, she started taking courses in the program, beginning with 15.516x (Financial Accounting).

“I saw completing the MicroMasters program as a way to accelerate my time at MIT offline, as well as to prepare me for the academic rigor,” says Movsesyan. “The program provides a way for me to streamline my studies, while also working toward transforming capital markets here in Armenia — in a way, also helping me to streamline my career.”

Movsesyan initially started as an intern at C-Quadrat Ampega Asset Management Armenia and was promoted to her current role of financial analyst. The firm is one of two pension asset managers in Armenia. Movsesyan credits the MicroMasters program with helping her to make deeper inferences in terms of analytical tasks and empowering her to create more enhanced dynamic models to support the efficient allocation of assets. Her learning has enabled her to build different valuation models for financial instruments. She is currently developing a portfolio management tool for her company.

“Although the courses are grounded deeply in theory, they never lack a perfect applicability component, which makes them very useful,” says Movsesyan. “Having MIT’s MicroMasters on a CV adds credibility as a professional, and your input becomes more valued by the employer.”

Movsesyan says that the program has helped her to develop resilience, as well as critical and analytical thinking. Her long-term goal is to become a portfolio manager and ultimately establish an asset management company, targeted at offering an extensive range of funds based on diverse risk-return preferences of investors, while promoting transparent and sustainable investment practices. 

“The knowledge I’ve gained from the variety of courses is a perfect blend which supports me day-to-day in building solutions to existing problems in asset management,” says Movsesyan.

In addition to being a learner in the program, Movsesyan serves as a community teaching assistant (CTA). After taking 15.516x, she became a CTA for that course, working with learners around the world. She says that this role of helping and supporting others requires constantly immersing herself in the course content, which also results in challenging herself and mastering the material.

“I think my story with the MITx MicroMasters Program is proof that no matter where you are — even if you’re in a small, developing country with limited resources — if you truly want to do something, you can achieve what you want,” says Movsesyan. “It’s an example for students around the world who also have transformative ideas and determination to take action. They can be a part of the MIT community.”

I just heard about this:

There’s a travel scam warning going around the internet right now: You should keep your baggage tags on your bags until you get home, then shred them, because scammers are using luggage tags to file fraudulent claims for missing baggage with the airline.

First, the scam is possible. I had a bag destroyed by baggage handlers on a recent flight, and all the information I needed to file a claim was on my luggage tag. I have no idea if I will successfully get any money from the airline, or what form it will be in, or how it will be tied to my name, but at least the first step is possible...

For over 35 years, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has presented awards recognizing key leaders and organizations advancing innovation and championing digital rights. The EFF Awards celebrate the accomplishments of people working toward a better future for technology users, both in the public eye and behind the scenes.

EFF is pleased to welcome all members of the digital rights community, supporters, and friends to this annual award ceremony. Join us to celebrate this year's honorees with drinks, bytes, and excellent company.

 

EFF Award Ceremony
Wednesday, September 10th, 2025
6:00 PM to 10:00 PM Pacific
San Francisco Design Center Galleria
101 Henry Adams Street, San Francisco, CA

Register Now

General Admission: $55 | Current EFF Members: $45 | Students: $35

The celebration will include a strolling dinner and desserts, as well as a hosted bar with cocktails, mocktails, wine, beer, and non-alcoholic beverages! Vegan, vegetarian, and gluten-free food options will be available. We hope to see you in person, wearing either a signature EFF hoodie, or something formal if you're excited for the opportunity to dress up!

If you're not able to make it, we'll also be hosting a livestream of the event on Friday, September 12 at 12:00 PM PT. The event will also be recorded, and posted to YouTube and the Internet Archive after the livestream.

We are proud to present awards to this year's winners:JUST FUTURES LAW

EFF Award for Leading Immigration and Surveillance Litigation

ERIE MEYER

EFF Award for Protecting Americans' Data

SOFTWARE FREEDOM LAW CENTER, INDIA

EFF Award for Defending Digital Freedoms

 More About the 2025 EFF Award Winners

Just Futures Law

Just Futures Law is a women-of-color-led law project that recognizes how surveillance disproportionately impacts immigrants and people of color in the United States.  It uses litigation to fight back as part of defending and building the power of immigrant rights and criminal justice activists, organizers, and community groups to prevent criminalization, detention, and deportation of immigrants and people of color. Just Futures was founded in 2019 using a movement lawyering and racial justice framework and seeks to transform how litigation and legal support serves communities and builds movement power.  

In the past year, Just Futures sued the Department of Homeland Security and its subagencies seeking a court order to compel the agencies to release records on their use of AI and other algorithms, and sued the Trump Administration for prematurely halting Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status, a humanitarian program that allows hundreds of thousands of Haitians to temporarily remain and work in the United States due to Haiti’s current conditions of extraordinary crises. It has represented activists in their fight against tech giants like Clearview AI, it has worked with Mijente to launch the TakeBackTech fellowship to train new advocates on grassroots-directed research, and it has worked with Grassroots Leadership to fight for the release of detained individuals under Operation Lone Star.

Erie Meyer

Erie Meyer is a Senior Fellow at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator where she focuses on the intersection of technology, artificial intelligence, and regulation, and a Senior Fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy. She is former Chief Technologist at both the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the Federal Trade Commission. Earlier, she was senior advisor to the U.S. Chief Technology Officer at the White House, where she co-founded the United States Digital Service, a team of technologists and designers working to improve digital services for the public. Meyer also worked as senior director at Code for America, a nonprofit that promotes civic hacking to modernize government services, and in the Ohio Attorney General's office at the height of the financial crisis. 

 

Since January 20, Meyer has helped organize former government technologists to stand up for the privacy and integrity of governmental systems that hold Americans’ data. In addition to organizing others, she filed a declaration in federal court in February warning that 12 years of critical records could be irretrievably lost in the CFPB’s purge by the Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency. In April, she filed a declaration in another case warning about using private-sector AI on government information. That same month, she testified to the House Oversight Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation that DOGE is centralizing access to some of the most sensitive data the government holds—Social Security records, disability claims, even data tied to national security—without a clear plan or proper oversight, warning that “DOGE is burning the house down and calling it a renovation.” 

Software Freedom Law Center

Software Freedom Law Center, India is a donor-supported legal services organization based in India that brings together lawyers, policy analysts, students, and technologists to protect freedom in the digital world. It promotes innovation and open access to knowledge by helping developers make great free and open-source software, protects privacy and civil liberties for Indians by educating and providing free legal advice, and helps policymakers make informed and just decisions about use of technology. 

Founded in 2010 by technology lawyer and online civil liberties activist Mishi Choudhary, SFLC.IN tracks and participates in litigation, AI regulations, and free speech issues that are defining Indian technology. It also tracks internet shutdowns and censorship incidents across India, provides digital security training, and has launched the Digital Defenders Network, a pan-Indian network of lawyers committed to protecting digital rights. It has conducted landmark litigation cases, petitioned the government of India on freedom of expression and internet issues, and campaigned for WhatsApp and Facebook to fix a feature of their platform that has been used to harass women in India. 

Thank you to Fastly, DuckDuckGo, Corellium, and No Starch Press for their year-round support of EFF's mission.

Want to show your team’s support for EFF? Sponsorships ensure we can continue hosting events like this to build community among digital rights supporters. Please visit eff.org/thanks or contact tierney@eff.org for more information on corporate giving and sponsorships.

EFF is dedicated to a harassment-free experience for everyone, and all participants are encouraged to view our full Event Expectations.

Questions? Email us at events@eff.org.

 

In an unhappy coincidence, the Covid-19 pandemic and Angie Jo’s doctoral studies in political science both began in 2019. Paradoxically, this global catastrophe helped define her primary research thrust.

As countries reacted with unprecedented fiscal measures to protect their citizens from economic collapse, Jo MCP ’19 discerned striking patterns among these interventions: Nations typically seen as the least generous on social welfare were suddenly deploying the most dramatic emergency responses.

“I wanted to understand why countries like the U.S., which famously offer minimal state support, suddenly mobilize an enormous emergency response to a crisis — only to let it vanish after the crisis passes,” says Jo.

Driven by this interest, Jo launched into a comparative exploration of welfare states that forms the backbone of her doctoral research. Her work examines how different types of welfare regimes respond to collective crises, and whether these responses lead to lasting institutional reforms or merely temporary patches.

A mismatch in investments

Jo’s research focuses on a particular subset of advanced industrialized democracies — countries like the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia — that political economists classify as “liberal welfare regimes.” These nations stand in contrast to the “social democratic welfare regimes” exemplified by Scandinavian countries.

“In everyday times, citizens in countries like Denmark or Sweden are already well-protected by a deep and comprehensive welfare state,” Jo explains. “When something like Covid hits, these countries were largely able to use the social policy tools and administrative infrastructure they already had, such as subsidized childcare and short-time work schemes that prevent mass layoffs.”

Liberal welfare regimes, however, exhibit a different pattern. During normal periods, "government assistance is viewed by many as the last resort,” Jo observes. “It’s means-tested and minimal, and the responsibility to manage risk is put on the individual.”

Yet when Covid struck, these same governments “spent historically unprecedented amounts on emergency aid to citizens, including stimulus checks, expanded unemployment insurance, child tax credits, grants, and debt forbearance that might normally have faced backlash from many Americans as government ‘handouts.’”

This stark contrast — minimal investment in social safety nets during normal times followed by massive crisis spending — lies at the heart of Jo’s inquiry. “What struck me was the mismatch: The U.S. invests so little in social welfare at baseline, but when crisis hits, it can suddenly unleash massive aid — just not in ways that stick. So what happens when the next crisis comes?”

From architecture to political economy

Jo took a winding path to studying welfare states in crisis. Born in South Korea, she moved with her family to California at age 3 as her parents sought an American education for their children. After moving back to Korea for high school, she attended Harvard University, where she initially focused on art and architecture.

“I thought I’d be an artist,” Jo recalls, “but I always had many interests, and I was very aware of different countries and different political systems, because we were moving around a lot.”

While studying architecture at Harvard, Jo’s academic focus pivoted.

“I realized that most of the decisions around how things get built, whether it’s a building or a city or infrastructure, are made by the government or by powerful private actors,” she explains. “The architect is the artist’s hand that is commissioned to execute, but the decisions behind it, I realized, were what interested me more.”

After a year working in macroeconomics research at a hedge fund, Jo found herself drawn to questions in political economy. “While I didn’t find the zero-sum game of finance compelling, I really wanted to understand the interactions between markets and governments that lay behind the trades,” she says.

Jo decided to pursue a master’s degree in city planning at MIT, where she studied the political economy of master-planning new cities as a form of industrial policy in China and South Korea, before transitioning to the political science PhD program. Her research focus shifted dramatically when the Covid-19 pandemic struck.

“It was the first time I realized, wow, these wealthy Western democracies have serious problems, too,” Jo says. “They are not dealing well with this pandemic and the structural inequalities and the deep tensions that have always been part of some of these societies, but are being tested even further by the enormity of this shock.”

The costs of crisis response

One of Jo’s key insights challenges conventional wisdom about fiscal conservatism. The assumption that keeping government small saves money in the long run may be fundamentally flawed when considering crisis response.

“What I’m exploring in my research is the irony that the less you invest in a capable, effective and well-resourced government, the more that backfires when a crisis inevitably hits and you have to patch up the holes,” Jo argues. “You’re not saving money; you’re deferring the cost.”

This inefficiency becomes particularly apparent when examining how different countries deployed aid during Covid. Countries like Denmark, with robust data systems connecting health records, employment information, and family data, could target assistance with precision. The United States, by contrast, relied on blunter instruments.

“If your system isn’t built to deliver aid in normal times, it won’t suddenly work well under pressure,” Jo explains. “The U.S. had to invent entire programs from scratch overnight — and many were clumsy, inefficient, or regressive.”

There is also a political aspect to this constraint. “Not only do liberal welfare countries lack the infrastructure to address crises, they are often governed by powerful constituencies that do not want to build it — they deliberately choose to enact temporary benefits that are precisely designed to fade,” Jo argues. “This perpetuates a cycle where short-term compensations are employed from crisis to crisis, constraining the permanent expansion of the welfare state.”

Missed opportunities

Jo’s dissertation also examines whether crises provide opportunities for institutional reform. Her second paper focuses on the 2008 financial crisis in the United States, and the Hardest Hit Fund, a program that allocated federal money to state housing finance agencies to prevent foreclosures.

“I ask why, with hundreds of millions in federal aid and few strings attached, state agencies ultimately helped so few underwater homeowners shed unmanageable debt burdens,” Jo says. “The money and the mandate were there — the transformative capacity wasn’t.”

Some states used the funds to pursue ambitious policy interventions, such as restructuring mortgage debt to permanently reduce homeowners’ principal and interest burdens. However, most opted for temporary solutions like helping borrowers make up missed payments, while preserving their original contract. Partisan politics, financial interests, and status quo bias are most likely responsible for these varying state strategies, Jo believes.

She sees this as “another case of the choice that governments have between throwing money at the problem as a temporary Band-Aid solution, or using a crisis as an opportunity to pursue more ambitious, deeper reforms that help people more sustainably in the long run.”

The significance of crisis response research

For Jo, understanding how welfare states respond to crises is not just an academic exercise, but a matter of profound human consequence.

“When there’s an event like the financial crisis or Covid, the scale of suffering and the welfare gap that emerges is devastating,” Jo emphasizes. “I believe political science should be actively studying these rare episodes, rather than disregarding them as once-in-a-century anomalies.”

Her research carries implications for how we think about welfare state design and crisis preparedness. As Jo notes, the most vulnerable members of society — “people who are unbanked, undocumented, people who have low or no tax liability because they don’t make enough, immigrants or those who don’t speak English or don’t have access to the internet or are unhoused” — are often invisible to relief systems.

As Jo prepares for her career in academia, she is motivated to apply her political science training to address such failures. “We’re going to have more crises, whether pandemics, AI, climate disasters, or financial shocks,” Jo warns. “Finding better ways to cover those people is essential, and is not something that our current welfare state — or our politics — are designed to handle.”