Two recent statements from the surveillance company—one addressing Illinois privacy violations and another defending the company's national surveillance network—reveal a troubling pattern: when confronted by evidence of widespread abuse, Flock Safety has blamed users, downplayed harms, and doubled down on the very systems that enabled the violations in the first place.

Flock's aggressive public relations campaign to salvage its reputation comes as no surprise. Last month, we described how investigative reporting from 404 Media revealed that a sheriff's office in Texas searched data from more than 83,000 automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to track down a woman suspected of self-managing an abortion. (A scenario that may have been avoided, it's worth noting, had Flock taken action when they were first warned about this threat three years ago).

Flock calls the reporting on the Texas sheriff's office "purposefully misleading," claiming the woman was searched for as a missing person at her family's request rather than for her abortion. But that ignores the core issue: this officer used a nationwide surveillance dragnet (again: over 83,000 cameras) to track someone down, and used her suspected healthcare decisions as a reason to do so. Framing this as concern for her safety plays directly into anti-abortion narratives that depict abortion as dangerous and traumatic in order to justify increased policing, criminalization, control—and, ultimately, surveillance.

Flock Safety has blamed users, downplayed harms, and doubled down on the very systems that enabled the violations in the first place.

As if that weren't enough, the company has also come under fire for how its ALPR network data is being actively used to assist in mass deportation. Despite U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) having no formal agreement with Flock Safety, public records revealed "more than 4,000 nation and statewide lookups by local and state police done either at the behest of the federal government or as an 'informal' favor to federal law enforcement, or with a potential immigration focus." The network audit data analyzed by 404 exposed an informal data-sharing environment that creates an end-run around direct oversight and accountability measures: federal agencies can access the surveillance network through local partnerships without the transparency and legal constraints that would apply to direct federal contracts.

Flock Safety is adamant this is "not Flock's decision," and by implication, not their fault. Instead, the responsibility lies with each individual local law enforcement agency. In the same breath, they’re adamant that data sharing is essential, loudly claiming credit when the technology is involved in cross-jurisdictional investigations—but failing to show the same attitude when that data-sharing ecosystem is used to terrorize abortion seekers or immigrants. 

Flock Safety: The Surveillance Social Network

In growing from a 2017 startup to a $7.5 billion company "serving over 5,000 communities, Flock allowed individual agencies wide berth to set and regulate their own policies. In effect, this approach offered cheap surveillance technology with minimal restrictions, leaving major decisions and actions in the hands of law enforcement while the company scaled rapidly.

And they have no intention of slowing down. Just this week, Flock launched its Business Network, facilitating unregulated data sharing amongst its private sector security clients. "For years, our law enforcement customers have used the power of a shared network to identify threats, connect cases, and reduce crime. Now, we're extending that same network effect to the private sector," Flock Safety's CEO announced. 

Flock Safety wooing law enforcement officers at the 2023 International Chiefs of Police Conference.

The company is building out a new mass surveillance network using the exact template that ended with the company having to retrain thousands of officers in Illinois on how not to break state law—the same template that made it easy for officers to do so in the first place. Flock's continued integration of disparate surveillance networks across the public and private spheres—despite the harms that have already occurred—is owed in part to the one thing that it's gotten really good at over the past couple of years: facilitating a surveillance social network. 

Employing marketing phrases like "collaboration" and "force multiplier," Flock encourages as much sharing as possible, going as far as to claim that network effects can significantly improve case closure rates. They cultivate a sense of shared community and purpose among users so they opt into good faith sharing relationships with other law enforcement agencies across the country. But it's precisely that social layer that creates uncontrollable risk.

The possibility of human workarounds at every level undermines any technical safeguards Flock may claim. Search term blocking relies on officers accurately labeling search intent—a system easily defeated by entering vague reasons like "investigation" or incorrect justifications, made either intentionally or not. And, of course, words like "investigation" or "missing person" can mean virtually anything, offering no value to meaningful oversight of how and for what the system is being used. Moving forward, sheriff's offices looking to avoid negative press can surveil abortion seekers or immigrants with ease, so long as they use vague and unsuspecting reasons. 

The same can be said for case number requirements, which depend on manual entry. This can easily be circumvented by reusing legitimate case numbers for unauthorized searches. Audit logs only track inputs, not contextual legitimacy. Flock's proposed AI-driven audit alerts, something that may be able to flag suspicious activity after searches (and harm) have already occurred, relies on local agencies to self-monitor misuse—despite their demonstrated inability to do so.

Flock operates as a single point of failure that can compromise—and has compromised—the privacy of millions of Americans simultaneously.

And, of course, even the most restrictive department policy may not be enough. Austin, Texas, implemented one of the most restrictive ALPR programs in the country, and the program still failed: the city's own audit revealed systematic compliance failures that rendered its guardrails meaningless. The company's continued appeal to "local policies" means nothing when Flock's data-sharing network does not account for how law enforcement policies, regulations, and accountability vary by jurisdiction. You may have a good relationship with your local police, who solicit your input on what their policy looks like; you don't have that same relationship with hundreds or thousands of other agencies with whom they share their data. So if an officer on the other side of the country violates your privacy, it’d be difficult to hold them accountable. 

ALPR surveillance systems are inherently vulnerable to both technical exploitation and human manipulation. These vulnerabilities are not theoretical—they represent real pathways for bad actors to access vast databases containing millions of Americans' location data. When surveillance databases are breached, the consequences extend far beyond typical data theft—this information can be used to harass, stalk, or even extort. The intimate details of people's daily routines, their associations, and their political activities may become available to anyone with malicious intent. Flock operates as a single point of failure that can compromise—and has compromised—the privacy of millions of Americans simultaneously.

Don't Stop de-Flocking

Rather than addressing legitimate concerns about privacy, security, and constitutional rights, Flock has only promised updates that fall short of meaningful reforms. These software tweaks and feature rollouts cannot assuage the fear engendered by the massive surveillance system it has built and continues to expand.

A typical specimen of Flock Safety's automated license plate readers.

Flock's insistence that what's happening with abortion criminalization and immigration enforcement has nothing to do with them—that these are just red-state problems or the fault of rogue officers—is concerning. Flock designed the network that is being used, and the public should hold them accountable for failing to build in protections from abuse that cannot be easily circumvented.

Thankfully, that's exactly what's happening: cities like Austin, San Marcos,  Denver, Norfolk, and San Diego are pushing back. And it's not nearly as hard a choice as Flock would have you believe: Austinites are weighing the benefits of a surveillance system that generates a hit less than 0.02% of the time against the possibility that scanning 75 million license plates will result in an abortion seeker being tracked down by police, or an immigrant being flagged by ICE in a so-called "sanctuary city." These are not hypotheticals. It is already happening.

Given how pervasive, sprawling, and ungovernable ALPR sharing networks have become, the only feature update we can truly rely on to protect people's rights and safety is no network at all. And we applaud the communities taking decisive action to dismantle its surveillance infrastructure.

Follow their lead: don't stop de-flocking.

Tips on what to do if you find a mop of squid eggs.

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.

Today’s decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton is a direct blow to the free speech rights of adults. The Court ruled that “no person—adult or child—has a First Amendment right to access speech that is obscene to minors without first submitting proof of age.” This ruling allows states to enact onerous age-verification rules that will block adults from accessing lawful speech, curtail their ability to be anonymous, and jeopardize their data security and privacy. These are real and immense burdens on adults, and the Court was wrong to ignore them in upholding Texas’ law.  

Importantly, the Court's reasoning applies only to age-verification rules for certain sexual material, and not to age limits in general. We will continue to fight against age restrictions on online access more broadly, such as on social media and specific online features.  

Still, the decision has immense consequences for internet users in Texas and in other states that have enacted similar laws. The Texas law forces adults to submit personal information over the internet to access entire websites that hold some amount of sexual material, not just pages or portions of sites that contain specific sexual materials. Many sites that cannot reasonably implement age verification measures for reasons such as cost or technical requirements will likely block users living in Texas and other states with similar laws wholesale.  

Importantly, the Court's reasoning applies only to age-verification rules for certain sexual material, and not to age limits in general. 

Many users will not be comfortable sharing private information to access sites that do implement age verification, for reasons of privacy or concern for data breaches. Many others do not have a driver’s license or photo ID to complete the age verification process. This decision will, ultimately, deter adult users from speaking and accessing lawful content, and will endanger the privacy of those who choose to go forward with verification. 

What the Court Said Today 

In the 6-3 decision, the Court ruled that Texas’ HB 1181 is constitutional. This law requires websites that Texas decides are composed of “one-third” or more of “sexual material harmful to minors” to confirm the age of users by collecting age-verifying personal information from all visitors—even to access the other two-thirds of material that is not adult content.   

In 1997, the Supreme Court struck down a federal online age-verification law in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union. In that case the court ruled that many elements of the Communications Decency Act violated the First Amendment, including part of the law making it a crime for anyone to engage in online speech that is "indecent" or "patently offensive" if the speech could be viewed by a minor. Like HB 1181, that law would have resulted in many users being unable to view constitutionally protected speech, as many websites would have had to implement age verification, while others would have been forced to shut down.  

In Reno and in subsequent cases, the Supreme Court ruled that laws that burden adults’ access to lawful speech are subjected to the highest level of review under the First Amendment, known as strict scrutiny. This level of scrutiny requires a law to be very narrowly tailored or the least speech-restrictive means available to the government.  

That all changed with the Supreme Court’s decision today.  

The Court now says that laws that burden adults’ access to sexual materials that are obscene to minors are subject to less-searching First Amendment review, known as intermediate scrutiny. And under that lower standard, the Texas law does not violate the First Amendment. The Court did not have to respond to arguments that there are less speech-restrictive ways of reaching the same goal—for example, encouraging parents to install content-filtering software on their children’s devices.

The court reached this decision by incorrectly assuming that online age verification is functionally equivalent to flashing an ID at a brick-and-mortar store. As we explained in our amicus brief, this ignores the many ways in which verifying age online is significantly more burdensome and invasive than doing so in person. As we and many others have previously explained, unlike with in-person age-checks, the only viable way for a website to comply with an age verification requirement is to require all users to upload and submit—not just momentarily display—a data-rich government-issued ID or other document with personal identifying information.  

This leads to a host of serious anonymity, privacy, and security concerns—all of which the majority failed to address. A person who submits identifying information online can never be sure if websites will keep that information or how that information might be used or disclosed. This leaves users highly vulnerable to data breaches and other security harms. Age verification also undermines anonymous internet browsing, even though courts have consistently ruled that anonymity is an aspect of the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment.    

This Supreme Court broke a fundamental agreement between internet users and the state that has existed since its inception

The Court sidestepped its previous online age verification decisions by claiming the internet has changed too much to follow the precedent from Reno that requires these laws to survive strict scrutiny. Writing for the minority, Justice Kagan disagreed with the premise that the internet has changed: “the majority’s claim—again mistaken—that the internet has changed too much to follow our precedents’ lead.”   

But the majority argues that past precedent does not account for the dramatic expansion of the internet since the 1990s, which has led to easier and greater internet access and larger amounts of content available to teens online. The majority’s opinion entirely fails to address the obvious corollary: the internet’s expansion also has benefited adults. Age verification requirements now affect exponentially more adults than they did in the 1990s and burden vastly more constitutionally protected online speech. The majority's argument actually demonstrates that the burdens on adult speech have grown dramatically larger because of technological changes, yet the Court bizarrely interprets this expansion as justification for weaker constitutional protection. 

What It Means Going Forward 

This Supreme Court broke a fundamental agreement between internet users and the state that has existed since its inception: the government will not stand in the way of people accessing First Amendment-protected material. There is no question that multiple states will now introduce similar laws to Texas. Two dozen already have, though they are not all in effect. At least three of those states have no limit on the percentage of material required before the law applies—a sweeping restriction on every site that contains any material that the state believes the law includes. These laws will force U.S.-based adult websites to implement age-verification or block users in those states, as many have in the past when similar laws were in effect.  

Rather than submit to verification, research has found that people will choose a variety of other paths: using VPNs to indicate that they are outside of the state, accessing similar sites that don’t comply with the law, often because the site is operating in a different country. While many users will simply not access the content as a result, others may accept the risk, at their peril.   

We expect some states to push the envelope in terms of what content they consider “harmful to minors,” and to expand the type of websites that are covered by these laws, either through updated language or threats of litigation. Even if these attacks are struck down, operators of sites that involve sexual content of any type may be under threat, especially if that information is politically divisive. We worry that the point of some of these laws will be to deter queer folks and others from accessing lawful speech and finding community online by requiring them to identify themselves. We will continue to fight to protect against the disclosure of this critical information and for people to maintain their anonymity. 

EFF Will Continue to Fight for All Users’ Free Expression and Privacy 

That said, the ruling does not give states or Congress the green light to impose age-verification regulations on the broader internet. The majority’s decision rests on the fact that minors do not have a First Amendment right to access sexual material that would be obscene. In short, adults have a First Amendment right to access those sexual materials, while minors do not. Although it was wrong, the majority’s opinion ruled that because Texas is blocking minors from speech they have no constitutional right to access, the age-verification requirement only incidentally burdens adult’s First Amendment rights.  

But the same rationale does not apply to general-audience sites and services, including social media. Minors and adults have coextensive rights to both speak and access the speech of other users on these sites because the vast majority of the speech is not sexual materials that would be obscene to minors. Lawmakers should be careful not to interpret this ruling to mean that broader restrictions on minors’ First Amendment rights, like those included in the Kids Online Safety Act, would be deemed constitutional.  

Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton will have an effect on nearly every U.S. adult internet user for the foreseeable future. It marks a worrying shift in the ways that governments can restrict access to speech online. But that only means we must work harder than ever to protect privacy, security, and free speech as central tenets of the internet.  

Ylana Lopez oversees programs and events at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. The Trust Center offers more than 60 entrepreneurship and innovation courses across campus, a dedicated entrepreneurship and innovation track for students pursuing their MBA, online courses for self-learners at MIT and around the globe, and programs for people both affiliated and not affiliated with the Institute. As assistant director, academics and events, at the Trust Center, Lopez leads an array of programs and events, while also assisting students and faculty members.

After graduating from Rutgers University, Lopez conducted research in human-computer interaction at Princeton University. After Princeton, she worked for the health care software company Epic Systems, in quality management and user experience. While at Epic Systems, she was simultaneously working on a startup with two of her friends, Kiran Sharma and Dinuri Rupasinghe. One of the startup co-founders, who was an MIT undergraduate student, applied for them to take part in the Trust Center’s flagship startup accelerator delta v, and the trio was accepted.  

Delta v is a highly competitive entrepreneurial program, with 20 to 25 startup teams accepted each year, which runs annually from June to August. At the end of each month, there is a mock board meeting with a board of advisors consisting of industry experts specifically curated to support each startup team’s goals. Programming, coaching sessions, workshops, lectures, and pitch practices take place throughout delta v, and the program culminates in September with a demo day in Kresge Auditorium with thousands of people in attendance.  

Prior to delta v, Lopez decided to leave her full-time job to focus solely on the startup. Once she and her partners went their separate ways, she was looking for a career change, which led her to reflect on her formative summer at MIT. In spring 2023, Lopez applied for an open position at the Trust Center to be an academic coordinator. Soon after, she was offered and accepted the role, and a year later was promoted to assistant director for academics and events. Lopez’s time at MIT has come full circle as her current position includes being a co-director of delta v. Like many of her colleagues who are serial entrepreneurs, Lopez has also started a design studio on the side in the past year called Mr. Mango, providing creative design services for film and music industries.

Lopez has always loved education and planned to become a teacher before deciding to enter the field of technology. Because of this, she describes working at MIT, and being a staff member in the Trust Center, as having the best of both worlds. While delta v is the flagship accelerator, Lopez also supports shorter programs including MIT Fuse, a three-week, hands-on startup sprint that takes place during Independent Activities Period (IAP), and t=0, a festival of events that kicks off each school year to promote entrepreneurship at MIT. In addition to delta v, other programs are available to those outside of MIT, as the Trust Center sees the value of bringing together an ecosystem that is not solely composed of those at the Institute.

At the core of the Trust Center is the belief that entrepreneurship is a tool to change the world. The staff also believe entrepreneurship can be taught, and is not just for a select few. Lopez and her colleagues are highly collaborative and work in an office space that they affectionately call “the bullpen.” The office layout and shared nature of their work mean that no one is a stranger. With at least two events per week, late nights can turn into early mornings, but Lopez and her colleagues love what they do. She is grateful for the growth she has had in her time at the Trust Center and the opportunity to be a part of a motivated, fun, and talented team.

Trust Center managing director Bill Aulet, the Ethernet Inventors Professor of the Practice of Entrepreneurship, cannot sing Lopez’s praises enough. “In my now almost two decades running this center, I have never seen anyone better at really understanding the students, our customers, and translating that back into high-quality and creative programs that delight them and serve the mission of our center, MIT Sloan, and MIT more broadly. We are so fortunate to have her.”

Soundbytes

Q: What is your favorite project that you have worked on?

A: This semester we piloted the Martin Trust Center Startup Pass. It is an opportunity for startups, regardless of what stage they are in, to have a daily, dedicated workspace at the Trust Center to make progress on their ventures. We set aside half of our space for what we call “the beehive” for startups to work alongside other founders and active builders at MIT. It’s great for students to sit alongside people who are building awesome things and will provide feedback, offer support, and really build a community that is entirely based off the spirit and collaboration that naturally comes to entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship can be lonely; therefore, a lot of our efforts go toward helping build networks that make it less so. In just one semester, we’ve already created a community of over 80 founders across MIT!

I’m also excited about revamping one of our rooms into a creative studio. We noticed that startups could benefit from having a space that has capabilities for creating content like podcasts, photography, videography, and other types of creative work. Those things are important in entrepreneurship, so we are currently cultivating a space that any entrepreneur at MIT can utilize.

Q: How would you describe the MIT community?

A: We have such a wonderful community here. The Trust Center supports all of MIT, so we have many programs that allow us to see a lot of people. There can be silos, so it’s great that we bring people together, regardless of their backgrounds, experience, or interests, in one place to become entrepreneurs. The MIT community is a group of inspiring, passionate people who are very welcoming. It’s a very exciting community to be a part of.

Q: What advice would you give someone who is starting a job at MIT?

A: If your day-to-day is typically in one office or setting, over time it can be easy to find yourself in a bubble. I highly recommend breaking out of your bubble by making the effort to meet as many people outside of the group that you work with directly as possible. I have met a number of people across different departments, even if we don’t have much direct overlap in terms of work, and they have been incredibly helpful, gracious, and welcoming. You never know if an introductory or impromptu conversation with someone might lead to an awesome collaboration or new initiative. It’s great being in a community with so many talented people. 

Leveraging the strengths of two world-class research institutions, MIT and Mass General Brigham (MGB) recently celebrated the launch of the MIT-MGB Seed Program. The new initiative, which is supported by Analog Devices Inc. (ADI), will fund joint research projects led by researchers at MIT and Mass General Brigham. These collaborative projects will advance research in human health, with the goal of developing next-generation therapies, diagnostics, and digital tools that can improve lives at scale. 

The program represents a unique opportunity to dramatically accelerate innovations that address some of the most urgent challenges in human health. By supporting interdisciplinary teams from MIT and Mass General Brigham, including both researchers and clinicians, the seed program will foster groundbreaking work that brings together expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and measurement and sensing technologies with pioneering clinical research and patient care.

“The power of this program is that it combines MIT’s strength in science, engineering, and innovation with Mass General Brigham’s world-class scientific and clinical research. With the support and incentive to work together, researchers and clinicians will have the freedom to tackle compelling problems and find novel ways to overcome them to achieve transformative changes in patient care,” says Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT.

“The MIT-MGB Seed Program will enable cross-disciplinary collaboration to advance transformative research and breakthrough science. By combining the collective strengths and expertise of our great institutions, we can transform medical care and drive innovation and discovery with speed,” says Anne Klibanski, president and CEO of Mass General Brigham.

The initiative is funded by a gift from ADI. Over the next three years, the ADI Fund for Health and Life Sciences will support approximately six joint projects annually, with funding split between the two institutions. 

“The converging domains of biology, medicine, and computing promise a new era of health-care efficacy, efficiency, and access. ADI has enjoyed a long and fruitful history of collaboration with MIT and Mass General Brigham, and we are excited by this new initiative’s potential to transform the future of patient care,” adds Vincent Roche, CEO and chair of the board of directors at ADI.

In addition to funding, teams selected for the program will have access to entrepreneurial workshops, including some hosted by The Engine — an MIT-built venture firm focused on tough tech. These sessions will connect researchers with company founders, investors, and industry leaders, helping them chart a path from breakthrough discoveries in the lab to real-world impact.

The program will launch an open call for proposals to researchers at MIT and Mass General Brigham. The first cohort of funded projects is expected to launch in fall 2025. Awardees will be selected by a joint review committee composed of MIT and Mass General Brigham experts.

According to MIT’s faculty lead for the MIT-MGB Seed Program, Alex K. Shalek, building collaborative research teams with leaders from both institutions could help fill critical gaps that often impede innovation in health and life sciences. Shalek also serves as director of the Institute for Medical Engineering & Science (IMES), the J. W. Kieckhefer Professor in IMES and Chemistry, and an extramural member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

 “Clinicians often see where current interventions fall short, but may lack the scientific tools or engineering expertise needed to develop new ones. Conversely, MIT researchers may not fully grasp these clinical challenges or have access to the right patient data and samples,” explains Shalek, who is also a member of the Ragon Institute of Mass General Brigham, MIT, and Harvard. “By supporting bilateral collaborations and building a community across disciplines, this program is poised to drive critical advances in diagnostics, therapeutics, and AI-driven health applications.”

Emery Brown, a practicing anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, will serve alongside Shalek as Mass General Brigham’s faculty lead for the program.

“The MIT-MGB Seed Program creates a perfect storm. The program will provide an opportunity for MIT faculty to bring novel science and engineering to attack and solve important clinical problems,” adds Brown, who is also the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at MIT. “The pursuit of solutions to important and challenging clinical problems by Mass General Brigham physicians and scientists will no doubt spur MIT scientists and engineers to develop new technologies, or find novel applications of existing technologies.”

The MIT-MGB Seed Program is a flagship initiative in the MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative (MIT HEALS). It reflects MIT HEALS’ core mission to establish MIT as a central hub for health and life sciences innovation and translation, and to leverage connections with other world-class research institutions in the Boston area.

“This program exemplifies the power of interdisciplinary research,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT’s chief innovation and strategy officer, dean of engineering, and head of MIT HEALS. “It creates a critical bridge between clinical practice and technological innovation — two areas that must be deeply connected to advance real-world solutions.”

The program’s launch was celebrated at a special event at MIT’s Samberg Conference Center on March 31.

Diffusion models like OpenAI’s DALL-E are becoming increasingly useful in helping brainstorm new designs. Humans can prompt these systems to generate an image, create a video, or refine a blueprint, and come back with ideas they hadn’t considered before.

But did you know that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models are also making headway in creating working robots? Recent diffusion-based approaches have generated structures and the systems that control them from scratch. With or without a user’s input, these models can make new designs and then evaluate them in simulation before they’re fabricated.

A new approach from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) applies this generative know-how toward improving humans’ robotic designs. Users can draft a 3D model of a robot and specify which parts they’d like to see a diffusion model modify, providing its dimensions beforehand. GenAI then brainstorms the optimal shape for these areas and tests its ideas in simulation. When the system finds the right design, you can save and then fabricate a working, real-world robot with a 3D printer, without requiring additional tweaks.

The researchers used this approach to create a robot that leaps up an average of roughly 2 feet, or 41 percent higher than a similar machine they created on their own. The machines are nearly identical in appearance: They’re both made of a type of plastic called polylactic acid, and while they initially appear flat, they spring up into a diamond shape when a motor pulls on the cord attached to them. So what exactly did AI do differently?

A closer look reveals that the AI-generated linkages are curved, and resemble thick drumsticks (the musical instrument drummers use), whereas the standard robot’s connecting parts are straight and rectangular.

Better and better blobs

The researchers began to refine their jumping robot by sampling 500 potential designs using an initial embedding vector — a numerical representation that captures high-level features to guide the designs generated by the AI model. From these, they selected the top 12 options based on performance in simulation and used them to optimize the embedding vector.

This process was repeated five times, progressively guiding the AI model to generate better designs. The resulting design resembled a blob, so the researchers prompted their system to scale the draft to fit their 3D model. They then fabricated the shape, finding that it indeed improved the robot’s jumping abilities.

The advantage of using diffusion models for this task, according to co-lead author and CSAIL postdoc Byungchul Kim, is that they can find unconventional solutions to refine robots.

“We wanted to make our machine jump higher, so we figured we could just make the links connecting its parts as thin as possible to make them light,” says Kim. “However, such a thin structure can easily break if we just use 3D printed material. Our diffusion model came up with a better idea by suggesting a unique shape that allowed the robot to store more energy before it jumped, without making the links too thin. This creativity helped us learn about the machine’s underlying physics.”

The team then tasked their system with drafting an optimized foot to ensure it landed safely. They repeated the optimization process, eventually choosing the best-performing design to attach to the bottom of their machine. Kim and his colleagues found that their AI-designed machine fell far less often than its baseline, to the tune of an 84 percent improvement.

The diffusion model’s ability to upgrade a robot’s jumping and landing skills suggests it could be useful in enhancing how other machines are designed. For example, a company working on manufacturing or household robots could use a similar approach to improve their prototypes, saving engineers time normally reserved for iterating on those changes.

The balance behind the bounce

To create a robot that could jump high and land stably, the researchers recognized that they needed to strike a balance between both goals. They represented both jumping height and landing success rate as numerical data, and then trained their system to find a sweet spot between both embedding vectors that could help build an optimal 3D structure.

The researchers note that while this AI-assisted robot outperformed its human-designed counterpart, it could soon reach even greater new heights. This iteration involved using materials that were compatible with a 3D printer, but future versions would jump even higher with lighter materials.

Co-lead author and MIT CSAIL PhD student Tsun-Hsuan “Johnson” Wang says the project is a jumping-off point for new robotics designs that generative AI could help with.

“We want to branch out to more flexible goals,” says Wang. “Imagine using natural language to guide a diffusion model to draft a robot that can pick up a mug, or operate an electric drill.”

Kim says that a diffusion model could also help to generate articulation and ideate on how parts connect, potentially improving how high the robot would jump. The team is also exploring the possibility of adding more motors to control which direction the machine jumps and perhaps improve its landing stability.

The researchers’ work was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation’s Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation program, the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology’s Mens, Manus and Machina program, and the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST)-CSAIL Collaboration. They presented their work at the 2025 International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

A Georgia court has decided that private non-profit Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) must comply with public records requests under the Georgia Open Records Act for some of its functions on behalf of the Atlanta Police Department. This is a major win for transparency in the state. 

 The lawsuit was brought last year by the Atlanta Community Press Collective (ACPC) and Electronic Frontier Alliance member Lucy Parsons Labs (LPL). It concerns the APF’s refusal to disclose records about its role as the leaser and manager of the site of so-called Cop City, the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center at the heart of a years-long battle that pitted local social and environmental movements against the APF. We’ve previously written about how APF and similar groups fund police surveillance technology, and how the Atlanta Police Department spied on the social media of activists opposed to Cop City.  

This is a big win for transparency and for local communities who want to maintain their right to know what public agencies are doing. 

Police Foundations often provide resources to police departments that help them avoid public oversight, and the Atlanta Police Foundation leads the way with its maintenance of the Loudermilk Video Intergration Center and its role in Cop City, which will be used by public agencies including the Atlanta and other police departments. 

ACPC and LPL were represented by attorneys Joy Ramsingh, Luke Andrews, and Samantha Hamilton who had won the release of some materials this past December. The plaintiffs had earlier been represented by the University of Georgia School of Law First Amendment Clinic.  

The win comes at just the right time. Last Summer, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that private contractors working for public entities are subject to open records laws. The Georgia state legislature then passed a bill to make it harder to file public records requests against private entities. With this month’s ruling, there is still time for the Atlanta Police Foundation to appeal the decision, but failing that, they will have to begin to comply with public records requests by the beginning of July.  

We hope that this will help ensure transparency and accountability when government agencies farm out public functions to private entities, so that local activists and journalists will be able to uncover materials that should be available to the general public. 

We need to talk about data integrity.

Narrowly, the term refers to ensuring that data isn’t tampered with, either in transit or in storage. Manipulating account balances in bank databases, removing entries from criminal records, and murder by removing notations about allergies from medical records are all integrity attacks.

More broadly, integrity refers to ensuring that data is correct and accurate from the point it is collected, through all the ways it is used, modified, transformed, and eventually deleted. Integrity-related incidents include malicious actions, but also inadvertent mistakes...

Meteorologists called the end of the DOD program "insanity" and "alarmingly bad news" as the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season ramps up.

Ireland is the latest European nation to stop using coal for electricity generation as the region adopts renewables to meet climate mandates.

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Much like Middle Eastern oil production in the 1970s, China today dominates the global refinement of critical metals that serve as the foundation of the United States economy. In the 1970s, America’s oil dependence led to shortages that slowed growth and brought huge spikes in prices. But in recent decades, U.S. fracking technology created a new way to extract oil, transforming the nation from one of the world’s largest oil importers to one of the largest exporters.

Today the U.S. needs another technological breakthrough to secure domestic supplies of metals like lithium, cobalt, copper, and rare earth elements, which are needed for everything from batteries to jet engines and electric motors. Nth Cycle thinks it has a solution.

The company was co-founded by MIT Associate Professor Desirée Plata, CEO Megan O’Connor, and Chief Scientist Chad Vecitis to recover critical metals from industrial waste and ores using a patented, highly efficient technology known as electro-extraction.

“America is an incredibly resource-rich nation — it’s just a matter of extracting and converting those resources for use. That’s the role of refining,” says O’Connor, who worked on electro-extraction as a PhD student with Plata, back when both were at Duke University. “By filling that gap in the supply chain, we can make the United States the largest producer of critical metals in the world.”

Since last year, Nth Cycle has been producing cobalt and nickel using its first commercial system in Fairfield, Ohio. The company’s modular refining systems, which are powered by electricity instead of fossil fuels, can be deployed in a fraction of the time of traditional metal refining plants. Now, Nth Cycle aims to deploy its modular systems around the U.S. and Europe to establish new supply chains for the materials that power our economy.

“About 85 percent of the world’s critical minerals are refined in China, so it’s an economic and national security issue for us,” O’Connor says. “Even if we mine the materials here — we do have one operational nickel mine in Michigan — we then ship it overseas to be refined. Those materials are required components of multiple industries. Everything from our phones to our cars to our defense systems depend on them. I like to say critical minerals are the new oil.”

From waste, an opportunity

In 2014, O’Connor and Plata attended a talk by Vecitis, then a professor at Harvard University, in which he discussed his work using electrochemical filters to destroy contaminants in pharmaceutical wastewater. As part of the research, he noticed the material was reacting with metal to create crystalline copper in the filters. Following the talk, Plata asked Vecitis if he’d ever thought about using the approach for metal separation. He hadn’t but was excited to try.

At the time, Plata and O’Connor were studying mineral-dense wastewater created as a byproduct of hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas.

“The original thought was: Could we use this technology to extract those metals?” O’Connor recalls.

The focus shifted to using the technology to recover metals from electronics waste, including sources like old phones, electric vehicles, and smartwatches.

Today, manufacturers and electronic waste facilities grind up end-of-life materials and send it to huge chemical refineries overseas, which heat up the metal into a molten liquid and put it through a series of acids and bases to distill the waste back into a pure form of the desired metal.

“Each of those acids and bases have to be transported as hazardous goods, and the process for making them has a large greenhouse gas and energy footprint,” Plata explains. “That makes the economics difficult to square in anything but huge, centralized facilities — and even then it’s a challenge.”

The United States and Europe have an abundance of end-of-life scrap material, but it’s dispersed, and environmental regulations have left the West few scalable refining options.

Instead of building a refinery, Nth Cycle’s team has built a modular refining system — dubbed “The Oyster” — which can reduce costs, waste, and time-to-market by being co-located onsite with recyclers, miners, and manufacturers. The Oyster uses electricity, chemical precipitation, and filtration to create the same metal refining chemicals as traditional methods. Today, the system can process more than 3,000 metric tons of scrap per year and be customized to produce different metals.

“Electro-extraction is one of the cleanest ways to recover metal,” Plata says.

Nth Cycle received early support from the U.S. Department of Energy, and when Plata came to MIT in 2018, Nth Cycle became part of the MIT Industrial Liaison Program’s STEX25 startup accelerator.

“What’s so important about being at a place like MIT is the entrepreneurial ecosystem and the ‘tough tech’ ethos of Cambridge,” Plata explains. “That’s been hugely important to the success of Nth Cycle and one of the reasons we moved the company to the greater Boston area. Being able to access talent and patient capital was key.”

Onshoring metal refining

Plata says one of the proudest moments of her career came last year at the groundbreaking ceremony for Nth Cycle’s first mixed hydroxide (nickel and cobalt) production facility in Ohio. Many of Nth Cycle’s new employees at the facility had previously worked at auto and chemical facilities in the town but are now working for what Nth Cycle calls the first commercial nickel refining facility for scrap in the country.

“O’Connor’s vision of elevating people while elevating the economy is an inspiring standard of practice,” Plata says.

Nth Cycle will own and operate other Oyster systems in a business model O’Connor describes as refining as a service, where customers own the final product. The company is looking to partner with scrap yards and industrial scrap collection facilities as well as manufacturers that generate waste.

Nth Cycle is mostly working to recover metals from batteries today, but it has also used its process to recover cobalt and nickel from spent catalyst material in the oil and gas industry. Moving forward, Nth Cycle hopes to apply its process to the biggest waste sources of them all: mining.

“The world needs more critical minerals like cobalt, nickel, lithium, and copper,” O’Connor says. “The only two places you can get those materials are from recycling and mining, and both of those sources need to be chemically refined. That’s where Nth Cycle comes in. A lot of people have a negative perception of mining, but if you have a technology that can reduce waste and reduce emissions, that’s how you get more mining in regions like the U.S. That’s the impact we want this technology to have in the Western world.”

Es Devlin, the winner of the 2025 Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts at MIT, creates settings for people to gather — whether it’s a few people in a room or crowds swelling a massive stadium — arenas in which to dissolve one’s individual sense of self into the greater collective. She herself contains multitudes; equally at home with 17th century metaphysical English poet John Donne, 21st century icon of music and fashion Lady Gaga, or Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli.

In the course of the artist and designer’s three-decade career, Devlin has created an exploded paint interpretation of the U.K. flag for the Closing Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, a box of illuminated rainfall for a production of the Crucible, a 65-foot diameter AI-generated poetry pavilion for the World Expo, an indoor forest for the COP26 Climate Conference, a revolving luminous library for over 200,000 in Milan, Beyonce’s Renaissance tour, and two Super Bowl halftime shows. But Devlin also works on a much smaller scale: the human face. Her world-building is rooted in the earliest technologies of reading and drawing: the simple acts of the eye and hand.  

For Congregation in 2024, she made chalk and charcoal drawings of 50 strangers. Before this project, Devlin says, she had most likely drawn around 50 portraits in total over the course of her practice — mostly family or friends, or the occasional covert sketch of a stranger on the subway. But drawing strangers required a different form of attention. “I was looking at another, who often looked different from me in many ways. Their skin pigmentation might be different, the orientation of their nose, eyes, and forehead might be other to what I was used to seeing in the mirror, and I was fraught with anxiety and concern to do them justice, and at pains not to offend,” she recalls. 

As she drew, she warded off the desire to please, feeling her unconscious biases surface, but eventually, in this wordless space, found herself in intense communion. “I gradually became absorbed in each person's eyes. It felt like falling into a well, but knowing I was held by an anchor, that I would be drawn out,” she says, “In each case, I thought, ‘well, this is it. Here we are. This is the answer to everything, the continuity between me and the other.’” She calls each sitter a co-creator of the piece. 

Devlin’s project inspired a series of drawing sessions at MIT, where students, faculty, and staff across the Institute — without any prior drawing experience necessary — were paired with strangers and asked to draw each other in silence for five minutes. In these 11 sessions held over the course of the semester, participants practiced rendering a stranger’s features on the page, and then the sitter spoke and shared their story. There were no guidelines about what to say, or even how to draw — but the final product mattered less than the process, the act of being in another’s presence and looking deeply. 

If pop concerts are the technology to transform private emotional truth into public feeling — the lyrics sung to the bathroom mirror now belted in choruses of thousands — Devlin finds that same stripped-down intimacy in all her works, asking us to bare the most elemental versions of ourselves. 

“We’re in a moment where we’re really having a hard time speaking to one another. We wanted to find a way to take the lessons from the work that Es Devlin has done to practice listening to one another and building connections within this very broad community that we call MIT,” says Sara Brown, an associate professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section who facilitated drawing sessions. The drawings were then displayed in a pop-up group exhibition, MIT Face to Face, where 80 easels were positioned to face the center of the room like a two-dimensional choir, forming a communal portrait of MIT. 

During her residency at MIT, Devlin toured student labs, spoke with students and faculty from theater arts, discussed the creative uses of AI with technologists and curators, and met with neuroscientists. “I had my brain scanned two days ago at very short notice,” she says, “a functioning MRI scan to help me understand more deeply the geography and architecture of my own mind.”  

“The question I get asked most is, ‘How do you retain a sense of self when you are in collaboration with another, especially if it’s another who is celebrated and widely revered?’” she says, “And I found an answer to that question: You have to be prepared to lose yourself. You have to be prepared to sublimate your sense of self, to see through the eyes of another, and through that practice, you will begin to find more deeply who you are.”

She is influenced by the work of philosopher and neuroscientist Iain Gilchrist, who suggests that a society dominated by the mode of attention of the left hemisphere — the part of the brain broadly in charge of language processing and logical thinking — also needs to be balanced by the right hemisphere, which operates nonverbal modes of attention. While the left hemisphere categorizes and separates, the right attends to the universe as an oceanic whole. And it is under the power of the right hemisphere’s mode of attention, Devlin says, that she enters the flow state of drawing, a place outside the confines of language, that enables her to feel a greater sense of unity with the entire cosmos.

Whether it’s drawing a stranger with a pencil and paper, or working with collaborators, Devlin believes the key to self understanding is, paradoxically, losing oneself.

In all her works, she seeks the ecstatic moment when the boundaries between self and world become more porous. In a time of divisiveness, her message is important. “I think it’s really to do with fear of other,” she says, “and I believe that dislodging fear is something that has to be practiced, like learning a new instrument.” What would it be like to regain a greater equilibrium between the modes of attention of both hemispheres of the brain, the sense of distinctness and the cosmic whole at once? “It could be absolutely definitive, and potentially stave off human extinction,” she says, “It’s at that level of urgency.”  

Presented by the Council for the Arts at MIT, the Eugene McDermott Award for the Arts at MIT was first established by Margaret McDermott in honor of her husband, a legacy that is now carried on by their daughter, Mary McDermott Cook. The Eugene McDermott Award plays a unique role at the Institute by bringing the MIT community together to support MIT’s principal arts organizations: the Department of Architecture; the Program in Art, Culture and Technology; the Center for Art, Science and Technology; the List Visual Arts Center; the MIT Museum; and Music and Theater Arts. During her residency at MIT she presented a week of discussions with the MIT community’s students and faculty in theater, architecture, computer science, MIT Museum Studio, and more. She also presented a public artist talk with Museum of Modern Art Senior Curator of Architecture and Design Paola Antonelli that was one of the culminating events of the MIT arts festival, Artfinity.